Hunt with your bare hands! This is the world of grabbling, where the mightiest warriors in the land equip themselves with wildlife by ramming their arms down various throats and making them into weapons. Delve deep underground in this low fantasy epic where the grabbler Beocroak, sole survivor of a petty bloodbath, must battle his way out of a rising ghostly city capitalizing on all that foolish subterranean death. Should he make it out of that cavernous grave, there is still the harsh world beyond, of Goodly and ghastly gods, of giant floating eyes watching your every move, and of sinister curses illuminated by green witchfire.
Grab
by
Blaine Arcade
(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes) (time for entire novel: 10 hours, 44 minutes)
Curse
Bound in hide, scorch-writ on wood, death diverse and plenty harvested this tome from the minds and lore of men. Safe and content it sits upon the owner’s shelf, in the author’s legacy. You are a guest in its pages. Do not smudge with your fingers. Do not mar with your drool. This is a meal for the soul, so do not eat or drink near it to avoid damage.
If you are unwelcome, if your eyes be thieves of words, know that you are cursed when these contents leave the shelf, lose their blanket of dust, and are not properly and primly returned. This curse has fingers that can touch in different ways. Should you abscond with the book you will die, and you will know it before it happens. Should you steal it with a lie, and claim to be its author, or its subject, your spirit will die, and your words will seem to reach no living ear, shouted from the bottom of a sinking wet hole.
Our ire against thieves must be understood, and it will be in the detail of a curse wrought.
Purloiner of these pages, may you be skewered and fried and fed to those so desperate they do not identify their meat, and whom strip their meat of names and titles should it have them.
May you garden in shards of glass, with only lead onions to harvest, and be only rewarded with them when you can uproot with nothing but your bloody wrist nubs and set them down away from the glass.
May your sword run black with ink and turn into a brush when you most need a sword; your enemy will strike you apart while you write your pleas for mercy, each becoming a laughable relic when stained with your blood.
May your bedfellow secret serpents into your sleeping presence, free to envenom your body and dreams alike.
May you find calamity upon the road, and have all your bones and organs trampled by the horse and cattle that pass until you are of the dirt: a smear too indistinct to draw remark.
May a fissure develop in your nethers, and from it you will birth discharges of diseases you never had to catch, but are caught from you instead. May your bedfellow witness and reject you in horror. Only the diseases will call you parent, and celebrate you when they claim the title of plague.
May a smart tiger injure you and leave you in a clearing, your miserable squeals to serve as bait for better prey. Slowly you will die, and many times it will use you, keeping your wound open with a claw. You will have to eat your own kind, left from its meals, just to continue on as this wretch.
May you boil in the sun, not under it.
May two arrows, fired across the world, change direction as the compass needle does and each find one of your eyes.
May your bones be rearranged to arthritic catacombs.
May a rhinoceros find your bung fascinating. It will obsess him as the alchemist obsesses over a blotch of gold in a brick of lead.
May you become fixated upon this tale until your mind reads it when it is not there, when you have long discarded it to hide the evidence of your crimes. Its pages will stick to your back and not peel, its characters will join you when you bathe, in the forms they took after the page of death, and look into your eyes while you wash, blaming you for their fate. Its burned words will forever be in your palms, and when you flex them the page will turn and they will burn closer to the end.
This is your curse for trying to own this book with your hands, or for trying to master it with your own words. It does not belong with you, to you. Let it pass through you without greed. You can hold the hide, but nothing else. You are supposed to be empty enough to desire the contents, you fool.
And so, cursed or no, continue.
Hole
Do not die underground. That is what they say. Goodly Gods live in the sky, clear of the gnarled grabbing hands of filthy lowly man. They look down and witness death, descending to take righteous spirits to join them in endless gardens of cloud. If you die underground they do not see. If you die underground you fall into your grave. There you remain. Only those lower than the lowly will ever take note.
Four thousand people did not heed this wisdom. Two thousand of them were under the banner of Sovereign Reyvathird, and had marched into the mouth of Wormskoll Cave with no intention of dying. What they intended was the taking of the cave itself, and of the frosty iron gates deep within. Through those bars man and demon and Subtlerrannean god could barter and bargain. Poisons and potions could change hands, but no bodies, and no possessing spirits. Continue reading →
Blaine Arcade 