Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 11

Minor Arcana of the Apocalypse Tarot

Greetings creatures, my Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine', a mighty Tome of posts not unlike this one, has staggered like a blind giant through a variety of artistic goals. So far we have blundered through the palaces of Scrap Princess, Jason Thompson, Jez Gordon, Peter Mullen, Amanda Franck and Daniel Puerta and, daft and thoughtless, have snagged these noble minds and shoved them into our greasy pockets.
Now a new and terrible goal rises like a thundercloud before our eyes - that of Valin Mattheis!




As a tribute to his eldritch conceptions..



 I give you the following post;
Minor Arcana of the Apocalypse Tarot
While discussions of the Major Arcana of the Apocalypse Tarot are common, experienced readers will devote themselves also to the Minor Arcana, the complex meanings of which often add depth and texture to the predictions of a casting.



The House of Suns 
Ace of Suns - A clear sky, contrails, daylight bombing, falling bodies.Two of Suns - Gradual but inevitable and transformative heating, companion card to the Queen of Seas.Three of Suns - Natural fires, combustion, lightning, the presence of materials for combustion.Four of Suns - The darkness inside a fire, pain shutdown due to nerve damage, unhealable wounds.Five of Suns - A Saint burning, purification, gold, transcendence, revolt of the unconscious.Six of Suns - Shrapnel, penetration of the body, revelation, the shadow of fire.Seven of Suns - Witches, heresy, the burning of individuals, assertation of reason.Eight of Suns - Light brought to a blinding point, lasers, destructive hyperfocus.Nine of Suns - The shaped charge, great force brought to a point, armoured vehicles.Ten of Suns - Firearms, conventional weapons, individuals acting en-masse, a great number.Page of Suns - Dehydration, death from water loss, water wars, rivers, desalination.Knight of Suns - Firestorms, mass strategic bombing, loss of home, a journey by night.Queen of Suns -  Fission weapons, nuclear dawn, a singular number, loss of flesh, blindness.King of Suns - Rapid stellar expansion, Nova, total atmospheric loss, Mars.


The House of Seas
Ace of Seas - Water, the cooling of thirst, rabies, the lapping of animals at a spring.Two of Seas - Venom, animal derived poison, political assassination.Three of Seas - Rats, fecundity, invisible transport, to be the medium.Four of Seas - Radio noise, the Dark Forest, solar events.Five of Seas - Pesticide, indigestible compound poisons, undrinkable water.Six of Seas - Invasive species, a creature with no predators, vast numbers of alien things.Seven of Seas - Plagues in the classical sense, a lack of immunity, isolation.Eight of Seas - Neurotoxins, mirror proteins, cannibalism, the brain.Nine of Seas - Ice, preservation in ice, (reversed if cast with a 'Suns' card)Ten of Seas - Shipwreck, loss of goods, a catastrophic sudden change, ice.Page of Seas - Peace, perfect isolation, a fortress against the world.Knight of Seas - Floods, rising oceans, a concentration of people, drowning.Queen of Seas - Tides, hurricanes, Tsunami, the inundating storm.King of Seas -  Silence, preservation, utter stillness, the interstellar dark



The House of Insects
Ace of Insects - Locusts, famine, crops, preservation, prophecy.Two of Insects - Reaching fingers beneath a door, an invisibly predatory crowd, the public gaze.Three of Insects - Parasites, infection of the flesh, the secret removal of resources.Four of Insects - Skittering, unseen movement, the spaces behind the quotidian.Five of Insects - Drummers, distant music, an arrhythmic sound, incoherent codes.Six of Insects - Teeth, a great multiplicity of things, a crowd.Seven of Insects - Concentration camps, population loss, cultural deletion.Eight of Insects - Binary, the false projection, a model of the world.Nine of Insects - Bacterium, symbiosis, a feast, unseeable but not unalterable.Ten of Insects - The Virus*, the unperceived and unalterable, the mirror of life Page of Insects - The engram, neural lace, dreams, dreams invaded, cybernetics.Knight of Insects - The synthetic mind via pure mathematics, simulated worlds, simulation theory.Queen of Insects - Fecundity, infinite growth, annihilation through growth, cancer, nanomachines.King of Insects - Grey goo, total atomisation, cosmic noise, the Planck length.
*(Doubled if combined with the Grand Arcana card 'Grand Virus') 


The House of Terrors
Ace of Terrors - Your own name discovered where it should not be, conspiracy, official interest.Two of Terrors - Storage, loss, theft, limited resources, meat.Three of Terrors - Familial secrets, hidden history, the truth revealed.Four of Terrors - The remaking of reality, doublethink, the well-accepted lie.Five of Terrors - An empty house, an unknown number of rooms, indeterminate values.Six of Terrors - To be lost in a familiar place, the unknown street, the familiar made strange.Seven of Terrors - Voices in walls, inverse and unseen spaces, that which has long been prepared.Eight of Terrors - Faith made real, Revelation, faith proved in blood.Nine of Terrors - Reavers, the armed group, a breakdown in law, the knife.Ten of Terrors - The State inverted, disordered government, an inappropriate order accepted.Page of Terrors - Traditional madness, delusion, to become incoherent, to discover.Knight of Terrors - Moral and physical triage, a decision which cannot be unmade and cannot be survived.Queen of Terrors - Betrayal, the false self, many faces, the family.King of Terrors - That which cannot be imagined, information hazard, the card which is not a card.

Twenty Heralds of the Garbage Barge!

Good news! Beloved and omni-compitent artist Peter Mullen has been snaffled from the ground like a delicious truffle, placed into a earthenware jar and taken to the pantry as of one of the ingredients for 'Speak, False Machine', my current kickstarter.



But as I sup from the developing brew I muse sympathetically within my own mind; "Some taste or flavour escapes me.. what could it be?"
Then, glimmering oddly on the horizon of my memory, there springs into my frontal cortex the phantasmorgic form of.... Amanda Lee Franck!
"Of course!" I solophise, "the perfect complement to my Mullen Stew", and race off in pursuit, net in hand. 
But whom and why, and where, is Amanda Lee Franck? Many links promise knowledge of her mysteries and some are set here for your pleasure..

You may wish to peruse her "itchooooo" and the adventure "You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge", in tribute to which, please accept this small d20 list of.......


TWENTY HERALDS OF THE GARBAGE BARGE
1. Eels fill the waterways.
2. Children become translucent and compulsively burrow.
3. Sentient dry ice breaks into homes.
4. Clouds gathering are actually made of old crisp packets, they hail dorito dust and rain oil.
5. Anxious garbage men knock on early morning doors asking "is this really all you have?"
6. The light from mobile phones summons tiny midge clouds which obscure use.
7. Council Pamphlet "HAVE YOU SEE "FLOATERS"?" These now seemingly real & not just eyeball things
8. All TV series infinitely loop, late night viewers swear sitcoms are auto-generating "false episodes".
9. Precognisant safety railings crumple in advance of any crash.
10. Everyone is repeating the hour of 5am but no-one will believe the early risers.
11. Ice Cream vans now have blacked out windows, scratchy intercom s & Ice Cream men w hairy hands.
12. Local Google maps gives cryptic routes which compulsively skirt graveyards & waterways.
13. Flashing television lights in empty homes, neighbours asking for duct tape.
14. 'Lost' child clothes hung on ironwork fences proliferate, more each day, all decayed.
15. Crows steal phones and make random calls. It’s all just cawS.
16. Ancient post starts to arrive for occupants of house 5 decades ago.
17. Car headlamps full of dying flies, resulting nacreous light casts tarmac in pale glow.
18. 1950's spiv goes door to door, offering to "reverse your taps" for "a shilling", sounds like a threat.
19. Birds lose fear of man and try to get inside the house.
20. The sun begins to clatter like a machine slowing down, the sun opens like a door, revealing it was little more than a painted spot about 100 feet off the ground, a flat capped gent in overalls smoking a pipe climbs out on a ladder and starts banging on the sky with a wooden mallet, the mechanical sound restarts, speeds up and becomes inaudible, the man climbs back into the sun and closes it, the day goes on.
 

Beyond Amanda lie the unbearable imaginings of the Isle-Bound Sorcerer Daniel Puerta, the biblically accurate brainscapes of the  Nechrarch Valin Mattheis, the cryptic dreamscapes of rumoured madman Dirk Detweiler Leichty, the brunneous paracosmic children of the mysteriously eldritch Ana Polanšćak and finally, far beyond the lands we know, the lanquid sketches of the disturbingly beautiful, and possibly fey, Alec Sorenson.
15 days! 7 goals! Can we do it???

GIANT BAT WITH FLAMENCO BIRD HANDS

I am blogging about Peter Mullens art until we attain his skills for my KICKSTARTER.

This is DAY TWO!


Firstly, this is a lovely image. I am not sure if it has been published anywhere but if it has my apologies. You can see the original at Peter Mullens site here.
Will Peter do anything nearly as amazing for my book? There is only one way to find out; BACK IT!!!
For todays PeterOddessy I will take us deep, DEEP into this image by naming and describing the background of EVERY living thing in it!
From the top left, moving counterclockwise to the bottom right




STAGE BEETLE
Wihlem Thrice, the only sentient and transformed insect in the image. Formerly a composer. Until now the slow integration with his insect life, the simple and binary pleasures of its existence and limited capacity for self-expression had dulled him into a dreamlike state, but now, with this incredible confabulation of events, he feels within himself the awakening of his muse, but how to record the symphony he feels inside his mind?!!?

FLAPPING BAT
Grimbles, formerly a witches familiar but was fired from that employment for eating the wrong child’s eyes. Now haunts the underworld, likes to eat spiders and is looking at (sensing) the large one on  the mushrooms just across the way.



GIANT BAT WITH FLAMENCO BIRD HANDS
The GRABULISER! Magnificent experiment of the Mage ZUCODU who fell under the spell of the CUBIC DEVIL FACE (see below). The Grabuliser wants only love but understands only desire, the desire to grabulise things. The Flamenco heads are true pseudopods with no separate brain structure, the eyes simply those of the bat enlarged and relocated.

MUSHROOMS
The mushrooms are indeed alive and one day may be more than alive. Fat with seeping visions dripping seams of the potions of the lost Alchemist Zircon, they throb with dark passions they are unable to express. Thank the gods it is so for their sheer inventive malignancy, if every given voice, would be enough to corrode the sky to tin and invert the stars!

SPIDER ON THE MUSHROOMS
This spider, which, if it were sentient and had a name, that name would be Steve, has seeks only a moment of peace and perhaps a steady draughtles spot to begin the construction of a web. Fate decrees Steve shall have neither, within a very trice he will be fighting for his life.



GIANT SLUG!

Flubbobo, monster of the trolls has haunted the infinite darkness for ages beyond counting. Once he was just a normal slug! He just kept eating! He doesn't even have a plan, nor is he aware that he counts as a near-supernatural devil and/or demon figure in no less that five undeworld mythologies, one of which is that of the hairy men he is about to eat, another of which belongs to the gargantuan snake-man, who recalls him of older times, tough Flubbobo himself remembers naught.

LITTLE HAIRY GUYS RUNNING FROM THE GIANT SLUG  (AND THE ONE HIDING)
The Theeble Kin make their living underground by shaping and painting solid rocks to look like tents from a distance and then clouding people over the head when they come close to investigate. They have never actually seen a real tent and have inferred its shape through an automatic evolutionary process. Here they have been foiled and made themselves accidental prey for the demon of their dreams, Flubbobo the Annihilator. The three running are Flix, Bix and Trix, the one cleverly hiding while they run away is Grabs, the only clan member with a double digit IQ.

THE THREE ADVENTUERS ROBBING THAT SHIT!



SPIKED HELM GUY
'Chunks'O'Keefe, former bartender (possibly current bartender as he never formally resigned). Was invited on the expedition last minute as he was the only one with a crowbar. It was his idea to crowbar open this chunk of stone but he knows he will get no credit for it.

COIFFE LADY
Tzina Szzrakk an incompetent thief from the bottle district. Instead of picking locks she made friends with a bouncer with a crowbar, instead of searching for traps she employs a mute Dwarf in a parka and instead of sneaking she just runs away. Still, she has at least discovered the alchemists stash she came looking for, but how much of that tuff is even still active? And how will she even recognise the Potion of Infallibility she was hired to retrieve?

SHIELD GUY
Orik Nailfyst, a mute, poor, white-trash Dwarf who grew up in a tent city and, despite knowing almost nothing of dwarfish, can still spot a stone out of place in the dark. Only 15 years old, he suffers from the cold and wears a quilted parka in all weathers. His shield was the results board for a darts tournament and the results can still be seen on the inside surface





THE TWO GIANTS LOOMING OVER THEM


Actualy the transformed bodies of the Mage Zucodu, accidental creator of the Grabuliser, and the Alchemist Zircon.
Zucodu came in search of the cubic devil faces but after his mind was blasted by its magics he wandered as little more than a troglodyte until he found Zircon secretly stashing his hyper-valuable Potion of Infallibility. Though understanding little Zucodu had vague memories of magic and threatened Zircon with a stone, believing he might return the mage to his near-forgotten state of sanity. Zircon attempted to trick the giant with poison but in the confusion and being threatened to drink along side him as secuity, both drank half a potion of Giantification and were thus transformed. Both too big now to leave, Zircon knows there is an old potion of de-gigantification in his stash which his fingers were too big to reach, he has awaited only the properly sized fools to threaten and beguile and now waits carefully, planning his plans.

CENTIPEDE
An occupant of the black pillar the Centipede is the reincarnation of a munificent Raja who once had his wife trampled to death by ten elephants. Banished from  swarga upon his death he was reincarnated in this many-footed form. Little has been learned from this.





THE MYSTERIOUS SPEAR-ARMED MAN
The dark and mysterious warrior is named Parakeet. Secretly a master of the dagger he carries the spear for show, pretending to be a fighter of much lower ability than he actually is. His "failures" in combat serve to lure an opponent to commit themselves and reach his inner ring of defence where any of a dozen daggers will annihilate them. Pretending to act as a mere bodyguard, in truth he seeks the Super-Serpent of the underverse and is one of the few here who could defeat it.





STAG BEETLE! 
This beetle once saw a horse explode, other than that little distinguishes the simplistic and barely-sentient creature.






DWARF WITH AXE
Max Brix, actually just a short man with a false beard but he plays the role well enough. Was hired as a bodyguard by the Sorcerer Lamular Grotte (see below) on his quest to find the Cubic Devil Face. On discovering the thing itself and witnessing Grottes horrid response he is about to cut the Wizards dick off.





TWO BEETLES CHILLING ON THE GIANT PAIR OF STONE FEET
All beetles are predatory by nature but these two alone, perhaps of all beetles, have developed between them a philosophy of non-violence. They are un-named but in order to record their achievement in history’s great book let us refer to them as Pax and Trax. 


GUY WITH COOL ROUNDEL SHIELD
Winston (von) Choom, his wife was once poisoned by the Alchemist Zircon and he attached himself to this expedition as a bodyguard for the Sorcerer Lamular Grotte IN FACT so he could observe Tzina Szzrakk and her two companions on their search for the Alchemists loot, which he intends to smash. Has no idea that the Alchemist survives in giant form down here. 



GUY WITH BLAZING STAFF!
Sir Vomulous of the Crumbling Keep. The wizard knight has no understanding of his own metatexuality but in fact he has been played in a wide variety of rulesets yet has maintained continuity of self and memory, this is the reason for his mixture of magic and swordplay. He sometimes worries about the episodic nature of his life. Of all the bodyguards Lamular Grotte hired in his search for the Cubic Devil Face, Vomulous is the only one who actually intended to act as a bodyguard.




GIANT LIZARD! IS HE A STATUE? WHO KNOWS?
The incredible Super-Serpant of the Hidden World! A creature too vast and magisterial for this situation or this adventure. He is only on his way between vastly more important cosmic assignations using the blackways of the Underverse as we might use a country road. It is not even clear if the Super-Serpant has noticed the eldtrich events taking place and it certaily has no idea that the vengance of Parakeet is close.

THAT DEVIL FACE LOOKS ALIVE, HOW ABOUT IT?
An utterly evil idol containing poisonous ideas. Like a kind of satanic rubics cube, the sections of the face can be slid about and anyone who can reformat the face into its unknown secondary shape shall gain the powers of a Devil. But the tiles inevitably move with a mind of their own and slip back into their assumed form, leaving the foolish individual who made the attempt to be reduced to either thrall or slave-prophet of the face.






GUY PRAYING TO THE DEVIL FACE
Lamular Grotte an inferior Sorcerer and lately a cultist of Choom (Coom, name of a town, home of Winston, see above). Grotte fled Choom with a pig-bound book containing rumours of the Cubic Devil Face and threw together all his funds to assemble this party, (only as cheap as it was as almost everyone in it had a hidden reason for being there). On reaching the devil face he rapidly fell under its spell and after feeding two of his bodyguards to eldritch fire, began hopelessly worshipping the face to the disgust of all.

TWO PEOPLE LEVITTING IN PILLARS OF ELDRITCH FIRE!




ONE A KNIGHT
The Holy Paladin Sir Dawningstar Faux, attached himself to Grotte expedition as, like everyone else, a bodyguard. of course he had his own designs on the Cubic Devil Face, to whit, its destruction! The Knight was a painfully bad liar and this is one of the few deceptions Grotte actually saw through. Grotte played the fool and used Faux to cut his way through the underworld but on encountering the Cubic Devil Face IMMEDIATELY sacrificed the knight and his squire without even really asking for much in return.


ONE LOOKS LIKE A FEMALE KNIGHT
Sir Biscuit Pen, the Squire of Sir Dawningstar Faux the lack of imagination in her (false) name is a quality of her own paucity of creativity, not mine, though I am actually not going to tell you her real name as I sense that you doubt me on this. Anyway she is secretly in love with Sir Faux, disguised as man, actually more competent, he can't see through disguise, you know the drill.


BARNACLES
The only indication of our real enemy here - THE SEA! Yes the Sea is a surprise visitor to this underground cave which is in fact a SEA CAVE.  Because.. the SEA is in one of Zircons hidden potions and if it is opened here they will all drown. Surprise last minute change! Subverting expectations!





CRABE!
A normal crab and decent crab but not a good crab for none are.

ISOPOD CHILLING ON THE PILLAR!
Next to the Crab but in no sense associated with it this Isopod, named 'Flux-of-the-Whale-Dream is in fact the Squire of a Trilobite Knight sent here to earn his or her 'Spurs' by the final defeat of Flubbobo!

The Lamps that were his Eyes

BLOGGING ABOUT PETER MULLEN UNTIL WE HIT HIS TARGET!
Hello, welcome back to me whoring out my latest Kickstarter for a MONTH. We are half way through!
If you are interested in previous posts in this series here they are;
Crimes of an Analog Future

The Troll Kings Invisible Hands
Cults of the Cuts of the Oceanic Star
The Popinjays of Knarr

Bring me the head of the Mocking Man
The Giant became a Wolf

So far we have attained Jason Thompson and Jez Gordon as artists!



Our next mighty golden HOOP to SNATCH from the Gods is the talent of Peter Mullen.
I will be writing blogs about Peter Mullens illustrations EVERY FUCKING DAY until we hit his goal so please save me from that by backing the Kickstarter.
However you are probably familiar with Peters style from his wonderous work for DCC (I think) and various other 'old school' productions. You can check out a page of his classics here.
But if you go a page over you can see he also does very beautiful monochrome nocturnes, a subject dear to my heart.




The Lamps that were his Eyes



The man, his flesh was moonlight. He was up there, about a ladder high with his big eyes swinging, dripping starlight with no stars in the sky.
That man wouldn't come in the daytime, or when you could even see the sky, it was as if he feared the stars and the moon, and would race from them, his huge terrible shining head obliterating treeshadows in a bobbing gait.
Only the stars and the dawn made him afraid but, but for their light nothing stopped him coming. He pulled apart the darkness like someone stepping through a curtain, his moony headshine leaking through, nacreous and horrid.
Then he came, sometimes tentative, like a boy entering an adults room, other time striding blindly, as if only half way on a long journey, and him behind schedule.
He was not especially, ridiculously huge. His spine was bent and that unsupportable head was, lets say just below a second story window. If he straightened up (clearly agony for him) he could look through that window, or even over the roof.
What was he looking for?
Everything living froze in his sight and even witful creatures, even the wise and the strong, were drawn towards his distant gleam  - it took such strength of soul, sometimes even a nail in the shoe, some barbed wire round the thigh, to remind you never to go near it but to hide. 
Anyone who didn't know about the light might wake up dreaming, see the beams of his eyes drifting in the black trees like a ships lamps bobbing on a dark sea, the only lights in a dark world, and, wondering what they were, wander out there in wellingtons and dressing gown thinking they would only go to the edge of the field, craning their necks "I think I can see it. What is it?" But then, a little further, a hop over the fence, they walk into the woods, caught now in a beam of moonish white, now eaten by darkness, hopefully never seen again.
He melted them.
Probably didn't intend to. Possibly didn't even know what they were, or where he was, (if it was even a He, long eight-toed footprints in the mud), the number of people who got close enough to look and came back whole enough to speak was slim, but if you got close enough to him and he noticed you, (they said), he would look at you, with those burbling eyes like bubbling white soup and blunder over to you like a cartoon.
It was the eyes probably  - you started melting then. Not like, from acid, or like being burnt, it was stranger than that. You melted in one go, as if your bones and skin and stuff were all made of the same wax, maybe to him they were, and it didn't hurt, didn't even feel bad really, kinda nice almost, staring into those eyes.
You wouldn't feel the melting til he picked you up in both hands like a teddybear, saying things you couldn't hear, but like an itching, a whining in your head, like those small bones vibrating on their own.
The lumescent man, maybe he was asking something. Was he looking for something?
But no-one here could help him and when he looked at them, and picked them up, they came apart like things not of this world. If he kept at it too long they came apart, dribbled through his hands like a fruit cup. A mercy really as there was less to discover and clean up in the morning and while the parts didn't die straight away, they usually weren’t sentient by the time they were found, worse if he put you down or dropped or forgot you, those people, still not in pain, we found in daylight, a sight you wouldn't wish to witness.
Mainly they died too, thank god, all the body parts were there but all twisted and changed and usually that meant something would just give up working after a while, surface area or nerves or molecules or something.
The strangest thing about it was how sad he seemed, (that’s what they said), and they seemed like they were half asleep. Still thank god again for his blessings, we hit them with tranq till they slept and just waited out the death before we called it in. Otherwise they 'came to' like someone slowly waking up from sleepwalking, and realising they weren’t dreaming and that it was all really happening, and we had to explain to them again and again it wasn’t a dream and they were really here and were really like that, and no we had no idea about the moonshine man, or what he was or why.
After few of those you might put a bullet in them yourself I tell you.

The Giant became a Wolf

First, a brief update; I didn't even have time to post about getting Jez Gordon to do a piece for the book before the Kickstarter for Speak, False Machine stumbled blindly through get another artistic Goal.



We will have Jason Thompson making an illustration for Chapter One - TEENS and Jez making one for Chapter Two - History of a False Machine.
500 copies printed          £9,110.00 Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 Simones interior art £13,270.00 Scraps Art          £13,430.00   Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00Jason Thompson £14,540.00Jez Gordon         £14,870.00   <<<< WE ARE HEREPeter Mullen          £15,370.00 Amanda Franck £15,650.00 Daniel Puerta         £15,760.00 Valin Mattheis           £16,640.00 Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 Alec Sorenson          £17,500.00 

Next up is the magnificent PETER MULLEN. 
At this rate me might even make it to Alec Sorenson!







THE GIANT BECAME A WOLF
By Phaserunner https://www.deviantart.com/phaserunne...
The giant lives above the snowline in the ruins of an ancient tower, He herds hairy elephants and wooly rhino on the high steppe.
He rarely bothers the world of men but every month he comes down from the high peaks and trades meat, fur and ivory for what he cannot make himself, and every 70 years or so, he comes down for a wife. Sometimes he trades for one, sometimes he just asks, the fact that it happens so rarely, and never by force, suggests that he isn't treating them badly or wearing them out, perhaps being a giants wife is not so bad a thing? There have been no giant children at least.
He rarely stays long below the snowline, he is visibly anxious about his herds. The old men know that pain, many are ex-herdsmen and are free now only as they have handed the herds over to their sons to worry in turn, but even now, aged and immovable, they still sometimes wake up in the mid-night, juddering, dreaming, imagining that "something has happened to the animals", about to throw on their old shoes and get riding until they remember that for them, such things were long ago. So they understand, the old men, when the giant gets twitchy and starts glancing to the high steppe.
The giant marks his herd with brand, dye and carved sign upon pelt and tusk - the tower-and-mountain, though none would dare to mess with his animals, firstly that they would be hard to reach, secondly where is the man who can tame a hairy elephant? or steal a wooly Rhino? and only lastly for fear of the giant.
"He keeps his place and we keep ours" say the old men, "such has it been and so shall it be", and since most think the place they are the better; in particular the green farmland, forests and river valleys over the ice mountains, wild steppe and tumbled tower, they find no problem with this arrangement.
"No doubt He" (for in this country "He" can only refer to one being) "He prefers his mountain as we prefer our farms, such being natural and comfortable to His kind"
If the Giant ever had a kind, or where he came from, or how old he is or what his gods or dreams might be, none know and few care to ask. Once asked if He had a name the Giant replied "called Orox". A terse being, singular, solitary and, so far as they knew, unique, there was little need for a name, and no-one in the country would have considered themselves familiar enough with Him to use it.
Once they said, a wizard came out of the south and asked for the Giant by name and went to see Him, but nothing came of it, and once, about fifty years back, a man said he had seen the Giant drunk in the high peaks, singing a terrible song and hurling stones into a storm, but no-one else saw it.

But the giant became a wolf.
Three months back some goat-herds in the high valleys, who sometimes see the giant about the skyline, and who sometimes bed down for the night near their goats to keep them safe, lost all their dogs, half their herds and went mad in a night. 
Only a few survived, bloodstained and crazed. A wolf had taken the goats they said, not a herd of wolves, or some large beast but one singular wolf, come in out of the night,, killed the dogs, eaten the goats and any who got in the way. 
No hope, no hope at all said the survivors.
How did it kill the dogs?
"Treaded them down."
"how big a wolf?" they asked.
"This big!", they replied, "no THIS BIG, can you see!"
When they went to look they found blood and chaos but no wolf prints. 
Madness perhaps.
Then the next full moon a farm down in the valley lost everything, all the animals, the dogs, even the geese, all gone and the only witness a child and she mad like before. 
"A big wolf!", she said, "As big as a tree!"
Then the next full moon a village was lost. Houses torn open, lanes slick with blood, cellars dug out and families gone. 
Some fought back, brave men. To no avail it seems. Again "a wolf".
But this time they searched deeper, looked longer, and one huntsman up a tree or on the roof of a collapsed house saw tracks, wolf tracks indeed, the tracks of only one wolf.
They had not seen them , in the hills or at the farm, for they had not been high enough to see. These tracks a man could nearly lie down in each one.
The people thought more deeply. The survivors;  a dog with a silver charm on its collar, the child at the farm with a silver comb, the goatherd with a silver ring.
It is clear what this means, and there is only so much silver in the valleys, even stretching it to cover each family might not work, and nowhere near enough for the herds, the sheep, the houses.
Full moon is only a week away.
Has the giant become a wolf? It has happened to men, eveyone knows, so why not a giant? Does the giant know he has become a wolf? Men often do not when they are so cursed, or so its said in stories, and who would tell him? His wife?
Who on this earth could stop the wolf? A curse-wolf alone is bad enough, but a skinwalker giant?
If the wolf cannot be defeated, what about the giant? Would He listen? and even if He did is there a cure? or a potion large enough to heal Him? Where would we find such a thing? How might be be restrained, even if He were to consent? Nothing in these lands could hold Him, let alone the thing He might be.
Could we even murder Him? Giants are mortal, and not magical beings or walking curses. It might be done, perhaps it could be done, but should it be done? After all He has never done Us harm, or wounded us at all, though he might have extorted us and ruled us if he wished. Almost the opposite for His presence has likely kept off worse things, this has been a peaceful country till these last three terrible moons, and there is only a week left before the next full moon, and the month is November. It is too cold to move the people, too cold to try to shift the herds.
Someone must go up the the mountains, to the tower of the giant (and perhaps his wife, if she still lives), and seek him out, and by force, or guile, or kindness or murder, stop these terrible raids.
If the giant can be cured and things go back as they were, that is well, but how this might be done, none know, and if not... The danger must be stopped before the moon is full.

Bring me the Head of the Mocking Man!

Bring me the head of the mocking map maker! Bring me his bones, his skin and his hair
He mocked me! The one person you are not supposed to mock!


THE SECRETS OF THE MOCKING MAN
He lives within a creaking gloomberg of ramshackle rooms, a rookery of old dreams, far to the west in a city where the sun sets and the light flames gold before the eve; in that funky dwelling he scampers hither and yon, peeping at reality through lenses, sticking up his head, staring at the city. From there he corresponds with similar rank fellows, a network of curious ghouls spread across the land, ferreting each other mail, cracking epistles scratched in yellow fly paper in a garbled hand. (In these he has mocked me!)



There in a quarter drenched in ravens and disturbing smells, where the pie-shops glisten in the afternoon smog, wrapped in stinking mundanity, climbs a curious house, perched above the like an drunken panther in a tree. It looms; dark but unserious, eyeing the city from under slanted eves which cackle like witches in the rain, propped up and joisted by wrenched beams that howl in the high winds from the amethyst sea.
Within lairs the Mocking Cartographer, ensconced in a warren of maps, each more deadly than the last. Like a rube Goldberg machine in there it is, or a dolls-house labyrinth. 



THERE, in a room which is not a room, in a house which is not a house slinks that cartographer of smirks. 
He thinks himself invulnerable for each of his enchanted maps has the power to drink in adventurers , invaders and thieves, trapping them in tiny parallel pearls of alternative sense. Each one a dungeon or labyrinth, castle or some other scene of "adventure"- the distant sky nothing more than an impenetrable painted board, the characters within nothing but feigned recycled mummers prancing through their sorrows. Here are snared the Mock-Mans foes, to be freed only on completion of the test, or else plucked from the parchment like a wriggling ant! Dropped into a jar - a collection of miniscule derps, trapped in jam! 
In the house of the Mocking Man, one never knows if one has opened a door to a True Room, or been enchanted and ensorcelled into some comedic jiggerypokery.



For the Mocking Man mocks us all.
He mocks the wise and the deluded, the heroic and the dark, he mocks the Knight and the Thief, the Soothsayer and Sage, he mocks the very principals of adventure itself! The agon of the hero! The pathos of the monster! The luciferian ego of the villain! All reduced to nonsense in his glimmering eye!
He is probably mocking you right now!

Therefore! I have set;
A BOUNTY ON THE MOCK-MANS HEAD
A bounty of wonders itemised by  part. 
For each section of the Mocking Mans body I shall return an equivalent selection - in precious materiel; bones of gold, flesh of ebony and ivory, clothes of spider silk and silver leaf, skin of tessellated jade, hair of spun ambergris, each eye a great gem, the brain a moonstone, largest in the world! The tubes I will exchange for amber guts. Any stools recovered for quartz.
Bring me the flesh of the Mocking Man!

YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN (but you were)

Good News! My Kickstarter has Funded. 



Plus  with the help of my printer I have once again re-defined the meaning of success to include things I have already done. Goals are being achieved and a complete product including every artist is within tantalizing reach!

500 copies printed          £9,110.00 Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 Simones interior art £13,270.00 Scraps Art          £13,430.00   <<<< WE ARE HERE!!Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00 Jason Thompson £14,540.00 Jez Gordon          £14,870.00 Peter Mullen          £15,370.00 Amanda Franck £15,650.00 Daniel Puerta          £15,760.00 Valin Mattheis           £16,640.00 Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 Alec Sorenson          £17,500.00 





Instead of writing short fictions where I pretend to be a Troll King I have been advised to sell my latest Book by actually talking about the book. I am not sure how to do this.
I pull out the book, I leaf through it..

and I am trapped - this time by a review of Amber Diceless (Wednesday July 2018), Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games - first entry of this subsection.
"It stumbles into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park" very clever patrick
then remarks on the nature of complexity "Amber has 4 stats, 3 kinds of universal magic power, no dice and it takes 250+ pages of US Letter Size to tell you what to do with them"


Lets flip again...


Page 241 Section; Uncertain Worlds, Subsection; Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters, entry; "Best Enemies”, (Saturday 23 January 2016), paragraph 2 "THE CARAPACED GOD"
"Bow to me heroes, for only by my will is your reality maintained!"
Clad in infinite unending onion-rings of trans-uranic iron teased from the torn hearts of worlds spiralling to nothing in the flensing horizon of a Cherenkov-strobing black hole. Armour flaked and abrading with the touch of unspeakable eons yet ever growing by the substance of his own dark thought. Each layer riveted with unique gnosis etched in sacred languages invented by prophetic monks. From his palace of shadow and slow-decaying waves at the end of all realities the Carapaced God rules and turns his hidden eye to earth and is displeased. Perhaps he wishes a continent moved, a second sun created, a nation drowned or time revered. or simply the slate of history wiped clean. Seeking some alteration he sends forth his sombre legions. Insect Priests, Twilight Knights, Tense Fetish Nuns and looming PanzerSnaegle. The heroes oppose him yet he is an enemy that can never truly be defeated for should he fall, all reality would collapse into screaming chaos."
.......
Would you believe that having it in front of you. Having the whole thing in front of you in print, in a single, coherent text you can access at fingertip, feels substantially different than just leafing through a blog?
Did we only dream such incredible events? But lo, the dreamer looks down at their hands and finds some token, a gem or a leaf of page or something to indicate that yes, it was real, that all that crazy stuff did actually happen.


ANOTHER FLIP!

Page 197, Section; False Readings, no subsection, entry; "Knights of the Snail" (no date given).
"The Queen was dead and the King of the Curlicue throne was sad.
All day he slept and wept and, as the sun fell through the empty air towards the terminating line of night, he woke and pushed away his salt-encrusted sheets and walked to the balconies deepening void to stare into the dying summer light, while the Fool, Ham Floret waited in his shadow tensing his legs to leap in case the king should try to jump.
The King did not jump. He simply looked into the gathering gloom, counting the drawn storms as they marched across the velvet horizon and the sun bled red across the land."
.....

Time, in this book, the ten years of its making, does not really exist. it has been re-arranged, and so all the changes in personhood and style which took place across that decade are living next to each other, like the differing generations of an extended family, living in random houses on a terraced street.
Open a door and what will you find? 

FLIP!

Page 410, Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games, “Quest of the Mist Golem by Delvers Dungeon, Full title; Quest of the Mist Golem, Module QMG1, Mist Hold”, Wednesday 5 October 2011
Several paragraphs down;
"There is a mini hex map with nothing on it. For a journey which we've already been told only takes a day and which will be 'uneventful'.
Every night mist rises from the ground near the tower and kills everything in it. So you can only gain access during the day. you are also safe from the mist in the tower, so no time limit there.
There is some rather boring treasure, except that some of it is black coral. I would just dump the rest and have the evil wizard paying his Gnolls in Black Coral. It's vaguely poetic."

Harsh words Patrick of 2011!Cruel even, would you survive such criticism?

FLIP!

Page 559, Section; Cryptoculture, Subsection; Star Trek, Entry 'Complex Objects Moving through Space', part two 'Opening My Doom-Wings Takes a While' Friday 13th March 2015, Subsection 'Nemesis'
"aand the azteking is back in the opening shot. It still doesn't look quite right. 
Ah crap there is more shuttlecraft dicking around on-planet. There is at least a half-interesting pov shot. But then an awful stunt.
Shuttles crashing, shuttles being too fast, shuttles having little shuttle adventures, all these are bad signs"
....
Simply an extended or in depth-review of a youtube compilation video showing every Star Trek film only through its effects shots and nothing else, or, when uncovered in the Borgesian labyrinth of Patricks Mind Palace, something more? A reference? A clue? A little fractal spark that leads you on a goose chase through the text? Somewhere in Rome Tom Hanks looks at a wall and whispers "oh my god".
To some extent what you are buying is not a book, but a palace, or really more a ruin, where the ages and towers and layers have been mixed up by overenthusiastic Victorian archaeologists who just blasted through a bunch with dynamite and re-built other parts the way they "should be".
... "From the blue beautiful self-indulgent 70s mystical V'ger to the clenched, grey-black desperate-to-be-cool CGI of Shinzons hateship, it seems fitting that we end where we began: watching a physical thing unfold for fucking ages."
...
How can I explain to you why I thought this would be a good idea and, furthermore, why I thought people might actually buy it?
Ego? Of course. A desire for just a little more imagined immortality? Yes. But, more fundamentally, are you the kind of person who walks down the alley by the side of the shopping centre and explores the rear of the warehouses, peeking through ancient security doors and eyeing the brick work? What if someone was living in that wooden add-on that seems stuck to the roof of a building half-way up? It looks like it’s been there for 50 years. No-one would know they were there. 
Are you someone who plays on the swings or are you more interested in that strange gap between the hedge and the security fencing at the back of the park?

FLIP!
Page 650 Section; Kleinplastik, 'The Loss of Silence in the Mortal Realms’, Wednesday 29th May 2019 (I fiddled with it a little after that point. Subgroup; The Music of the Band. Paragraph 15
"The forming and grouping of a skirmishing Warband is quite different than with most other kinds of wargame. Most other figures resonate or 'play' together in regular groupings, they feed off each other and carry their identity in relation to each other."

The spine on my giant test print is already cracking, BUT YOURS WILL NEVER* CRACK! A casebound tome! A fine Wilabin cover! Eternal and pure! A mystery to unfold, a curiosity to boast of or a folly to regret, its up to you.






(*Not a legal claim.)

The Popinjays of Knarr

 The KICKSTARTER for my incredible book SPEAK FALSE MACHINE is at about 97%!!!!!!

But first... 

The Popinjays of Knarr

Knarr! The jewelled city hanging in vermillion crowds like a balloon in a kids dream. 

Mistress of Adventures lost behind the rains of time. A Versailles of the mages, the crown city of multiversal nobility, streets very literally paved with gold, where pocket realms trapped in gems are gambled on baccarat games. A city without an underclass as all the servants are mind-wiped, time-looped Kings and Queens released into their home causalities at the end of service with a pocket full of magic dust or occultum coins brought forth from Knarr.

Coffee houses, swept-hilt blades, long-stemmed pipes and bone cigarette holders. Beauty spots, feathered hats, exquisite bows, puffed sleeves and brocade. Fine dining, late arrivals, tiny glasses, potent drinks. Exquisitely sensitive taste. High couture, connoisseur culture, (honour culture), highly strung, razors and ridicule, monocles and business cards; "my man here has the details".

Here the popinjays gamble for magic lamps, the keys to polar fortresses, the maps of labyrinths, small kingdoms held in glass spheres, or enchanted in paintings, or lost continents hidden behind teleport gates, or micro kingdoms in jars, or lands grown from the dreams of a sleeping child.

Swordplay; its an age of exploration, the multiversal spiderweb highway. But this is not a city of the explorers, or of those who fund the explorers, not even those, but those who back the backers. An army falls or rises, a realm burns or glows with light, all pieces on a board, marks in chalk, news for the coffeehouse.

Bejewelled are the swordsmen of Knarr. Perfumed and pungent, wealthy beyond reckoning. Most travel with an ogre butler who takes care of basic needs and holds the mirror when they re-apply makeup in the morning (what kind of gentleman can't apply his own mascara and beauty spot?). The butlers never fight of course, what would be the point? ad of course, returning home without ones jewels would be a crippling shame in the transient city of Knarr. To return home after having been mugged, or ransomed, or having to pawn a jewel for food, one could never show ones face in society again. Life would be over.

Of course its fine to lose these things and get them back, of course of course, that adds wonderfully to the tale; tied up in a sorcerers cave, captured by orcs, tricked by a Pixie, so long as you get the jewels back by the end, all is well. Better than well even, the greater the disaster the finer the tale, so long as you get them back.

Treasure is all very well. Most adventurers treasures are less than a Noble of Knarr starts out with to be frank. One returns with a chest of bloodstained gold, a broken crown, a half-burnt magic text, for the aesthetic of the thing.

These are the treasures valued in Knarr, the correct treasures, the proper adventuring treasures. It doesn't matter if its a goblin riding a pig, in fact that might be better, so long as the story behind it is good. In Knarr, so incalculable is the Wealth of everyone that treasures are like a kind of fashion, an art of selection and display. The display halls of the Palaces of Knarr hold whole dragons hordes, with the dragons bones too, not for their monetary value but for the quality of the experience, the classical nature of the adventure (neo agonists might turn up their noses at such a predictable display; "another dragon, oh my" but it is a classic for a reason).

So tour the multiversal swordsmen of Knarr, roughing it in micro-realms, hanging around in taverns, volunteering as caravan guards or for the city watch during a siege, trying to bump into wizards or hermits, practicing their duelling, hopping onto pirate ships, or getting marooned, (in a sense they could leave at any time, but in another more accurate sense, they could not, as to return to Knarr with an adventure incomplete, unresolved, or to go home beaten, would truly mean a kind of social death, and to be ostracised in the transient city is to die, to become nothing, even less than nothing. For wealth and power mean nothing to those whose streets are paved with literal actual gold. Nothing coin buys back a reputation once it is lost. Nothing can end the ridicule, and it is ridicule the Popinjays of Knarr fear more than lesser souls fear death.

Cults of the cuts of the Oceanic Star

 (The KICKSTARTER is still going, is at 90-sometthing per cent AND, I am reducing the print run to give a greater likelihood of being able to produce an artistically-complete book. We are down from 2000 copies to 1000, soon we may be down to 500, which, paradoxically, makes getting a book with full art and layout more likely. REDEFINING SUCCESS PEOPLE!)



Cults of the cuts of the Oceanic Star
So deep was the blue of the Oceanic Star that, with each fresh cutting of the gem new cults sprang up like grass, some focused on the stone-to-be, some raging in resentment at the losing of the stone-that-was, others worshipping the fragments, (of these, so many it would tire the tongue to tell of them all).
It was the quality of light, all agreed, though none who saw it could say precisely, exactly, in words,just what it was.
Some compared the stone to sea-smoothed jade, not in its texture, for its surface, ever since the first cutting, was diamond-bright, but in its depths, as the texture of the light it held_. Soft, dark, as if it had a grain. Shadows pooled in the depths of the gem as if it were a shallow sea.
The Oceanic Star was first hauled from the belly of a mine so deep it touched the fire of the earth. Black with murderous fumes; great fan-towers heaved out the stinking air and flung it high, forcing down into the depths what must have seemed little more than breathable smoke, turning miners black from lung to limb, but vari-coloured at the limb-tips. The rainbow-handed quick-living  miners stained, perhaps by the curious chemicals of the mines rare ores, or simply poisoned by rare earth  or other toxins, fingers purpling and iridescing before they died
Here came forth the Oceanic Star, discovered by its glimmer. Nearly a boulder at first, black and stained, but curiously weighted. The miner who recovered it, famously,  received as their reward, one gold coin and two days off.
Careful cleaning bared shining adamant; the scales of a crocodile rising from a muddy bank. A gemstone, huge, a diamond perhaps, a sapphire, though coloured like no other seen before or since.





CULTS OF THE FIRST CUT
The followers of the True ShahThe Cult of the Inner SeaThe Cult of DepthThe Cult of the CoinThe Cult of the Ocean StarThe Painters Cult
Cut for the Shah, broken into several stones, its mass reduced by two thirds, the centre stone and largest still the biggest in the world. Almost un-wearable. Heavy, rounded, set in gold. When worn; well out of scale, like a child wearing their mothers things.
Thus was the Shah marked and his greatness maintained. Interpreted in a thousand paintings. (Famously a small conflict broke out over access to the precise pigments of blue demanded by the empires two greatest painters, even then, the blue caused bloodshed.)
Here the central stone gained its name; the Oceanic Star. Symbol of a landlocked Imperium burning on the plexus of the god-selected potentate. The Star flattened every other gem in that unserious panoply. There it was the night sky, a storm, in day so blue it was near-black at night so pale it seemed to hold the moon.
Here the Shah idled years away in contemplation of the stone, calling forth philosophers and creaking fools, madmen, prophets. 
"A prize to he tells me truly of the colour of the star, the star my son shall bear and be Shah after me"
O jealous son. O long-lived and indolent pa-pa. The Shah was hurled from his own tower, followed by his books. The son became a king through foreign gold and foreign guns, the price of which was either half the nation, or the gem.
And so was born the first (major) Cult of the Oceanic Star. The followers of the True Shah, who believed he did not die, or chose to die, or hid the secret of his death amongst the books with which he was buried in a secret tomb, but he, or his wisdom, or his True Line, shall return and he will come from the sea. The Star is required, the true star, not its false and altered selves, the True Shade must be known, it can be found in old illuminated texts and the nation shall be renewed.
Till then, the bombings continue.


CULTS OF THE QUEENS CUT
The Cult of the Shah The Cult of the Divine PathThe Cult of the WormThe Cult of the Order of the Star
The Star was surrendered to the Reasonable Mercantile Incorporated Gentlemen, and by them cut again. This was the Queens cut. The Star was re-shaped, reduced slightly in its gourd-sized roundness. Such stones were made for crowns, not to bounce on the chest.
It was delivered to the Queen of a far-away land, a sea-girt realm, rich in trade, investors, a line which must be pacified lest they interfere, and what better for that than the worlds greatest gem?
So, of Sea-Land the star became the crowns own Jewel, set amidships on the royal brow. Perhaps it never saw the sea, but in this cold, grey land, spread with white light it is said the Star grew colder, its texture changed, though its facets multiplied.
Borne darkly on a crown, wrapped in hymns, pinnacle of orders of decayed knighthood the star grew bright, blazed even, in this deeper darkness, astounded as it had not before, awed where once it seduced, now like starlight, or clear water, or like a spark. The Queens cut had no depth, did not exist in this world, could not be measured by the eye, was pure light alone.


CULTS OF THE THIEVES CUT
The cult of the HeadThe cult of TransportThe Performers of Mysteries
Revolution! The Queens head falls and in the chaos the Star disappears from history, red-flagged wood-shoed anti-tyrants rampage through the royal apartments, the powder store, the dungeons, the files and luxuries. Everything is packed up, itemised and sold for the revolution! the people need arms!
Amongst this, somewhere, the crown loses its star, only a blank space remains.
It takes a century for even half of the truth to come out. Darkness bears its fruit and in the last will and testament of a later age a strange "sapphire" emerges from the gloom of a merchants bequest"a stone unlike any other" - the auctioneers say.
From there; trade and museums, court cases and newspaper drives, advertisements and arguments. Seen now, in this penultimate cut, by more eyes than ever, trapsing past in museum queues, photographed and visualised
What of the colour? the texture? the light? Mediocre, say the gem cutters and the aesthetes. Sky blue, sparkling, tangible, like bright ink, wowing the crowds, pleasing the photographers. Pop culture writers make book after book, but it does not burn in darkness, it has no depth.



CULTS OF THE LAST CUT
The Cult of MeatThe Cult of the SeeThe Cult of the EyeThe Cult of the Dream
Delivered by thermic shock and high intensity bombardment, what little forces remain did not make it to the site in time. Not even looters survived the bombs.
The last cut shattered the star into an asymmetric curl of radioactive light. No longer anything like a gem. More akin to fulgurite or broken bone.
There it lay, a long while, buried in bone-ash and powdered brick until finally cold claws drew it forth once more into the light of a red sun, but the light of the Oceanic Star, lost since the Shah, or perhaps even before, returned now; deep, dark blue, shifting, endless and consuming, lit now from within, burning the hand if left there long, blinding the eye if gazed upon too much, sacred once again, though physically a mess. The dream of a forgotten ocean, the only living blue in a dead, red, world.

The Troll Kings invisible hands..

..twitch, ghostly but for its rings; hoops and bands of Rheingold set with gems from plutonian realms. chalcedony, oryx, Martian pyrites, amber fossils from the toxic beds of Venusian seas.
The king half-slumbers, half-wrathful and half-sad, vast and earthlike, invisible but for silken robes stitched from the campaign tents of emperors, the barding of dead grail knights, the wedding dresses of a thousand brides woven with their golden hair.
Fat the troll-king is. Fat with eaten women and brave men, and bitter his cold breath.
Adored he would be.

https://www.instagram.com/davidthierree/

"Am I not... " he breathes out, in a murmur like interstellar static.
A pause.
The crown, a crown of splintered diamonds shining like glass, woven together with the unending labour of a hundred thousand enchanted spiders whose curse and purpose is only and entirely to weave their webs endlessly around the spiked crowns hoop and attach it firmly to the Troll Kings invisible head, that it might not fall, cascade down down down onto the sea-stone fall and there shatter, erupt like crystal waters, like a meteor of light, and drown the petitioners in a sea  of bloodstained gems.. (each spider was a hero once, the Troll Kings foe, this being his just punishment for those who would place limits or reductions on the Troll kings wealth), the crown, tilts, rises!
A gasp runs round the hall! The King is sitting up! He is, well not rising, but he is straightening his magnificent spine! Not for a century, not for two, has the Troll king even raised his head. Noble lines have lived and died and chronicles been written and been lost in the hundreds of winters since that last and mighty raising of the brow.
"AM I NOT..." (one thousand salt-stained copper-clad troll knights draw to rimy hunchbacked attention, some waking up for the first time in a decade).
".. a KING???" the Troll King cries.
The hall is silent. What does this mean?
One hundred ageless elf-maids languishing in one hundred gilded cages hanging from the Troll Kings stolen stars while their ever-gold hair grows ever down (for only when it grows long enough to stroke a goblins head below will they be set free), start, awaken, glance curiously amongst themselves. Is he having a stroke? they think.
The college of goblin sorcerers, so old and mad their ears have been plaited into mobius strips under their chins, shiver, shaking tomb-dust from their hunched backs, grit their sharp yellow teeth, one snaps their man-bone pipe, one has, unnoticed, at some point become a mushroom.
The gold bird captured in an onyx mirror held only by the shadow of a sleeping silver girl, herself locked within a crystal coffin which is locked within a crystal coffin which is itself so locked, seven-times-seven times, each lock made by a dwarven smith who was strangled with his own beard and the key given to a seperate deamon each, the gold bird chirps!
"WELL?????" the Troll-King whispers, barnacles crunching from his armpits and rear as he shifts in his cold and granite throne.
None speak, until one, the Crone Sycroax, the Troll-Kings mistress of maladies, the storm-stirrer and milk-curdler, the baby-stealing witch and his sanest advisor, hauls her sagging paps from her silver bath full of cold and curdled cheese and says;
"Aye. A King. King you be and so it is."
"AND YET..." the earth shakes, the murmur of weeping gods issues from the toothed vault behind the throne, thunder deafens. He is getting up! the Troll King is rising!
No. No it is safe yet. He is merely setting his great feet, slippered in ebony caravels which set sail for forgotten lands, as if he might stand, he is not standing yet.
But still! What a cataclysm!  What horrors? What if he stands up? What should be done? None there know for it has never been seen or recorded in even the glyphs of aeonic time.
"AND YET" the Troll King speaks, and ear bones shatter spontaniously in several adjacent lands "WHERE ARE MY ADORERS?"
Then. Slowly, horrifically, like the end of empires, the King stands!
Several go mad at the sight. 
Dust, virgin bones and unknown of Archean life cascade down his mighty silken gown. He stands! The hundred-thousand-diamond crown rises to the level of the lowest elf-maids cage. The invisible mitts sweep hanging elf-hair aside like a curtain of gold. The head turns! Slowly, like a cannonball rolling. This way! That way!
Where the invisible gaze passes, gold coins turn to wizards and run away cackling, teeth shatter or turn to stone, bones turn to glass, gain sentience or are engraved with impossible prophecies beneath the flesh.
"AM I NOT ADORED?" 
The Troll-Kings bitterness forms springs of raw vinegar which spurt up like geysers from between the sea-stone cobbles of his hall, (each a hill), picking some goblins and sweeping them away.
"I SEE NO LEGIONS. I SEE NO CHOIRS. WHERE LIE THE TRUMPETS AND ARMIES? WHERE THE POETS AND MANDOLINS? WHERE THE APES AND MAIDENS? 
The Crone-Thing Sycorax stands in her bath, dripping cold cheese. All who see her nakedness go blind and die.
"They are passed O King." She says.
"PASSED?"
The Crone coughs up a teratoma, examines is with one beady eye, smiles and puts it back in her mouth, chewing carefully.
"Those were the poets of your youth, O King. Those were the armies of the summer when the world was young, and the maidens of the dawn. Now is the night and the dark. Now is winter and the end of all but stone. Dust are your adorers. Forgotten is your name."
"DUST?" whispers the invisible king, "YET I SLEPT BUT FOR A MOMENT."
"Hggggh" grunts the witch, and shits a bloody stream into her bath of cheese. "Ahhhhh. No King. Worlds have burned in your sleeping. Towers fallen and been raised. New stars shine. But not for long. The world falls, soon to die."
"AH." Whispers the Troll-King, and sighs out a dozen ghosts who weave through the hall like streamers of pale fire. 
"AHHHHHHHH."
The Troll-King sits so slowly and tectonically that mountains nearby tilt by a degree towards his weight.
"IT WAS ONLY A MOMENT THEN. A MOMENT OF GOLD."








In other news, the Kickstarter is going... less well than hoped for..

Leading to some more modest and hopefully achievable goals..
Which you can find out about in Updates HERE!!!!