Tablets IV-XIII, "The Eight Plagues of Dovria"
(as translated and compiled by Rufous Längsamm)
When the
Wild Gods took over the mortal lands, they rent the earth in their wake. Fissures grew, the liminal boundaries cracked, and it was not long before the
Demon Lords found a suitable crack in which to stick their claws and crawl their way up.
The chasm opened in
Dovria, then a fair kingdom of fertile fields and gentle lords. Each
Demon who laid horrible eyes upon it was seized with a need to destroy it.
Swift
Yeenoghu made his way into the land first. His brutal canids circled the villages, and the forests grew thick with phantasms of hidden enemies. Tribes became as packs of wild dogs—huddled together in clutches, withdrawn and fearful from the neighbors they had once happily broken bread with.
Queen Lolth emerged next, under a blanket of fog. She spun psychic threads from the people's doubts and fears and wove them together in dissonant patterns. Fears became conspiracies, and whispers about the dangers of the Other hung on every doorframe.
Then came the
Demogorgon, prince of all demons, after his dread scouts had paved the way. Wherever his dread gaze fell, each group that had banded together—large or small—was cleft in twain. Each man knew his former brother as a traitor. The Other lived among them, and love was too fleeting and too fickle to trust.
Then the black wings of
Camazotz emerged to blot out the heavens, and the land was sucked dry beneath the starless night. Crops and children were pale, feeble, and small—when they lived at all, that is. The sun hardly seemed to rise. In the darkness, a few men heard
Camazotz whisper in their ears, promising them their heart's desires and more. And so the children of Camazotz emerged into the long, starless nights, and sucked dry the lives and livelihoods of the people as surely as the drought drained their wells. They fed on misery, and they (and only they) prospered.
As the masses realized what they had lost to those vampiric few, they cried out at once in the voice of
Alquam, and he amplified their discordant dread through the land. His laugh sounded something true and terrible in the hearts of every hungry man. It rang through the magistrate's chambers and silenced the gavels of peace. It soured the sweet songs of love and rang in harmony with vicious epithets and declarations of war.
And so, when the bell of
Orcus finally sounded dolorous doom, none had the strength to resist it. Brother turned against brother, all against all, in the deadliest war the land has seen before or since. No surrender was called, no quarter was given. The fields were no longer dry, but fertilized with bodies and watered with blood. The land no longer needed to strangle its people for them to die; the people, in their all-consuming fury, cut each other down in droves on their own accord.
When the blood ran dry and the will of the warriors waned, lithe Akyshigal skittered through the debris, as the prince of roaches is always wont to do. Law no longer governed, walls no longer held, and the old great Kingdom was utterly forsaken. Only the roaches and locusts flourished in their ruins, and the people who gave tithe to this new demon lord and followed in his thieving ways. They survived, for a time, as vermin do. None remembered a time when they dared hope for more.
But even this meager life could not hold. Queen
Zuggtmoy's dread decay seeped through their bodies until their viscera poured through their eyes. The few whose bodies clung to life were driven mad in spirit instead, their souls hurtling through days and days into the far-distant twilight of the gods, until the rot silenced their raving and claimed them in the end.
No sons of the Dovrian Empire walk its plains today. Those who build their bricks from its curséd clay do so on time borrowed from what angels see fit to defend them. Beware! The demons lay in wait beyond the woods, as surely as the monsters of the river lurk below. The land they split in twain will never hold to its center again. Till fields, build towers, sing the praises of the gods... it matters not. Your kingdom, too, will someday rot.
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