real heads will already know
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| dont stop spinning |
- 1d20 men walking on their hands and knees like dogs. they want to eat the man-wolf in 0302.
- a swarm of sainted mosquitos from 0102.
- 1d6 bite saints, hovering slightly above the ground as their blessed organs bulge and bear them up towards heaven.
- 1d12 doctors going to fight the war on cancer. they are armed with the miracle drug that cures all cancers and machine guns.
- Ursa Major, looking for Ursa Minor. like a bear of mostly empty space and nuclear radiance.
- Ursa Minor, who has gotten lost and frightened. He wants to climb the tree in 0202 to try and get back in the sky.
stay sick
0201. papery sun and a scarlet mesa, briars clinging to the rocks. on the top, flayed skins are stretched and hung on the briar trees. these human hides are starmaps, each blemish, scar, freckle and mole incorporated into the chart.
a doctor with long, beautiful hair dutifully skins a corpse to make another map. he is nonviolent, but requests you bring him any corpses you can. he can pay you with the belongings of the dead. he has memorized the night, and since the sun will not set, he recreates them here.
0301. an eclipse. the sun is only a ring of fire. a herdsman with bleeding feet herds invisible cattle across the stone.
0401. diamond sunlight on white sand dunes. black against them, gnarled thorn bushes with thorns like white knives. impaled on one bush, a ragged corpse, nude and looted, black oil trickling slowly out of his wounds and down the dune, pooling at the bottom.
0102. A river curls through the grasslands here, water pale and grey as the diseased sunlight that glints dully off of it. Briars thick with cobwebs throttle the grass by the lip of the bank, making approaching the water’s edge difficult. In the distance, an overpass.
Press inward, smoke-blind, spider-bitten, thorn-ripped, and find one man gutting the corpse of another, grunting with exertion, blood soaked from the waist up. Where the blood drips into earth, flowers bloom, twisting up through the soil, blood red and bone white.
The dead man’s smock lays in the mud beside his murderer, and the killer’s stolen horse, oblivious and alabaster, waits some yards from that. Mosquitos swarm in the air around the scene of butchery, their whine resonating in your teeth. They feast in droves, coating the corpse in teeming life.
The mosquitos who drink of the saint’s blood now carry sainthood within them like a plague; should they infect you with it, one by one your organs will be blessed until sin burns and sicken you like a plague of fire, and you will have no choice but to lead a life free of violence, lust, and greed. Those who live in sin will hate instinctively, and you will have to struggle hard to avoid a martyr’s death.
0202. the sun is brown like parchment, shadows flat and black, outlines picked out as though you were in an illustration. the tallest tree in the world bursts out of the prairie here. if felled, it would cross all hexes in the direction that it falls. the moon has been flung in its branches and is unable to escape. if it ever did, the sun would flee in shame.
0302. Grass gives way to sand and stone. The sun casts a crimson light on the badlands here. Shadows like pools of blood.
Two sets of prints through the sand, both messy with haste. First, a buffalo, then, later, a pair of boots in pursuit. Follow them a ways, and find a few possessions; a rifle and a handful of bullets, a pair of dice, a sheriff’s badge from a town you’ve never heard of.
The buffalo’s prints continue on, but the second pair changes here, from those of a man to those of an eager, hunting beast. Wolf or dog. Follow them further, and they grow wearier, until they are not prints at all, but a line dredged through the sand by some crawling creature.
Follow further still. Find the corpse of a wolf. Massive, monstrous, it crawls forward feebly, pursuing the buffalo even in death. Poison oozes from its skin where the fur is pale and patchy. Open its jaws and find the face of a dead man looking back at you, gray lips and rotted eyes.
0402. Dunes of white dust, drowning in a fevered haze of pale sunlight. A rusted oil derrick crouches atop a dune like a demonic locust, pump ceaselessly vomiting crude into the sand. Beside the derrick, rusted barrels, some full, some empty, form a silent congregation.
Twisting up from the scrub grass around the derrick, a dead tree claws at the sky. A golden clock hangs from a golden chain looped around one of the tree's knotted fingers.
Look closer. The second and minute hands keep their usual time, but the clock's markings span not a day, but eons, and a century hand inches forward constantly, working its way towards the midnight end of the world. The pump seems to keep time with the ticking of the second hand.
Stay a while. Are the hands speeding up? The longer you linger, the faster they race, and the more of the earth’s lifeblood spills across its surface. A great greed is growing in you, an apocalyptic desire to bottle the oil, to hoard and keep it. Linger here, fill the barrels, and when all are full, sit below the pump itself and be baptized. Drink the oil, take its sacrament. Store it in your belly. Drink until the earth is empty, and you are full.
0103. The sun is washed out. Everything is grey and drab. A highway surfaces from the loose, dry earth then plunges back beneath it. By that small patch of asphalt, a little white cross, a plastic bouquet, and a spilled bottle of the miracle drug, the drug that can cure all cancer forever.
0203. Shade trees by a river under an amber sun. the tallest man in the world has come here to hang himself, but none of the trees are tall enough. His left ankle is chafed raw where he was bound.
0303. The sunlight here is brown and dirty, clinging to the tall silver-gray grass of the steppe. A trail of packed earth cuts gracefully across the landscape.
Bright in the grimy sunlight, diamonds dot the trail, pushing up through the earth, half exposed. A trained eye and hand will note on further inspection that these are not diamonds; they are too light, their facets more organic than geometric. The gems are egg-sacs; kept close to the warmth of a body for a few days they will pulse and flex with life, each finally releasing hundreds of tiny, glittering spiders.
In the distance, a wooden cross stands lonely above the grass. A woman in a leather frock is tied to it by her ankle. Eagles nest at the top, massive and ungainly. The birds circle high above, swooping and diving gracefully through towering palaces and cathedrals of cloud.
The woman lives on the egg-sacs of the diamond spiders, tearing them open with unnervingly strong teeth, many-legged larvae spilling from the corners of her mouth. The rope is thick and tarry; any attempt to untie or cut it will merely gum up the fingers or dull the blade.
She wants to play knucklebones for your faith. I squandered mine, she says, and places an eagle feather at your feet. But you still have yours, and should you win, the Kingdom of Heaven will open to you like the prophets of old, and you will see paradise while you live.
Should you win, she weeps, silent and bitter, and hands you the eagle feather. Hold it aloft and call on God’s couriers, she says. When and wherever you do, so long as you are yet faithful, two eagles will streak from the sky, transforming into fierce angels, black feathers, golden eyes and talons. They will lift you like a child, and carry you upwards towards what once were clouds, and now are endless empty palaces of marble and courtyards of flowers whose smell alone heals and refreshes you. You may stay only one night in this place before the angels return you to earth and the halls and pillars are swept away by wind, but its memory remains a comfort always.
Should you lose and forfeit your faith, the eagles circling above drop into a death-dive, stopping just short of the earth as they transform into angels. They sever the woman’s rope with golden claws, and one holds you still while the other binds your ankle with it. The woman, weeping with joy, offers them the feather, and they lift her skyward, carrying her towards the kingdom of clouds.
0403. Blue sunlight flashes off of tin shanty roofs and sets the badlands swimming with epilepsy.
Shacks dot the plain. Black against the ash-white earth. All are empty save one; a rusted kettle, maybe. Dust-drenched sheets. In that last one, though, the nine remaining townspeople gather in a game of poker.
All of them are ancient, and all maimed. Senility fast approaching. Crusted rags wrapped around the stumps of arms and legs. Saliva dribbles from mouths that can’t quite close.
So long as the game continues, they cannot die. They have long run out of money to bet, so now they play for flesh, and eat their winnings to stay sane. They know their minds will not remember the rules forever. This scares them more than anything.
0503. a weird haze hangs around the crater, thick and boiling in the pink light. through it, the arms of cacti can be seen, weirdly human in the mist. they surround the crater, in a thick and crowded ring, as through protecting it.
within the crater, weird boulders bulge from the ground, strangely smooth. some have been cracked, bludgeoned open, and the huge, horrifically half-formed serpent-fetuses inside spilled forth and flayed and split the intact egg-stones still contain life, and should they be broken, they are still fetal, but better-shaped, more capable than their slaughtered siblings.
their scales slowly work the environment to shield and shelter them. tents or cloaks of their hide, when in one area for long enough, draw plants to shelter them, call fog or mist or stinging insects to protect and hide them. the more skin there is, the stronger the effect. if these serpents are ever to reach adulthood, the charm on their scales is dramatically powerful; storms follow in their wake, stone turns in on itself to allow their passing, the grasses seize their foes and prey.
0104. A buffalo stands perfectly still atop a hill, completely covered in flies. the red sun makes their wings look like rubies. if it were ever to be disturbed, the flies would swarm from it to cover the land.
0204. sunlight hangs in the air like blue glass, suspends the long, swaying grass in stasis, moving like ice melts. a stream runs through the grasslands, the only movement in this slow, still place.
gold glints through the clear water; coins. pull them out and see that the water has warped and deformed them, stretching them as though they had been melted or squeezed like wax.
the coins are real gold, though oddly shaped, but if they are used to pay for anything, the following night, they melt into into a dark, honeyed syrup.
0304. A river runs through the white stone of a canyon, harsh and dazzling in the flourescent blue light. a swollen corpse is seated on the bank, propped up by a boulder.
the body died of heroin overdose; dried vomit on her chest, the needle still in her tied-off arm, impact point huge and swollen. she was a gambler; a hand of cards to her side and more, arranged in a circle as if she had been playing with someone.
one “seat,” opposite the gambler, is piled with dollars, bills weighted with coins. she and all the others have nothing. the gambler’s corpse writhes and twitches with maggots, but the stink of death-bloat is overpowered by her perfume.
0404. The light is ashen. the ground is soft and flaky. Charcoal stumps dot the landscape. A woman in a heavy coat embroidered with all the saints sits on one, cutting out her organs and watching as, one by one, they float like bubbles to heaven.
0205. The sky is like mud over a field of wildflowers. A mountain of dead doctors, guns in their hands, each killed by cancer. The ground is littered with painkillers and bullet shells. Atop the corpses, Cancer sits, like a little tortoise.
0305. A little clay house. A woman sits inside, arguing with her dead husband. She is very hungry and wants to leave the house and wants where he spent all the money she gave him. If you bring food into their home, her husband springs up and eats it all. Then he beats her and goes out to find money to gamble.
0405. A stand of trees on a hill overlooking the steppe. Pine trees black and sharp, motionless in the red sunlight. Path through the stiff grass, tamped down and matted with dried blood. The path leads to a tall pine. Old claw scars in the bark. One boot, weathered but immaculately cared for, wedged in the roots of the tree. Old blood on the white leather.
High in the tree, the corpse of a man mauled by a beast, his clothes ruined rags but for the second white boot, clean well preserved. In his hanging fist, the tooth of a wolf, ripped from the root. Leathery skin barely holding the tatters of his body together. He climbed the tree and died there, belly down on a branch. Looking across the steppe to whatever place it was he never reached.
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| godspeed you! cowboy pervert |
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