What About the Monsters: Part 2

Two Weeks Ago

Harlon did not like the tinkerer. The man was too refined, not a single grease stain marred his white cotton shirt sleeves. What little hair he had left was oiled back, and he grew a long, sharp goatee beneath an overbite that had grown brown with decay. His teeth were the only part of him that had the used-up, worn out quality that Harlon associated with trustworthiness. Unfortunately, he was the only person for leagues around who could possibly answer any of Harlons questions about his latest contract.

“Honestly, there could be anything out there,” the old man said with airy words. He did share that quality with other artificers. The learned always spoke like there was just the tiniest drop of wonder in every question, as if everything had some grand answer. Harlon, who spent most of his life down on the ground, found it nauseating.

“The Stained Waters are a giant stagnant tributary for every river around,” he went on. “It was one of those spots that was used as a battlefield on several occasions during the Nightmare War. During one of those battles, presumably the last one, some powerful mage, or even an apprentice channeling great power during his death throes, cast the kind of impact spell that obliterated everything around it.” The pair were studying a map in the artificers home. He swept a surprisingly youthful hand roughly over the center.

“Somewhere around here. That’s where the deepest waters are. Unfortunately, mariners will not bring their boats to those waters, and most others that would make the journey for historical reasons tend not to return.”

“Any idea why? Or do we just assume they were eaten?” Harlon asked, innocently, he thought. The artificer looked at him disapprovingly over half moon spectacles.

“Safest to assume the worst, after a certain number of bodies,” he said dryly.

“Fair enough,” Harlon said. “The most recent victims weren’t historians, though. Most of them were children, all under 16.”

“Interesting,” the man said and fell into a pensive silence. That certainly wasn’t the word Harlon would have used to describe several dead children, but he rationalized that sometimes you need strange people to solve strange problems. Even if the oily old man did make his skin crawl.

“How were the murders discovered?” he asked after a while.

“Entrails were found floating into the water wheel over in Humphrey,” Harlon said. “First one set, then the miller followed the stream to find the rest. Eight missing people, eight entrails.”

“A picky eater, then.” The old man abruptly turned away from the map and pulled a heavy tome from the bookshelf. “As it happens,” he said, opening the book to around the middle.

“I did think I saw something in the river behind the shop yesterday. There was a horse that looked, I don’t know, a little too black.” He turned a few more pages and Harlon was not surprised to see a black horse on the page, though he did not recognize this one’s name.

“What is a kelpie?” he asked. “Some kind of carnivorous horse?”

“More like a mimic that prefers to look like a horse,” the tinkerer said. “Vicious thing. Dines exclusively on human flesh, but intelligent enough to have a distaste for the entrails. This one must be killing your villagers and taking them into the stained waters to eat.” Harlon didn’t comment. There were all kinds of horrible things across creation, and a lot of monsters could be cruelly specific. In his time, Harlon had heard of stranger things, like a frog that eats only obsidian stones, or large cats that dragged their kills to the tops of towering trees to eat them. Giraffes existed, so to Harlon, so could anything else. That was as complicated as the universe was. Why wouldn’t there be a mimic that pretends to be a horse so it could drown children? He read through the artificer’s bestiary entry; everything seemed to be adding up.

“So how do I kill a mimic horse?” he asked. “I doubt any of my tricks for treasure chest mimics will work on a moving target.”

“Well, we still don’t really know how to permanently kill mimics,” the tinkerer began. “But I do happen to have something that should be able to kill anything that’s eaten human flesh.”

Present

The Broga was a magical beast, mythical even. It was entirely possible that Harlon and the kelpie had been swallowed by the last of the giant frogs left on the continent of Ikar. They were relics of a bygone age, a time when magic took a more proactive role in the creation of new forms of life. Broga came from a time when giant monsters who could perform tremendous feats of magic, just by way of their existence was the norm. One quality that all Broga shared was that their digestive systems exist in several different dimensions at once, which means for anyone unlucky enough to be swallowed, but lucky enough to survive it, being eaten is more of an inconvenience than a death sentence.

Non-Euclidian digestive tracks tend to have several exits, it’s just that they may be miles apart from one another, and in all the hours or even days you spend searching for it, you will never happen upon the same patch of frog guts twice. Thankfully, Harlon happened to make up for the kelpie knowledge he lacked by knowing quite a bit more about Broga. The massive tongue split in two once it sensed that it was carrying two individuals town the creatures throat, and Harlon and the kelpie were separated down opposing tubes.

Harlon could hear the kelpie screaming for some time after he’d lost it. It sounded like the monster was genuinely afraid for it’s life. Good, Harlon thought. That will save him the trouble of having to figure out how to kill it while he was in here. He still had a job to do, but if the kelpie didn’t know what it was doing, it could easily get lost and starve to death, or fall into a pit of acid to be properly digested.

Harlon knew better, though, and let the snake-like grip of the tongue pull him by the leg into one of the Broga's many stomachs. Soon, as the accumulation of lubricating mucus at the bottom of Harlon’s legs began to be unbearably annoying, the “throat” Harlon was sliding down opened up into a sickly red cavern. The black tongue pulled him down to the shore of an acid pool, but then it let go and receded into its respective black ulcer in the ground level of flesh.

Contrary to what one might think of a creature the size of the Broga, but this giant frog was a carrion feeder. The Broga’s size prevented it from being able to quickly rush to a decaying carcass before other carrion feeders do, resulting in the Broga dining on already half eaten deer if it had no other ideas. The “bigger-on-the-inside" digestive system allows swallowed animals the opportunity to wander around and die naturally. The flesh walls surrounding Harlon were devoid of blood, and he knew attacking it wouldn’t have any effect other than making him feel filthier. He relaxed. Let the kelpie wander off, it would die soon enough. Now, Harlon needed to find his own way back to the outside.

The chamber that he’d landed in, one of a thousand identical stomachs, contained one large pool of acid in the center, and seven slowly shifting tunnels in the flesh of the walls, ranging in size from a foot across to twenty-foot arches. There were also a few tunnels beneath the acid, channels that led to proper digestion, that Harlon knew to ignore. The shifting tunnels were impossible to map out, but the Broga created very few hazards on the inside of it’s body. The only dangers Harlon was likely to face in this dimension of flesh would come from failing to notice an acid pool, or from anything else the Broga had swallowed that was still living.

After a quick inspection of his person for injuries or missing equipment, there were none of either, Harlon chose a tunnel at random, the largest, and started walking. Within the Broga, he was on much firmer ground than with the kelpie outside, metaphorically anyway. His grandfather had earned the renown of three whole villages just for having seen one when he was a child, and as a result, Harlon had made it his first duty as a monster hunter to learn everything he possibly could about the interdimensional monsters.

There were a few melon sized black ulcers lining the tunnels as Harlon passed through them. These could move with just as much freedom as the tunnels themselves, and each housed another long, black, and possibly sentient, tongue. Nobody was really sure, but with all his past research, Harlon thought that Broga must have originally come from one of those dimensions far away from this one. Monsters with nonsensical anatomy usually were. The flesh that surrounded Harlon was naturally bioluminescent, giving about the same amount of light as the sun on an overcast day. From the corner of his eye, Harlon watched one of the ulcers as it easily kept pace with him from the floor. He ignored it. He’d always thought these kinds of monsters were needlessly complicated. What kind of benefit does a Broga gain from killing animals in an internal death maze, that couldn’t be gained from just eating normally? All of the monsters from far off dimensions had some feature like this; mind ravagers were octopus-headed former humanoids that ate memories rather than conventional food. Qorloths, impossibly ancient subaquatic beings of immense power that Harlon couldn’t help but think of as “fish gods”, didn’t seem to be capable of eating at all, because every diagram he’d seen of one during his training days had no discernable mouth. Captions always told of theories that they were fed by the “life energy of mere presence of their thralls”, whatever that meant. Maybe they got fed by being near living things. Maybe that was why they had to keep enslaving people. And then there were things like shoggoths, mimics and kelpies, which were creatures from far away dimensions that could eat properly, but they were also, in order, a pile of amorphous flesh with gnashing teeth, the same but disguised as every day objects like doors or treasure chests, and the same again but disguised as a horse.

None of it made any sense to poor, dimensionally simple Harlon Tavish. Maybe there was some interdimensional famine that drove these creatures to his world, and drove others to find some other way to get fed. Aside from a few idle musings to keep his mind off the black ulcers, which were definitely gaining numbers and following him now, Harlon knew it was pointless to speculate. Even the dimension right next door to his own could potentially have some deeply ingrained, imperceptible or even nonsensical difference to his own, and he could spend a hundred lifetimes searching for the reason why without ever making any headway. Right now, he just needed to focus on moving forward.

Probability was a wonderful thing. Theoretically, so long as Harlon kept going, an exit would eventually appear before him. Whether or not that was true, whether or not it made sense, whether or not Harlon even believed it himself did not matter. There was nothing else Harlon could do in an infinitely shifting series of identical tunnels, so keep moving he did, and he tried to keep his mind occupied while he hoped to effortlessly walk into a miracle.

What he did find eventually felt more like the antithesis of a miracle, like a god had received his prayers and decided that what Harlon actually needed was a little more punishment today.