Redemptor Adventures - The Heroes' Journey

LE'ACHATI - Something Boggi

What they did with their days, with every passing sento of their existence, had always been determined by the Guild Leaders, their masters. These were the peoples Redemptor intended to return to save. These were their people they had to leave behind. 

Safe inside the supertowers of Tetrapolis, to work with all their strength upon strange, enormous machines, and never knowing what they were making. Just that the gears should turn. The chains go up and down. The steam hisses. The pistons thump and hiss. Everything moves. Everything black or gray or rusted red. Everything pipes that tremble. Everywhere black that burns. The belts crawl on, and bringing the pieces they made with their hands here to somewhere else they'll never see, nor see what it all ultimately becomes. 

The black shackles on their ankles. As many sizes of ankles of creatures working there, those Guild Leaders always had a shackle big enough to fit around it and for it to never come off. It made them feel safe. Maybe long long ago, when they were first captured from their homelands and brought to Tetrapolis to serve Gorchen, they resented the shackles. But with enough sentos, enough orbits, no matter where they came from they got so that they loved their shackles. Were grateful for their shackles. Sometimes a memory of that old life before the supertowers might flash, and they would feel so guilty they would shudder, ashamed of themselves, that there was a time in their lives they were ever not in service with their lives to the Guilds. To Gorchen.

But there was something happening all those orbits that the gears were turning, and no one knew. All the sweat, the gruesome, unguessing labor of their days, it went on everything they touched. It left a trace. And what few creatures on planet Fait know about captivity is that while the mind can be trained, the mind can lie to itself, the body cannot. Their work, those black shackles around their ankles, that unnatural subjugation of their living life-forces that is natural to be free and happy, it produces something more than mere things. Something terrible. Something boggi. 

Through shoddy pipese, the chemical waste of those factories runs down the insides of the walls of the supertowers, and gets pumped out in massive churning falls off the shores and acid-foam into the sea. Through shoddy chutes, scraps of metal and broken chains and glastic cruddy bits descend. Out it all goes. The sea, so dark, surely no one will notice. But there is something more than those chemicals, scraps, chains, and glastic. Something boggi. 

There is something that swims thousands of berus through darkness.  

Something that grows bigger each time it swirls in on itself, swimming low, ever forward to be born.  

Something that finally rises on the banks of a river that winds across an enchanted jungle filled with what-should-be peaceful, exotic creatures. Creatures that know nothing of industry nor craft. Creatures that have never even heard the hiss of an engine. Creatures that know only freedom and nature and sylvas' songs. These poor creatures, alas!, are about to learn the hard truth of the inky spiked tendrils of the Le'achati. 

It is a hard truth that most of these gentle, quiet beasts will not survive. None will ever be the same. For if the Le'achati is not stopped, here, in the Tulgey Wood, there will be no stopping it from spreading like the plague it is and claiming the rest of Fait, up to and including that certain city's imprisoned creatures that unwittingly created it in the first wretched place. (That is, if the ghost riot presently underway in Tetrapolis does not kill those wretches first.)