Twilight Cities of the Cadaverous Earth

[Steerpike]

The Seven Twilight Cities of the Cadaverous Earth

The Twilight Cities are incredibly ancient: even the youngest is built on ruins many millennia old.  Tombstones of sublime and faded ages long since decomposed by a series of half-forgotten cataclysms* and the gnawing erasures of time, only seven of the once-great metropolises remain inhabited, and even these are largely empty, their streets dusty and silent, their labyrinthine undercities crumbling and hollow.  They fall roughly into two broad types: some, like Dolmen and Somnambulon, are ruthlessly authoritarian, oppressive city-states, while others, like Baranauskas and Lophius, are chaotic and unstable, held together with more occult codes and coherencies.  They writhe, devour, rut, seethe with moribund energy: putrid and hideous, like chancres on a diseased fleshscape.

The Twilight Cities cling to the fringe of the so-called Slaughter-lands, a wild waste where prowling clouds of sentient eldritch radiation cause the dead to walk, otherworldly horrors from the Membrane Wars lurk in dark lairs and ruins, and the Red Rains metamorphose those who sip of them into murderous doppelgangers of their former selves.  This is a world no longer merely dwindling, no longer dying, but rather become a great corpse peopled by maggots and worms, the fester-spawned parasites of a Cadaverous Earth.

Yet even as the world spasms its last breath, sloughs free the shredded vestiges of history, bloats with corpse-gas and grins with the shriveling onset of rigor mortis, a phoenixian ember flickers in some black and cyclopean socket.  Pink new flesh squirms beneath the scabbed surface, and long-chained entities await the Great Unfettering.

* The Membrane Wars, the Pallid Decimation, the dementia epidemics, the Suppuration'¦

Somnambulon, The Sleepwalker's City

Thronged by a zombie proletariat condemned to brute psychic vassalage, Somnambulon is ruled by a ruthless clan of industrialist nobles, the so-called Lords Revenant.  Existing symbiotically with a cadre of numinous parasites (the zehrer) passed down from generation to generation, the nobility possess unnaturally long lives and a variety of eldritch abilities which they use alongside their advanced technological warmachine to maintain power.  Cutthroat mercantilists of the first order, the Lords Revenant enjoy the spoils of their success from their mausoleum-palaces, manses part temple, part tomb, part keep; sprawling about these ornate megaliths are the smoke-clotted factory districts, the vicious waterfront along the Sinew River, and the vast, rude, lawless shanties of the Unbound, a ragtag but defiantly lively lot whose music and carnival antics contrast harshly with the black grimness of the Lords and their shambolic subjects.

Crepuscle, The Mottled City, The City of Red and Black

Crepuscle lies at the intersection of the Radula and the Sinew Rivers, and as such is a major trading port, principally dealing with Skein, Moroi, and Somnambulon.  Its streets are colourful and pastiche, cosmopolitan in the extreme: here are soul-tinkers and mechanoapes and dyadic naghini, hagmen from the south, graft peddlers and arcanists and sigil-scribes, yapping zerda foxfolk seers, mantid costermongers, ghilan of every breed and quick humans of every race.  Justice is administered in stylized gladiatorial courts, wherein the defendant must defeat a pantheon of combatants (including the Blind Man, Guilt, and Reason) to secure his or her innocence.

   Apart from its bustling markets Crepuscle is distinguished by its labyrinth, a huge maze at the center of the city which few dare enter despite the legends of unfathomable treasure and wisdom to be found within; its walls are scriven with runes in some long-forgotten language, a tongue which those who spend too long wandering the endless passages begin to inexplicably babble in.  These lost souls, the so-called mazeborn, are chained to the walls of shrines in the temples of the Gibbering Goddess, where robed neophytes record their rambling glossolalia.

Skein, City of Silk, The Clockwork City

A shuddering, iridescent carnival of a city, the snarled urban sprawl called Skein juts with a hundred cyborg spires against the bruised and hazy sky.  In the clockwork factories at the city's industrial center, a verdigris-riddled army of automaton limbs peel and unravel the delicate casements of silkworm moths.  The silk is cut and dyed and woven by a horde of arthritic and ink-spotted workers in the warrens of the Sepia, Indigo, and Damask Wards.  From here it is loaded by spidery iron cranes and hulking dock-laborers, muscles squirming with symbiotic grafts, onto submersibles equal parts gearwork and crustacean or leathery dirigibles.  These vessels clot the sluggish coils of the Radula River or ride on dry winds from the glowering Slouching-Devil Mountains (winds that bring thunderstorms and murders of predatory imps and bouts of disturbing erotic nightmares).

   The city's other boasts: a long tradition in the crafting of expensive (but efficient) automata and a mastery of the centuries old, carefully cultivated practice of demoniac husbandry.  Blurring the lines between puppets and puppeteers are the five supreme rulers of Skein, the Moth-Kings, wizened scholar-husks who traded flesh and memory and essence to arcane entities beyond human fathoming in the distant past, perhaps as far back as the Membrane Wars.  They brood in their shadowy, palatial spire, queasy shapes somewhere between men and corpses and diabolic phantoms; they rely on less overtly otherworldly mouthpieces to deliver their rare but irresistible commands.

Baranauskas, City of Bodysnatchers, The Maggot City

The Skin Markets of Baranauskas are famous across the Cadaverous Earth.  Guilds of tomb raiders and grave robbers of every stripe daily plunder the nearby Slaughter-lands and even the ruinous Hecatomb Cities of the deep waste, returning with the musty relics of bygone aeons '" and with scores of bodies.  The relics are pawned in the scabrous little Curio Bazaars, but the bulk of goods traded in Baranauskas take the form of carved bones, flayed flesh, blood, and bodies, though there are also large sections of the Markets dedicated to the trade of slaves or the solicitations of prostitutes.

Here also are the glyph parlors, the graft peddlers, and the tissue-shops, where libertines, mercenaries, thugs, and adventurers purchase flesh-hexes or augment themselves with extra limbs, poison glands, or squirming cosmetic tattoos.  Even the human citizens (a sizeable minority) are practicing cannibals, but the hagmen, the cestoids, the ghilan, and innumerable other grave-spawn depend on the city's grisly produce for subsistence.  One will also find mercantile agents of the Lords Revenant in search of fresh bodies for labor purposes.  Though superficially a liberal, even anarchic city, Baranauskas is essentially ruled by a loose oligarchy composed of high-ranking members of the Robber Guilds and wealthy merchants.

Dolmen, City of Spiders

Xenophobic and isolationist in the extreme, the city of Dolmen is the domain of the lilix, spidery and matriarchal, ruling through a rigid caste-system.  Below the city are the vast breeding caves, where a near-blind, colourless race of subhumans are bred as livestock and slaves, to work new tunnels into the unyielding earth or be consumed in the gory meals of their mistresses.

Above these stone pens the city's core thrusts upwards in tiered levels, a bizarre geometric radiation of temples and armories and dwellings, trading halls and factories and torture-halls.  Here the city's mortal gentry live a penumbral existence: chalky-skinned freedwomen dressed in black and red lace who tattoo extra eyes on their foreheads and keep cadres of male slaves.  At the center of the upper city are the harems, banquet halls, council chambers, and living quarters for the lilix themselves, where the males are kept as footmen, concubines, and bodyguards while the women drink marrow-wines and sanguine cordials.

Beyond the limits of the city is the foreigner's quarter, a trading hub and center of exchange where the normally unyielding web of etiquette, taboos, and laws is relaxed and the lilix reluctantly deal with outsiders; here the Sinew River flows down from its point of origin in the nearby Chelicerae Mountains.

Moroi, The Gaunt City, City of the Elder Tree

At the center of Moroi, towering over the baroque intricacy of its rambling streets, the Elder Tree claws at the sky with gnarled fingers.  Sublime, incomprehensibly huge, and old beyond all remembrance, the Elder Tree remains magnificent even as the Resin Merchants despoil its ancient grandeur.  The tree is penetrated, ravished, ensnared in a vampire-machine, a twisted complexity of tubes and gears and churning pipework that invades its withered bark and sucks the god-tree dry.  Two more of its brethren loom over the city like headstones, ossified and empty, the machinery entangling them turning slowly to rust.

   The Resin Merchants of Moroi drain the Elder Tree of its puissant sap, the substance dubbed ichor or nectar: a potent arcane catalyst which, when ingested (usually via injection) infuses the user with eldritch energy.  Those with latent power are tracked down by the city's recruiters, chained and injected with heavy doses of the drug and converted into babbling living weapons, till they burn from the inside out or go mad completely.  Large amounts of the drug also finds it way into the marketplaces of Skein, Crepuscle, and Baransauskas.

Lophius, The Corsair City, City of the Lamprey

Straddling the Maw, the swampy delta where the Gland River empties itself into the Sallow Seas, Lophius is a considerably younger city than its brethren to the north and east, though still centuries old.  Though predominantly human, Lophius teems with other creatures as well, many of them amphibious: leechkin, hagmen, and certain wetland strains of ghilan.  Though certainly a hub for commerce, Lophius became rich through piracy and other activities generally regarded as illicit in the other Twilight Cities, acting as a haven for thieves, smugglers, and corsairs; its only government is an informal kleptocracy comprised of whatever particular clan of cutthroats last seized power.

   The other principle faction within Lophius is religious, as the city is a major point of pilgrimage.  Idols dredged from the fens by scavengers or from the briny depths by daring sub-mariners are erected in the ramshackle shrines of the Driftwood District, attended by a priests with seaweed in their hair and shells for holy symbols; each upstart deity competes with the others for petitioners, a thousand bickering godlings in a maze of skeletal shipwrecks-cum-churches and barnacled wooden fanes.

   Quite distinct from the carven deities of Lophius are the true gods of the swamp, nameless elemental demons of stagnation and wasting illness, brooding in the brackish waters.  These fey, muttering entities are kin to the mad, primordial beast-gods of salt and nacre that slumber in the deeps of the Sallow Seas.

Adventure

Adventurers come in many varieties.  One might play as an exiled baron of the Lords Revenant, a vampiric aristocrat possessed by an heirloom spirit; or a member of one of the Robber Guilds of Baranauskas, a grizzled tomb raider contending with malevolencies and the elements in the Slaughter-lands, questing for lost technology; or a sneak from Lophius, some tattooed, moustachioed footpad or duelist dealing death with knife and pistol; or an arachnoid assassin, a male lilix courtier with a wit to match his deadliness; or a magister attended by a homunculus leashed with a warded silver chain; or a half-mad witch-savant, an ichor-junkie hurling drug-fueled hexes; or even a misshapen graftpunk with stitches or inked sigils still raw from the augmentations of the tissue-shop or the glyph parlor.

   Adventures tend to oscillate between survival in an unforgiving and hazardous wilderness and gritty urban intrigue.  Adventurers might loot haunted tomb-cities in the Slaughter-lands or mount expeditions to retrieve lost secrets from abandoned libraries where the dead walk.  They might pursue bounties on brigands and savage leechkin and nameless demons in the clotted swamplands of Lophius, or escort caravans for the Resin Merchants across the disconcerting amorphousness of the Tallow Plains where the wax-born roam.  They might become prospectors in the Slouching-devil Mountains in search of ur-fossils, or scholars seeking the lost poetic incantations of Vurlu, or street-fighters for hire in the chaotic markets of Baransauskas, or perhaps gentleman burglars preying on the aristocracy of Somnambulon.  They could converse with sentient automata clothing themselves in flayed human skins, forge contracts with creatures born of the Suppuration, drink blood and whiskey with grave-spawn in riverside ghul-bars and saloons, battle nests of fettergeists in the undercity of Skein, or poach tenebrals in the shadowy hunting grounds of magister-princes.

[Ishmayl-Retired]

This is very intriguing, and I have no idea how it has slipped by my attention until now.  In your first paragraph, when you mentioned a city named "Somnambulon," I was wondering if it would be zombie-infested, and I found out with further reading that I would not be disappointed!

Honestly, I can very much imagine stories being written in this much moreso than adventures taking place.  All the cities seem to be wont for some vignettes or epic ballads being written of them.

Welcome to the CBG, I hope to see more!

[LordVreeg]

love the adventure tidbits.  Much to look forward to.  Somewhat wolfe-esque...

[SA]

Somewhat wolfe-esque...

And with a definite touch of Mieville's "wierd punk" flavour.  This setting was practically designed to get me Jonesing.

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Thanks everyone for their replies.  And yes, the Cadaverous Earth plunders liberally from Wolfe, Vance, Mieville, Mervyn Peake, and Stephen King, though I hope the resulting synthesis is somewhat intriguing, if not precisely original.  I've used bits and pieces of it in various stories and games; this setting is something of a conglomeration of ideas and tidbits.

More to come soon on the different species...[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

Hagmen

The hermaphroditic hagmen predominate in the southern regions of the Cadaverous Earth.  Somewhat resembling anthropomorphic eels, hagmen are vermiform, with slimy, elongated tails, lacking legs.  Their upper bodies are more humanoid, including a pair of long, bony arms and vaguely human heads, albeit with horizontal mouths with many teeth, beady eyes (though not blind, hagmen have poor eyesight), and whisker-like barbs; they often sport a mane of shaggy hair that looks like swampy vegetation, especially if a hagman submerges itself in water, a common hunting tactic.

   Hagmen possess both testes and ovaries and so have interchangeable sexes; they have developed complex cultural gender constructs '" unfathomable to most humans '" that reflect their intersexed natures.  The name 'hagman' was chosen for its androgynous implications, but many hagmen consider the name crude.  Most 'civilized' hagmen can be found in cities such as Lophius, Crepuscle, and Baransauskas, where they tend to congregate in amphibious ghetto districts with communal dwelling places somewhere between bathhouses and residences.  Other major structures include the hatcheries and temple-brothels, where hagmen that have chosen to become female ritualistically mate with males in honour of Myx, an aspect of the nebulous, multiply natured hagman deity representing fertility, lust, and creativity.  Hagmen have integrated into urban society as fishermen, agriculturalists (farming seaweed and marine livestock), submariners, amphibious warriors, dockworkers, artisans, and even scholars.

   There are many less urbanized hagman communities, most of which conform to a tribal structure; these 'savage' hagmen are hunter-gatherers with some primitive farming techniques, and are known for their deep racial prejudice for the leechkin with whom they compete for territory and food.  The hagmen denounce the leechkin as the unclean spawn of an amorphous devil figure, a vampiric adversary-demon representing parasitism and degradation.  Vestiges of this race-hatred linger even in metropolitan centers, though many progressive hagmen and leechkin have learned to set aside their differences.

   Apart from their prejudices, the hagmen of the Twilight Cities have inherited their tribal cousins' religious beliefs, albeit adapted to a less primeval cultural landscape.  They worship a monotheistic deity with a myriad of different aspects, and their system of arcana or witchcraft is integrated directly into their religion.  Each aspect of the Aeon-Worm (a rarely-used epithet of the gestalt of the hagman deity's personalities) is attended by a cult, with rituals and ceremonies tailored to the venerated aspect's portfolio.

[Steerpike]

Leechkin

Often deeply disturbing to humans first encountering them, leechkin are hairless humanoids with green or black skins, bloated torsos (which shrivel if the leechkin hasn't fed), and long, spindly limbs.  Their faces are rudimentary: leechkin have almost no neck, their ears are mere holes, and they have no mouths on their faces '" only a pair of small yellow eyes and a set of nostrils.  Instead, they possess two individual mouths on their palms, each resembling a lamprey's maw with many serrated teeth.  While hermaphroditic like the hagmen, leechkin do not possess the shifting mutability of gender of that species: instead they are essentially sexless, with individuals assuming the role of male or female in a temporary fashion during procreation (the 'male' grows a sperm-sac which the 'female' consumes, impregnating 'herself').

   Leechkin are haematophagic, consuming a diet entirely of blood.  While many creatures on the Cadaverous Earth are cannibals of necessity, the leechkin dependency on blood, like that of the lilix, has led to their demonization in other cultures, and leechkin are often regarded as unclean or monstrous, especially by the hagmen.  This conception is exacerbated by certain bands of tribal leechkin who after months without proper feeding succumb to a bloodthirsty psychopathy, degenerating into murderous animals.  It is not uncommon to find a steamboat drifting aimlessly in the southern swamps, its crew bloodless, covered in small red circles like gruesome love-bites.

   While the bulk of the leechkin population dwells in the swamps themselves, some leechkin communities can be found in the Twilight Cities, particularly in Lophius.  The leechkin mindset is inherently parasitic, and leechkin culture denigrates the very idea of 'work,' scorning the lofty accomplishments of men as mere frivolity; thus, the bulk of urban leechkin are simply beggars seeking enough coin to purchase their next fix of blood.  As leechkin tend to be regarded as untrustworthy rogues, some find employment as enforcers, torturers, and other underworld figures, which hardly helps their species' reputation.

   The leechkin religion is animistic, with shamans serving as healers and sorcerers.  The leechkin have some traffic with the nameless gods of the swamp, whom they seem to regard as avatars of the natural environment.

[Steerpike]

Lilix

Rulers of the city-state of Dolmen, the lilix are spiderfolk, a race of anthropomorphized arachnids, each possessing eight limbs and eight eyes.  Other than these obvious differences and a set of mandibles in lieu of a mouth the lilix are essentially humans with grayish, sometimes hairy skins.  They are further distinguished by their ruthlessly matriarchal culture, their appetite for blood, and their capacity for artistic, political, and intellectual intricacy.  Those few lilix that live in cities other than Dolmen tend to be advisors, architects, artists, and spymasters.

   The lilix political structure is a kind of gynocratic fascism, a caste system placing the pallid subhumans at the bottom (humans bred for centuries for slave labor), with human freedwomen and their male concubines above (a kind of lower middle class), then lilix males, the courtier caste, and finally lilix females, the queen caste.  The males tend to be taut and strong, bred as they are for their sexual appeal, their obedience, and their fighting ability.  Lilix females are leisured and so tend towards softness and roundness, with elder females achieving a heavily fetishized obesity.  A rigidly conceived and highly ritualized state religion closer to a dogmatic bureaucracy than a living faith codifies and attempts to legitimize the stratifications of Dolmen.  The holy texts of the religion are embedded in ancient tapestries reputed to be spun by the creed's central mother deity, an elder spider-goddess called Virlum.  The tapestries are hung in the inner sanctums of official temples; any reproduction or facsimile would instantly be declared blasphemous.  As such the all-female priesthood is able to keep the religion under firm state control, reserving the right to interpret the tapestries and so maintain power.

   Like the primitive leechkin of the swamps the lilix are haematophagic, subsisting on the blood and liquefied bodies of humans and other creatures.  At a lilix feast all the food is liquid: bowls and sauciers of half-coagulate blood jellies, marrow juice, and pulped, runny meat, washed down with goblets of thinned arterial blood they drink like wine or xocolatl.  A carrion perfume cloys the upper levels of Dolmen, raw and coppery, mingling with the fecund pheromones of the lilix and the sour tang of the flesh-castings carpeting the black marble floors.

[Steerpike]

Ghilan

The origins of the ghilan (singular: ghul) are clouded in mystery, remaining a subject of major scholarly speculation.  Some claim they were born during the Pallid Decimation, when (legend has it) the Ravager-Worm Hirud ruptured the world, the dead arose, and the earth was alight with funeral pyres; others claim they are the dilute offspring of some elder demon race.  Whatever their genesis, ghilan have become the principle grave-spawned race on the Cadaverous Earth, and can be found in all of the Twilight Cities.  They resemble the quick in most respects, but have chalky, leper-gray skin, sharp teeth, claw-like nails, and cat-slitted eyes.  Their 'life-spans' are theoretically unlimited, and few diseases affect them; though grave-spawn (or 'undead,' a term that has passed from the status of racial slur into a kind of quaint archaicism), they do not decompose, and they are far from the mindless zombies of Somnambulon or the hunger-obsessed haunts of the Slaughter-lands.  Some grave-spawn live for hundreds of years, though most die of hunger, thirst, violence, or accident before they reach a hundred.  Ghilan are carnivorous creatures, ingesting only raw meat, and are shamelessly cannibalistic, eating both humans and other ghilan (they tend to dislike seafood and so find the flavor of leechkin or hagmen distasteful).

   Ghul reproduction is surrounded by such a haze of mythology that their true method of procreation seems disappointingly mundane.  Like most grave-spawn, ghilan are the hosts to parasites, in this case to a strain that survives in necrotic human flesh.  Those that eat uncooked human meat infested with a ghul-worm or fluke may potentially be transformed from a normal human into a ghul.  The parasite essentially kills its host, then revivifies it after making several alterations, using the brief period of clinical death as a kind of liminal space, a cocoon-state in which the host is metamorphosed into a ghul.  The newly reborn ghul will be afflicted with moderate to complete amnesia but suffers no other damage apart from sterility '" though rumors persist of half-ghul children, they are thought to be merely the imaginings of grotesque minds.  Sexual intercourse between ghilan and the quick remains possible and is quite common despite vague taboos surrounding such couplings.  Self-infection with a ghul-worm is not unheard of, but the invariable memory loss involving the change deters most who would seek to transcend death in this manner.

   Ghilan culture resembles that of the quick closely.  On the whole, ghilan tend to be more solemn and ritualistic in contrast with the frenetic quick, who seem to the ghilan a loud and reckless breed (though many ghilan profess a certain nostalgia, only half remembered, for the heady, frenzied days of life).  They are a nocturnal race and abhor direct sunlight, though it does them no actual harm.  Because of their longevity many ghilan eventually obtain enough wealth and power to live relatively luxurious lives.  Some become decadent, macabre libertines who savor meals of the softest flesh and attend theaters, gambling halls, drug dens, and orgies with regularity, spending their nights in hedonistic debauchery.  Others prefer a more staid living, becoming administrators, priests, and even monks '" there are more than a few ghilan in the Order of the Weeping Lady, cloistered in the monasteries of the Chelicerae Mountains.

[Steerpike]

[ic=Inchoate]The sap of the Elder Tree pulsed in his veins, filling him with eldritch light, a suffusion of celestial nectar, throbbing in time to his heartbeat '" elemental, transcendent, eternal.  Sketching an arcane character in the air with the articulated finger of his clockwork gauntlet '" sigil scribed, twined with cabalistic wires feeding into his bloodstream '" the aspiring witch Magnus Shacklebane muttered the invocation fervently, his eyes clouded with tenebrous puissance, the bloodstone in his right fist sizzling, scorching his leather glove.  Laboriously he pronounced the prolix syllables of the incantation, giving each torturous, convoluted phrase of the formula its proper weight, affecting the serpentine sibilance appropriate for the ritual.

   The air before him shimmered.  Behind his square glasses Magnus' eyes widened, glowing with sepulchral light.  The distortion intensified as the adolescent witch continued the invocation, gesturing with his gauntlet and holding forth the bloodstone.  There was a queasy smell '" brimstone, copper, burning blood, the syrupy reek of nectar.  A vague manifestation half-solidified: a grotesque but monstrously charismatic visage, at once gibberingly mad and unfathomably wise, its eyes sublime voids.  For one ephemeral moment those abyssal eyes stared back into Magnus' own; but then, as the bloodstone singed through his impskin glove to burn bare flesh, the would-be witch's tongue stumbled over a single whispered syllable.  The face flickered; the bloodstone slipped from Mangus' hand and fell to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand iridescent shards.  The face, only a hazy insinuation, melted into a wisp of red smoke.[/ic]

[Nomadic]

I am not worthy :O

This is absolutely brilliant and I demand more. More!

[Steel General]

Excellent stuff, looking forward to more.

[Steerpike]

The Watchdogs of Baranauskas

The three colossi known as the Watchdogs (or just the Dogs) of Baranauskas are huge, venerable creatures that guard the three gates of the walled inner city '" the Witch's Gate, leading to Moroi, the Eel's Gate, leading to Lophius, and the Butcher's Gate, leading to the Slaughter-lands.  The Watchdogs were created four hundred years ago, commissioned by the Robber Guilds and the Rag-and-Bones cartels from the mad magister Orlando Petrifax, a specialist in fleshcraft; though many of their constituent parts have been replaced over the centuries, they remain at the three gates of the Maggot City, motley sentinels easily capable of dispatching any wandering horror or band of mutant brigands that might dare approach Baranauskas from the Slaughter-lands or elsewhere.  In times of war the Dogs have very rarely been unleashed upon the battlefield to aid in the destruction of some particularly malignant foe.

   The Watchdogs are gigantic, vaguely canine creatures formed from innumerable scraps of glyph-scribed, hairless flesh grafted irreverently atop the puissant bones of malformed dire-beasts or giants dug from the Slouching-devil Mountains.  Petrifax apparently conjoined these bones without respect for their previous owners' anatomy, resulting in strange, unwieldy configurations of limbs, odd protrusions, and bizarre skeletal structures.  As a result the Watchdogs are misshapen and monstrous, their deformed skeletons clothed in a grisly patchwork, a palimpsest of stitched skins.  Within their sigil covered bodies strange presences squirm and rustle, pressing against their fleshly prison '" the animating spirits the magister bound within the Dogs' warded skin, to give his creations life.

The Dogs are chained to their gates but can wander a fair distance, though they are well trained and so spend most of their time dozing in the shade of the walls, the terrific stench of their breath and the sickening quantities of formaldehyde used to preserve their bodies assailing those who approach the gates of the Bodysnatcher's City.  They are fed every three days, glutted on huge bowls of raw meat '" a spectacle which draws large crowds of visitors who haven't witnessed the Feeding before.  An elite unit of the city guard comprised of magisters and beast-masters tends to the Watchdogs, called the Kennel Masters.

[Steerpike]

The Suppuration

Most of the various apocalypses that wracked the Cadaverous Earth in aeons past have dwindled into myth and legend, alluded to only in the footnotes of moldering texts or in the distorted narratives of fablers.  The lingering effects of such disasters still haunt the present '" the Red Ravishing, when the earth flooded with blood, still persists in the Red Rains, the demoniac scourge-armies of the Membrane Wars have scattered across the land while old war-engines are slowly subsumed by rust, and a slew of plagues still recur with devastating frequency '" but the origins of the world's current afflictions have largely been forgotten.  The Suppuration, however, cannot be so easily expunged from memory, as it continues to seep clots of destabilizing unreality, bearing new litters of alien monstrosities on the far side of the Slaughter-lands.

   Few have seen the Suppuration itself (and returned with their sanity intact), but those who have describe an unimaginable chasm or wound, a reality sore dribbling unseemly accretions of the uncanny and whining with a kind of keening wail.  Though the exact nature of the Suppuration is far from understood, it seems evident that it is more than a mere dimensional orifice or portal like those used by invaders during the Membrane Wars.  Rather, the Suppuration seems to be a kind of chaotic womb, a cesspool of diseased imaginings.  The beings that emerge from the tempestuous swirl of the Suppuration are not demons or daevas, are not visitors from some otherworld or alternate plane, though such creatures do exist in abundance across the Cadaverous Earth.  Rather, the things that crawl and slither forth from the gushing lips of that ghastly birth canal, licking the pus of the Suppuration's afterbirth from their flickering forms, possess an unplaced but undeniable familiarity, made twisted by their hideousness.  They are like the nightmares of the world's collective subconscious, welling up through the rift in a shadowy, dissonant headbirth - the oneiroi.

[Steerpike]

[ic=Gaolor] The witch unlocked the door to the cellar and began his descent, one hand trailing along the decaying brick wall, the other grasping a glossy black taper for light.  Flesh-colored boots padded down the slime-slick stone steps.  In the candle's flicker the witch's face was thrown into unnerving chiaroscuro, its hard lines sharpened, violet-stained smirk made crueler, wolfish yellow eyes more predatory.  The trailing hand tapped at the crumbling brickwork with long, black nails.

   At the bottom of the stairs the candlelight bloated to fill the high corners and skeletal vaulted curves of the chamber with a swollen gothic glow.  A legion of shadows sprung forth from the dim recesses to cavort along the walls, caressing the grotesque marble gargoyles with lithe, black fingers.  The witch used his taper to light other candles about the room; the shadow-dancers withered and diminished.

   In the center of the floor, surrounded by a chaos of scrawled inscriptions, engraved wards, and circles of red powder, the creature squatted in a cage of black iron, peering at the witch through the bars with coldly hateful eyes.  It stroked its wrist with a seven-fingered hand and hissed.

   'Hello, Marquis Naberius,' the witch said, revealing a mouth full of sharp white teeth.  'I have questions for you.'

   The creature shifted its weight in its cage before venturing forth into the light.  A huge black raven's head sat on a slender body with dark purple skin etched with livid orange tattoos, like lines of flame.  The lower half was coarse and hairy, with canine paws and tail.

   'Music!'  The creature demanded, its voice welling with weird echoes, as if it were speaking across a long distance, or from deep underground.

   'How ill-mannered of me,' the witch apologized.  'One moment, my good Marquis.'  He crossed the chamber '" careful not to break the protective markings on the floor '" and withdrew a small wax cylinder from a pocket of his long coat, which he inserted into a polished phonograph.  A strange, haunting music something like a nocturne began to play, filling the room with spectral voices and the spindly plucking of strings.

   'Ahhh'¦' The raven-headed thing sighed.  Its long digits traveled up and down one sinewy arm, lingering at the shoulder where black feathers segued into smooth humanoid flesh.

   'And now then, my excellent '"'

   'Hush!' The creature commanded, eyes squeezed shut, listening.  The witch's mouth twitched in irritation, but he allowed his captive several minutes to savor the lush macabre textures of the music.  While he waited he smoked a long cigarillo plucked with splendidly manicured fingers from an enameled ebony case.  Soon the air was filled with wraiths of pungent blue smoke.  The Marquis was making shadow-puppets on the wall, its fourteen spidery fingers contorted into fanciful configurations '" lion, three-headed wolf, winged serpent, a man and woman copulating.  A tremor of disgust and, beneath, quiet fear traveled down the witch's spine.  He twirled a black ringlet of his wig, and reminded himself of the wards he'd placed, the sigils he'd spent days laboring over before binding the creature to a corporeal manifestation.  Were a stray rat to evade the clutches of his vermin-catching homunculi and break even one of the circles'¦ He dismissed his anxieties as the Marquis stirred.

   'Very well,' it consented.  'Ask your precious questions, mortal manling.'[/ic]