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Maybe it was insecurity, albeit subconscious, that drove her obsession. She was the lone mortal on a council of Gods, and perhaps it was a small part of why she was so incredibly desperate to be useful, though if that was the case, she was note quite self-aware enough to recognize it. No, her overarching concern was survival - her, her pardmentlings, All. Fleeting glimpses of myriad futures often flashed unbidden and random through her mind, waking or sleeping, fragments and full visions that had haunted her life for as long as it had been a life, a gift of Prophecy that had long ago pushed Ashoka into madness.

Yet it was a useful madness, and she a remarkably functional being, all things considered. She was profoundly strange, yes, flighty and erratic and often far removed from what others saw as logic and reason, but she was not broken. She was different. She had seen the End a thousand times, and a thousand times again, a shard here and a shard there, from the time of Destruction to Gehenna to the remaking of the sky, and now. There were still Grigori, waiting. Doing something, they had to be doing something. They would not have come so close to simply disappear, give up, leave the worlds in peace. Whether it took them a year, or a century, or an Age, they were not finished. That much, at least, was certain, and time not spent preparing was time wasted.

She had dawdled awhile at first, just after being appointed, waiting for the gods of the Council to make their plans, to make decisions, to do the things they had promised to do when they sought the votes of their fellows, backing them to rule while Creation rested. She had waited, tended to her spawn, all the while brushing off the crooked-sharp, word-defying horrors that clawed at the dark corners of her mind, skittering away the instant she turned her head to look. At the one meeting of the Council, they had discussed searching for relics and, just as importantly, for information. She had agreed to look for such lost things in partnership with the purple dragon, and had waited for him. Too much waiting. She could not say how much time had passed that way, until she had had enough.

She resolved finally to look on her own - enough of waiting, enough of gods! She would find Old Places, and Old Things, Lost Things, and come back with them. See what I have done? she would say, and she would laugh, because she had done when they had not. But that was not quite how it went, because rarely did anything go as planned, even for a Prophet - especially for this Prophet, who had not actually had a plan beyond Find Things. It had started with the Old Pantheon, where Zhiji had found his ancient armor, and he and the purple dragon had found stones of Fate, but she had been unable to reach it. Was it even there to reach still, or had it gone into Nothing?

But there were pieces, old fallen pieces on other worlds, like on the snow-world where the Kings had found their entrance, but Ashoka did not like snow. It was cold. She did not want to dig in the snow. She went anyway, ignoring what fragments remained of the bird-people of The'ta'naa, mind only on Old, not Now, but the digging was hard and it was cold, and she found nothing before everything got so cold that she couldn't feel it anymore, and her erras-friend Hyksos made her leave and go somewhere warmer. She didn't remember where, but she had two less toes now, and it was still strange to play with her feet and only have eight claws to count.

She had Seen something, though, touching that place - another place, less cold, that had pieces of the same place, and with the errais' help she had found that place. It was wet and ugly and dark, all full of twisted plants and sucking mud, but also of pieces of that place that Once Was. And it wasn't cold. She could dig and dig, and not lose toes. But there was so much digging, and so much mud, and she was only one mad pard. She could dig all the rest of her life, and another after that, and another, and there would still be digging left to do.

Her erras-friends were not very good at digging, especially in a place like that. The mud sucked at them and they got stuck, because they were too heavy, not like feather-light little Prophets who forgot to eat unless they were reminded, so they brought her better help. A person here, a person there, and at first she hardly noticed, until they started bringing her things. A shard of too-bright blue glass, a 'Shoka-height bone - had it been a god once, or a servant, or just a thing that got stuck in the mud and died there? - little pieces that probably weren't important but they were something, so they were set aside Just In Case. Sometimes people who weren't diggers brought her things from somewhere else - is this important, do you want this, please take this, we want to help. They were desperate to help, to be of even the slightest importance. If she were able to see herself better, she would have seen herself in them, but she saw too much to see everything.

Over days and weeks and months, a hoard fit for the unpickiest dragon amassed itself. Very little was ever deemed Possibly Important, but every last thing was kept. Someone, at some point, started cataloguing it all, organizing it, asking her what she thought and where it should go. Callum, just a funny little human man with not much hair. He was old, but not very old, and she liked him. He never looked at her funny. Sometimes people just wanted to tell her things, and he wrote them down, because she would forget. She heard too much to remember everything.

By the time she realized that people were not just coming and going, but coming and staying, they had built funny little huts on stilts to keep themselves and their stuff out of the mud. They even built her one, and it was the nicest one, which was funny, because she couldn't remember the last time she had been white with brown spots, and not brown-gray with white smudges showing through. They made her the nicest hut and put the nicest soft things inside it, but she was made of mud. Why would she need nice things? She slept on the floor so that the nice things would stay nice until someone brought her a magic bathtub that filled itself and was always warm. She thought at first that it was another not-important Important Thing someone had brought, but Callum had told her it was a present. For her. No one ever gave her presents but Yu, and her pardmentlings if small dead things counted as presents.

Once she was not mud, she felt better. Strange, she had never thought that she felt bad, but she must have, because she felt better. She wanted to think again, and pay attention to all these people. So many people, so many pasts and futures, and she hadn't bothered to see any of them - not even Callum, not really. She had been too busy digging, and being mud. They started asking her things, and she started answering. It was mundane, mostly, things like where to build new huts, and maybe it would be better to build them this way, what do you think? We're tired of eating bog-hares, can we trade some of our not-important stuff with Thus-and-such for better food? It was weird, and it was harder than the questions she usually got before - how will I die, can I stop it, will I see so-and-so again, on and on - but she sort of liked it. She wasn't always good at it, but someone almost always told her when she was not quite right, and showed her a better way that she hadn't been able to get to on her own.

They were very patient with her for some reason, the Collectors. It never occurred to her to wonder why, only to observe it as an oddity, and one she appreciated. She was also not sure who had decided they would call themselves that, and when she asked, they weren't sure either. That was just what they were, and somehow, they were hers, even though she had never Seen them coming.

((tl;dr 'Shoka's still crazy and somehow has followers. halp.))

There were more than she ever bothered to count, not many many but enough that she couldn't know them all, couldn't keep them all held in her memory. Her mind was too busy, too scattered, too full of glances and glimpses of them all for her to keep them straight, and so she didn't try. She ignored them to the extent that she could, quickly brushing aside the pasts and futures that leaked off of them and tried to ooze their way into her awareness, and over time it became easier and easier. They became background noise, a once-incessant buzzing that she became so used to she barely registered it, most of the time. Every now and then, something would jump out at her and catch her interest, and she would follow it to who it belonged, but even then, sometimes she was too busy to bother.

More people were coming to offer and trade things, necessitating better organization of their Thing-Huts...and more Thing-Huts. Her unwillingness to turn anything away, to packrat it all, was making it more and more difficult to find specific things. And they needed to be able to find specific Things, and know whether or not they were maybe-Important Things or the Things they could use or trade for more Things. She had already lost track of time long ago, and more and more bled away unnoticed as she led the reorganizing of their hoard, touching every last piece to Look at it and decide where it should go. Things that might have History or Power here, things that were just pretty there, things that - no, there were too many things that were just pretty, they needed to be more separated, a place for glass and a place for jewelry, and there were books also, and living things and dead things and so many bones. Her fellow pard, Narasingh, helped with the bones, because he could see which ones belonged to each other. It was a little less for her to do.

The sorting was like digging again, and she had to be reminded to do other things that were also important, to meet with the people who came to give or trade, or just to see the Magpie. It was a name she caught in whispers, and didn't realize it was her until she asked Callum who this Magpie was - he had laughed, but it was a good laugh, not at her. Much like Collectors and Bogtown, it was a name that had just happened, and it fit. As they had grown and traded, word had spread across the region that they were here, then across the world, now across worlds, not only that they were here but that the Mortal Councillor was here. Funny, she almost forgot about that sometimes, even with the pendant at her throat, until someone reminded her. It was strange to be important, and they often found her strange as well - how could this odd little Magpie be of such a station? Sometimes they were disappointed, but that was fine. What she was didn't matter, only doing mattered right now.

Besides, it was good to be known. It brought them more Things, and now and then more people who stayed. More people, more Things, more guards to keep the Things safe - and then to keep the people safe from the people, too, because the number of incidents and disputes grew with the number of neighbors. They needed more rules, a real system for what to do when someone did something that was wrong. It was mostly payment to the person you'd wronged - Ashoka liked that better than letting the person be hurt back, or making them leave. Callum called it some funny word she never remembered.

Once they'd settled on the rules, she didn't think about it much again until someone tried to hurt her. Silly Prophet, so busy with sorting that she didn't See it coming, yet another glimpse of yet another Collector brushed away into the background buzz, without noticing the knife in his hand that came for her while she was sorting dead pieces, skins and feather and horns and claws. Only in the very last moment did she see, in time to slip to the side and change from thin biped to massive pard. He was less brave then, with a giant cat curling claws into his flesh while she held him down and waited for the guards to come and take him.

They wanted to kill him, but she didn't. Well, she sort of maybe did, but he had said things, angry things, about the gods, even said Grigori once, and it made her curious. Did he know Things? She she made everyone else go away, and she listened, listened long enough to be disappointed. He didn't know anything. He was just an angry man full of bloody words, who thought that Nothing would be better than the gods. He was not a Thing she needed, so she cut off his hand and told Hyksos to take him somewhere very very far away and leave him.

She kept the hand, and someone gave her a jar of something that tasted like salt to put it in until it was an ugly mummy-hand. She didn't put it in a Thing-Hut, but in hers on a shelf next to some candlesticks.