13 - 3 [Fool] Monstrum And The Tree Cursed To Die That Did Not The Soap-Maker - 2nd of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Somewhere, deep in the black bosom of the Sleeping Goddess Herself, evil things were wrought.

Beautiful things, Greth Eladre thought.

The warlocke walked the halls of his unholy home, the very walls screaming. Or, more accurately, it were the wailing tapestries flayed—to the muscle, the tendon, the sinew, the bone—that hung upon the mantle of marmon.

Men and women whose concealing skin was pulled back to bear what lay underneath. Were it not for their mostly dessicated and dehydrated flesh, the wall coverings would have long since passed by way of bacterial infection.

Instead, now the purposefully dried layers of themselves served to separate their wet insides—still beating hearts and breathing lungs and soft, warm flesh—from the without.

Tongues dried stuck to the back of their throats; the tapestries ached to scream with no ability to do so.

Captive within the husks of themselves.

But, they were not the subject of Greth’s attention. Most certainly not, for today—or tonight; he did not know the exact state of the Heavenly Sphere of Sola, for Eladre Junior did not fancy himself to care of the passage of the days under the heel of the Gods Above—would mark the creation of his first Unhallow.

A homunculus—an artificial man-thing—or, as the ancient sages of Anchored Aramaea and the Twelve Wandering Tribes of Ehbrahai called it, a Gohlem; an amorphous thing made of clay close to divinity.

Yet the medium by which Greth had formed his recreation of the First Children was not clay.

It was the flesh of babes.

Though, not literally, of course.

Collecting all that raw material from such tiny and massless monstrosities was far too difficult. Their middling mehna and weak corporealities were not nearly strong enough to endure the processes needed to wrought Greth’s vital material.

Besides that, procuring such resources was far too costly; the rat-catchers required double the pay of fortyear-passed bondmen for tykes yet-to-be-lumened.

No, instead the warlocke’s sculpting medium was mature carnality rendered back unto the embryonic.

It was branch made back into stem.

Through processes Greth did not fully understand, and by alchemicking that would put even a Guildam maester to shame, the warlocke had refined or, perhaps it was better to say, undefined adult human tissue into massa confusa.

‘Confused mass’ the Vitaens called it. It was a base material achieved after passing through the process of nigredo or melanosis; the black work. Usually by way of some caustic alchemickal, a once complex substance was made chaotic and pure and unripe.

It was made back into stem that may be cultivated however the alchemist saw fit; a confused lump of uniform soot, pliable and plastique for the sculpting.

The warlocke entered one of his bigger cavernous workshops, barrels of wood wowan linning the walls as did racks of tools both iron and argent.

At the center of his little room of horrors lay the scaffolding upon which his gohlem would be built.

Within each barrel that lined the walls was a viscous substance; slightly ruddy and red, but quite erebeian nonetheless. No common man would argue that the gelatinous liquid therein was not dark as sin.

From the blacken broth, Greth took and plastered false flesh upon bones of white; carved marmon stone fashioned in the likeness of a man, but much greater in stature.

A giant; a Nameless Forefather was to be the scaffolding and skeleton to bear the flesh of babes.

Fitting, that, Greth Eladre thought with mirth. For, he knew of the irony of coincidence and repetition at hand; nothing new was ever born, instead happenings of now and later were but repeats of cycles minted long since passed.

The Forefathers of the Seven Gods and their Godlings had been usurped for the simple fact that They Who Shall Not Be Named ate of Their own offspring.

One of Them, in particular, was egregious; a jealous god-thing that devoured His own babes for fear He would be superseded by such.

The fear of a primordial—an alder creature born from the depths of the Primeval Crucible; part and parcel of the Living Universe for its flesh was the flesh of reality itself—had given way to that which They attempted to avoid, nonetheless.

For a babe had survived the cannibalistic culling and came full-grown back to avenge the death of His kin.

What those of the Sevenfold Faith called Oriath the Iron Lord.

The Seventh God to survive the culling of He Who Dwells Beneath Creation had taken up the mantle of war and strife so that Those Who Lived may have fighting chance.

With cold iron and six siblings, He slaughtered the Forefathers and took Their Heavenly Thrones for Himself and His holy kin.

At least, such was just one of the many myths and scattered tellings of the Forefathers found all throughout the Civilized Realms.

A disaster of epic proportions, sung song about till this day in variations depending on the realm. In the Strosunian Isles, the sagas foresent of gluttonous ettins called the Eotenas; in the Vitaen Heartlands and Akaen Archipelago twain, the legends abounded with mention of Great Giants banished to beneath Creation called the khthonos or earth-born.

So on and so forth, similar tales sprung up like the weeds they were. Though details diverged, the bones remained the same.

And these bones Greth had taken inspiration from, carving marmon unto a frame fit to hold three men abreast and two erect, one upon the shoulders of the other.

With careful and meticulous precision, Greth wrought a Forefather, in the flesh of babes.

The warlocke wore gloves, lest he burn himself from the extreme basicity of the plaster he worked with as a medium. Glyphery that shone the wine of things-not-right warded him from chemical and alchemickal burns twain, sewn by rope of hair oiled with the juice of olives and heartblood.

It had taken no small amount of time to perfect the enchantments within the gauntlets with his piecemeal skills in artificery; breaking apart and stitching back together the discordant screams of the many souls therein was no easy feat, the now harmonious wailing a fruit of his toils and tribulations.

Even with the ken given to him by the Man, Greth found himself wanting.

Wanting for more fellen knowing, for his was the want to rip apart the Veil In Between and peek into the inner workings of the Rotunda, the Wheel.

A crow’s mask, an apparatus made by the Order Mahneanic and sold to many a Guildam sanctioned magicker, was set upon his face. Herbs and greenwood filters of all kinds shielded his lungs from the acrid, choking stench of the massa confusa.

The cover-up of the Upper Pyre’s apprentice’s explosive mishap and death had been no easy feat. But the tools taken had been worth it, all for this:

Layer by layer, simulacra of flesh by simulacra of flesh, Greth made his life’s black work.

A vessel, not for another, but for himself.

Most living creatures beneath the Heavens slowly decayed and were pulled by the insidious seirene song that was White Gull’s willy will.

She would not make him wade into the waters of the Pale without his volition and consent.

No mortal or immortal would impose upon Greth their want.

The Man had seen to shown the warlocke the possibilities of the trade-most-foul. Of power and conviction in only himself.

With no scrupules to hold him back; with no conscience to limit his grand work; with no need to think of another as equal and deserving of consideration, Eladre would achieve apotheosis through the machine.

A, quite literal, Deus Ex Machina as the Vitaens had called it.

Greth smoothed out the still malleable plaster black before he carved grooves like the striatta of skinned muscle. The form did not contribute much if anything at all to the gohlem’s ability to move its limbs, but Eladre Junior was nothing if not a perfectionist-obsessive.

Only the best of the worst would do.

First the feet, then calves, then thighs, then waist, then hip, then abdomen, then shoulders, then chest, then back, then arms, then forearms, then hands.

These groupings of pseudo-musculature were not powerfully built like some Akaen’s depiction of their Holy Twelve, but instead slender and honed and elfin.

A lithe giant whose limbs were the swaying branches of a young willow tree; hands bearing the talons of a bird of prey and fingers like the sinousity of serpents.

Then it was the neck and nape before finally, the head was wrought.

It had no face and no ears and no nose.

It had no features but a singular eye-socket smack dab in the center of the forehead, vertically oriented instead of the horizontal configuration common to humanity.

Where the glabella rested, the Mind’s Eye point of cotermination, was to be where the gohlem’s core would rest.

There, Greth would place the storage of his soul.

He would carve out his still-beating, sin-black heart and bind it within the homonculus.

Apotheosis Through the Machine.