I'll be visiting my family this weekend so next part will come on Sunday.
Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats
by Charles Matthias and Ryx
Pars III: Descensum
(m)
Wednesday, May 9, 708 CR
Sir Charles Matthias walked down a long road.
Barren pines, dead with shriveled needles strewn
at their base, lined either side of the road. A
brittle sun cast a pale scorching heat that made
his paws sweat and thrust his tongue from the
side of his snout like a panting dog. A pallid
quiescent air smothered everything. Hard,
sharp-edged rocks were mixed into the cracked
earth beneath his toes, and he winced as they
gouged his flesh. A trail of blood drops sizzled behind him.
In the distance he could see a mighty tree. Many
of its branches hung dead, bereft of their
leaves. But there were a few which still
glimmered green which made the tree the only
living thing he saw in the burned out wasteland
around him. The road led toward it and so he
stayed on the road, wincing as every step
squeezed another drop or two of blood from his scarred paws.
He could not recall when he had started walking
along this road, nor what he left behind. All the
rat knew was that he did not dare turn around.
Something waited there. Something malevolent.
Something ravenous. He must have been frantic
with fear at some point to have so incautiously
run along the road to escape it. It was not hard
to avoid the jagged rocks which slashed his
flesh, but a running rat would skewer himself in short order.
Charles frowned in the miserable heat, pondering
what could have frightened him so greatly as to
risk running. He could not recall. He
contemplated turning and facing whatever lurked
behind him. The still air was broken by the
slightest of mists across the back of his neck.
His blood ran cold, heart clenching in his chest.
He picked up his pace, whimpering at the pain of his bloodied paws.
After a few minutes the rat was able to regain
control of his fear. Nothing had come for him.
Nothing had touched him. It had only been a
brief, almost non-existent brush of wind and not
the breath of some monstrous thing slavering at
his neck. For what could survive in this desolate and utter ruin of land?
As if in answer to his question he caught sight
of something poking up from beneath a charred
pile of pine needles at the side of the road
ahead. Charles cautiously lowered himself to all
fours and crept toward it, tail lifted behind him
to keep it from scrapping against the volcanic
rocks. Rheumy and discolored, it emerged from the
layer of needles like a mutilated wolf trap.
Charles kept a slight distance as he brushed the needles free.
What emerged from the desiccated foliage was a
half-digested cadaverous husk. At the top was a
disgorged pile of shattered bones, the marrow
sucked dry from the glinting ribs and limbs while
a skull leered at him with lips of tattered
flesh. Beneath it, beginning at the waist was a
putrefying, gangrenous mass that had once had fur
and walked on two legs like a man. The overripe
and almost rubbery flesh made his stomach clench
and one paw went to his snout to hold back the
contents within. His eyes trailed to the long,
thick tail that was gnawed and wormy. What had
once been vibrant with life was now bloodless and
mouldering beneath the protective cover of dead
needles. Freed of its sepulchral foliage, the
wounds sizzled as the suffocating heat made them
cook and seep with a scent so repulsive and
poisonous that he could no longer thwart the quivering of his gorge.
Charles stumbled away on all fours, back aching
but unwilling to rise. Tears burned in his eyes,
drying before they reached his cheeks in the
miserable sun. He lifted his snout to look for
that one sentinel that offered hope in the
perfidious wasteland. The massive tree still
stood, watching but indifferent, inviting but ever distant. He scrambled on.
Walking on all fours did provide him the
advantage of giving his hind paws a rest in
turns. First Charles would favor his left leg,
tucking it back against his belly as he charted a
winding path through the rock-strewn road. And
then when the misery in his right grew too
intense he would scurry with his left paw down
instead. Apart from the initial discomfort in his
back he felt nothing incongruous with his
four-footed posture. Likely he'd become more
feral in appearance, animalistic despite his
anomalous size. The numbing fear of the
kangaroo's corpse and the brush of air on his
neck from what lay behind him kept him from worrying about his shape.
His parched throat hungered for water so much
that as he continued on his way, he began to lick
the sweat from his fore paws. Sticky and bitter
with the dust of the road, it did not slacken his
prurient thirst. Nowhere did he see any signs of
pools to dip his snout into. And even if he did
he knew that they would be sulfurous and would
kill him, either from the burns on his flesh or
the fire in his belly. Either way, he would end
up like that putrid corpse half buried behind him.
Over the endless hours of crawling he saw six
more corpses along the road, the bodies all in
varying states of decay and digestion. He did not
dare investigate any of them. The vomitous bile
caked his throat and threatened to freshen itself
with each disfigured corpse. But as he neared the
tree, the one thing even half-alive in this
blasted and hellish landscape, he could not help
but ponder what had happened to those seven who'd
come before him. Had they tried to turn from the
road and the tree to which it lead only to be
devoured by what lurked behind them? Or was he
unwittingly running directly into the mouth of the beast lurking in the tree?
Though the only sound he heard in all that
serotinal blight was the crunch of dust beneath
his limping paws, he could not help but feel a
heavy tread following him, a vibrato growl of
something monstrous edacious for his flesh. And
more. This thing, eldritch and abominable, would
not be sated with mere matter, but would savor
every mote of his spirit, chewing on his
substance with hellish perfidy until nothing at
all remained of Sir Charles Matthias.
His only hope was in the tree.
Charles continued, eyes set only on that tower of wood, branch and leaf.
He saw no more corpses as the hours trickled
past. His thirst and hunger only increased. The
tree swam in his vision. He felt weak from blood
loss. The blistering heat set his flesh to
trembling with palsy. But to turn and give up his
quest was madness that ended only in dissolution.
Before he quite realized it the road ended at the
base of the tree. The roots stretched for almost
half a mile in every direction, and between these
walls rising twenty feet or more, the road wound,
delving within. Charles followed, savoring the
shade it provided, and enjoying the feel of soft
earth beneath his paws. Charred twigs littered
the path, but these were easily swept aside in the ever narrowing passage.
Where the roots met the trunk of the tree an open
door invited him inward. Charles stepped through
and collapsed onto a soft carpet stretched over
the wooden interior. His tongue, dried and
swollen, stretched from his gasping jaws, while
his paws trembled and curled, blood still
trickling from the gashes in his hind paws. But
the coolness of the air within and the softness
of the carpet could not relieve his agonies.
Charles! a familiar voice gasped from the other
end of the cavernous chamber. He blinked his eyes
and stared into the darkness, shapes beginning to
resolve themselves. It looked like his home only
stretched with wide empty spaces between
furnishings. Rushing to his side was his wife,
dressed in a russet gown marred with scorch marks
where a fiery rain had struck her. Nestled in her
bodice was the purple stone medallion and it
glimmered in the unremitting sunlight streaming
through the open doorway. But for the nonce he
paid it no heed, preferring instead the ewer of
cool water she poured across his tongue.
You finally made it, she said with a deep
relief in her voice. I thought you'd turn back like the others.
Despite the water his tongue still hurt too much
to speak. He stretched out a foreleg and to his
delight discovered it was once more an arm. With
this he reached up and stroked his wife's snout
ever so gently. Her whiskers thrummed beneath his touch.
Let me bandage those wounds. Wait here.
Kimberly rushed back into the deep gloom of the
chamber while Charles panted for breath, control
returning to his body bit by bit. His eyes spied
four children waiting and watching, fearful of
the doorway, but hopeful in their glance toward
him. For the first time, Charles gazed back along
the path, but apart from the drifts of fallen
twigs gathered against either root, there was
nothing back there to be afraid of. Yet in the
brilliant and sickly light, staining the jagged
edges of the roots a faint crimson, there was
something to fear. Something was out there. He
should shut the door, he knew it, but could not
make his body move toward it again.
His wife returned with salve and bandages and set
to work on his feet. His four children emerged
from the darkness, their faces curious and
anxious. He tried to smile to assure them but
could not. Instead he tried to mouth some
question to his wife. Nothing came from his throat but painful coughing.
Only you can save us, Charles. I love you. She
washed his feet with the cold water, gripping his
ankle with one hand to steady his trembling legs.
The fire of the wounds felt like glass jabbed and
dragged across his back. He beat his fists
against the ground and screamed into the carpet.
The salve cooled the pain, and about this she
tied the bandages so tight he knew he could not
walk again until the wounds were healed. Instead
he crawled, dragging his legs with him, away from
the door and into the interior darkness. It
welcomed him with a coaxing assurance. His
children remained where they were, with his
eldest going so far as to lie down and fall
asleep. Something whispered just out of sight,
like a tickle at the back of his neck.
He quivered in a heap as Kimberly finished the
bindings on his feet and disappeared back beyond
where his children reposed. A dry wind drifted
through the open door, hot and scorching his
throat, full of dust and ash. He quivered at each
brush as if spectral hands caressed his flesh,
intoxicating and voluptuous in their intimate
touch. Charles pushed himself deeper into the chamber.
Along the root walls framing the path to their
door he could see embers scorching the wood.
Crimson and angry, they stank of sulfur and decay
as of a thousand mangled corpses left to rot in a
pit. Vapors swayed in the open doorway like
sashaying dancers, seductive and incorporeal.
Charles tried to scream for his children to run,
but his tongue would not leave the roof of his
mouth. The stygian phantasms were not nearing the
portal into his sanctuary yet lingered with
perverse interest just beyond beneath the desolated rust spewed sky.
And yet, despite their mesmerizing allure,
loathsome in their sightless and pulsating
intangibility, Charles' gaze pierced through them
to the shadowed thing he now glimpsed gibbering
down the path between the roots. Its gurgling
breath was the rumbling of borborygmus from the
belly of a nameless terror, all slime and mucous
oozing from its many slobbering jaws. Wretched
and yammering, it crept down the path, shape
obscured by the phantasms through which it passed.
Charles, hapless and fighting to bite back a
vomitous mass which threatened to erupt from his
throat and spew across his tongue, jaws, and
chest, clawed at the wooden floor, stretched
toward the door. Its edge ever a breath from his
claws he vainly gasped, his eyes ever remained on
the obnubilated horror encroaching down the path.
A foul odor wafted through the doorway, full of
quagmire and primordial slime. And yet his
children and now his missing wife persisted in
their insouciance, watching from the shadowed
interior without expression, if not, in the case of the one, sleeping.
A sharp pain forced the rat backward from the
doorway. Through the wooded floor thorns thrust
upward, long, baleful, and glistening as if
poisoned. The spikes gathered around the
entrance, but spread inward, from the walls, the
ceiling, and the floor, driving Charles backward
deeper into the gloom away from the stagnant
light. From each spike sprouted more thorns,
until each teemed with millions of razor-sharp needles.
Charles scrambled back as quickly as he could,
though the bite lacerated his tail as hapless it
slid across one of the falcate spikes. A
soundless scream ripped ragged from his throat as
the pain revealed itself with an oozing smear of
blood along the length of his tail. Frantic, he
pushed with his agonized feet and managed to
scramble toward where his wife had disappeared,
back away from the entrance, the vaporous
silhouettes in the pallid light, and the
gibbering thing writhing down the path to his door.
Piercing the veil of dancers, the bulbous thing
emerged in the doorway. With a crimson aureole
around a large, flat head grayish and heaving,
three mouths opened beneath five large simmering
yellow eyes. It shambled on seven legs, and
stretched eleven pseudopoidal arms in every
direction. Green warty skin dominated its limbs
and every exposed surface there was no way to
tell whether it had either chest or back.
Charles gasped in horror, even as it leaped
across the maze of spikes and tendrils of pain
flowing from the doorway like aeolian poison. His
youngest daughter, Baerle, screamed as it landed
near hear and flung out a long, pink and leprous
tongue at her. She tried to claw away, but the
monster dragged her back, the ichorous muscle
wrapped about her waist, searing her flesh. Its
many arms grabbed her limbs, contorting her into
a tight ball while one of its jaw spread wide.
Her screams were cut short as she was shoved head
first into that cavernous maw, wriggling and
writhing even as tight lips closed down across,
sealing her within a fiery tomb. The head warped
as muscles pressed down, mutilating and jellying his little girl.
Kimberly cried and rushed from out of the shadows
to protect little Erick who cried in terror.
Charles, only you can save us! His wife
exclaimed, as the gibbering beast lumbered toward
them. But there was no weapon at his side, and
his feet were in so much agony he couldn't even
force himself to stand and brace the monstrosity.
Blood loss made him dizzy and weak. The pitiless
beast croaked in enormous repugnance, opening the
wide maw into which his daughter has disappeared
to reveal only smears of red amidst the gangrenous cavern within.
He waved to his wife to flee and get the rest of
his children out of there. Even though he could
not stand, he turned to the beast, dragging
himself between it and his family. With all his
strength, he pushed his quivering flesh upward
until he was crouching on his knees. Those
throbbing jaws, vast and malicious, puckered with
an ineluctable menace. And then it bunched its
legs beneath its disgusting mass and leaped over his head.
Kimberly screamed once, as both Erick and
Bernadette bawled. The bloated monstrosity
wrapped his wife in its arms and enveloped her
head within one of its maws, while the other two
crushed her chest and legs. Charles pushed up
with his legs to try and leap after the beast,
but felt himself struck when its fixed lips
closed around his wife's neck in a spray of blood.
Charles! This way!
He turned his head away from the weeping of his
children to see a strange light in one corner.
There, before a strange whirligig in the floor,
was another young rat. This one was white-furred
with a black hood covering head and back as if he
bore a cape. He felt his heart skip a beat when he recognized him.
A scream pierced the air from every direction and
then with a whisper it vanished as if a hole had
been punched through the substance of the tree.
His other children still wept as the slobbering
amphibian masticated the remains of Kimberly's
flesh. Standing before him, beckoning him closer was his lost son Ladero.
Charles wept of his own, rushing as quickly as
his drained and scarred body allowed him. Ladero
nodded and motioned for him to quicken his pace.
He felt the tendrils of thousands of wisps
tugging at him to keep him back. Through them he
pushed, caring not for their perfidious touch.
Beneath Ladero the ground spun away in a cyclone
descending down through the floor as if some
vortex were sucking them down. Yet Ladero
remained standing even as he fell, as if the
ground itself were the illusion and only he
remained fixed in a fluctuating world.
The hellish beast behind him croaked at the
sating of its unrelenting hunger, even as his
other daughter gave a shriek when her body was
plunged into the abyss of one of its maws.
Charles closed his eyes in horror at the
slurping, gelatinous crunching that followed. He
dove forward into the vortex, arms stretching
after his boy as they plunged away from the house
and its horrors, spiraling ever into a deeper
darkness in which the brilliance of his son's fur
and the glimmering of his eyes became clearer and starker.
He stretched out an arm to snatch him out of that
sucking spiral, when everything shook and broke
like a stone thrown through glass.
Dada! Dada! A voice echoed in his ears. Charles
blinked and in the darkness broken only by the
deep crimson of the cinders in his hearth, he
realized he was laying in his bed with one of his
children at his side trembling and clutching the fur of his chest.
He blinked and pushed himself into a sitting
position, one arm wrapping about the little boy
he recognized as his eldest. Little Charles? What's wrong?
Dada! The little boy whimpered. Your dream scared me!
Charles blinked again, confused by his son's
choice of words, but knowing fright when he saw
it. He wrapped his son in his arms and rocked him
back and forth, while Kimberly slept fitfully at
his side, though she did not stir. It's all
right. I'm here. I'm here. He cooed to his
little boy as the rat child trembled against his
chest. Beside him Kimberly calmed and began to rest peacefully.
----------
Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR Evening
Wait, wait, Charlie waved one paw to stop his
sire's lengthy recitation. Already he'd had to
get up and stretch twice as he listened to detail
after detail without ever once getting at what he
really wanted to know. But something in that
nightmare unsettled him, leaving him trembling
and on edge as he listened. The Baron appeared
frightened and at times had to be coaxed to
continue. But with the waking and comforting of
his one year old self, something had finally
become clear to him. I remember that dream. I remember it.
Baron Matthias grimaced and narrowed his eyes,
though one of his paws still trembled and
clutched his trousers so tightly that he was
tearing a hole into it. I'm surprised to hear
that. You don't seem to remember anything else of that time.
I've had that dream, nightmares of it. Not in
many years now. Father helped me overcome it...
He shook his head. But I don't remember the frog
monster scaring me. It was something else...
Do you remember?
Charlie shook his head, and then scowled. Nay,
and nor do I want to. He let a little of the
anger simmer in his voice. You aren't telling me of the deal.
I am almost there, the Baron assured him with a
grimace of his own. At this point I was already
a slave to Marzac and did not know it. It now
looked for an opportunity to use me. I will spare
you some of the details for there are three days
left until the deal was made. And there is much to be said after that as well.
So far all I've heard tell of is some voice telling you what to say.
And do.
Charlie grunted and stretched his neck from side
to side to work out a little kink. I suppose it
told you to give me up in the deal?
His sire grimaced but did not say anything for a
moment. His eyes turned inward and he slowly
shook his head. Not quite. But if you let me
continue you will understand shortly.
Sometimes he hated his sire's penchant for
storytelling. He had an irritating habit of
withholding the most important piece of the tale
until just that moment when it had to be
revealed. But until that moment he could not be
forced to divulge it; even to the son he gave
away who desperately sought the truth it was
still a nugget that could only be shared at the right moment.
Still, everything he'd said up until now was
supposedly important. He schooled his heart and
bid his anger restrain itself as he settled in to
listen to more. Well then, go on. Tell me.
Baron Matthias nodded his head and with a deep sigh, continued.
----------
May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love,
Charles Matthias
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