05-14-2019, 03:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-14-2019, 03:18 PM by Corri.)
Another, much longer scroll of paper is fastened underneath.
It has been suggested to me that I post a copy of the story which created this monster. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the story, possible ideas for the creature's weakness, etc. Here is the story as recorded the night it was told:
Did you know a city can die as easily as a person? It dies in the same lonely ways: a knife in the governor’s heart, a poisoning of a goblet, and there are diseases that begin slowly. Who would notice such things, tucked away in a city of tides and prides and demons? A city can also be eaten like food, as all things inevitably are. It can be torn limb from street and swallowed- by larger cities, by armies, by citizens too hungry for the meager meat of boats and proclamations and commemorative structures.
Or by something which has come to like its taste.
You could call me a disease, a tumor tucked away in the dusty corners, but it is more apt to call me a creature of appetite. I have no mother, I have no father, is my pedigree not immaculate?
There was a Lord Fire Elf once in a world far from here. This man suffered a great hunger in the way some men suffer a wasting illness or an arrow in the kidney. He was a man of some property and before this ailment he was not unhandsome and married well. His wife was lovelier than a year of Mays, black of hair and eye. He was called Jabari; she was called Fatima.
Because of the fortunate match of Fatima, Jabari found himself with a goodly number of tenant farmers, which for a time he treated as well as any lord may- with neglect at all times, save the harvest. But it came to pass that for three harvests the land was cruel and hard and did not yield enough to feed all that tilled it. The lord’s house satisfied itself with selling tapestries and such-like in order to supply apples and pigs flesh and cabbages.
In the fourth winter, there yielded no crop at all. Wind battered the fields, bristling and bare as a new monk’s head. Jabari and Fatima stared at an empty table and so too did all who worked the land. The last dairy cows had been slaughtered, the last egg chickens had been slurped to the bones. I will not describe what the most wretched of them did to survive.
In the depths of this winter, Jabari conceived the great hunger in the way some women concieve children. His belly snarled and lurched, he was blind with it, clutching to his roiling gut and rolling on the hot marble floor.
But fortune sometimes smiles on the suffering and it was a rich, green spring of new lambs and new fields of seed and fine breeding pairs provided by sympathetic relatives of Fatima sending caravans over the dunes. Speechless with relief, Jabari ate and ate. He paced the halls, his stomach gnawing caverns into itself, devouring apples, pig flesh and cabbages. But there was no surcease for the unlucky lord! He did not grow fat, for as quickly as he ate he hungered anew.
Finally came the harvest and the lord’s due. Fatima hoped her husband would be sated. Into his mouth went cider and beer, hazelnuts and venison, currants and sheepshanks, squash and pies, roasted chickens and beef knuckles, mushrooms and pigs by the wagons. He stopped ordering his meat butchered and ate all there was to offer; ears, hooves, tails, tongues, eyes, bones and marrow. All but the teeth, which even he could not stomach, and piled in the corner.
When there was nothing left for the farmers, fair Fatima approached her husband, who could not bring himself to leave the table, the torture rack on which his bones cried out. He blinked at her in shame with hunger-haggard eyes, red as plague and twice as hollow.
.
“Its alright, husband.” She laid her hands on the table, smooth and tanned with her days beating blankets and sewing tapestries. She spread her fingers against the juice-stained grain of the wood.
“A woman may give her flesh as she pleases, and a lady owes no less than her people give. The lord takes equally from all. Take only my hands.”
He feigned horror and refused her at first, but his mouth watered for her. She said nothing and did not withdraw, even as he brought out his carving knife. He wept as he severed the brown hands at the wrists. Fatima did not weep. He would not eat before her gaze and crouched in the corner among the teeth like a whipped dog and sucked flesh from bone, gnawing and worrying the marrow, then grinding them to a fine dust. And for a time he was sated.
But a time came again when he was again consumed. Fatima went to the farmers and begged them to hand over the animals they had left to her husband’s hunger, now so great that fruit and vegetables alone could not touch it. They took pity and surrendered their livestock. Down the king’s throat went ox and horse, donkey and sheep, goat and goose, dogs and pigs, farm cats and hollering chickens too craved to be killed and cooked first. And all the same as before, all happily supped upon save for the teeth which were suckled and then spat out into the pile of teeth.
His wife came to him again and fair Fatima smiled.
“It is better I lose my feet than our countryside lose all once again.”
This time the lord did not argue and drew his carving knife, nocked and pitted from severing so many joints and sinew, and cut the beautiful sand-smoothed feet from the ankles. He supped upon them greedily in the midst of his tooth graveyard. And for a time, he was sated.
But as a disease can come back in full force after being operated on, so did the hunger and the king sobbed and ached at a dining table he felt no compulsion to rise from. He worried the wooden edge of it with his jaws and suckled at reliefs of animal paws carved into the base of the legs. Fatima sent word to her relatives, to the countryside’s finest hunters, and begged for their help once more.
Soon the dining hall was filled and sooner still relieved of exotic delicacies that even the poorest of the world would refuse. Down the king’s gullet went tiger tails and desert otters, scorpions and fuzzy spiders, red wolf and camel, drake and cobra, hyena and zebra and crocodile and once it was rumored that a speared harpy lay upon his plate. There was no joy in the feast and the lord wept over what he had been reduced to. Through huge, wet tears, he called his guards and ordered that every first born daughter and second born son in the countryside be brought to his table, by force.
But Fatima called a halt to the meeting, and the nursemaids carried her to her husband.
“It is better I lose all than see my husband reduced to the ravaged lunacy of an animal and choke out the world in his pursuit to be full.” She lay upon the table before his shame and the hunger on his face. He drew out his carving knife, blackened from woman’s blood, and struck her through the heart, slurping meat and bone, sinew, blood, hair, eyes, fair skin, heart, liver, lungs, kidneys. All but her teeth. He climbed the mountain of them, close to the ceiling, and placed them upon the very top of the pile.
The lord was sated, and I awoke. The bundle of Fatima’s teeth ignited my heart and I stumbled as the tooth cairn, raw and uncertain. Jabari stare as I took my first steps, hooves of teeth clicking on the marble. I saw him and wobbled. I saw him and hungered.
I swallowed him up, bone and tooth. I was still hungry and I left the house on the hill, bringing the hunger with me. It is all I am. I am all it is. We seek things big enough to feed us. We began with cattle and peasants, but not enough. We trid forests, but thy were bitter. We tried swamps but they were brackish. Finally, we found cities.
A gleam of white, a crunching, gnawing sound in the gnarled roots of the forest, I crawl on my belly like a cringing dog towards the fires of light. My four limbs are a jumble of molars, bicuspids, incisors. Great flat horse teeth make my spine and the long canines of sabertooths curve into ribs. My feet are hooves of enamel molars. My delicate face, stippled of row after row of baby teeth, houses my eyes, wolf’s teeth yellow with age. I am called Golod.
-Nevicata del Bastone, della Tribu della Verga d'Oro, precedentemente della Fiore dio Loto Bianco
