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The City of One Thousand Children
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment |
Upon a warm shore facing the Lantac stands Rej Neroo, a city of nut-brown and lustful people. They build halls in the shadow of a great, crumbled statue of an ancient priest, standing upon a mountaintop. Ancient indeed is this place; spired ruins of cities that have come before spread far and about; fields of strange herbs grown by the men of Rej Neroo curve about fallen statues. The name of he who shadows the city - and that of the God he sacrificed to - are lost to a past aeon of the world; in the age I plied the concubines of Rej Neroo with heady nessen wine, they had long given heed only to the Undergod Bulsath.
The bloated, hair-wrapped body of Bulsath rumbles beneath the city in loathsome sleep, lulled only by machinations of priests of the Five Grey Temples - stern and unlaughing Lords within a city given over to pleasures of the sun, sea and flesh. Dour priests stalk the streets by day and night, in festival or drunken aftermath, and in fear the brown, lithe women of Rej Neroo obey their every whim. To hear the priests, it is the dreams of Bulsath that sustain their city - and prevent the Undergod from reaching out His long thorny hairs to spear the left eye and liver from every man and woman of Rej Neroo.
There are one thousand children within Rej Neroo, always and ever more; no more than five more nor five less than this number are permitted. It is the cries of children that lull Bulsath's pulsing organs and quiet his dire tendrils, the sounds given to Him down through earth and rock by great tubes and Grey Temple sorcery. Ever forth go the forbidding priests, with tablets marked for each child - and to order the fate of women, the better to calm the Undergod they serve, and steer His dreams to their end.
Woe to the trader children who are carried to Rej Neroo upon coastal ways in ignorance, for they will be slain and cast into the sea, lest Bulsath awaken to shake off the city from His back. Entwined bodies and drugged, laughing revels of the following day will be their only tomb marker. Woe to the nut-brown woman who is ravished and with child of her own choice and does not flee this laughing city and the worms within its core!
[ Posted by Reason on October 30, 2006 ]
