a place in a stolen world

these are the killing plains

every artfag gets a free beksinki now and then shut UP

The Baker’s fields once grew here, irrigated by the Great Glass River. There were cities here, mills here, foundries and laboratories and kilns and factories and airstrips, all testament to the prime heresy of alchemy: that grain may belong to Angbora, but bread does not.

Now it is the mass grave of a failed people, the only place in the Stolen World where nothing grows that is good to eat. Angbora's spite and talisman against revolution. Bare, sucking clay. Bones and grave goods and bullet casings rising to the surface when the rains turn the earth queasy. the people of Mither dine on birdflesh and wait for the Swallowed Curse to find them, and the Coffin-draggers rot-pickle the animals that come here to die. the Great Glass River drips from the fangs of Dead Ouroboros in the mountains. Anything left in it is, over months, encased and preserved in the green glass that lines the bottom of the river.

Its Laws

• Do not sleep on the ground: as the earth ate the Bakers pounded into, it inherited their thoughts. Their dead-minds cannot tell the difference between death and dreaming, and clay will pull you into itself to join them.
• Do not light fire: the Furnace Curse Angbora laid on the Bakers still lingers here. Thick oily napalm smoke pours into your mouth, nose, ears and sets your heart on fire with Cinder-Sick.
  

Its flora

who knew? i've been feeling hamaguchiesque all along

Only three things grow, harsh and strange, from the deathly clay.

Sorrowful Soldier

Tall, stiff grey grass with big, bent seedpods that leak a sticky red sap. Grows to spite the razor hooves of the Thracian Mares. Thickets of it mark where the Baker's dead lie in large numbers, as though the revolutionaries were sprouting their own mourners.

Moon-Bishop

Man-height, hardy, thorned, hooded plant, revealing a luminescent flower only on the full moon. Stamens like eyes. Insects of all kinds gather around these plants on the full moon in complex prayer-mosaics and carry their seeds to found cathedrals in other places. Not of this world, so Angbora and his curse hold no power over it. The sweet, phallic roots can be eaten, but do not pass through your body, and touched by the light of a full moon, the blossoms burst through your eyes and render you senseless. You will dig your own grave, and lie quietly within it. A host of insects carts the soil back over you, and by the next full moon, you will have sprouted. A popular means of suicide. 

 

Liar's Guilt

A curse, crawling out of Babjo's heavy conscience. Fungus that recreates ruins and the people who lived there. Found everywhere in the stolen world, but here, where an entire way of life was ground to mud, it is omnipresent. Mycelial matrix imitations, sprouting from the earth that held them. First pale and ghostly, then cuttlefish shifting to match their original color and texture. Touching them proves otherwise; soft, spongy. All are real, mostly. The imitations are close enough to pull souls through time to inhabit them. All of them only wish to be destroyed. They know they’re not supposed to be here.

Its eaters of plants

Toshihiko Ikeda soothing my soul after i just got so fucking pissed off about how much ai slop ive had to sort through today jfc

Cage Crown Spider

like a double sided spider; feeling legs pointed up, walking legs pointed down. has no means to eat on its own so it needs to jump on your head and use its feeling legs to root itself in your brain and make you into a docile grazing animal, chewing the sharp stems of Sorrowful Soldier with a bleeding mouth. its walking legs, now pointed skyward, stiffen into a crown that eventually releases a bloom-cloud of baby spiders from its tips.

Spade-Sparrows

Quill-feathers that secrete alkahest and spade-wings that let them swoop through clay. A product of the Bakers genetic crucibles, used to scout for mineral deposits and tend the roots of their grain. Spending their whole lives beneath the earth, they eat Moon-Bishop roots without fear. Called Poetbane Birds by some who resent their tendency to eat the shoots sprouting from those dead of Moon-Bishop suicide  before they reach the surface. 

Its eaters of flesh

source lost in a sea of new age neo pagan bullshit

 

Laughing Lightning

Another Baker project, this one a weapon grown to kill the Hounds of Id. A charged, joyful thought, writhing and opalescent-electric, freed from the original war-mind that dreamed it. Like chain lightning, leaping from target to target charring each one to ecstatic cinder and growing as it consumes the total dopamine release it pulls from their minds. Whatever is last to be struck becomes its new host: it burns out all other thoughts and coils in the skull, sending a laughing, manic figure twitch-running over the clay towards more prey.

Liquor-Sick

Called Barrel-Mystics by the Coffin-Draggers, who first created them with the Drunken Curse, and venerate them as the the only of their people truly free from Angbora. The honored is placed in a barrel of liquid nitrogen (rare, among the most coveted finds of these scavenging peoples) and forced to drink the volume of their bodies blood in alcohol. Then they are exsanguinated by some secret means that drains their blood while leaving the alcohol. These sodden, freezing drunks are kept alive by processing the ethanol inside of them, and, vampiric, they ferment more by drinking blood. Their stomachs twin, one kept for the processing of alcohol, the other a fermentation tank of living blood. Brains too cold to support thought, fingers too numb to use tools or weapons, they kill by inducing hypothermia with their embrace and sucking blood out through their preys tongue with frozen lips. If their victim is human, they vomit alcohol into them to replace it, and so beget children. When fed, Barrel Mystics huddle close to one another in family groups, seeking some facsimile of warmth.

Cinder-Sick

Crawl naked as their hearts burn down, mimic the sound of laughter and chatter. Distant corpse-light on the horizon. Cough up their burning hearts to make the fire; hide, half sunken in the earth nearby. Swallow fresh hearts to let them stand and walk like men, feed the unneeded bodies to the heart-fire, which nourishes them. Heartfire does not carry the Furnace Curse; this is valuable enough to risk the trap for many. Can place a burning heart in an empty body to raise them as Cinder-Sick, and care for these children deeply.

Its eaters of the dead

peter maxmaxxing

Dredgeweavers

Huge, bristly dragonflies, the size of a small prop-plane. Mate angler fish style; male latches on, his legs growing into long spindly nets that hook onto dead animals and hoist them up to rot in the air. The liquefying flesh is slurped up by the female, who is pumping the male full of eggs until he eventually wrenches free under their weight and crashes into the earth. All the eggs inside hatch into squirming young, fed by their dead father. Like all insects, they divide when chewed but retain their life; its source is other than our own. Hated viciously by Angbora, who has no domain over these aliens. A thief that steals the flesh that should be his to eat, and let it rot instead. The Coffin-Draggers celebrate this, and tame the insects to drag their coffins and harvest rotting flesh to pickle and eat themselves. Eating putrescence does not incur the Ash-Tongued Curse; the Emperor does not sully himself by dining on filth. 

Aquarri

Fifteen foot tall women of steel-strong ceramic, enameled with flowers and petals of fire. Solar panel butterfly wings on their heads, which carry water from the Great Glass River. Baker constructs, they do not eat, but collect undamaged corpses or their pieces and place them in their heads to preserve them. Once their heads are full, they detatch and fly back to their nests, where countless specimens lie, encased in glass, arranged as though to form whole beings. Originally scientific instruments, repurposed during the revolution for medical purposes. Hands with fingers all the way around, like the rays of little suns. Their empty wombs are large enough to carry the mechanic who would service them. 

Its tyrant

but he used to be beautiful

The Jewel of War

Once a palanquin-bearer for Angbora on his victory tour of the plains. Bewitched by the murmurings of a jade ring the Emperor wore to spite that oldest of stones, he stole the jewel, and swallowed it when he was searched. It now seeks to drag him into the earth so it can rejoin its kind. Too proud to surrender it, he is at war with his own body, the earth, and all who walk on it. He moves at incredible speed as the ground sucks at his heels, and wages constant ceremonial combat.

His Laws

• blindingly fast, cannot be hit while moving
• when he does stand still, the earth begins to swallow him, rooting him in place and making him immune to being pushed/knocked prone
• green-sick, he is ravenously hungry and must stop to eat any kill
• by focusing the homesickness of the stone in his stomach and striking the earth, he splits it, creating a pit which closes after a few moments. 
• he uses to conceal himself before erupting from below, or flings his foes into it to bury them alive. 
• when he is half dead, the strain of the stone is too great to bear. half his body begs to surrender and let the earth swallow him, but with the other half he rips himself vertically down his center, separating into two half- beings, each with a missing arm and leg replaced by tendrils of coiled veins and sinew. the two of halves still joined by their tangled intestines, wrapped around the tiny shining ring. 
• When he dies, he gets 2 attempts to force the jade ring into his killer. If he does, it is so soaked in his hate that it roots in them as it did in him, and forever seeks to drag them into the earth. 

His servants

their intentionally blasphemous work that addresses ideas of sovereignty, excess, the links between violence and the sacred, and the immutable but impossible place of God and Satan in the cosmological order

Chained Preachers of Triumph

Hooks in their grotesquely muscled bodybuilder flesh, chained to each other, bellowing the supremacy of the Jewel. Loop themselves to create his arena, bind people to bring to the tournaments, force captives to fight one another to determine the champion who will face him. Used to be palanquin attendants who would clean the bearers, wipe the sweat from their bodies, and eventually, sanctified by Angbora, serve as their meals. This blessing has not been revoked; you may eat a Preacher without suffering the Ash-Tongued Curse, and they dine on each other.

Their Laws

• Encircle you with the chains that link their bodies. They can always hit you if they flank or surround you.
• Once they have hit you once, with every subsequent hit they can hook a chain into your flesh, hobbling you and binding you to them.
• If they have four chains hooked in you, they control the movement of your limbs. 
• If you have four chains hooked into you and there are 8 or more Preachers in the chain, you count as a Preacher and can be eaten without fear of the Ash-Tongued Curse
  
•  Cannot be killed unless the majority of the Preachers chained together have been killed; until that happens, the living can puppet the dead through the chains hooked into their flexing, straining flesh.

His scourge

Stamatis Laskos new absolute favey

The Pantagruelites

A warband of Coffin-Draggers, keepers of the giant-molds, who dine on Preachers. In addition to the coffins containing their elders, drag huge man-shaped molds with holes at the top and bottom. Criminals and prisoners of war are placed in them and the mold is hauled by pulling on their arms and legs until they've reached great length. Then, masks of clay from the Great Glass River, shiny and bottle-green, are placed over their faces.  Huge, servile, gangly attrition hunters who just walk after you, throwing lightweight, ribboned spears ahead of them, retrieving them, throwing again.

The Pantagruelites follow in the wake of the Chained Preachers, sending their giants ahead of them, picking off groups raiding other Coffin-Dragger caravans or pilgrims on their way to Dead Ouroboros. Those they rescue are not spared looting, though most consider themselves lucky to have escaped the Jewel of War's roving arena.

As a group they tend to be overconfident and insecure. They are proud of their warlike manner compared to most of the Coffin-Dragger clans, but know that truly, they risk little, and survive only because of the blessing Angbora laid on the Chained Preachers so long ago. They wear the chains of their chosen prey as jewelry, and dote on their giants with something between the care of a parent and the owner of a racehorse.

Masked Giants

Stand around 12 feet high on stilt-limbs, arms and legs terrifyingly long in comparison to their still human-size heads and torsos. Their spears fly little ribbons at their ends to better mark their targets, and they can throw them around 600 feet, or nearly a quarter of a mile with their atalatls, made from the femurs of their dead.

 

Their Laws

• If you are standing still, they can always hit you with their thrown spears.
• If they have missed you with two thrown spears, they can always hit you with the third
• If you have a spear stuck in you, they can always hit you with another.