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Description

          After a few hours of worm-hunting the winds began to pick up and the bitter rains began to escalate into a mad rage, slamming themselves against the mud and kicking it up several feet in the air. A wise and universal decision was made that it was time to seek shelter.

            The storm came fast and hard upon its prey. Within the miles of flat and open tidal plain there was no shelter, and the thick mud slowed one’s movements considerably. Sheltered hills were still but a distant paradise by the time winds threatened to knock the Atrox Sapients off their feet and carry them away, the sheer force of it all sweeping the mud and grime into glistening cascades and arcs. The sea of mud had entered a primordial rage, once-quiet surface alive with ravenous waves leaping into the air with frothing white teeth and rumbling bellows.

            Storms in that world were deities unto themselves, raging beasts of wind and rain rampaging over the wilderness and tearing up the primordial ooze. They broke bones and tossed rocks from hills without bodies to be struck by clubs or claws. To the worm-hunters and their quarry they were veritable gods.

            An hour became a year in that primordial chaos, its sufferers effectively blind as the heavy winds and rains distorted their senses. The Atrox Sapients walked in front of Bouillon, shielded from the worst of the wind by his immense frame. Even he was afraid, mostly for himself at the time but also for his rhino, who he had left tethered to a heavy boulder back in the hills where the ground was dryer.

            That old monster called the sea had long been penned-in by the miles-wide walls of mud and filth, but now it was slamming itself against its constraints and sputtering over the surface. Its roars could be heard well within the sanctity of dry land, which grimly faced the possibilities of being devoured.

            “De sea!”, cried Bouillon, bracing against his spear as another gust of wind hammered his back. “Have tu monkes ever seen de sea!?”.

            “Soon!”, cried Shat, swatting windblown mud from his face.

            “I went ‘n ate moi some ah dem lump-crabs at de sea, once!”, gurgled Meatbag, trying to fight the rain with his club.

            “Dey any good!?”.

            “Every bit as dey say, ya see!”.

            If they had eyes, the Atrox Sapients would just barely notice frothing white waters stampeding across the horizon like an approaching army.

            The monster was loose.

            It moved with the wind, eating up mud and hurtling mud-things in the air. A twenty-foot Bull-Worm was tossed up from its substratum and launched twice its length in the air, landing with a splash in the froth. The water was rust-colored from the mud, the swirling winds red with the grime of surface algae.

            “Ever gone swimmin’, mon amis!?”, screeched Bonshat. A segmented worm-thing of the marine kind landed on his face.

            Skies screamed and the monster roared, vomiting its underworld-belly and all the demons within. Dark things of the sea were hurled at the dark things of the land, all blind and wriggling beneath red skies and a black sun.

            The human perception of the nature of gods is radically limited. They take their image and plaster it onto natural forces, anthropomorphizing divine conceptions and violating the formless abstraction of existence with macabre imagery. Gods as we know them are human creations, things made and expected to care for those that made them. For all their power they were designed to stoop to man, providing rain and blessings in exchange for worship.

            The true nature of a god is the beauty and cruelty of life, the joy of creation and the renewal of death. It is everything in existence intertwined, all with equal right to live and procreate, all borne of the same light and dust and heavenly ideals. It is beyond the truthless animal perceptions of pain, pleasure, and morals. It is beyond morality itself. It takes no solid form, existence in the fire and light of its soul, ideas and being upon which it forces others to experience in shells of flesh. Sentient beings exist in their truest forms as souls, without body and constrained by sensation and animal desire. Gods are those who surpassed this infantile state. Gods dwell as within the mind, limited only by what they cannot dream.

            To those of that dark world gods were not the workings of the elements defiled with their image. Gods were rain and hail. Gods were thunder and lightning. Gods were the unstoppable, raging sea in all its ancient chaos. Gods were unperceivable, uncontrollable, reminders of one’s smallness, one’s insignificance, the fragility of life and the brutal, many-tiered order of creation. Gods were pain and fear, those most cruel and divine of sensations.

            Gods were as unchanging and unyielding as the void. Gods were worshipped from fear. Gods were beyond beings with extraordinary power or the manipulatory tools of cruel governments. Gods were nature itself.

#

            Things long-dead lived as they shouldn’t and things long-alive tasted death. The land and sea had intertwined in a violent, bestial marriage, with the clamor of their engagement ripping apart the marshes and casting aside those who dwelled within.

            Bouillon was still managing to hold himself up against the torrential downpour and attacking winds by virtue of his size. The storm came from the sea, and his nigh-indomitable mass shielded his smaller companions from the worst of it. No longer could they hear anything but the sloshing of seawater, the screams of wind, and the rumbling, merciless roar of a god.

            Water was launched to the height of hills by the wind, slicing through bitter skies and cascading downwards in legions of glittering droplets. The swollen tides frothed white and oozed red, ebbing with oranges and rust-colors and all the shades and hues of whatever bacterial layers they had kicked up. From an aerial view in less disastrous weather the algae marshes would look to be works of abstract art, like some clumsy painter had spilled a few different kinds of watercolors on a page and let them swirl and intermix amidst crude imagery of familiar fauna.

            A foot away from the struggling group passed a bloated, rotting wyrm-corpse dragged to the surface by the winds. Slimy marine things without eyes and limbs weaved between their feet in a desperate search for shelter that was not there. They were kicked aside without pity.

#

            Between the dry land and open sea there were, of course, the vast tidal marshlands formed from accumulated layers of algae. Year after year of bountiful growth rotted in the dark winters and piled atop the remains of years past until there was a wall of muck several miles wide and dozens of meters deep dividing water from land.

            Past this the water was dense and cloudy, littered with particulate waste and murk. Marine algae grew in colonies on the surface and slimy clouds of it hovered below. Beyond that it was black as night and rank with loose sediment and decay. For the pale blind things of the sea it was paradise, and upon the advent of the primordial chaos that was the storm it was lost.

            The great dragon of the depths had spent a century of her life nosing around there, probing the dark corners for food and burrowing in the seafloor. Her race was parthenogenic, slow-growing, and a healthy member could hope to live for centuries. From the black seas of the north she had crawled into warmer waters for the abundant prey, and there she had stayed beyond all light and knowledge of those above. The storm had kicked her up from the abyss and sent her rolling with the land-bound waves, a dazed, disoriented nightmare stranded in reality.

            Bouillon did not notice the eighty-foot mass of black, tubular muscle until it smacked into his back and nearly knocked him into the floodwaters. He swerved around just in time, spear gripped as the pointed, javelin-snout of the dragon came spiraling out of the froth. It missed him, crashing back into the water and sliding into dark chaos. The flopping, wriggling tail struck him across the shoulder once before sinking below and knocking aside Shat as it went. He fought to the surface, sputtering water and spitting curses.

            Just within sight the dragon was struggling against the waves and casting her body up out of the water in great, dripping arcs. The bladed head sliced through froth and plunged into red deluge, the immense body looping through the monstrous rage of the storm.

            It can be said for the dragon, a kind of immense, marine wyrm relative, that she was not intent on attacking anyone or anything and had no real idea of where she was. Her kind fed entirely on small aquatic animals they caught in the mud and engulfed with their extensible proboscises and amidst the raging weather eating was the last thing on her rudimentary mind. All she wanted to do was last through the storm and swim somewhere murky and dark, and that instinctive urge to survive drove her struggle against violent winds and gluttonous waves.

            Her snout possessed slight electrical properties not unlike certain Earth eels, which she used to stun prey, and in her desperate fright she shocked water and wind alike. Bouillon trumpeted a curse in his native tongue as the great javelin snout hurled itself towards his face, ducking quickly enough so as to only suffer a slight graze across his neck. The electric shock bubbled his skin an ugly pale and made him scream.

            “FIRE!”.

            He had never experienced anything electric upon skin and thus made the next best logical conclusion. The looping, twisting mass of the dragon was shoved aside and struck with the sharp end of his spear, ripping loose some of the skin and revealing pink, stringy flesh that trailed along the floodwaters.

            Now the dragon was in a mad rage, wound stinging in the salt water and senses muddled by the storm. Blind, afraid, and in pain, her thrashing coils made for a powerful enemy.

            The muscular tail lifted up and struck Bouillon across the face, nearly knocking him over. A loop of her body snagged his foot and finished the job. Again came the bladed snout, driving apart the waves and grazing his flank. He grabbed hold of it and received a shock to the hand, kicking and flailing in confused pain.

            His spear struck the dragon and caught hold in one of her gills, trailing blood in the water. He held on, trying to anchor his feet in the mud as nearly thirty meters of muscle tore through the storm and fought the stampeding waters. In an instant they were devoured by the violent abyss.

            Now the Atrox Sapients were in a desperate craze, calling blindly to eachother and thrashing in the enveloping flood. Great arcs of red water were cast up and into the faces, filling their breathing vents and sensors with painful salt. They could not find eachother, they could not find their way, and they could not find Bouillon. Somehow, through all of it, Shat managed to hold on to his worm.

            The god that was the storm had swallowed their world, and it would pass through night and well into the next day before it was vomited back out.

Description

          After a few hours of worm-hunting the winds began to pick up and the bitter rains began to escalate into a mad rage, slamming themselves against the mud and kicking it up several feet in the air. A wise and universal decision was made that it was time to seek shelter.

            The storm came fast and hard upon its prey. Within the miles of flat and open tidal plain there was no shelter, and the thick mud slowed one’s movements considerably. Sheltered hills were still but a distant paradise by the time winds threatened to knock the Atrox Sapients off their feet and carry them away, the sheer force of it all sweeping the mud and grime into glistening cascades and arcs. The sea of mud had entered a primordial rage, once-quiet surface alive with ravenous waves leaping into the air with frothing white teeth and rumbling bellows.

            Storms in that world were deities unto themselves, raging beasts of wind and rain rampaging over the wilderness and tearing up the primordial ooze. They broke bones and tossed rocks from hills without bodies to be struck by clubs or claws. To the worm-hunters and their quarry they were veritable gods.

            An hour became a year in that primordial chaos, its sufferers effectively blind as the heavy winds and rains distorted their senses. The Atrox Sapients walked in front of Bouillon, shielded from the worst of the wind by his immense frame. Even he was afraid, mostly for himself at the time but also for his rhino, who he had left tethered to a heavy boulder back in the hills where the ground was dryer.

            That old monster called the sea had long been penned-in by the miles-wide walls of mud and filth, but now it was slamming itself against its constraints and sputtering over the surface. Its roars could be heard well within the sanctity of dry land, which grimly faced the possibilities of being devoured.

            “De sea!”, cried Bouillon, bracing against his spear as another gust of wind hammered his back. “Have tu monkes ever seen de sea!?”.

            “Soon!”, cried Shat, swatting windblown mud from his face.

            “I went ‘n ate moi some ah dem lump-crabs at de sea, once!”, gurgled Meatbag, trying to fight the rain with his club.

            “Dey any good!?”.

            “Every bit as dey say, ya see!”.

            If they had eyes, the Atrox Sapients would just barely notice frothing white waters stampeding across the horizon like an approaching army.

            The monster was loose.

            It moved with the wind, eating up mud and hurtling mud-things in the air. A twenty-foot Bull-Worm was tossed up from its substratum and launched twice its length in the air, landing with a splash in the froth. The water was rust-colored from the mud, the swirling winds red with the grime of surface algae.

            “Ever gone swimmin’, mon amis!?”, screeched Bonshat. A segmented worm-thing of the marine kind landed on his face.

            Skies screamed and the monster roared, vomiting its underworld-belly and all the demons within. Dark things of the sea were hurled at the dark things of the land, all blind and wriggling beneath red skies and a black sun.

            The human perception of the nature of gods is radically limited. They take their image and plaster it onto natural forces, anthropomorphizing divine conceptions and violating the formless abstraction of existence with macabre imagery. Gods as we know them are human creations, things made and expected to care for those that made them. For all their power they were designed to stoop to man, providing rain and blessings in exchange for worship.

            The true nature of a god is the beauty and cruelty of life, the joy of creation and the renewal of death. It is everything in existence intertwined, all with equal right to live and procreate, all borne of the same light and dust and heavenly ideals. It is beyond the truthless animal perceptions of pain, pleasure, and morals. It is beyond morality itself. It takes no solid form, existence in the fire and light of its soul, ideas and being upon which it forces others to experience in shells of flesh. Sentient beings exist in their truest forms as souls, without body and constrained by sensation and animal desire. Gods are those who surpassed this infantile state. Gods dwell as within the mind, limited only by what they cannot dream.

            To those of that dark world gods were not the workings of the elements defiled with their image. Gods were rain and hail. Gods were thunder and lightning. Gods were the unstoppable, raging sea in all its ancient chaos. Gods were unperceivable, uncontrollable, reminders of one’s smallness, one’s insignificance, the fragility of life and the brutal, many-tiered order of creation. Gods were pain and fear, those most cruel and divine of sensations.

            Gods were as unchanging and unyielding as the void. Gods were worshipped from fear. Gods were beyond beings with extraordinary power or the manipulatory tools of cruel governments. Gods were nature itself.

#

            Things long-dead lived as they shouldn’t and things long-alive tasted death. The land and sea had intertwined in a violent, bestial marriage, with the clamor of their engagement ripping apart the marshes and casting aside those who dwelled within.

            Bouillon was still managing to hold himself up against the torrential downpour and attacking winds by virtue of his size. The storm came from the sea, and his nigh-indomitable mass shielded his smaller companions from the worst of it. No longer could they hear anything but the sloshing of seawater, the screams of wind, and the rumbling, merciless roar of a god.

            Water was launched to the height of hills by the wind, slicing through bitter skies and cascading downwards in legions of glittering droplets. The swollen tides frothed white and oozed red, ebbing with oranges and rust-colors and all the shades and hues of whatever bacterial layers they had kicked up. From an aerial view in less disastrous weather the algae marshes would look to be works of abstract art, like some clumsy painter had spilled a few different kinds of watercolors on a page and let them swirl and intermix amidst crude imagery of familiar fauna.

            A foot away from the struggling group passed a bloated, rotting wyrm-corpse dragged to the surface by the winds. Slimy marine things without eyes and limbs weaved between their feet in a desperate search for shelter that was not there. They were kicked aside without pity.

#

            Between the dry land and open sea there were, of course, the vast tidal marshlands formed from accumulated layers of algae. Year after year of bountiful growth rotted in the dark winters and piled atop the remains of years past until there was a wall of muck several miles wide and dozens of meters deep dividing water from land.

            Past this the water was dense and cloudy, littered with particulate waste and murk. Marine algae grew in colonies on the surface and slimy clouds of it hovered below. Beyond that it was black as night and rank with loose sediment and decay. For the pale blind things of the sea it was paradise, and upon the advent of the primordial chaos that was the storm it was lost.

            The great dragon of the depths had spent a century of her life nosing around there, probing the dark corners for food and burrowing in the seafloor. Her race was parthenogenic, slow-growing, and a healthy member could hope to live for centuries. From the black seas of the north she had crawled into warmer waters for the abundant prey, and there she had stayed beyond all light and knowledge of those above. The storm had kicked her up from the abyss and sent her rolling with the land-bound waves, a dazed, disoriented nightmare stranded in reality.

            Bouillon did not notice the eighty-foot mass of black, tubular muscle until it smacked into his back and nearly knocked him into the floodwaters. He swerved around just in time, spear gripped as the pointed, javelin-snout of the dragon came spiraling out of the froth. It missed him, crashing back into the water and sliding into dark chaos. The flopping, wriggling tail struck him across the shoulder once before sinking below and knocking aside Shat as it went. He fought to the surface, sputtering water and spitting curses.

            Just within sight the dragon was struggling against the waves and casting her body up out of the water in great, dripping arcs. The bladed head sliced through froth and plunged into red deluge, the immense body looping through the monstrous rage of the storm.

            It can be said for the dragon, a kind of immense, marine wyrm relative, that she was not intent on attacking anyone or anything and had no real idea of where she was. Her kind fed entirely on small aquatic animals they caught in the mud and engulfed with their extensible proboscises and amidst the raging weather eating was the last thing on her rudimentary mind. All she wanted to do was last through the storm and swim somewhere murky and dark, and that instinctive urge to survive drove her struggle against violent winds and gluttonous waves.

            Her snout possessed slight electrical properties not unlike certain Earth eels, which she used to stun prey, and in her desperate fright she shocked water and wind alike. Bouillon trumpeted a curse in his native tongue as the great javelin snout hurled itself towards his face, ducking quickly enough so as to only suffer a slight graze across his neck. The electric shock bubbled his skin an ugly pale and made him scream.

            “FIRE!”.

            He had never experienced anything electric upon skin and thus made the next best logical conclusion. The looping, twisting mass of the dragon was shoved aside and struck with the sharp end of his spear, ripping loose some of the skin and revealing pink, stringy flesh that trailed along the floodwaters.

            Now the dragon was in a mad rage, wound stinging in the salt water and senses muddled by the storm. Blind, afraid, and in pain, her thrashing coils made for a powerful enemy.

            The muscular tail lifted up and struck Bouillon across the face, nearly knocking him over. A loop of her body snagged his foot and finished the job. Again came the bladed snout, driving apart the waves and grazing his flank. He grabbed hold of it and received a shock to the hand, kicking and flailing in confused pain.

            His spear struck the dragon and caught hold in one of her gills, trailing blood in the water. He held on, trying to anchor his feet in the mud as nearly thirty meters of muscle tore through the storm and fought the stampeding waters. In an instant they were devoured by the violent abyss.

            Now the Atrox Sapients were in a desperate craze, calling blindly to eachother and thrashing in the enveloping flood. Great arcs of red water were cast up and into the faces, filling their breathing vents and sensors with painful salt. They could not find eachother, they could not find their way, and they could not find Bouillon. Somehow, through all of it, Shat managed to hold on to his worm.

            The god that was the storm had swallowed their world, and it would pass through night and well into the next day before it was vomited back out.