The Desert of Blood-Stained Gold

 

CRAWLING TOWARDS VALIN

The world is a challenge and surely every day in which we accept that challenge is a good day, yet as I crawl across a pile of blood-stained gold towards the crouching beast-feet of Valin Mattheis, my fingers digging into the heavy coins, the fat, bright metal slick with blood, my mind fills with dreams and with visions....


OF THE RUMOURS OF THE HOARD

There are rumours of a pile of bloodstained gold, a hoard of dark realities cursed with truths, and whomever should pick up a coin from this hoard shall see others truly, but not themselves. So the curse commands that only those in pure company should dare risk the blood-cursed gold. So that the gold-pile mingles with the bones and bodies, mushrooms sprouting from rat-gnawed skulls, the blood itself browned with age, caked and crumbled into dust, yet the gold still gleams

OF THOSE WHO COME FORTH FROM THE HOARD

Demons of blood and gold, a vengeful spirits bound to hordes of wealth, crippled monsters, famished and undying, burrowing through a dark afterlife of blood-slick coins, tortured eternally in a cold womb of crushing metal. Dark is that hell, and heavy. 

OF THE HELL OF BLOODSTAINED GOLD

There the gold-cursed spirts clamber across hills and plains, dunes of cursed gold piling in drifts, driven by cataclysmic winds from a curse-lashed sky. Wild cracks and shattermarks of varicoloured lightning crash between acidic clouds, typhoons of smoke and ash roll across the burnished land and when they briefly clear, black aurora melt and skitter across the welkin like hallucinations.

Truth is in the desert and truth is in the gold. Truth without end or limit. Cursed self-knowledge. Bright burns the freezing gold in the flashing light of the cursed aurora.

None walk across the plain. All are crippled. The gift of the gold is this - ye may not walk but ye may dig. To those so cursed, the gold gives way before their grasping hands like soft soil. They burrow like snakes, clawing and squirming their way down into the cold dark. They must, for there is no other shelter in the desert of gold coins, there they hide like scorpions.


THE DAMNED

For the damned of the hell of bloodstained gold can never die or sleep or walk, but must crawl endlessly, their bodies slack and heavy, dragging on the lain of jumbled coins, cold beyond reason, starving and thirsty beyond what any living soul could bear.

Some go mad and try to eat the gold, stuffing it into their mouths, their bodies bloated with the freezing coin, pinned like fat leeches, immovable till they purge the gilt.

Of those damned to the hell of bloodied gold all there is to feast on is each other, and they fear and hate each other. Yet hunger and desire to feast upon even that parched and withered flesh. Some gorw wild upon this feasting with the illusion of strength, others willingly hurl themselves into the mouths of their hunters, weeping joyful tears of dust as they are slowly slowly torn apart and eaten, finally discovering annihilation.

BENEATH THE DESERT

The oldest and the strongest are said to occupy small caves and caverns gouged out of the gold and propped open with the bones of their lessers - or with the bones of dragons, for this was once the hell of dragons, where , deep beneath the desert of bloodstained gold are ghoul-cities built from their bones.

For when the souls of mortal men first came to the dragons hell they were  prey for the anguished spirits of the flightless, crippled drakes which heaved themselves through the dunes of wealth as if it were a sullen sea, but in the dream of time allowed within this timeless land the numbers of the mortal dammed grew and hey swarmed the spirits of the dragons like starved and crippled rats feasting on a blind and cripped man, covering them in a horde, and the greatest of which thereby, turned each opn the other, ripe with the memory of dragon flesh and consumed each other, growing more mighty still, until an uneasy equipoise existed between these ghoul-kings, and one by one they buried themselves deep beneath the plain of bloodstained gold, dragging down with them, dragonbones, and fistfuls of scales piece by piece, building themselves small caves and hollows far beneath the blasting storms.

In time, (and there is in this place infinite, unending time,) lesser dammed discovered them and, burrowing from place to place, set about them, tunnels and crawlways which linked each larger realm, making of it a city-warren of the imperishable damned haunted by the psyches of the ultimately awful; souls in love with pain, gleeful witnesses to unending horror.