RP:The Burrower Beneath, Part 1
Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc
This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.
Eboric's Camp, Venturil
It is night. The day's dying heat has evaporated the Deadlands' scant moisture into dank mists which roll across barren flats and barrow-hills alike.
There is a creature – ancient and terrible even in legend – below the ground. It senses above it meat, blood, salts.. life, the way a plant senses light and grows toward it . But the seeping horror, in its burrow deep below the camp possesses the vestigal, animal awareness that it has absorbed from its many sentient victims. It enjoys sentient meat most of all…
Under one particular man's resting-spot the horror tunnels upward, its thready tentacles thin but determined in their quest.
And there is nothing, nothing at all that will offer either warning or salvation to that slumbering man.
The camp sleeps, with the exception of the vigilant guards patrolling the perimeters. All is more or less quiet, from the Aethling's tent in the center all the way out to the trenches that surround the camp. Hnaef, a thegn from Frostmaw, lies in his sleeping furs, sound asleep and oblivious to the terror below.
Displacing earth a little at a time, only worms might note their passing: the thin, dark threads of proto-flesh which continue to dig upward until they near the recumbent body of Hnaef. Swelling when they've breached the earthen floor of his sleeping-place, the tips of those terrible feeder-tendrils burst into bloom like disgusting flowers or the fruiting body of a ripe fungus as suckered extrusions replace sharper burrowing-tips.
They surface more fully then, with drops of viscous fluid dripping. These wormlike threads with their horrid heads come slithering softly, silently, under the folds of his blankets and clothing, until they encountered skin.
Hnaef slumbers still, likely yet in the grip of the ale he had consumed before staggering to his tent. He does not notice the foul fluid, though it would not be uncommon for him to awaken damp, stinking of urine. Even the gentle touch of the threads do not rouse him; he remains oblivious to his own danger.
And he will remain so -- for eternity. Embracing Hnaef like the arms of an incongruous jellyfish, the feeders latch their toothed suckers onto his skin and begin to drain his body of its fluids, absorb salts from skin and sub-dermal layers of fat. It takes mere moments for more of the siphonoid pseudopods to join their atrocious brethren, each one exuding anaesthetic poisons and digestive juice. The man is never again to wake, but perhaps dreams as he grows colder, more dry.
His fellow soldiers will discover Hnaef’s dry husk, a desiccated version of himself, light as a feather for its lack of water-weight, its inner and outer flesh chalky and brittle.
No evidence of what became of the man will be apparent, except for the fact that the soil below his corpse appears freshly turned in places, and the body is dotted with ghastly circular sores, both where skin had been bare and below his garb.
In the morning, when Hnaef's turn for guard duty comes, he is not there. Muttering curses on the derelict drunk, his immediate superior, Breoca, storms toward his tent, ready with a bucket of water to hurl on him, and a vicious kick as a chaser. The water does nothing, and the kick staves in his dried out side. Breoca drops the bucket in horror, backing out of the tent to run, stumbling, to find Eboric.