With special thanks to bad doctor for the challenge.
The challenge is "Introduce something to another blogger's setting that fundamentally alters it. They MUST incorporate this change, so get permission first and don't be a pill." and bad doctor has given permission for me to write something for her Stolen World setting. This is that:
Edelfull: A village on a screefull slope at the foot of alarmingly tall and sheer cliffs buffeted by winds that smear anyone who attempts to climb them. They stack stones with great precision and when the landslides come they slide the stones together into drafty homes just so. Grapevines grow throughout the village and when the harvest is ripe wild sheep are driven through them and the people have learned to subsist off the fumes of the trampled grapes. Wild pigs were used once but the damn bastard pigs were too gluttonous to leave the mash to rot and many starved. As they live off fumes their teeth have fallen out and their mouths have grown small and they speak only in whispers and wheezes. As they live off fumes of fermenting grapes they are at all times jolly or weepy or angry and drunkenly foppish. Also they need twine and rope and suchlike to hold their inflated skins together or they will burst and fall to earth flayed. As they can float about through the sky they see many things and can carry messages between people and places.
Leanjeddies: A cavortment of olds with the Hounds of Id sniffing about their cerebellums. Nomadic on all fours but stand up while they're talking to people but sometimes they forget how they're supposed to do that and stand on their heads. Trepanned to the last, so that sometimes when the Hounds get in they can be fooled out. Live off begging to chew off people's fingernails and slurp out the dirt from under their toenails, and off mercenary-killings and brigandage.
Eivilley: Once upon a time there was a giant whose mouth was so big that the Ash-Tongued Curse could not put enough of its children in the giant's mouth to keep it from eating and eating and eating everything that belonged to Angbora. So other servants of Angbora came and cut the giant in half and buried one half under one stone and the other half under another. Some time later the village of Eivilley was formed in the cleft between the stones and with them its founders brought the feet of a statue which although were very large had nothing to do with the giant. They wrap chains around the toes of the statue-feet and wind them through holes in the stones which are as big as hills and they raised them up as high as they can and drop them down again and again as quick as they can and this agitates the worm's that crawl in the jaded deep which belong to no god which come up out of the ground and are seized and eaten up. The people here are deaf and prone to leaping and jigging and for this world they are relatively well-fed and if you bring them metal to weld to their chains which are always rusting they will let you share in the feast of worms.
No-People-No-Name: The people who once lived in this village could not figure out a way to live and so they had one last feast and one last dance and one last orgy and then they disguised themselves as their houses up the eaves and inside the walls and under the hearth. They wept and slept in their disguises and forgot they were people. The houses-that-were-people were alone for a time and without people living in them they began to wonder why it was that people lived in houses at all and not the other way around. The village appears well-kept though abandoned but if you linger the houses will try to make a home in you. The children of the villagers' last night as people were born some time back and now are furniture and they are much more reasonable and often move far away.
Cythylyx: A village in a frondling rainforest where the people dig deep pits and lounge in them as the water fills them up because this is the cheapest way to soothe their savaged throats. There are pitcher plants that grow in the forest wide as barrels, and the villagers cultivate them into varieties like the glassware of a chemistry lab. When the pitcher plants catch a thing the villagers scoop a careful portion of the digestive broth into another, smaller pitcher, and so on in gradations of dilution until they are left with a homeopathic cupful of almost entirely acid. Much more painful to quaff than hunger pangs are to endure, but won't kill you in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment