Marmot Soap Angst

This is my obligatory anagram post. I've been listening to Rabelais again on audiobook in the forest and it got me onto a blog called Six Degrees of Thomas Urquhart, which is nice and allows me to indulge my logofascination, the which indulgence is one of the primary reasons for the existence of this blog (no secret really). So Zak brought up this site which I've been in love with before and I allowed myself the writing of this little post in which I mess with anagrams and mediaeval monotheism.

I also now have a tumblr; http://verminprong.tumblr.com/ onto which I dump lots of inspirational imagery for Middenmurk.

On a hunting trip in celebration of the achievement of her majority, the fourteen year-old Countess of Feigned Irony was seen to clamber through the summer air to impossible distance while waiting attendants shuddered in dumbfounded fear and watched her dwindle in the sultry heights. In the balmy evening among dancing fireflies she came down like an elegant meteor, incandescent and terrible, and devoured the entourage with celestial fury.

Thence in a crater of her newly-attained radiant selfhood did she tarry a while in contemplation of universal mysteries that had suddenly revealed themselves. And a heresy was born for many holy heads did joyously avail themselves of such an opportunity to grasp from the universe the offered semblance of righteously embracing of a truth 'twould topple the highs and mighties of others whose truths were long-enshrined in cathedrals of historicity and rivers of scribed ink.

Such is the way among the holy, holiness itself is not enough, furnished as it is with burthens of chastity and self-denial most galling to bear, to be holier than was the utmost aim and gilded with innumerable admirations. So tramped they hither and builded shrines nigh unto the abandoned pavilionade while summer faded. Imprecations were pronounced and theology woven from whole cloth, disagreed upon, torn apart and patched together on the crater's rim. The boldest heretics would venture into the burning pit to prostrate themselves before She who waited like an ember in the centre but her mystery was unfathomable, mortal minds could not conceive of it. Thus were they made into torches and became burnt offerings to that which cannot be conceived. Thus was this practice deemed unholy save for upon the feast day of the Aphasic Ladder.

The predictable ossification of the once-fluid theological debates occurred under the stifling influence of Einhardt, the Scalded Pariah. From this does his title derive: while circumambulating the crater on pilgrimage he was caught in the first of the boiling rainstorms that derive their heat from the celestial firestorm of Her ardour. He was burned but in his pain did he speak in the tongue of angels, others heard and were smote deaf by its purity unmerciful. His revelation was then agreed-upon as unnassailable Truth, a cyst builded for him of grey stone upon the crater's brink and daily would stone-deaf acolytes attend to him and bring his scrawled parchments of dogma to the hastily-constructed scriptorium.

The sacred texts out of the scriptorium are bound in leather and marked upon the cover with an Heraldic Spada, for so is named the langeschwert in Southering provinces and thus also 'mongst the delineators of blazonry. It is deemed a solar sigil and emblematic of her cutting disdain for perfidious backsliders and the likesuch unholy. Of these revealed parables are three held most high;

I. A Caliph's Adder tells of the serpent of an Orient potentate that bade him glut too eagerly of his concubinage and with intemperate zeal indulge in correction of perceived transgression and how this did see that fatuous magnate die by a virgin's razor.

II. Another text tells of how the Sesquipedalian Apocrypha of Balthasariandromachus was only partially correct about the flight of Aethelfleda, that the sentries upon that desolate hillside revealed she Hid a Paled Scar beneath her cowl, indicative of her persecution during the terrible Plaid Charades.

III. Redcap's Dahlia is a text that describes the most perfect blossom grown in the garden of a petty-noble by the boggle-bairn who was resident there and how this noble's expressions of gratitude manifest in such a manner as wounded the little gardener and turned his dedication to service into black loathing for light and life and keenest desire to defile reality with merciless abandon.

Otherwise the heresy is utterly orthodox in its heterodoxy. Nettle-scourging and ritualised starvations and kneeling penitences and bewailings of untranscendable materiality abound by the great cloud of steam that veils Her perilous beauty and fills the crater like a cauldron of curdled milk .
________________________________________

Chaotics will be destroyed by spontaneous immolation upon setting foot into the crater.

Neutrals are assailed by steam and boiling rain -1d6 dmg to reach the centre but numb amnesiac stupefaction prevent any meaningful perception of her glory.

Lawfuls may pass into the centre and behold her as a pillar of fire, white-hot and terrible, and a roaring in the ears like constant thunder. They may ask questions that may resolve the occurrence of this bizarre theological anomaly but the answer to the fourth question is always ultimate destruction.

Should they ask the right questions they will learn of the whereabouts of Bartholomaeus Crumpe* and that he should be brought before her that he may seek forgiveness for his sin prior to his transcendence of materiality. This done she ascends, bestowing a seraphic ikon upon the souls of those petitioners who secured the transgressor.

_The Ikon is a whole 'nother experience level, contingent upon the maintenance of purity and avoidance of shellfish and young cabbages, upon consumption of which it is irrevocably lost.
-------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes when I feel like I am being coy and flippant with enormities I remind myself that other people eat the furry people with whom I hold inane one-sided conversations in paddocks sometimes, that aesthetics is abstract and most of my neuroses ain't got nothing to do with much in the real world. Anyways sorry if'n you is offended.

* As it happens, Crumpe has appeared before, what a fortuitous coincidence.

Omentide part 1

1. A horde of spiders emerge from crevices in the ground, they seem to be making their way westward.
2. A small grey and angry rain cloud comes up from the south and rains heavily atop the party, continuing thus for the rest of the day.
3. A small grove of yew trees is seen to be full of hanged men, women and children. One man is in the process of hanging himself.
4. An unfriendly group of charcoal burners curse the PCs and spit upon the ground. For 1d3 days thereafter the party is followed by mocking jackdaws.
5. A human heart is found at the base of a tree. Affixed to the tree with a dagger is a parchment bearing these words “Unto such ends do traitors go”.
6. A donkey with a naked man tied facing backwards atop it gallops across the path. The man is laughing hysterically.
7. All the birds fall dead from the sky.
8. The constellations of the night sky seem to do battle for three nights running.
9. A great fish is found dying in a field far from any watercourse.
10. A mob of young men dressed as fishwives, with faces painted black and sprigs of nettle in their bonnets run by whooping and squealing, following a terrified cow upon which the word “Mirth” is daubed in drying blood.
11. A smoky darkness ascends from the ground and the sound of laughter and drums comes with it.
12. A dule tree stands at a crossroad; a gibbet-cage hangs from it, within which a starving man with his eyes torn out sings an old ballad about a lusty nun.
13. A pair of horses trots along drawing a blazing wagon.
14. A council of thirty burghers are seen meeting at a moot hill; they are discussing whether a gaggle of geese that were seen to go widdershins round a thorn tree are responsible for the ill-luck that has beset their village.
15. A scrawny old woman is gathering herbs with a sickle of bronze, murmuring a song in some queer tongue. She runs into the forest when she sees the party.
16. A Halfling wench is tied to a stake in the middle of a large clearing with a pile of faggots at her feet, she is cursing and swearing at the top of her voice, no one else is to be seen.
17. An ancient oak tree bursts into flames and appears to writhe in pain as it burns. A pair of storks alight nearby to watch it burn.
18. A distraught young woman stumbles along the path with a babe-in-arms. The newborn has a birthmark on her face. An angry mob follows.
19. The rhythmic sound of whipping precedes a procession of flagellants with rapturous expressions turned skyward. They demand recruits.
20. A broadsword-shaped star is seen in the sky for eight nights running. Panic ensues.
21. Ten grim monks are in the process of martyring a saint by sawing off the top of his head. The “saint” resists all attempts at rescue.
22. The countryside is desolate, half-eaten livestock are seen in trees, farmhouses burned, people thrown into wells and streams befouled.
23. A group of rough-looking bog-trotters are preparing to set their dogs onto an elf-boy, who is grinning idiotically. They ask the PCs if they want to join the betting on which dog rips the mooncalf’s throat out.
24. An elf-woman dressed in parti-coloured motley lies asleep in a muddy ditch.
25. A host of starving children singing an ancient hymn pass by on their way to a mythical holy city in the uttermost south. The stripling girl who leads them is blind.