A BOOK OF MONSTERS

[SA]

A BOOK OF MONSTERS

Achedarah
"False Man/Woman"

Early humanity drank the blood of deposed gods as it flowed into the chasms beneath the world. Thus they gained wisdom and passed wisdom to their children. When they sacrificed their children, part of that great gift returned to the deities wherefrom it was taken.

When predatory animals consume human substance they likewise gain a measure of divine wisdom, but it is fleeting. Only the most ravenous animals consume enough to understand the magnitude of that gift. Having done so they become desperate to preserve it: they stalk and ambush human beings in ever more ingenious ways. They soon discover speech. They lure travellers with feigned pleas of assistance or even make open petitions for a community's fresh dead. At last they discover glamours with which to cloak themselves in human shape. Sometimes they assume the identities of their victims.

The most common Achedarah are wild dogs, wolves, rats and ravens. Mandrakes were also once believed to be achedarah but this has since been disproved. Because the glamour of an advanced achedarah is so difficult to sustain, a creature thus disguised must kill humans with great frequency. Such habits cannot be concealed for long.

False people were ubiquitous during the arterial age, when humankind first drank the Wine of the Gods and did not yet understand the strength of their inheritance.

Kit-himmu
"Solar Parasite"

A creature much like a giant translucent flea, the kit-himmou bathes in sunlight and becomes aglow with solar power. At night it burrows underground to remain undetected, and its stolen light filters into the earth, feeding fungi and other anomalous lifeforms. Many pernicious mandrake infestations have been the side-effect of solar parasitism.

The solar parasite is an aberrant variation of the luminescing starbeetle, a more benign organism that draws its energy from starlight. The kit-himmu's mastery of luminal energies far exceeds the starbeetle's: it can conjure prismatic phantasms, alter prevailing light conditions between blinding brightness and artificial night, and project beams of solar fire. There is no established upper limit to the age, size and power of a solar parasite: all known specimens to date have been actively sought out and terminated. None exist in captivity.

Ooede
"Amphisbaena"

Ooede have the bodies of long winged serpents, with eyeless heads at both ends. They feed on the dense luminal substance called monochromatica, which is abundant among the crevasses of Moon, and can convert this material into the more rarified chroma. The ooede's common name "amphisbaena" means "going both ways". They are called this partly because of their two heads, but moreso because they have mastered using both chroma and monochromatica to produce complex illusions and temporal-spatial transmutations.

Amphisbaena communicate visually, with elaborate phantasms. They cannot understand human languages at all.

THE AGES OF THE WORLD

Udthante
"Theomachy"

The gods descend into madness after a million years of ennui, and slaughter one another.

The most-ancient-ledger is destroyed, so that the conditions of their rise and fall cannot be recreated.

Engra
"Arterial Age"

Protohumans consume the flowing blood of gods and become Human.

The city Abundant Nectar is founded, thrives for nineteen years, and is destroyed.

All the technologies of that city are lost and will not resurface for a millennium.

Lady Mobbu mothers the Eight Splendid Generals. They divide the known world between them.

General Erket-Mobbu creates the sublime script from a fragment of the most-ancient-ledger.

BLACKFATHER curses the world, summoning ever watchful Moon to haunt the sky.

Feancatton Byata
"The First Year"

The old calendar is abandoned. A new one is created to mark the phases of Moon and to tally her abuses.

Tiny Ufue founds the first college of the grey art. It specialises in the study and destruction of monsters.

Oapa the Grand Magister invents the strange fruit, from which sorceries are drawn.

Zwolong Byata
"The First Age"

The ooede arrive from another world and make their cities among the mountains of Moon.

Using strange fruit, countless humans take to the sorcerous art. Monarchs license the practise after failing to stamp it out.

Sorcery replaces human artifice. Nations grow fat and indolent. New altars are built to the slaughtered gods.

The instruments of Abundant Nectar resurface in the hands of revolutionaries.

Ap Teunchen
"The Last War"

It is called the Last War because there has not been one since, not because there will be no others.

[Steerpike]

Which primordial demon-god do I have to burn offerings to to get an update  :D?

The achedarah are totally awesome.  Are all the names of things here totally made up?

Does sorcery draw on a set of sun/moon images, as the monsters seem to, or is it more variegated?

As always, your posts remind me of why I joined this community in the first place,  Also they make me want to steal your brain.

[SA]

In order:

1) Ebgacattachentamet. He's not from around here.
2) Yes. And they are pronounced exactly like you think they are.
3) I wasn't conscious of the motif, but now that you've identified it I'll need to be careful not to fall complacently into it. Sorcery is like it is in Arruntulla, but not nearly so grotesque.

And besides all the ordinary reasons why I wouldn't want my brain stolen, I dread to think what you of all people would do with it.

[SA]

Dimhil
"Black Katydid"

The artilects of Abundant Nectar have pledged their instruments to humankind: every piece that is uncovered in the wasteland of the world is ours to master or cast scornfully aside. But not everything that was birthed in that city's hollows can be slaved to human will. The first people held no allegiances and were sworn to no laws; their creations likewise defy conformation.

The black katydid, which is a later product of Abundant Nectar, has the shape of a locust and the dimensions of a prostrate man. Its exoskeleton is composed of the pale metal oocite common in the works of that city, and it has no apparent sense apparati, nor organs of any kind. From its head depends a slender prehensile cable, as long as its body and coloured an unreflective black.

Dimhil, the Progenant word for this creature, means "to excoriate". The dimhil's "whip" is capable of cleaving through virtually every known substance and the creature can cover as much as a one hundred meters with a leap. Black katydids are the only unambiguous instruments of war ever created by the first people, who never had cause to use them. Thus the creatures' slave protocols were never completed, or have been concealed, or else have deteriorated beyond reliable use, and any person possessing one will have at best an inconstant mastery of the creature. Uncontrolled dimhil rampage for approximately a day before becoming dormant.

In these post-war years all discovered instruments of the first city are registered with the State. Some may be possessed by private citizens, others must be surrendered. The black katydid is ungovernable and must always be destroyed. People are not always this sensible.

POSSESSION

Tsemgat Byata
"The First City"

It is the first human city, not the first of all cities.

The cities of the gods, towering and trembling and vast, precede our works by unaccounted ages...

(But, coming as they do from a time before the human capacity for recollection, might be millenniums old, or only minutes).

Cthese
"Succession"

The citizens of Abundant Nectar are commonly called the first people, but among those who respect divine seniority the gods are called the first people instead.

Perhaps their divinity was inspired by an altogether more ancient people.

Perhaps, in our wake, that divinity shall be devolved to some later race and likewise exalt them.

Caar
"Precocity"

All that is left of the gods is humanity's own blood and the works of Abundant Nectar, which were derived from those deities' swiftly evanescing constructs.

The last shred of their preserved substance was spent in the creation of the theosynth BLACKFATHER, who would, it was hoped, recall the glories of his own time, but who instead employed his first and only breath to curse the entire world.