It’s not uncommon for someone doing maintenance to leave the grating off of the sewer while working. You know this, yet neglectfully you stumble on the anchor of the rope ladder and trip into the hole on the side of the city street. Falling roughly 50 feet, you break your fall with the neck of the pipe cleaner, and with no way out you sit and look up to the sky and sun above you. You shout for help but no one comes to help you. Looking around the bottom of the pipe you see more grating looking out into the vast sewers. Corridors of pipes and streams of corrosive liquids are hardly visible with the dim light shining through the thin bars. You begin to hear heavy footsteps sloshing towards you and you yell out for help again, to make sure they notice you. Minutes pass in mostly silence besides the sound of the wet stomping before you are approached by two large figures creeping from the darkness of shadows.
Reaching out from darkness is a gangrenous, bloated hand. The figures move forward and you see they are all this way, covered in boils and mucous, with open sores and flesh falling off. Still the hand gets closer until it grasps the bars of the sewer grate. “Human thing. Are you desperate to be freed?” The question comes through in a strange dialect. You nod yes and the shambling mound nods back at you sincerely as the thing grabs your arm and forces you through the metal grating, ripping your shoulder out of its socket, and nearly off your body. Yet you made it through, now you’re looking back at the corpse of the pipecleaner, his face lit by the glistening of moonlight beaming down from above.
The grotesque ones lead you through the endless tunnels for miles. As you approach a bottleneck in the hallway, where it narrows to about 3’ in diameter, you see a flickering light. Then the shamblers instruct you to crawl through the opening, so you get down on your hands and knees, and move through the tiny hallway and closer to the light with the two rotting corpses pushing you further.
As soon as you enter the room you find yourself watching a strange ritual at the center of a toxic pool. A sort of pier has been constructed over the foul water. At the end of the boardwalk a ring of robed figures chant to repetitive effect. Within the circle are two figures, one much taller and the other bearing a single blue candle. Both figures are heavily focused on one another while the flames dance across the glowing green bones of the skeletal familiar and the piss stained robes of the sorcerer and his acolytes. Echoing throughout the room is a rousing chorus;
“Dusty old bones, full of green dust!”
As quickly as you get a bearing on your surroundings, you are grabbed by the shoulders and pushed closer to the circle. You push past the moldy rags hanging from the monks chanting and approach the sorcerer, his own rags weighted down by armor made from the same bones as his familiar. He reaches out with his left hand and reveals a bloated fly and then proceeds to jam his open palm into your forehead. As his hand makes contact, the fly and the hundreds of maggots within pop and drip down your face, into your eyes and mouth. Still holding your face the sorcerer drops you into the vat of shit and decay festering in the pool below you. All the while the acolytes continue to chant;
“Dusty old bones, full of green dust!”
As you’re submerged in the water it begins to glow a bright green and swirl. Unknown objects bump you as you spin, rotten food & feces, severed feet & hands caress you.
Baptized by filth, the chanting stops and you rise from the pool. Hideously disfigured your body is covered in blisters and boils, you look at your reflection in the water, still glowing dimly. What you see scares you, but you’ve changed, you feel no fear. There is no more returning to society, life in the sewer is all you will know. You see the flesh of your face is peeling, so you pull at it, and scratch at it until your dead skin falls off revealing your new face. Same as the bloated insect smeared across your face, fly headed. You look at the sorcerer and he looks back intently. Oddly, in an obligatory manner you say your thanks to the robed man for the many plagues inflicted upon you, as you accept your fate, twisted by chaos. You are the flyheaded man deep beneath the town of Estark. You are the one who under the cover of darkness pulls unwitting passersby through the grating of the sewers. It is you who the children sing nursery rhymes about, and who keeps them up at night, clicking his nasty claws upon lead pipes as he wanders through the sewers of Estark.
C34 Plague Elemental
See you in the sewers.
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