[Mkguild] Divine Travails of Rats - Pars III. Descensum (m)

[C. Matthias]

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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