Topic: [Non-40K] Thomas the Mad's Prophecy of the End Times

[Sir_Godspeed]

- From the Apocrypha of Thomas the Mad -

 And then she, the Herald-Whore, my guide into the coming Days of Woe, told me to turn and look upon the world.

 And lo', I beheld from the skies a great fire that fell to the blackened earth below, and a loud bellow sounded, like that of a great beast.

 One time it bellowed, and the earth was rent asunder, and molten rock spewed forth.

 And I saw Ak-Shemeshet, the Black Goat of the mountain, bray; and her numberless children did pour from her womb, in an orgiastic parade of bloodletting and sacrifice, adorned in bodily remains, riding on skinless steeds from which hung sharp hooks. And they carried banners of the skin of the damned, inscribed with blasphemy and the deepest transgressions. They anointed themselves in the blood of innocents, violated the inviolate. Rape and senseless murder followed in their footsteps, and before them, people lay down to be crushed beneath the spiked wheel of their war wagons, or the brass-shod hooves of their steeds. And even as they died, they hooked themselves onto those very horses, or impaled themselves willingly onto the weapons of the braying host - so as to provide them with blood and entrails for sustenance.

 Two times it bellowed, and the great seas, thick and green with filth, spewed forth, and swallowed whole lands.

 And I saw Gur-Nergal, The Three-Eyed Toad, rise from the murky depths, and with him-her the swarms of writhing tentacles and untold masses of their slithery, boil-ridden subjects - come to pull all down into the deep, lightless abyss. The Mesoarch of Misery did despoil the holy places, and they crumbled to dust by their touch. As the batrachian hermaphodite  vomited forth bile, a great host of flies descended upon the land, and the waters were covered in the floating bodies of dead and decaying creatures of the sea. A great miasma was upon the world, the stench like an unholy incense for them, the Basilisk Toad, and their misbegotten congregation. The miserable wretches of the world praised their name, and ate the pus from their foul sores and boils, offered to the forlorn in unholy communion - great litanies of moans and wailing, even as flesh rotted from the bones of the Toad's supplicants.

 Three times it bellowed, and the skies were darkened, as if by a great and unseen thing, and behind it the sun was dimmed and lost.

 And I beheld Amon-Addon, the Cockerel Sovereign, the Sultan of Roosters, and upon his head I saw the Ten-Toothed Crown, and it radiated in gold and red, and the world's powers were enthralled by it, and they cheered and hailed him as Saviour, and bowed before him as he ascended the Highest Throne, and the powers were blind to the destruction, even as they heard his guttural crowing, which made the Pillars of the World crumble and fall, and his wicked claws and beak did rip all laws and creeds to shreds, so only anarchy and cruelty remained. They praised his name highest of all, and he spread his wings, to let gold fall to the ground. But when they picked it up, it burned their skin and flesh - and the more they were burnt, the more they praised him - and he gouged out their eyes and took them for tribute.

 And then, the Great Beast rose, the Serpent-of-Old, Ûrùn-sah, the Eternal Adversary, the Gaping Maw and Cosmic Wound. Terrible beyond comprehension and of form beyond words. It ripped the Veil to the Beyond, broke the Bones of the World, and everything became Chaos, and all minds were lost. It shattered the Great Cycle - the Clockwork of Ages and the Loom of Fate. What is, what was and what will be it swallowed and devoured and no Winding Walks or Star Paths lead from its stomach, for there is only Oblivion, and no thought is uttered and there is no division between IS and IS-NOT. Its infinite and coiled form all that would be for eternity, a cacophony of everything and nothing reflected in its ebon scales, and the cold fire of entropy burning in its thousand eyes. What was will never have been and what could have been likewise so, the very idea of existance gone forever and eternity.

 And then there were no more sounds, however much I screamed.

--------------------

(Notes: Obvious sources are visible here. Christian eschatology was the main driving background, however clear inspirations came from 40k, as well as Mike Mignola's Hellboy, which I've been reading a lot of lately. This is a vision of a hypothetical end of the world scenario which I intend to use in the fantasy setting I write in. Most of the terms here refer to things I've "codified" in my private notes. The use of animal motifs are mostly allegorical - ie. we're not necessarily talking about literal events here. The more important thing is what these beings represent. Although I personally think they're pretty cool. XD )

[Spectral Arbor]

I think you've achieved your goal.

The only qualm I have, is a rather... cliché... use of whore to describe the only feminine reference. A whore-herald, in the common use, would be one that announces the coming of prostitutes.

Digging a little deeper, could be "one that announces or proclaims the coming compromise of morality". That would be a google-search for many, including myself, to look for an alternative meaning. If that was the intention, than bravo, you've achieved your goal again! Otherwise, I'd suggest a different herald title, as it would have a better taste on the palate.


It certainly has a fire and brimstone tone, coupled with raving madness... I enjoyed the second read of it more than the first, which I mean as a compliment.

[Sir_Godspeed]

I think you've achieved your goal.

The only qualm I have, is a rather... cliché... use of whore to describe the only feminine reference. A whore-herald, in the common use, would be one that announces the coming of prostitutes.

Digging a little deeper, could be "one that announces or proclaims the coming compromise of morality". That would be a google-search for many, including myself, to look for an alternative meaning. If that was the intention, than bravo, you've achieved your goal again! Otherwise, I'd suggest a different herald title, as it would have a better taste on the palate.

Well, actually, Ak-Shemeshet is female too. Originally, Gur-Nergal was hermaphoditic, I might go back to that. I did think about the balance of genders before writing it (the cockerel in particular struck me as an idealized male archetype gone horribly wrong), but I may not have made the right decision.

My use of Whore-Herald is actually much more simplistic than you give me credit for - In my mind it simply denoted a whore who is also a herald. Much like a barber-surgeon was a barber who was also a surgeon, rather than a surgeon that solely worked on barbers. I'm not sure if that shines through well enough though - I'll certainly take your advice into consideration. Perhaps switching the order of the words is better? Herald-Whore?

As for me including the term 'whore'. It was something I thought about for a while - but in the end I put it in for few reasons. First being that it's a term that pops up every now and then in the Bible when female figures are to be vilified (sometimes combined with 'witch' or 'idolatress' or 'poisoner' or other, arguably less contentious terms). It seemed like a maddened priest in a pseudo-medieval culture would resort to similar rhetorics (even if the fantasy world I write in is significantly less gender-biased). Secondly, it is an allusion to the Whore of Babylon (who admittedly was not intended to be interpreted as being an individual, but the actual city of Babylon, or some other place, polity or organization. But I digress), or more generally, just moral decay.

The Herald part is more prosaic - she is a Herald of the coming end. As an aside, the reason the Herald is female is because I imagine Thomas to have been a heterosexual male, and being led into his visions by her manipulations. Had he been homosexual or in some other way having a preference for males (or if it had been a heterosexual female who had the visions), the Herald would have been male. The bitterness of this temptation (which undoubtedly was sexual in nature) is partly what lead to the use of the term "whore", as a kind of "beslubber you" from Thomas. This doesn't come forth in the story at all, but it's something I thought about before writing it. I might rewrite it to get that point in somewhere.

It certainly has a fire and brimstone tone, coupled with raving madness... I enjoyed the second read of it more than the first, which I mean as a compliment.

That is high praise. Thanks a lot!

[Spectral Arbor]

I meant it.

The "whore" thing might make more sense as part of broad picture, all I can see is here, and yes, the medieval "chicks make good men do bad things" also came across. It is just so hit upon throughout culture that it... I don't know... felt less "fantastic" and more like something you could find if you went digging through the darker parts of current religious texts.

Old is new, and the new is old, I suppose. It felt outside of my imagined time-frame... if that makes sense. Somehow I'm seeing this in a "200 years from now" sort of scope. That's probably a TON of my own imagining going into that, but that's where my brain put this as happening.

Are the "Named" entities of your own creation, or are they references to "existing" entities?

[Sir_Godspeed]

I've made a few edits based on your feedback.

There are quite a few references here. Shemesh was a Caananite sun goddess. I've added a "-et" suffix to make it seem more feminine (-at/et, IIRC are feminine endings in Semitic languages)

The wagon that people throw themselves in front of is based on the Hindu Jagganath, more famously known as Juggernaut, a wagon carrying the idol image of Krishna, which, according to early European chroniclers, people threw themselves in front to be crushed as a religious sacrifice. The skinless horses with hooks hanging from them are from Celtic mythology.

Nergal was a Mesopotamian god of war, pestilence and the noonday sun. Nurgle is based on him, in a sense, since the ancient Hebrews tended to portray him as a horrible being (as they did most of the gods of their neighbors).

The association with toads and marine life is atypical, and probably occured because I was thinking of Dagon.

Amon was an ancient Egyptian deity that was originally the patron god of Thebes, but was later merged with Ra and became a unified sun-and-creator-god, Amon-Ra, who was said to be immanent in all things.

"Addon" comes from Abaddon, which is a hebrew word that means "destruction", which in the bible is regularly used alongside "Sheol", meaning "grave" (although it is commonly translated as "hell"). In the Christian Revelations, Abaddon (also called Apollyon in Greek), is an "angel of the abyss" leading an army of locusts against God's faithful. (also the locusts have human faces and lions' manes, because Revelations is crazy like that.)

Amon-Addon's Ten-Toothed Crown is drawn from Revelations as well, where the First beast of Revelation has ten horns with ten crowns. They got mixed in my head with the comb of a rooster, which looks faintly like some kind of crown.

The additional prefixes are generally added for cosmetic value.

I feel a bit ashamed that I didn't mention the (blatant) Lovecraftian inspiration here, but considering that I went by other sources that in turn have been inspired by his works, I kinda forgot it. "The Black Goat" is a clear reference to Lovecraft's Shub-Niggurath, also called “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”. I wanted to use the goat imagery due to the European association between goats and Satanic qualities, and the older pre-Christian association between goats and fertility.

As you can see, there's not necessarily a huge correlation between their qualities here and historical RL attributes, but the names are evocative enough that I decided to use them. They're not set in stone though, names are, in the end, quite small details that are easily altered.

[Wyddr]

Here's my take, for what it's worth.

There's a tendency with these things to focus upon the minutiae--the suffix of this, the inspiration of that, the way you phrase this thing or that thing--because, well, it's the easiest thing to look at. I could do this, but I'm not going to. It is well written and evocative, and any other notes I could give you on a syntactical or dictional level would simply be quibbles over style, and there is no reason for me to try and compel you to write like me. The tale is fine for what it is--a horrifying description of the end of days.

What I'd rather discuss here is what its purpose is, in a practical sense, in the story/stories you are writing. This might be where you hit a few hang-ups and snags, as it were. The first issue may be the fact that is is so clearly derivative of western Judeo-Christian (and to a lesser extent Ancient Middle Eastern) apocalyptica. Which is to say, just how 'new' is this? Well, it's not really. This has been done, not just by your initial sources per se, but by a lot of other authors spinning their tales off of those original sources.

Okay, but how much of a problem is that? Well, that depends on what you do with it. For me, the most interesting bit is at the end:

 

What is, what was and what will be it swallowed and devoured and no Winding Walks or Star Paths lead from its stomach, for there is only Oblivion, and no thought is uttered and there is no division between IS and IS-NOT. Its infinite and coiled form all that would be for eternity, a cacophony of everything and nothing reflected in its ebon scales, and the cold fire of entropy burning in its thousand eyes. What was will never have been and what could have been likewise so, the very idea of existance gone forever and eternity.

Here the end of the world is shown to be an unraveling of distinction. The real and unreal are merged together into what is called 'oblivion', but what can be reasonably be assumed to simply be beyond Thomas's capacity to perceive or understand. This is the collapse of space/time into a single point, somehow brought about by this Serpent. That, to me, has narrative legs and is more interesting than bloody Goats, Roosters, and Toads or any amount of continent-swallowing slime. The sun going black and the oceans swallowing the land is old hat, but the collapse of recognizable existence into something unknowable is more interesting. It isn't that this hasn't been done (that is ultimately the objective of the Warp to some extent), but it is certainly less often explored.

As a final note, I presume this text won't appear in its entirety in the stories it is meant to inspire/drive? I only say this because heavy duty purple-prose of this nature is the kind of thing that doesn't directly hasten the conflict of the story in question, really. Bits and pieces of it work as flavoring, but a big chunk of raving lunatic writing shoehorned into a scene generally kills momentum. I'm not sure how you intend to use this, mind you, so this critique might be entirely moot (as a piece of flavor text to help with world-building it works just fine), but be forewarned: sticking this into a story or novel is a delicate process.

Hope that was helpful. As I say, it is an evocative piece and kinda cool, but how it can be used may be an issue.

[Sir_Godspeed]

Here the end of the world is shown to be an unraveling of distinction. The real and unreal are merged together into what is called 'oblivion', but what can be reasonably be assumed to simply be beyond Thomas's capacity to perceive or understand. This is the collapse of space/time into a single point, somehow brought about by this Serpent. That, to me, has narrative legs and is more interesting than bloody Goats, Roosters, and Toads or any amount of continent-swallowing slime. The sun going black and the oceans swallowing the land is old hat, but the collapse of recognizable existence into something unknowable is more interesting. It isn't that this hasn't been done (that is ultimately the objective of the Warp to some extent), but it is certainly less often explored.

It ties into the fundamental metaphysics and ontology, as well as the cosmology of the universe, yeah. I've got a few conceptual terms to explain how various races view the matter, but basically, the end of the text describes a complete unravelling of the very concept of existence.

I do feel, however, that the earlier parts are necessary, simply because I'm writing about a Western-inspired culture, which has a tendency for vivid and fairly concrete imagery, if not the meaning behind it. From the view of a different culture, the vision would have been explained quite differently. It's my fault for not weaving that well enough into the text, since it is delivered very decontextualized here.

As a final note, I presume this text won't appear in its entirety in the stories it is meant to inspire/drive? I only say this because heavy duty purple-prose of this nature is the kind of thing that doesn't directly hasten the conflict of the story in question, really. Bits and pieces of it work as flavoring, but a big chunk of raving lunatic writing shoehorned into a scene generally kills momentum. I'm not sure how you intend to use this, mind you, so this critique might be entirely moot (as a piece of flavor text to help with world-building it works just fine), but be forewarned: sticking this into a story or novel is a delicate process.

Hope that was helpful. As I say, it is an evocative piece and kinda cool, but how it can be used may be an issue.

I hadn't throught about how I would be using it, actually, so thanks for the tips.

I mostly wrote this to work out some writing-itch. It will probably never feature in its entirety in anything. More than anything it's to help me envision what the people I write about fear, the esoteric literature they have as cultural baggage, etc. References to various concepts in it might make appearances, but for now I thought I'd share it because I found it pretty fun to write. (This is also why I have an unfortunate tendency to over-share processes behind the text.)

[Wyddr]

Don't get me wrong--this kind of sharing is really handy for world-building. As David Eddings once wrote, you need about 1000 pages worth of background material before you can go writing stories in a fantasy world (in my experience he's exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. My own fantasy world has a cool 700+ pages of junk, probably, very little of which will see the light of day). My blog frequently sees various tibits of world-building folderol for various settings I've got cooking.

Anywho, I think it makes for rich cultural material for certain. References could be fun (though if this is from a mad and, presumably, heretical monk, who would be making those references would be somewhat restricted, but I digress). Good luck with the world building, at any rate, and by no means resist those urges to write things!