@ Prague Golem
2025-02-11 16:54:13
Deep within the primordial forest of Novuschroma, where the pines clawed at a bruise-purple sky and the earth exhaled whispers of forgotten aeons, there dwelled a gnome artificer named Thaddeus Glimmervein.
His cave, a jagged maw in the flank of a cyclopean hill, hummed with the clatter of clockwork drills and the eerie glow of arcane lanterns. Thaddeus, a diminutive figure with a beard like frayed copper wire and goggles smeared with eldritch ichor, had spent decades tunneling into the black heart of the earth, seeking diamonds—*perfect* diamonds, he insisted, to power his magnum opus: a machine that would "harvest starlight itself."
The villagers (those who dared speak of him) claimed Thaddeus had gone mad. They spoke of how his cave shuddered at night, how his drills bit into strata best left undisturbed, and how shadows pooled thicker there, as if the dark resented being carved. But Thaddeus scoffed. He had uncovered veins of crystalline wonder, each gem throbbing with an inner fire he swore was *alive*. "Cosmic seeds," he called them, "fragments of the old gods’ dreams!" His journals (later found waterlogged and reeking of brine) detailed visions of diamond lattices humming in harmonic resonance with the Hyades star cluster—a music only he could hear.
One night, his drills broke into a cavern no mortal map had ever charted. The walls gleamed with diamonds, yes, but they were *wrong*. Their facets curved in non-Euclidean geometries, their light a sickly greenish-white that cast no shadows but instead *absorbed* them. At the chamber’s heart lay a titanic, obsidian obelisk, its surface etched with spiraling glyphs that squirmed when observed. Thaddeus, trembling with triumph, pried loose a central gem the size of his fist. It pulsed like a heart.
The machine, of course, was his undoing. When he slotted the diamond into his starlight harvester, the device awoke with a shriek of grinding gears and a stench of burning ozone. The cavern trembled. The diamonds sang. Thaddeus watched in rapture as beams of corrosive light lanced upward, tearing a rift in the sky—a gateway to a swirling abyss where colossal *things* with too many eyes and too few limbs writhed in anticipation. His starlight harvester, it seemed, was not a bridge to the heavens… but a dinner bell.
As the first tendril, slick and iridescent, slithered through the rift, Thaddeus laughed—a high, broken sound. His life’s work had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams! The stars *were* right! The Great Old Ones *had* noticed! But as the tendril coiled around his ankles, he realized, too late, the irony: the diamonds were not seeds. They were *eggs*.
The villagers found the cave silent days later. Thaddeus’s machine lay dormant, the central diamond replaced by a hollow, obsidian shell. Of the gnome, there was no trace—save his goggles, crushed beneath a single, perfect footprint: a cloven hoof, steaming faintly, pressed into the stone as if the rock were clay.
And in the night sky, now, a new star glimmers hungrily. It winks.
It waits.