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The Rotted Throne
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment |
A demon of great antiquity once took upon the vague semblance of a man - but giant, warped and miscolored. It hung nerves deftly extracted from a hundred men of Yorm about its wattled neck, to better hear the thoughts that lead men to destruction. A great throne this demon built in a dank, cavernous space below the desolate lands, and there it crouched to be a man.
What this might have been, none may say, for the seeping Undergod Ruk lusts for nerves alive with pain and screaming. The oily, liquid Ruk oozed upon the demon of ages, distracted by its necklace of nerves and thoughts, and consumed it; the nerves hang yet in the Silent Web of Ruk, wherein pain greater than all the world's suffering plays sweetly for the Undergods. This much is etched by iron claw-knives upon the stone of the Acris Tablets, or so is believed by the few free scholars who dwell in filth in the sewers of Magak.
But the demon's throne remains, and I have seen it. Expelled from the deep earth, it stands canted, tall as ten men, foul and eternally rotting in the bone-strewn Vision Desert beyond Abekabar. Diseased beggars and women halved lengthways by the sorceror Bagad-Tul are stoned and cast from Abekabar; the throne sustains them in ways no man should see, and these weak grow strong in the desert that thirsts for blood and flesh. The dregs sport, lust and mock Bagad-Tul and greedy merchants in the shade of the rotted throne - and so none in Abekabar now dare the caravan path marked by tall black pylons that crosses the Vision Desert.
[ Posted by Reason on November 4, 2006 ]
