RP:Hunger Spirit
Part of the Creepshow Arc
Fancier Room for Rent
Note: This story was told orally by Josleen to Ezekiel in an inn room in Cenril. She improvised the story on the spot. They were nursing Josleen's bruised face after her violent encounter with Tyler, but only the story itself is preserved here to facilitate speed-reading.
This rp took place on in two parts January 17th and 19th, 2014.
Do you know what a Hunger Spirit is?
I’m scaring myself with thoughts of the Hunger Spirit. Hunger Spirits, would be more accurate. The first documented Hunger Spirits came to be thousands of years ago in the arid plains of what today we call Venturil. It wasn’t called Venturil then, of course. And back then the plains were even more insufferable than they are today. There was no city yet, only remotely located villages under the subjugation of a warlord whose name does not bear repeating.
The warlord makes Eboric look like a kindly benefactor. He controlled all local trade and commerce, and and heavily taxed any item that was produced on or crossed into the plains - even infants! Families who delivered a baby were expected to pay a tax on that child, or else the child would be sold into slavery abroad for the profit of the warlord. The parents would then be publicly lashed for good measure, because he couldn’t rightly call himself the Sickest Bastard to Ever Live if he didn’t jump on every opportunity to lash a poor soul, now could he? To describe him as despicable would be a compliment. To describe him as evil is too easy. He was his own brand of horrid - a dictator whose iron fist was spiked and laced with venom.
During one particularly bad drought year, the combination of lack of rain and high in-kind taxes on the small harvest led to mass famine. The people of the villages withered away, the elderly and young dying first - some children were even ‘mercy’ killed, if you could imagine it. That’s how bad things got. Well, in one village there lived a woman who was respected as a religious leader and local healer. She saw child after child, grandpa after grandmaw die while the warlord and his men grew fat. They say she summoned a terrible curse on the warlord, but the details of the curse were left open and vague. She wasn’t a witch, you see, but simply a piteous woman who had had enough.
The gods heard her prayer, and chose to intervene in the way only gods know how - by making everything worse. Famine still decimated the village, and all the dead who died from famine in her village became Hunger Spirits. Terrible monsters who inflict their prey with hunger and eat their hunger pains. When the victim tries to eat, at first they say the victim simply can’t. They gag and even vomit. The idea of food is physically repulsive. But eventually a little nausea isn’t enough, is it? Not when a victim is out-of-their-mind hungry. So then the Hunger Spirit causes anything the victim touches to sour and spoils at their touch - food sprouts worms and maggots. The Hunger Spirit locks onto the victim until they too succumb to famine. They say the warlord and every single last one of his cronies were found in the warlord’s estate looking like nothing but starved skeletons. But the Hunger Spirits did not disappear once the warlord and his men perished. No, they hunger on, looking for new victims.
Ezekiel Jos, so what you're trying to tell me is, I'm cooking dinner tonight?