Hellknight Hill: Bumblebrashers! (Inactive)

Game Master Joana

Not remembering how he came into this world - nor his earliest years - except how they Felt (and more on that later) - his earliest memories were of his uncle’s rough hands keeping a young Lough away from the sharp implements that decorated the shop - axes, hammers, chisels, all made of dried skin, dead wood, and cold iron - until such a time he would encode a rigorous set of routines directing one’s preoccupations towards measures that would minimize the drawing of blood or formation of clot by cut or bruise. And Lough would still develop plenty of those over the course of his apprenticeship, slaying animals and emptying them of their guts to hang in the unrelenting sun, chopping into the rings of aged saprolings that had matured but were stripped of their fruit, plunging hunks of ore into blazing furnaces before bludgeoning them repeatedly with those same implements that were once forbidden to touch. Life has a strangely cruel sense of humor. Or at least that is a conclusion the young man would eventually draw. But not yet.

Lough did not possess a lexicon out of a working range of basic conversation and workshop jargon. Curt, but courteous. His uncle taught him to have manners, respect his elders, brook for children at play, and not to speak ill of other people even when they were not around to hear. Besides, he quickly grew very competent in his skill, and possessed of a youthful constitution, soon enough became able to outpace his mentor without giving on quality. The implements they made together - and sold or bartered in town - where a source of pride, first in his uncle, and aptly instilled into him. People would talk about how “I barely have to swing this axe” or “this hammer never breaks” or other remarks that stood as a testement to the craftmanship involved. And the first change went barely unnoticed becasue of it - Lough’s fingernails were incredibly sharp and strong, iron working like wood in his grasp, wood like leather, and leather like textile. If his uncle noticed, he never mentioned it. That didn’t stop lough from hiding his hands when he went out; maybe wearing his heavy work gloves, maybe always carrying around other objects, or at the end of the week at the local pub, simply keeping them in his pockets.

As his weeks began to take upon a clockwork rythm - 6 days of hard work at his uncle’s shop, piecemail work for the local lumberer at high demand, and always at the pub the 7th day - a coworker of his (from the lumber consortiom) expressed curiosity towards the very thing he meant to hide, and Lough found himself telling this coworker a story about a family member who did not exist, embarking on a quest that did not happen, and meeting a gruesome end that was inexplicably gory. He couldn’t believe his own words as they flowed from his mouth! Pronouncing words he had never even heard before! And the look on this coworker’s face! Sure enough, the feat was asked by others to be repeated, two or three times now, starting small, then burgeoning into what felt like the whole pub sitting in and listening in - surprised each time the story took a turn for the worse! Walking away from the pub that night, Lough danced as though on a cloud, a constellation of emotions that included both euphoria and sorrow, surprise as well as a deep-seated sense of order. It dawned on him in this walk home that there had been a second change: The stories he had been telling had happened: Happened in a dream he had forgotten.

But there were more.

Restless nights of sleep under terrors of imagination, Lough would wake up in cold sweats, having “lived” as someone else and met a terrible fate - in a word, “died” - only to wake up, back into the clockwork machine that was his post-somnambulant experience set. He was asked again, the following 7th day, and the next, and the next after that, and so on, to continue telling new stories, each which flowed from his mouth without thought, each that had mapped directly onto a dream he had “forgotten” earlier that week, each time to the look of uproarious shock his audience of coworkers, barkeeps - and eventually other patrons in this town and the next - retained when the story concluded with some awesome turnabout. It became not a thing that he chose to do. But instead, the thing itself chose to have itself done by him. Lough - despite his growing popularity - began to succumb to a nagging sense of non-control, growing like a tiny seed in the back of his mind, embedding roots into the very sense of self that his uncle had worked to diligently to build in him. Verging on the brink of something… else?

Seasons turned - as they do - and Lough had developed a new habit of sneaking out into the local wooded area - either in the dead of night or the first light of morning - to spend time with himself with nature. When he couldn’t sleep - or wouldn’t sleep - he came out here, spending hours by himself, the soft chirp of crickets or birds, the excess cold of winter or heat of summer suffusing his skin, the sun’s rising embers or the moon’s creeping glow casting over him. Unlike everything else in his life, there was no real pattern to this. Sometimes weeks or months woudl fly by without his return. Sometimes only days between. Sometimes hours. And Lough liked it like that. He still went to work 6 days a week and storytelling on 7th days. But into that perfect order, he managed to work in a little uncertainty - a little unpredictability. In a sense, this was Lough “taking back” what had been “taken” from him - even if he couldn’t really articulate what it was that had been lost. No matter. He had managed to retore the balance, and found himself able to thrive in this newly restored equilibrium.

…

But it was only short lived. It happened in one night, a third change, in a dream. She was there, and she had never been there before, and what was more strange, that instead of being someone else, Lough was himself. He was aware that he was himself. And that he was dreaming. And aware that the dream was aware of him. And she was there. He felt her in his throat. Like she was watching from inside of his throat. Watching him. She began to whisper. A language Lough had never heard, but intuitively understood. A language he Felt. Whispers to come. But come where? He thought to himself, reasoned that he was already here, and so, could not “go” anywhere else. But she didn’t listen - she only spoke. Lough learned things from her. Like an infant. He Felt about things. About things to come. About things that would happen to him. About things that he would barely live through, that he would survive, that in surviving he would pay a cost, a cost that was too high to pay, that he would have to live with himself knowing he had paid it. And she never lied!

But this dream Lough never “woke up” from - she simply stopped talking to him. He went back to bed, layed there. When the sun was up, he went to work with his uncle. He visited his wooded area. He stayed until dark. She visited him there. More speaking, more visions, visions testing his mortality, visions of losing things he cared for. There was an accident at work that day. Lough had been cutting down a tree - using proper technique and exceedingly compliant safety measures - but the tree fell and killed one of his coworkers. Just as she said it would. And just like she said he would, Lough was not held accountable, and the event was deemed an “accident”. Except it wasn’t an accident. Lough “knew” it would happen, and did nothing to prevent it. That night, when she spoke to him, in addition to more dire visions, she spoke about this event, and about another. There was a second accident that week. Similar circumstances, similar results. Lough was there, witnessed it, again was not blamed - despite the coincidence! - and left with the guilt of inaction. She stopped coming for a period of time. But just when Lough thought she’d never return, she did. And more of the same. To his pattern of life, was added not only his seemingly random departures into the woods, but too these seemingly random arrival’s of this Matron (as he would come to call her). And slowly the everpresent sense of looming dread that had plagued his mind, his heart, his soul, dis-integrating them of their once vigourous passion for sheer existance, began to slowly, slowly, slowly eat away at what he had created for himself to escape it.