Slush Pile 7

I accidentally deleted this slush pile once before. Rewrote what I could remember from it, but its original form would've changed the course of human civilization.

Place Names: Ixaret, Hickoryholt, Hell 2, Skarlang, Ostelottz, Quelm, Theyis (there were much better ones in the original post I can tell you that much)

Briskcomb (I should really write down why I write certain words down), wormshod (sounds cool)

A dungeon that's based around, or literally is, a syntax tree - a syntax tree describing a memetic virus - literally or abstractly entering or altering the tree is the only way to alter and thus defuse the virus

Learned the other day that being deprived of the ambient noise of the Earth can cause great anxiety in astronauts - a nice bit of flavour for sci-fi settings, and if fantasy-ized you could have planetary muses that sing the gaian harmonics of worlds or whatever - an injured muse could disrupt planetary biorhythms and cause a plague of nightmarish insomnia - spaceships could navigate by virtuosos able to pick out a single muse among the galactic chorus - the rotation of ships could not only supply artificial gravity, but also play a giant phonograph recording the muse of the crew's home planet. Conversely, warships might deliberately omit the planet-song to keep their crew on edge and save on weight

A species of carnivorous marine cactus, evolved an involution/cavity full of spines with flexible opening - when guard-spines around the opening are triggered, it flexes open, sucking in any fish nearby to be impaled and digested - the cactus's flesh is a source of fresh water for sailors

Alien with a life style somewhat like a lion - large "alpha" defends territory while "mates" hunt - except that the "mates" are a variety of species implanted with the alpha's larvae that manipulate their brains

An alien that's a super-cell, like merged slime molds - the organelles of such an organism also grow in size & complexity - a protoplasmic ocean home to mitochondrial-fish, the rippling and swarming/schooling behaviours of both causing self-organizing complexities to emerge

First-class relics are the remains of a saint. Second-class relics are the possessions of a saint. Third-class relics are ordinary objects and materials that have touched higher-class relics - oil collected from lamps burning near places important to Jesus's life, for example. The highly-classified zeroeth-class relics are living people predestined to become saints.

"Carnlevare" - "putting the meat away", related to Carnival - would make a good name for a monster

Literal concrete poetry written in brutalist block type

Future mutant - homo corporaticus, bicameral throwback, hears the voice of their employer as an inner voice of God

By legend dogwood originally stood straight and tall, but twisted and shrank itself in shame after its wood was used to make the cross for Jesus's crucifixion - speciation by way of sin

Aqua regia is an acid that can dissolve even gold - terra regia can solidify anything it touches, aeris regia sublimates or vapourizes, ignis regia is ever-burning and all-consuming

Funhouse dungeon background - made by a king who'd lost the ability to dream, and ordered the construction of a whimsical environment to emulate dreams while waking

Mad emperor dams up river of the underworld, causing it to flood the surface and trapping the living and the dead in a wretched in-between state

There's a city atop a sea-cliff which is fabulously powerful, magical, and xenophobic - this isn't about them. This is about the city built atop that city's trash, discarded at the foot of a cliff. That city is wealthy and powerful too, but a shadow of its unwitting benefactor, the city above, and is always stinking and sinking into the muck. Sailors can navigate its harbour in fog, night, or with their eyes closed just by the distinct reeks that waft from parts of it.

Render unto Mooloch - for many ancient cultures cattle were as much or more the symbol and expression of wealth than gold or whatnot - replace gold pieces with heads of cattle - great cattle raid of the temple of elemental evil (cows that lactate lightning)
-corollary: devils took their horns in imitation of cattle

The people of Quelm inter their dead in cone-towered sepulchers - not bodily, but in the form of pots. The pots are exactingly molded so that when wind blows over their lips they sing with the voice of the dead person they represent. The sepulcher's towers are shaped such that wind is always blowing through them. Dead tyrants of Quelm are mocked by saying their pots bear the sound of their flatulence rather than their voice.

Lechuza - central american(?) cryptid - a witch that shapeshifts into an owl, can kill someone by scratching at their door three nights in a row

I think these are puppet or clown names: Arlecchino, Innamorati, Balanzone, I Gelosi, Mezzetino, Truffaldin, Trivelino, Bagatino, Zaccagnino, Pierotto, Guazetto, Beltrame, Brighella, Scapin

The seat of the gluttonous baron contains a secret compartment that only pops open if enough weight is placed upon it

Mattel corporation has copyrighted REAL PINK for a line of barbies that was never released - the pink we know is a pale imitation of REAL PINK filtered through microplastic contamination of our vitreous fluid

Some of the 9 extra colours or however many that mantis shrimp can see are jale, ulfire, dolm, octarine, etc. - no serious occultist lacks a saltwater aquarium with mantis shrimp in it

Night hags do brisk trade in the broken shells of crystal histories, for they are a fine substrate on which to build dreams. Have you ever dreamt of a yellow sky, of frog-storms in July, of an old friend by your side? Perhaps that dream was made with a fragment of forgotten truth

From a dream some nights ago: a city built on the inner film of a giant bubble, using the surface tension as mortar - one day the bubble popped, flinging the city into many pieces, an instant diaspora of quarters and enclaves and ghettos

Rogue mytheme: the god of the underworld and its buried wealth is not some cold and jealous lord, but a red-hot living mass, reshaping the world with its explosive exertions

The Rikihoko Pearls, a necklace cursed and coveted in equal measure, are in fact the lustrous eggs of some loathsome beast - their psychic influence and hatching into parasitic monsters are the true cause of the doom that follows those who wear the pearls.

Fire elementals play instruments based on forge equipment - drums derived from bellows, pipes from tuyeres

Near-future sci-fi cult - create clones from blood samples scrapes from the shroud of Turin and crucify them to expiate themselves of sin

Giant spider with necrotic necromantic venom - the drained husks of its prey lunge out from its webs to drag in new meals

Candle shaped like a sword-grip - when lit its smoke forms a wavering blade

Leibnizian terrorists attempt to make a bomb that works by splitting a monad

An assassin's comb, which can be used to brush out hairs as piercing needles

Sobriquet => Soberquet - a secret name empowered by abstinence

A church grim has been witnessed in the graveyard at night - it's not protecting the graveyard from desecration, but keeping something within from getting out

A dungeon built to trap an immortal being's death Koschei-like - the death, taking a shifting form like a dagger, a black crescent moon, a snarling serpent, has been charged with its long delay - this energy can be turned devastatingly against its intended target, or defused to bring many lesser deaths against other creatures

A great dragon who, once slain, splits into a profusion of worms - following generations of adventurers taking a tally of its slain splitted parts, always hoping they never reform, or reproduce

A society that uses sign language as the language of the court - silence in respect for the sovereign - uses those who've had the flesh between their metacarpals severed as the sign language equivalent of castrati

A wizard who wears censers as earrings, burning herbs whose smoke brings focus and imagination, stoked by a fire mephit perched on his woven-asbestos mantle

A parliament whose seats are on horseback, and whose assembly is on an open plain - votes are duels and battles, fought with padded spears, victory in battle and policy coming from knocking your opposition from their seat - a plebian tribune of footsoldiers lurk around the edges of the assembly, looking for an opportunity to seize a seat for the common people from the equites

Bacterial mat farms of the darkwater civilizations, spread of abyssal floor converted into catalytic conditions for serpentinization by crushing and distributing mafic & ultra-mafic rocks, and thus for conditions for bacteria to feed, which in turn feed larger lifeforms up the chain to livestock consumable by the farmers.

The skullcracker parrots of the jungles around Ixaret can, as the name suggests, split open a man's skull as easily as their smaller cousins crack the shell of a pistachio. They speak with the voices and words of those whose brains they consume. The old and wise of Ixaret are fed a soporific tincture, then are themselves fed to skullcracker parrots, which are kept chained in aviary-tombs to preserve some remnant of their mind another half-century or so.

Nation ruled by vampires, culturally equates being fed on by vampires with motherhood - those who die in the process are honoured, and said to be reincarnated as nightingales

Dissident Finnish Christian sect centered around the practice of karsikko & cross-trees - believe that Jesus's return is delayed by the creation of such, buying time for them to save sinful souls through the intercession of saints

Does the existence of hyperspace - a science-fictional conceit of a different world/dimension wherein distances and times are contracted - imply the existence of hypospace, wherein the opposite is true - leading to basis of stasis-pods, pocket dimensions, etc.

Corn maidens sacrificed by live burial in grain silos to ensure a bountiful harvest protected from pests

The sophists of Quelm, who provide the intellectual & rhetorical legitimization to its many tyrannies, tattoo their shaven heads with the patterns of a tortoise shell - for it's said that a great philosopher once went about with eagle talons pierced through his scalp after it swooped on him, and they now try to invite birds to emulate his appearance

Stargazy pie is a delicacy of the astrologers

The warrior-caste of Ostelottz are differentiated by their right to bear naked weaponry, and by their syrup-baptism, which if they're able to survive it replaces their soft human skin with crystalline armour - secret formulae known only to elders of the caste are required to make this armour flexible enough to move in - those who would steal their secrets are punished by turning them into immobile sugar-encased statues, watching helplessly as they're eaten alive by bats and hummingbirds

The cuirass calabash, a fruit whose shells are tough enough to be worn as armour, was cultivated in a secret project by generations of slaves over centuries in Theyis, and became instrumental in that country's revolution, counter-revolution, and counter-counter-revolution, which resulted in its transformation into the Republic-In-Chains, where every man is a slave to every other man

The heretical trans-gematrian workings of the mathemagicians can convert all things, not just words, into numbers and calculations. Their numerical perfection of the world has been stymied thus far by the incompleteness of their theorems - they pursue the Kaluptein, a total simplification of the world, so that it may be saved.

The sacred groves of the heathens were burned, and thus saved from destruction - transformed from physical idols to idols of the spirit - ancestral shades wander among the ghosts of trees, fed blood for guiding poetry, ecstatic inspiring fungus growing on the rot they left behind

Soma: divine plant, source of immortality, also churned from ocean by gods & asuras
Somatic component: motions used to cast spell
Ergo: Somatic components churn the stuff of the cosmos to produce magic

You can only reach an epic level once you've had an epic composed about you

Tabaxi were mutually domesticated by early humanity to aid in the hunting of a plague of wererats

The Green Man is a shared identity between a lord of light and a pigmentous prince - the Virescent One and the Emir of Emeralds - attempting to create a new unity between the coloured courts of addition and subtraction

The pure form school of modrons reject polyhedrons as insufficiently orderly - each takes the form of a black square, organizing together like the surfaces of polygons to create greater collectives

Kenku see the moon as an egg, with its waning being its hatching - when the full moon starts to fade it is a time of celebration, for the forgiveness of debts and the forgetting of copied words for the free expression of a cawcawphony

The miracle-money of Skarlang is backed by the fact that it can be redeemed for divine interventions - it is printed with the pulp of golden reeds which grow only on the banks of the River of the Barge-Gods

"Champagne strengthens the soul, caffeine gives the illusion of having one"