Saturday 23 March 2013

its late and i'm tired

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.

4 comments:

  1. 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".
    My hand is still in the air for any assistance you end up needing.

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  2. Congratulations, Patrick. What an undertaking.

    I think I just caught your monotreme transformation in that moment!

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    Replies
    1. Both you and Tom and d&d poets of the highest order!

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