10th Transmission

… there are several varieties that will release their spines in sets of four, but the length of the needle, the breadth of the plumage and any coloration should be noted as distinguishing features. The Grim’s Parish Manticore is particularly f&@0”JBi8ax

*0ijw2BBB8n{-y0ur thoughtspace frequencies have been saturated with sterile and fallow transmission content. The gods that can help you cannot exist in such spaces. Hollywood the Wretched prepares the souls of your world for devour1nG#0”js^^Bax

BB*&@ w1th a little attention and some fast action, the toxin from the tailspines will be much less dangerous than the beast’s large, highly venomous fangs.

-Cont’d from a back issue of the Knight’s Almanac

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  That night, Thremp found a muddy outcropping close to the river. He planted his back flat against it, wiggling a ways into the pliable silt, folded his arms and went to sleep. His rest was fleeting and stilted, but adequate. The knots in his leathers gripped firmly into the earth. He could feel the bending of trees far off in the wind through this connection, and surely would know if a living boulder began to move off before he got a word in with it. Daylight did not take long.

  Thremp approached the pair from the previous night’s skirmish in open sight. Things were more at ease, he knew, if they saw you coming. In the daylight the boulderish figure now gave the impression of a mountain range at a great distance. It was the size of a mere gardener’s hut, but its structure was somehow vast and sweeping. The small rock faces that jutted out of it to form its shell were varied and layered and dense with tectonic information. A walking landscape.

And making this creature their night’s resting place was a hunched gray thing in a shirt of tattered burlap. Strands of thick, flat hair like dense black grass limply hung over his face. As he stirred, this small bulbous person with thin limbs flexed open their broad orbulor black eyes open and closed and quickly met Thremp’s gaze.

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“You’re what killed everything last night, aren’t you?” He said.

He scrambled up one of the mountain creature’s overhanging cliffs to watch him. With a sudden rumble, the creature’s shell began to lazily rotate in place, its head orbiting toward Thremp.

Thremp responded with practiced, subdued good nature, “I imagine some of them were still technically alive before your companion began devouring them. But yes, it was I who cut them down.” There were small puddled bits of blood in the soil deposited between rocks on the creature’s shell. It had the structure of a sprawling river network. “Can I ask where you’re from, sir? Haven’t seen you around here, and I’m out and about quite a bit.”

  “I came from the wastes. From Speculation City.” The little gray guy turned his attention to the small bits of plant life that were beginning to grow on exposed buttes and plateaus around his companion’s shell.

  “Can’t say I’m familiar. I’m sort of a Warden for the lands outside the Port, you see, and I’m afraid I don’t travel much beyond that. That’s Ranger Thremp Fontaine if you ever need to ask after me. If you’ll be traveling further up the coast I’ll likely be needing to know a little bit about what it is that brings you up here.”

  “I am Elk of the Ashen Wake, Witness to Accretio the Hoardosphere.”

Thremp didn’t know of a Hoardosphere, but guessed well enough that it was the thing that still slowly turned its head toward him, in the river under the boy named Elk. It was kind of like a tortoise, Thremp now realized.

  Elk went on, “We’re traveling the world, collecting the things.”

  “Some kind of academic type then? You’ll probably get a kick out of Port Orbital then, it’s full of the bookish types,” Its legs lifted and there was gravelly dragging noises along the river bed. It was getting closer. “But if you’re traveling out in the plains here, there’s going to be all kinds of beasts and baddies trying to kill you and eat you. We’ve been having quite a time wrangling these goblins and you’d best find some way to defend yourself.”

  The Hoardosphere finally rumbled its face up to meet Thremp’s eyes. As its craggy maw opened, smoke from old embers curled out and slow words followed, “I have tasted the lifeblood of these goblins and now have sense of those that share it. I can lead you to your quarry and we might witness further violence in daylight.”