Once again, from the depths of the OSR Discord craws the Santicorn, leaving the gifts of writing prompts to the good(?) denizens of the server.
You got shutteredroom’s prompt, “The Real Monster of which the Shitting Log of Catalonia is the sanity-protecting bowdlerization.”
First, a quick visit to Webster's to check something....
bowdlerization:
noun
The
deletion of all passages considered to be indecent.
Similar:
bowdlerisation, expurgation
The
action or instance of bowdlerizing; the omission or removal of
material considered vulgar or indecent.
The
act of deleting or modifying all passages considered to be indecent.
OK, gotcha. That's what I thought...
***
The portal from the Void opened, and the Entity entered the world. Fools twisted by promises of power and ancient knowledges from before the time that Men walked the land had called it, at a great cost of life and sanity. For, they knew, great power comes at great cost. Particularly if it is others that are paying with their lives. So they had spread war and desolation in their pursuit of this favor.
And desolation they received in turn. For the Entity had no interest in wisdom or power. Just madness and destruction. And piddling little evolved apes were not of consequence. XXX walked the land, its energies from outside of space burning a halo of destruction where it went.
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However, some of these apes had slivers of power. Whether by craft, or energies arcane or divine. So they fought XXX, desperately and to little effect. After all, fighting a being whose name itself caused fear and madness was a nigh-impossible task. Only the Sightless, paladins blinded of all vision except that which saw auras of evil, were able to stand long before its predations.
They called upon their god, YYY, to aid them against this desolation in living form.
The plow wrenched and twisted in Farmer Priggins' hands. Damned land. Get a square from the local lord, and it's half rocks. He kicked at the impediment, finding the end of a rock slab. Great. This was going to be a chore. Grabbing a shovel, he dug around the end before unhitching Brutus and Mercury from their plow harness to attempt to pull the thing loose. The stout draft horses strained, but to no avail. Fine, another day lost.
As the horses browsed the untilled grasses, Priggins set about exposing the slab. It was larger than first thought, more than the height of a man, and he dug out its limits. Brushing off the slab, he saw it marked with runes and pictographs. Hmm. Some old barrow-stone or menhir, toppled and buried.
Priggins set to cracking the stone with a drill and wedges. His hands were numb from driving iron when he finally heard the satisfying CRACK, and the slab split. About damned time... Priggins tied the harness to one half the stone and goaded the horses. Brutus and Mercury strained, then the stone jerked free, perhaps for the first time since coming to rest. Untying the rigging, Priggins repeated the process to dislodge the remaining slab half.
Below the slab was a lead box, the size of Missus Priggins' bread box. Well, maybe the day wasn't lost after all. Priggins drove a wedge into its sealed lid. A clatter distracted him, and he saw Brutus and Mercury fleeing to the homestead, harness and rigging slapping behind them. What spooked them? Priggins looked around, and spotting nothing, shrugged and went back to his labors...
***
Finally, YYY sent an Angel. A being so terrifying that half of the paladins themselves went mad upon its arrival. But it was, at least, a match for the thing. Its sword, crafted of metals from the heart of a star and blessed by the god itself, cleaved and stabbed. Even so, XXX ripped great gouts of celestial flesh from the Angel, and the land on which they fought grew blighted and dead. Finally, the thing succumbed to the Angel's blows.
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It hissed a warning to the paladins that its aid would not come again. And left them with the corpse, which still twitched with extraplanar energy.
The paladins were left with the "dead" thing to dispose. But fire, neither earthly nor arcane, could consume it. All that was left was to divide it up, and spread its parts. Cut apart, its limbs sealed into lead boxes and buried under stone slabs covered in warning runes and glyphs in six different languages, so that none may ever disturb them. For even a single limb or organ, once freed, may seek to reconstitute the whole, and the horror may begin again.
***
The Baron's soldiers happened upon a badly injured draft horse, still in its harness, dragging the remains of half of its harness-mate along the wagon road.
“Get that poor thing out of its tack! You know whose horse that might be?”
“Looks like Priggins' horse, Sir. Bruce, Buster. I can't remember. They got a stake down the road.”
“Ride on down there, let me know what you find.”
The two troopers galloped down the road. The Priggins' wasn't far, another steading granted by the Baron for new folk to settle within his holdings.
The place was demolished. Something had erupted from the field, throwing stone and turf, before ripping a furrow through the soil. All around, any living matter had turned an ashy gray. Likewise, the Priggins' home was shattered to splinters. A path was torn through the forest beyond. Trees were withered along either side.
The soldiers cautiously crossed the field, fingering their swords as they looked over their shoulders. The grasses they trod were dead, and even the soil felt barren. At the source of the destruction they found what appeared to be a lead coffer, twisted and torn open. Half-buried in an eruption of soil was a mummified body, desiccated, face frozen in terror. Its eyes appeared to have exploded.
“That Priggins?”
“Ayup. But what did he find?”
One soldier cautiously dismounted, kicked about among the detritus. He brushed soil from a split stone slab, its face covered with runes.
“Gods be with us.”
“What ya find?”
“You're not from around here, are you? Gramama told us stories of a demon-thing from way past. Called it the Shitting Log of Catalonia. We giggled, but she said if you'd say the name correct, you'd go mad. Said it killed the land where it walked. Finally the old horror got cut up and buried. I thought it was a tale to scare us to be good. But that rune there says this is cursed land. We gotta tell Cap'n and the Baron. Priggins dug up hell.”
***
First of all, I don't know why I keep getting the end-of-the-world-Lovecraftian themes. I think this is the fourth one (1, 2, and 3). Ha. No worries, I'm happy to apply my overwrought writing style to satisfy (hopefully) the requester's prompt.
Once again, thanks to Archon's Court for doling out the prompts.
And again, thanks to 0ndes for the appropriate art pieces, and Cryo Chamber for the inspirational soundtrack.
Oh, and Dicegoblin filled my gift request "Vampires that Aren't Quite Vampires" with several real world biology-inspired entries - which always gets my seal of approval.
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