So you get this one unedited.
And that is fifty.
Fifty monsters fifty cave and fifty moods. One hundred and fifty THINGS for ONE chart.
DEATH
HOPE MURAL
This
place was the end point for the last member of a dead civilisation.
They wrote a crude final testament on the walls in whatever they
could find. Deeply scratched, bravely engraved lithographs of the
barely remembered fall and clambering death of a once great race.
Sadness is written into the image and touching them will poison you
with grief.)
SCRIMSHAW
MADNESS
he
shrimshawers art is absent time. A lot of people waited here for a
long long time. This cave was godbone or something bigger. Years of
waiting wanderers have scrimshawed every available inch. A few
hand-sized patches remain bare. Mad interlacing of alien cultures in
the signs. Carvings from every people and empire, name all you can.
SMELTING
FURNACE
What
about a furnace compels us. It's thickness, it containment, it's
inwardness. That distant burning eye. Another world. The weight of
the earth is centred in this place. Like everything above found its
foundation here and every deeper cave was chandelierd and hung around
its neck. Black unlightable ferric walls. Pot-coloured corpse iron.
Smells of metal. Hand-sized holes in walls. Jam your face right in em
and you can see distantly, round crooks and curves, something that
might be a slice of impossible sky.
COBALT
KOBOLD CAVE
The
bluest gunmetal-glimmer kobalds you've ever seen. Art Deco dogmen
precision cut in naked rock. The life-sized two-dimensioned capering
cutouts process he walls in frozen madness. Patternless
dandelion-drift hieroglyphs. Each one holding a uniform wave-belly
blue like midnight midsummer skies hold distant stars.
EUROPIUM
UNION
The
rare earths are fucking boring looking. Clods and sods of oily lumpy
stuff. Bulging like the crusts on boiling pans. Thick and dark and
vile like oven stains. Europium reacts with oxygen. It lights
spontaneous flame. As it dries it burns. The spreading glop is
sometimes ringed with spasmodic imperial fire in shades bad poets
like. Witchlights bead and flare in runs like headlights passing on a
distant road. The rings expand and meet.
RAPTUROUS
SULPHATE BLEEDS
Choir
like cloister like sulphur singing. Veins of raw sulphur in gothic
archway forms. Curving rows in organic regularity. The flames come
together like hands praying burning deep blue like darkness visible.
Fringes of flame around black cores.
INTERFERENCE
PATTERNS
Wind
ripples ruffling the surface of still pools. Or rock-skip circles on
a silent sea. The walls a waved with even spaced and intersecting
rills. Some emanate from points inside the cave like rocks dropped
into liquid floors. Some come from beyond. There are deep unseeable
swells. Still and frozen now. If magic is used here it will move for
a time.
WAR
GRAVE CAVE
The
fatal endpoint of a forgotten war. A dead armies final stand was
here. Abandoned bones are scribed with blunted swords now rusty
ghosts of blades. Scavengers won't interrupt the written names with
gnaws. The bonetags make a library of the dead. No name here can be
entirely lost. Someone living will recall it. No remembered name can
be wiped out. Permanent rust angels on the floor.
TESSILATED
FACEPRINT FLOOR
A
floor of stone screaming faces. Stumble and you put a foot into a
gaping mouth. Do this deep enough and it bites. You scream. Fail to
escape and you will scream till blood clots your lungs and eightballs
your eyes. When you die, all of you will rot except your face. Which
turns to stone. (Can be handy if you can lever one out.)
LOCK
PICK CAVE
Weird
equilateral fingertip gaps. The sounds of endlessly turning locks
that never catch. If anyone dies here there will be a loud 'click'
and all the tumblers will pause, then continue, except for one.
Putting your fingertips into the black gaps will get them snipped.
It's hard not to when you climb. Only saints of theft can pick the
locks (and it must be in the right order)
ROCK
MILK TEATS
Rock
milk is the white oil made from decayed celestial trees. The primal
arboreum folded under the earth and compressed. The hydrocarbons form
randomised kabbalisitic glyphs beyond the sight of the eye. Distended
nodular cysts ooze forth the freaky milk. It's white. It fumes you
lightheaded and burns rainbows like gay petroleum. Its slippy and
flammable and the fumes can poison bad alignments and drive good ones
mad.
LEAF
SHADOW SHARDS
Like
the leaf patterns left behind on cheaply painted cars. Leaf shadows
remind me of the autumn but the shadows move in the wind. All things
counter, original, spare, strange. Glory be to god for dappled
things. Saw edged patterns on park benches and cut turf. Walls staked
from sharp edged flakes arranged like mingled leaf shadows on
summerlit ground. The colours reversed. The fragments pale like
plants before they die, the holding stone an ashy brown like
half-burnt wood.
PYROXENE
RIDDLES
Casino-chip
pyroxene chunks that crystallise in the magma chamber before volcano
tops fire off. They are black glass prism-scales like grieving
dragonskin or teeth from dark mathematical sharks. They grow slowly
in the prenatal volcano, they soak up semiriddles in the fireflow.
This is deep-earth knowledge gain-able no other way. But it's random
like radio's in storms. Break the crystal to hear the riddle. (Most
are stupid, just think of the riddle and idiot would make and say
that. One in every hundred is meaningful.)
AMMONITICO
RUSSO
Petal-pink
marble, perfect for a sculptors touch. Like Michelangelo's Carrera
Marble. Almost glows with its presentment to be polished and cut.
Sensual like naked skin. Inside, hovering and hiding like uzumaki
ghosts are fossilised spirals, ammonites. Curls of caspar-pale undead
stone, seen beneath the pink like the moon in a summer sky.
GIANTS
PAUSEWAY
Yes
giants pause and think underground. They have a lot to contemplate.
Hexagonal treaty rocks like contracts individually signed. But peace
always fails and is sought again. A pavement of failed surrenders.
The death of giants. A floor of hexagonal stands. Mixed length,
higher and lower as chance decrees. Like pistons in a stalled
machine. When the wars they sealed begin again they will shrine into
absence. Once a field of uniform columns. They judder and sink with
each conflict. The giants are a dying people now and the halls are
passable.
DEAMON
TUSK CAVE
The
walls are made of nails and teeth. Stalagtites and mites arranged in
open jaw-tooth pattern. Good people should avoid standing in the
middle. The tusks are carved with people beig eaten by the daemon.
I look forward to being able to sit a book on the table and say "Okay kids, today we're going to explore psychedelic horror caves that stretch on forever".
ReplyDeleteMy hand is still in the air for any assistance you end up needing.
Thanks dude
DeleteCongratulations, Patrick. What an undertaking.
ReplyDeleteI think I just caught your monotreme transformation in that moment!
Both you and Tom and d&d poets of the highest order!
Delete