Yet More Monsters

Reminded by wasitlikely's recent post: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2025/02/before-moon-was-born.html (among other good features of it: witch-as-verb) of her monster generator: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2023/03/monstrous-amendments-fictional.html, which I attempted to make a post for before but forgot about. Alas:

A House Made of Birds

(Lurker + Family + Mouth
Wounds + Robbed + Bind)

It is good and right and natural that we should eat the dead, and build atop their corpses. The seasons pass, the generations pass, and the past nurtures what comes after. A foundation of bones sits strongly.

Some refuse to become-ancestral, to yield their place in the now to their descendants. Most of these sorts simply continue to age, and age poorly, but a rare few take decisive steps:

They will stake themself to the roof of their house, or in the attic, and sing an old and nasty and thankfully-all-but-forgotten song, without rhymes or tune. Birds will come to listen, and to eat the singer piece by piece. Depending on the size of the birds this could take quite some time, and one must sing the whole time throughout, so one should have alcohol or something stronger at hand to ease the pain. When they are finished the birds wheel through the air, then vanish.

There will be another house there, invisible to most, squatting atop the first. The children and children's children, and so on and so forth of the one who performed the ritual must remain in that first house. It can be renovated, it can be knocked down and built up from the foundations, but it must remain the ritualist's house.

So long as it does, and their kin remain within, the ritualist can swoop through their lives and their bodies raptor-like, influencing and seizing for moments (often appearing in the form of one of the birds that devoured them) to keep their family around, keep them bound to the will of their ancestor. The ritualist's spirit can't be exorcised while leaving the house intact - it's all gotta be burned, and left far behind.

Plum-Wine Conspirators

(Royal + Lamprey + Creeping
Porcelain + Plum + Dagger)

Every empire has its eunuchs - whether their balls are literally chopped off or not is irrelevant - it's the role, the identity that matters, the subordination of libido to the empire.

These guys definitely chopped their balls off though. They keep them in pots, beautiful delicate pots of painted porcelain, steeping in fine plum-wine. Over these pots they perform unspeakable rites - rather, the rites are pretty speakable, just not in polite company.

Within the pots they become generative organs of a different sort. Strain the wine through silk-cloth - see what wriggles through the fibers - pale little things, like worms, like eels. Drink the wine, and you take in the parasites it holds. They weave themselves through your ganglions - they feel luxuriantly soft.

The original idea was that they would found their own dynasty - one assimilated rather than birthed - but the parasites had their own intelligence, their own ideas, in their networks rather than in the individual organisms.

One drink isn't enough to do much more than infest a finger, for a time - cause it to twitch and change the trajectory of an arrow, or a character being written. You need to be plied for months to become a true host.

Over the years many true hosts were made. The parasite-network grew beyond its ability to maintain consensus. The conspiracy splintered, stuck out and into itself. Parasite began preying on parasite, sub-networks lurked hyperparasitical within. The empire they sought to overthrow works better than ever now - a tensegrity sculpture strengthened by the tension.

Hammerers of the Wound-Hoes

(Beetle + Reward + Hill
Sorrow + Butcher + Marrow)

There was coal in those hills, and enough of the finer minerals to keep people looking for them. Still is coal in them - they leak its fluegas through their caves and their mines and their cracks like an angry old man smoking on his porch.

Things were pretty good for a while, a good long while. Mine-work's pretty shit at the best of times, but nobody went hungry. Miners would leave bowls of blood and milk for the things that writhed in the dark behind the stone, and in return those things would knock to guide them to rich veins, and warn them of the build-up of bad air.

Then a mine collapsed. Half a hundred men lost, crushed or cut off and starving, suffocating. In their lonely nightmare, dying in the dark, they called out to the things beyond the stone. The things answered their call, and out of the sight of the sun they tore at each others' flesh and made love.

Those miners are dead now, but their children live own. The hills belong to them now. Hairy coleopteran hunchbacks. They hate light, and covet it. They're masterful smiths, but all they're willing to sell you are weapons - weapons that look wrong, serrated and lumped, but they kill better than most.

The children don't sell this weapons for coin, but for a promise - a promise of corpses, slain by their weapons. For the weapons bear their eggs, and bear their eggs into the wounds they carve, and the eggs incubate in the slain.

But the children's children come out wrong, and the children weep and tear out their hair at the thought that they will be the first and the last generation of their kind. The smithies pour out their smoke, and the corpses keep piling up.