Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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thinkpig
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Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by thinkpig »

I was born in the Wealdath. I remember each detail of every moment I have lived starting some time inside of the woman in whom my father had sown his seed. From that first instant I wanted out. I kicked and scratched and found I had not the strength to struggle my way out of her, and then I knew sleep, and dreams of some crimson jungle on the edge of a vast plains of razored grass. A few years later, Ausser would tell me this place was Talona's land, a place called Cathrys. Between dreams of that hot place I kicked and pushed and scratched, and I could sense that I was an unwelcome prisoner in that wet cocoon. Finally one hot day I chewed and crawled out to the sound of my mother's screams, and her first glimpse of me as I thrashed about in the moss and mud was one of revolted horror. The wet red tongues of dog stinkhorn fungi were all about us and quite similar to the hue of my own ruddy womb-soiled flesh and I immediately felt more akin to them than to that bitch who bore me. She looked on in horror as I devoured first the cord that bound me to her and then started on those devil's tongues, delicious fungi, while her mate stumbled about seeking to aid her. I paid them little heed, for my appetite was endless, and only years later would I recall the words they spoke to each other and comprehend that she'd wanted him to kill me. He had not the strength for it, though I laughed at him through mouthfuls of fungus...

((More if and when PC is approved-- hold your breath))
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kiyoti
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by kiyoti »

Whoa! This is a story id like to read more of! Good luck on approval man!
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by HEEGZ »

This should be fun... :twisted:
thinkpig
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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The human man, my mother's mate, is the reason I have sought not to be as such a race. He buried her while I slept, and though I woke to see him filling a hole with earth, I did not realize until re-living the day in my flawless memory years later that it was her grave. I simply assumed he had eaten her.

He had little idea what to do with me, and debated it with himself aloud often. I had let him pick me up, and he carried me for a time among the birches paper, yellow, grey and the scarlet oaks, the aspens bigtooth and quaking, the slippery elms, the ashes black and white, the hawthorn, hemlock and hickory, the honey-locusts... Ausser told me once that the word Wealdath reminded her of wealth, and that our Wealdath had a different kind of tree or plant for every star in the sky... and there were mosquitoes and bloodsquirrels, that day, and a marten and some foxes and frogs and a lonely mallard, and I'd learn to name them all five moons from my birth.

It was the Karsch spiders that got him, all scarlet and amber and golden as the morninglord's ass, hiding in the black willows. My mother screamed a manlier scream than that sorry bastard. He didn't scream long before talona's kiss had him and the spiders were spinning him up. One of them bit my belly and then they spun me up, too, round and round, and I slept, and in dreamt I strode again in the crimson fields, my feet bleeding in the razorgrass.

When I Woke on the earthen floor of Ausser's abode, I had vomited the dog stinkhorn fungi, and it lay all about me in bile, rotting red.
You see, the dog stinkhorn is the antidote to a Karsch's poison, and Ausser was quite friendly with those Karsch that had spun me.

How the old Gnomess had known Talona's kiss! The flesh of her face had been twisted and swollen beyond recognition by the lady's lovely caress. Each day, she strode to the den in the yard and thrust her little fist inside and whispered, "kisses for your sister," and then I'd hear her happy moans, her squeals of joy.

When I was three, I'd tell her I wanted to be a gnome, but she said I'd never seen a gnome, that she was not what was called a gnome. She'd become something quite else.

"You're no gnome, little one. What you are is Yugoloth. That's why you're so quick, and why your memory works the way it does. I bet your granddad or his had words to some long magic in the head."

The only other thing I ever wanted to be like is a spider, solitary and serene. Sometimes, Ausser would become a spider, and walk among the spiders, sometimes a pink toe or a maztican blue, a birdeater or a cameroon.

We slept in beds of webs spun by the druidess herself, and in the seasons that followed I spit until I learned how to speak, watched the spiders until I learned how to hunt, and I tasted the sweet flesh of every plant and prey and glimpsed every star in the sea of sky, and dreamt often of Cathrys, until at length Ausser's flesh had come to fail her.

She said that soon she would shed the skin and make the final journey to Cathrys, and that I could not stay in the Wealdath, for in Cathrys she would be powerless to conceal me from the nearby elves, who were swift and keen of eye like me, and were my enemies.

And thus she sought to smuggle me among cargo she herself had sent north along the trade way, through Auril's cloudpeaks, where she assured me I would find some old ally of hers to guide me. I somehow doubt such an ally exists, unless that ally be Talona herself.

I have passed through the cloudpeaks, now. The humans were beset by wolves along the way and many are dead. I can still smell their blood...
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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When the caravans were being unloaded I slipped away from the travelers. Someone said that it was going to rain and soon it did rain. There was the remains of a tree that had been sawn down the way they cut the feet of the Wealdath near the trade way. At a glance 87-rings. Probably older than anyone alive in Beregost today. I stood in the rain and looked at their buildings and thought about the way dwellings are designed. Ausser had planned her home in the Wealdath around already extant condition of bent tree and root dispersion aboveground, providing the framing for a mixture of sand, clay, and dried grasses, so that the home was as a quarter-slice of a sphere on the edgeroots of a great sycamore. The cubelike frames of the structures of Beregost were laughable by my conception of design. The high corners would bleed heat and the weak humans inside would need, for instance, more fuel than otherwise necessary to heat the structures-- and heat them they did, even now, for smoke drifted up from several chimneys. What could there be to protect such structures, save prayer and short time? The sweet thick raindrops sang on my shoulders and the rooves of the buildings of Beregost, and at length I had been pondering the velocity of raindrops, the frequency of rainfall and the maintenance of poorly designed structures when I was accosted quite suddenly by a grown human with a grayed beard who had been standing a number of paces from my stump and keeping to himself until he said

"Good day… didn't see you there, traveler."

I endeavored to ignore him.

There was the clearing of his throat and the continued song of rain. It had driven most of the other humans into their inept structures, and I looked again at this man and saw that he was waiting for me to say something. I hesitated for a time and finally said that it was well he enjoyed the rain, and before I knew it this sad old berk was getting me ready for his boo hoo hoo story, something about a dead wife. Soon he had lost my attention, and I noticed a sizable toad of the bufo barias variety, yellow-footed, its prominent dorsal and ventral spotting suggesting a sweet lick flavor I prefer, and the old man ceased his narrative as I bent and grasped the toad and stuffed it in my mouth. I chewed twice, severing each hind leg to savor in the crook between tooth and gum, and swallowed the rest of him whole, and then the old man shut up and watched me for awhile until after some time had passed, and then he was asking about my appetite, and saying I ought to try cooking my food, and then he told me that he'd like to feed me.

Now this was and remains beyond my comprehension. I assumed that he wished to hunt with me, which seemed wise of him until I realized he did not wish to hunt at all, but to go inside one of the buildings where someone else would hunt for us and we could grow a bit softer, a bit weaker, which seemed instead foolish since I had previously congratulated him on his preference for the open weeping sky. His disappointment in my unwillingness to join him hung between us in the rain awhile and then at last I was rid of him.

It wasn't long before his daughter was along asking if I'd seen him, and then the both of them came back. They sauntered about an old fireplace spot a dozen paces from me where the old man's mate had evidently shed coil while the daughter begged him to go for a meal, and then he was making her promise that if plague came north from Amn again she'd avoid the place, and I wondered whether he meant the town itself or the fireplace.

When they were gone I left the three drops in the ashes with my gloved fingertip, and then I decided to listen by the caravans for talk of the region and perhaps learn something of its dangers. My timing was apt, and I heard some interesting things, indeed…
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by HEEGZ »

thinkpig wrote:The sweet thick raindrops sang on my shoulders and the rooves of the buildings of Beregost, and at length I had been pondering the velocity of raindrops, the frequency of rainfall and the maintenance of poorly designed structures when I was accosted quite suddenly by a grown human with a grayed beard who had been standing a number of paces from my stump and keeping to himself until he said

"Good day… didn't see you there, traveler."

I endeavored to ignore him.

There was the clearing of his throat and the continued song of rain. It had driven most of the other humans into their inept structures, and I looked again at this man and saw that he was waiting for me to say something. I hesitated for a time and finally said that it was well he enjoyed the rain, and before I knew it this sad old berk was getting me ready for his boo hoo hoo story, something about a dead wife. Soon he had lost my attention, and I noticed a sizable toad of the bufo barias variety, yellow-footed, its prominent dorsal and ventral spotting suggesting a sweet lick flavor I prefer, and the old man ceased his narrative as I bent and grasped the toad and stuffed it in my mouth. I chewed twice, severing each hind leg to savor in the crook between tooth and gum, and swallowed the rest of him whole, and then the old man shut up and watched me for awhile until after some time had passed, and then he was asking about my appetite, and saying I ought to try cooking my food, and then he told me that he'd like to feed me.
This was a fabulous read, thank you!
thinkpig
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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...at first I thought it was the great city of Baldur's Gate but in fact it was only a place called the Friendly Arm Inn.

The long rain that had begun in Beregost poured on while I sat outside the walls some time turning up the soil for nightcrawlers to go with the magpie mushrooms I'd picked for my lunch. I was swallowing the last ripe trembling worm when this flip curvy halfling spellslinger lass came up asking if I was okay.

I told her that I was healthy and reciprocated her question in order to transfer the burden of prompted speech and she said that she was as healthy as can be, and then she showed me her teeth, the way Ausser said berks do when they want to be friendly sometimes, and I told her that she looked healthy. She asked if I Wasn't going inside and I said that I was a hunter, to let her know I didn't need to go in that place to feed myself, and she asked what I hunt, and then I thought she was after me, maybe for eating the nightcrawlers or the bloodsquirrels or something.

But then said her name was Susona Starlight, and that she delivered letters. I thought she meant leeches but she meant writings, and then somehow we were talking about stars and music and death all at once, and soon she was weaving spells to show me that she was a sorceress of some power, and I was beset by four images of this alluring little creature, and she was asking what I hunted. I told her about things I had eaten in the last few sunrises: Toads, the marten, the bloodsquirrels, mushrooms dandelions and all the weeds and the berries and the mallard...

She asked what the bloodsquirrels tasted like, and I told her of their sweet and crunchy delight, and how their flesh is wrought with the fibres of berry and nut membranes.

I was eating some crickets and grasshoppers and we discussed food awhile. Presumably she wanted to be sure that I could feed her. I am certain now that she wanted to mate; else why the flip display of appetizing flesh and magic? It is too soon for me to choose to mate with anything though. I know that should I mate with her, she will kill me. That is the way of mating. Then, she was boasting she could hunt well with the bow, and a gorgeous tarantula crawls out of this vixen's hair, and it could not have been mere sorcery, for I allowed it to bite the flesh of my forearm, and it was quite tangible, and exquisite creature, and then I had to shift the way I was sitting because my flesh was singing with this urge to mate, and she was trying not to look to scared because I'd accidentally given her a good look at my teeth.

She told me she'd lost her memories and didn't know what kind of person she had been, and how she had failed to find a way to undo the cruel magic, and I wondered if she wanted to use me to get her memories back somehow, and I thought maybe she was thinking that mating with me would bring back her memories, and I asked her about how halflings mated and she talked about these bizarre and complicated courtship rituals that didn't really sound sexy at all to me, except for this part where you hunt together, and then she was asking me to hunt some game some time.

When she was gone I examined the masonry of the Inn's walls at length and came to find that a number of species of insects had made the masonry's grooves their homes and I sampled them and found that their flavor is remarkably pleasing and I should dine on them if ever I return to the Friendly Arm Inn.
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orangetree
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by orangetree »

..eep! :eek:
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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He leaned against the wall, stretching the way a cat might, this halfling. His armor was oiled duskwood, like Ausser's, and his eyes held an unmistakable look of predatory cunning, and the hair of his head was wrapped up in a way that looked something like a mane. Looking at his fingernails, he said that the worms and the toads upon which I dined were not worthy prey. They were defenseless.

Soon we crept into the nearby woods in search of a meal. Goblins lurked about, picking the blackberries. This lord Ali, he whistled low and a great black panther crept up purring at him and that, I thought, must be why he was called the prince of cats.

I shot the first goblin in his loins, and bit is nose off and stabbed him in the throat, and while I chewed the green nose this lord Ali and I laughed quietly, the goblin rolling about and thrashing and choking up blood and grasping at its punctured loins in agony.

Then this lord Ali said he thought he'd like to get a bite himself, and then I found that prince of the cats he was indeed--he was bursting with fine black fur and popping bones and this sly halfling was suddenly a massive black fucking cat, and I watched as the two panthers came at a goblin from both sides, one taking it by the face and the other by a leg, diving and biting and twisting, and its bones went snap snap pop and then this lord Ali the cat was shaking the little goblin's corpse all to and fro and the blood was dripping from the maple leaves, and I for the first time since I left the Wealdath, I felt right at home.

When we came back out of that wood by the Friendly Arm Inn, I was chewing a goblin ear, but lord Ali said to spit it out, because fancy city pukes will get scared if they see you eating a goblin.

Prince Ali's got a family, and he says they're all hunters. I met his sister's mate, who is called Rain and looks like a real hunter. He carries a sword so large that I doubt if I could swing it with much success. This hunter has two wives, and the one that was not lord Ali's sister was with him. When they came to us on the road, he carried this wife, another halfling called Ru'yah, like a mother might carry a child, and I thought of that flip curvy sorceress Susona and how painful she said such a pairing might be for the females, and I thought that this hunter Rain must be quite deadly to have two mates who had not yet killed him during their trysts. I might ask him in time how one might mate and survive the ritual.
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kiyoti
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by kiyoti »

Welcome home and good hunting!
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thinkpig
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

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"You just drinking, or are you holding up the walls there, sunshine?" The black-maned man stood at the gate of the friendly arm inn making faces at me, expressions the meaning of which I was unsure of, but seemed haughty.

I spit out the rabbit skull I had been chewing on. "Holding?"

It twisted its lips. "Guess you be holding up the walls," and it stepped closer.

"Hunter?" I asked him, for he was covered from head to toe in heavy steel murder tools.

"No. Killer. You?"

"What do you kill?" I asked him.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then he said, "Ugly fuck, ain't ya?"

I let him see my teeth.

"Oh," he said, "course I aint been called good looking except by a drunk orc whore."

I caught the scent of slain canine on him them, and I sniffed to get a better taste.

"It's your ass that smells," he told me, "go bathe."

Then he was asking me how I liked the wall, and I told him about the tasty treats that lived in its crevices, and showed him how to get a taste,

"So you just here to eat bugs off the wall," he asked me, "Or you plan on making a living with that used tired bow?"

"I, Karsch, am a hunter. I have no need of human money."

"That right?" He asked.

"Money is the way the men in the cities make others their slaves."

"Sure," he said, "and a sweet honey pot is how a woman makes a man, but you don't like finely crafted things? You ain't willingto bater with a man for his trade?"

"I have no need," I explained, "of others and their crafts."

"My craft is weapons."

"Ah," I said, "A maker of tooth and claw for humans."

"You a poor stinky fuck, ain't you roach?" he said. "And you are a dumb one a that."

He told me at length of his troubles on the trade way south, and how the roads were being trapped and the gnoll hunters were like drinking travelers' blood, and I told him I knew what a trap was.

"My last scout said the same thing," he said. "Youngster ended up with a big spike in his thigh."

I could almost smell this scout's blood, along with the canine blood, and I told him so.

"Don't forget the smell of your own ass," he said, "you stink like a pissed-out fire."

I held my head high and told him that I, Karsch, have the scent of sweet Cathrys.

"Fair enough," he told me, "remind me to fuck a donkey before going to Cathrys."
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by thinkpig »

((special thanks to orangetree, heegz, kiyoti, stephenumpf, sidhe, ogr, TrentfromPunchy, and Lokan for this story-- no part of it since the backstory would be possible at all without collabotative RP with each of you. more soon...))
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by HEEGZ »

Image
*Karsch takes an arrow to the neck as he attempts to bluff his way out of an encounter in the Wood of Sharp Teeth. The hobgoblin slits his throat and feeds him to his worg pup.*

(( Image ))

(( Failed bluff, natural 1 vs. natural 20 crit. Farewell Karsch, I barely knew ye! ))

:cry:
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kid
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by kid »

A shame.
Was an interesting read.
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Re: Dreams of Cathrys (18+ strong stomachs only)

Post by orangetree »

aww *hugs*
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