Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. -The Festival, H.P. Lovecraft
Ghorion was once one of the Three Troll Kings of the Cloudsteeth Mountains. Undeath has only made him crueler, and much, much more powerful.
"We're nothing new. We've always been here. YOU're the newcomers. You're the animal that forgot that it was a man. Stop crying, you animal, you sleepwalker! If you opened your eyes for only an instant you would see that. You're a race of amnesiacs, of dreaming children. I said STOP CRYING! You disgust me. That's why I'm not going to explain anything else. That's why you will die--screaming--without ever having truly woken up. I will paint every inch of this floor with your blood."
-An Awakened, formerly Ms. Albright, speaking to Albert Frond, immediately before his murder
I try to avoid them if I can. I see them sometimes herding their flocks of flabby grey creatures into and out of Boston harbor, and it always gives me the chills. Briano tells me that they brought me back to life, but I can't remember it. I can't remember a lot of stuff. He also tells me that I was good friends with one of them once. One of the ones that begs outside of Grand Island Bank for nickels or blood. I can't tell you why I'm uncomfortable around them. They're just fish.
We were crossing a ridge when Corgan was lifted off the ground by something. "Shoot it! Shoot the tyrannosaur!" he screamed as blood streamed from the puncture wounds that had opened up in belly. I fired into the empty space above him to no effect. Then Corgan's ragged corpse dropped to the forest floor, and I was alone. Utterly alone. There was no dinosaur. There was nothing.
A tree that sends roaming fruit on a singular quest.
a.k.a. Mosquito Man, a.k.a. Stirgili, a.k.a. Mansquito.
Death is the fate of every birth, and life is only a brief loan of light before the eternal darkness swallows us. The remaining years of life have been stolen from the creatures known as Time Zombies, who stalk the living in the hopes of stealing a few more years of precious life.
The cries sounded like some misshapen creature being devoured alive. Or a stillborn baby deer, somehow struggling back to life in the filthy grove where it had been abandoned, crying in infinite pain and hatred.
As I neared the ridge, I could hear a set of shuffling, twitchy half-steps, more like pained spasms than any sort of a gait. And when I saw it. . . Oh gods. . . It's like. . . that face. . . THAT HORRIBLE FACE!
There's more to the Dembraava Wilds than just deformed beasts and unicorn husks. In that place there are also men--or something very similar to men--and no one has ever recovered one of their corpses.
A big flock can suck a cow bloodless in a few minutes, yet your doctor shows up carrying one around a small birdcage in the tip of his staff. Maybe you're better off just learning to live with the kidney stones. . .
Stay out of the woods. It's not a place for men. Not anymore.
Only after the unicorn hunts ended did the people realize that the unicorns were not returning. Many were saddened to discover that they had killed the last unicorns. Some wept.
But when they returned many long years later, many more would weep.
Veglins are fungus-goblin hybrids with a unique life cycle, all of whom are inflicted with inescapable racial dreams. Their biology and psychology are product's of an ancient, evil wizard's plan to get someone else to build his hideouts for him.
A notoriously fragile flower than only blooms under the full moon. It can be made into a powerful, magical narcotic, and is the symbol of a major death cult.