Here's my first ever D&D character, a human warlock, with a nameless Lovecraftian patron from the far realm.
The Story of Naethan Rivercrest: First Contact
A commoner, disheveled and unkempt, was shoved unceremoniously into the cell - a cell filled with filth and disease. Perhaps by intent and malice, or perhaps by negligence and incompetence, these captives received more punishment than imprisonment; their health were taxed to the limit, assaulted daily by foulness and contagion. Those that succumbed, simply disappeared.
Wracked with fever, the commoner stumbled and fell to the ground with a grunt.
"Enjoy the stay, Naethan the scribe," mocked the guard with a poison-dipped chuckle, savoring the downfall of a learned man, perhaps calloused by his own difficult life.
With some effort Naethan rolled onto his back, exhausted, and quickly fell into a feverish slumber. Unconsciousness was a meager but welcome reprieve from his predicament.
Naethan woke up to the sharp sounds of clanking metal. The guards banged against the cell's iron bars to signal the delivery of the meals. Bowls of thin gruel were passed into the cell through a slot. Naethan's feverish body protested every movement, but he was in need of sustenance. He shuffled along with the other prisoners and retrieved a bowl. As he ate, he glanced about the new surroundings. In addition to several other hapless and slovenly commoners, he noticed an etching in Espruar script in the corner of a wall. It seemed scratched into the stone using some rudimentary tool, forming crude but legible writing. Even though Naethan could read the script, he could neither pronounce it nor understand it; the word did not appear to be Elvish. Unable to make sense of it, Naethan closed his eyes as the fever and exhaustion overtook him once again, and fell back into a fitful sleep.
He dreamed of a better time - a wooden table, the smell of ink, the feel of the parchments. A grayhaired gentleman in lavish silk robe appeared.
"Magnificent progress!" he commended in high spirits, while browsing through a stack of parchments on the table. Naethan recognized the voice of Master Rovik, his employer - a shrewd man with a seeming addiction to silk.
"Thank you Master Rovik," Naethan saw himself looking up from the laborious transcription task, responding with a smile.
But he knew the compliments and the pleasant mood were due in no small part to a handsome payment that Master Rovik would receive for this service. Perhaps enough for him to purchase a few more extravagant silk robes. Naethan's own compensation however, was merely a pittance by comparison. Instead he was promised recognition and exposure that would lead to lucrative opportunities in the future.
"Fine work Naethan, impeccable Espruar script," nodded Master Rovik as he picked up a parchment and examined it closer.
An almost imperceptible change occurred all around Naethan, everything seemed the same yet filled with malice. It was as if the air itself became a transgression of nature. Naethan looked at the table, and saw himself busy with the transcription. He wrote quickly with practiced and fluid motions, a single word, over and over. Perturbed, he pushed the stack of parchments off the table and they landed haphazardly in a messy pile. He saw that every parchment had the same word, repeated, filling its entirety - the same mysterious word that was on the prison wall. A sense of searing malevolence welled up around Naethan, corrupting this sleeping mind, invading his dream.
He tried to escape in desperation, but remained trapped in his dream - a dirt floor, the smell of filth, the aches in the body.
"I'm sorry Naethan, I didn't know," apologized Master Rovik, now laying on the dirty cell floor. His silk robe became a grimy prison tunic, his skin sullied and pale. He pleaded with labored breathing, "please believe me, I had nothing to do with this!"
Naethan saw himself, unkempt with a similar soiled prison tunic, turning to reply angrily, to stab a few verbal wounds into his dying employer. But he remained silent. He knew they were both merely the expendable pawns of nobility squabbling over wealth and land, fighting over every copper. This dying man, in search of profit, and Naethan himself, in search of opportunity, allowed themselves to be entangled in the treacherous games of the nobility. Naethan, whether he would admit it or not, was a willing participant.
“I beg you,” the man once again pleaded, seeking to reach solace before his own inevitable death. “Nae...”
Master Rovik did not finish the sentence. His face was frozen in a macabre mask, his mouth opened impossibly wide. What sound came out instead was utterly alien, monstrous, and profane. It was a word that brought blasphemy. It was a word that brought heresy. It was a word that defiled the very existence of this world. But Naethan knew this word. This was the word that he wrote hundreds of times in his dream, urged by the malice; this was the word on the prison wall.
To his horror, Naethan looked on, transfixed, as Master Rovik’s mouth continued to open wider. The bones cracked with sickening snaps, the flesh folding, stretching, and lifting off his face. An unimaginable vileness flowed from his mouth, now a deformed fleshy orifice, like a swarm of insects, devouring all in its path.
Darkness.
A colossal evil presence of terror, dread, and revulsion faded into existence from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, surrounding Naethan like a poisonous fog. It spoke directly into his mind, without words or language. It compelled him to repeat the accursed word. Naethan cried out to Lathander, “Great Morning Lord! Please...” but he was unable to continue. Shadowy and immaterial tendrils reached in and tightened their grips around his mind, like a python throttling its meal. No longer able to resist, Naethan complied.
With each utterance of the word, the presence and its surroundings became visible ever so slightly. Shapes began to form and connect, darkness began to grow into different shades. Naethan saw the faded outline of a writhing mass, enormous, slithering, pulsating, and emanating an unspeakable evil. Behind it was an utterly alien landscape, with grotesque mountains jutting up like a corpse’s hand, and jagged terrain forming impossible angles that defied understanding. Unable to stop, each repetition of the word was like a dagger driving into Naethan's skull. The vision before him became ever clearer, relentlessly assaulting his mind with incomprehensible madness, drowning him in a pool of insanity.
Naethan suddenly found himself awake, drenched in cold sweat, screaming the foul word that he now knew how to pronounce. He paused and steadied himself, afraid the terrifying visions from his dream would somehow follow him into this world. The other prisoners looked at him curiously, but no one paid much attention, mired in their own misery.
Shivering and agitated, Naethan scrambled to his feet. As he stood up, he once again felt the tendrils, reaching across dimensions, tugging and strangling his mind. He was compelled to touch a particular spot on the prison wall. There was no seeming relation between this spot and the Espruar script in the corner, yet inexplicably, he knew they were connected, one and the same, in defiance of the structure of this world.
Naethan reached out unsteadily and haltingly. He mustered all his strength to defy the command of this malice. He willed his arm to stop. But he touched the wall. Dimensions within dimensions unraveled, reality split open like a gaping wound, and a fissure appeared, suspended in the middle of the wall, a visible perversion of nature. A terrible force of alien evil blasted through, knocking Naethan off his feet and he fell backwards. In awe, a nearby prisoner stared at the fissure with shock and disbelief. Visions of madness from an unimaginable alien world and unthinkable creature drove the prisoner insane. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, gouged out his own eyes, and collapsed convulsing, laughing maniacally with deranged relief.
From an impossible angle, an incomprehensible intersection of space, shadowy tentacles shot forth from the open fissure, and wrecked destruction wherever they touched the material of this world. One smashed though the stone wall as if it was made of paper, another snapped the thick metal bars of the prison cell as if they were twigs. Several prisoners and guards were grasped, easily lifted screaming into the air, and pulled toward the rip in reality. As the tentacles retracted, the bodies of these unfortunate individuals were not able to cross into the fissure. Their torsos torn apart by the ripples of the dimensions that should not be, the blasphemous space that should not exist. Blood, bones, flesh scattered and splattered all over the damaged prison cell, and the tentacles continued their wanton devastation.
Death. Screams. Carnage. Naethan laid on the ground, stunned and unable to move.
Fire.
The prison was now aflame, snapped torches and smashed lanterns strewn about the floor.
"Hey!" Naethan felt someone shaking him. "Hey, get a hold of yourself! Let's go!" the man yelled with urgency. Naethan was grabbed by the arm, together they ran through a large hole in the prison wall, and disappeared into the street.
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