Rivulets of blood cascade through fields of writhing digits and plow-lines of hair and glass. The air is wet and sour with rot, carrying the russet whisperings of bitches separated from litters and chiclets screaming for water. Hanging in the pregnant claret sky is an unblinking eye, fat with spiders. And it ends when the great teeth split the world and eat you like a rotten pill and your feet give way and your breath catches and all is darkness and silence and fire and rot and sanguine red sleep.
Every night, for the past five days, Anna has been missing from the streets of lakeside Creaksport, where the wind carries the smell of mouldering lakewater and getting out of bed to face the day is as miserable a heave-ho as ripping the serpents from the sea. Grubby hands count silver, a king’s ransom from pauper’s pocket.
This is a tragedy.
BACKGROUND
The Red Maw, the earth below, transcending as it does winter’s marrow-chill and summer’s swelter, had no such mithridatism for greed. Blood ran black to red, and from the firmament came the Celestial Harmony to assuage the Red Maw’s apocalyptic fever dream.
Anna is missing.
LOCATIONS (Check to see where Anna is and where they think Anna is. Asterisk indicates a clear road from Creaksport.)
1 Blood Rock.* 20 minutes by skiffer, an hour by rowboat. Waves beat senselessly against the long-fallen walls of an Old World temple. At its epicenter, a crater bears a bloated husk of skin that illuminates the night. This is where the Celestial Harmony fell to earth. THE AGGREGATE. A tangle of dead lobsters and eels, crawled undying out of corrupted water into a golemic hulk. It’s hungry and melancholic; no more, no less.
2 The Crumbling Lighthouse.* Juts from the earth like an accusing finger, ringed in paint and spit. Rubberly crimson biomass overgrows long-crumbled stairs. The lantern gallery harbors a knotted heart weeping caustic crimson oil, shattered windows framing Blood Rock and the Umbral Conch. LILIES OF THE ARTERY. Polyp-blooms bind long enough for the capillary-vines to attach their probusci.
3 The Abandoned Farm.* Unmoving drill rigs sag under years of rust. The maintenance shed is in gory disarray. One horse head covers a festering wound, a portal into the earth. Cold, dead stone becomes a red and wet throat a mile down, ripped, oil-slick skin hanging from above. OLD WOMAN. Limbs long and wrong and bent, tongue black and eyes blind. Bears a cudgel made of mortared teeth and a super fucked-up SPELL.
4 The Red Cave. A long-burned campfire and rune-scored human bones betray just how old the Old World is. The walls are smeared claret, with murals of half-bull monstrosities devouring prostrating masses. THE COLD. You see snowfall outside. Your torches grow dim. Your friends are whispering behind your back. You can hear them- they want to turn on you, slaughter you like a sick cow and rob you to flesh and bone…
5 The Umbral Conch. The first time you see it, it looks like a bristling mountain of tentacles and eyes. Then you blink, and it’s a foreboding iron shell tangled in ragged kelp. THE NODE. Like a snail in a shell, like a spinal cord thrust into the dark soil, like a great stinging jellyfish. The Celestial Harmony’s link to the stars.
6 Below the Rusty Goat. Above, fishers and tanners buy swill and gruel for whalebone pennies. Below is a sacrifice-soaked altar, adorned by deer horns and goat gall. SHAMBLER. Should the altar be defiled or the ritual interrupted, the hornéd fiend will rise, its scream perilous and paralyzing. It can only be sated by holly and oak.
RANDOM ENCOUNTERS (Check once per journey: 5-in-6, 3-in-6 on a road)
1 d3 Once-Bears, enraged by corruption
2 2d6 bloodlusting hares with sealed eyes
3 A rusting drum bloated with curdling oil
4 A dying bandit, chest torn asunder
5 A pilgrim in the robes of a distant land staring silently out to sea
6 A salt-smooth obelisk of inscrutable iron ice
7 2d6 tentacles tumbling out from a wound in the earth
8 d3 Conductors, executing anesthetization
ONCE-BEAR. Towers of sinew and claw, weeping in memory of a life unblemished by agony. Swallows all that lives to sate a hunger undying. Its butcher is cursed to be Once-Themself three days hence.
CONDUCTOR. Two maws, five legs, ocular clusters and flesh of bluefire. Their minds whisper interstellar secrets in madenning choruses. Uses tentacles to freeze prey in agony. Upon death, SAVE versus infection from Celestial Harmony meld spores.
CAST OF CHARACTERS. (Roll a die to divine what causes their madness. Red Maw on evens, for the Celestial Harmony is always odd.)
1 ANNA. A scared little girl with a birthmark like wine-colored fingers clawing at her face. Currently in mortal danger. Bed-wetter.
2 AGATHA HOLMSBY. As mayor, someone has to keep things running straight-laced and orderly-like around here, though no one remembers electing her. Picks her nails as a nervous habit. Old World heretic.
3 ICHABOD VIACHOLO. Every boat, every crate, every drill rig, every damn piss-pot is emblazoned with that Viacholo Incorporated logo. The richest and most powerful man in town for decades, before the oil dried and the slump came. Incarcerated for dementia; claims to hear a choir of angels sing inconceivable truths to him.
4 JEBEDIAH SUITT. A fire-and-brimstone preacher who wonders why the end times are coming so soon. His sister is one of the townspeople who for the past five days have done nothing but stare at the sea and smile. Always carries stale bread.
5 BILGE. Itinerant fisher and owner of the Lady Mary, who won the big race a couple years back. Always masticating a cigar and itching for a nap. Cannibal.
6 XANTH. A wet, bedraggled corpse dredged from the lake and given life anew as a high priest. Touch from its left hand bears the sensation of drowning. Lisps softly. Collects spoons.