Musings on Monstrousness

For  GLAUGUST    Think of the soul as the unique conglomeration of every memory which is experienced, assembled as some spiritual second substrate layered over the physical body. A unique song where every instance is a note. Life is the continual composition of the song. Death is when it ceases because it no longer is tied to the physical world. No machinery, like a mind or eyes and hands, exists to record it.  To bring someone back to life is to restart the song. A fragment which contains it must be obtained. A corpse is best, of course, because it is like an inert record which may yet be spun up if restored properly. The fresher the better, of course, and damage can cause parts to be missing. This is why so many undead are mad, chunks of who they were did not carry over, but they are not a new person; they are the same person they were, "missing" parts. It is the reverse of a SOMA situation; if you can perfectly replicate a copy of a dead person, the dead person re...

The lights beyond the sun emit queer and mysterious radiances through the aether, kept at bay by the pneumatic bubble which encapsulates the world. Holes and tears scar the earth, creating places where nothing wholesome grows. Vessels which would ply between worlds must be sturdily built and shielded, by sorcery or cubits of soaking stone. But some stars, at some times, at particular angles, are notorious for certain effects, piercing even the cloudy Low Heavens to shine upon the worldly folk of Anlil. Shemmiads- Flower Stars A shoal of pastel stars which occasionally drifts through the sky, adding color to the night. The Flower Stars spur the growth of greenery irrespective of the wishes of the terrestrial gods or tillers of the soil, and are at once benign and vexing, for they beget weeds, roots, crops, and forage in equal measure.   They most often appear during the spring, for hours or days at a time. Zurid- The Green Star A sickly green glow in the sky, a harsh pinprick resemb...

I have spoken at length of monsters. Of how they come to be, what they are, what drives them. Here is what it is like to be ruled by them. Flesh Eaters Hulking, bellicose lords in towering keeps and castles, sneering at their lessers. Brutish and direct, ever warring for slaves and man-cattle. Their enforcers are parodies of true knights, or perhaps merely with pretensions of chivalry stripped away. No subtlety exists here, and attempts at it are quashed. Foolish though they are, they oft know themselves to be so, and silence the silver-tongued and learned with a cudgel lest they poison or misdirect the masses or themselves. Bow, scrape, know your place until your dismembered corpse is in the butcher's pot, or you laugh swollen and proud with the rest of them. The defining characteristic of such realms is tyranny. The lowborn cringe and shrink, the ogrish aristocracy jeers and batters. Raw strength and direct force rule the day. There is always a war, there is always a toll, always...

  In a world where corpses can rise, specters haunt the night, and innumerable horrors straddle the line between life and death, is it truly so surprising that a graveyard may be just as perilous as the deepest jungle? Oh, not all of them, for certain. Not some muddy plot in a frontier town, no. But when a city, a kingdom, is immense and decrepit, swollen with history, riddled with catacombs and bloated by mausoleums, a second realm will sometimes grow up from within the lands of the living, sprawling for miles, latched on to its host. Courts of blood-drinkers, carrion-eaters, flesh-takers, their people the teeming masses of shambling rot drawn from the luckless masses dumped into its innards. No longer for peace of mind or restful repose, but as tribute. For so long as the graves are filled, their rulers have no need to leave. For where else would such a multitude of corpses, as food or as slaves, be delivered to their door? The flesh of humans provide unique nourishment, and cert...

       At man's height, the heresy of Syncretism took root. In our hubris, we sought to interpret the Gospels to better understand them, and grasp the totality of Heaven. We can do this no more than mice grasp the scope of a behemoth, and our efforts were futile. But so titanic were the engines and sorcery and artifice bent towards this end, that Creation itself grew strained, and broke. Space distorts, time bends, the Un-Worldly slip through the cracks and grow in number. For all the succor to the spirit that the Gospels give, they could not mend such a tear, and the world was thereafter changed without hope of reversal. Is it any surprise so many have run back to the old faiths, the forgotten gods, in the hope that they will find something which will? Oh, each of these is a path to ruin, for certain. Be it in the long centuries of decay or damnation in the present, any faith devoid of Heaven's Gospel allows the seed of Primeval Sin to take root. Only those which de...

An effigy of a man built in our image, sustained through Miracle and birthed by Gnosis. That is a golem, a human soul housing a body of surpassing physical tenacity. Break them apart, put them back together, extract the core of them and place it into another body. They are the ideal servant, soldier, and tool, depending on the structure used to make them. Indeed, any civilized land can boast at least a few, though places which have them so common as to render certain professions obsolete is a rare and wondrous sight. A golem's body is distinct from a mass of inanimate matter given life. Any magus can bid rocks to move or water to flow upwards if they wish, or rotting corpses to shamble about. Granted a pseudo-soul in a form unfitting for stable perpetuation, they rise to accomplish a task and then fall apart as worldly law asserts itself. A golem is more complex. For the soul to reliably puppet it it must be articulated or plastic in some way. It must be capable of standing and wal...