Fiction Friday (Macabre Manses): Cult of Formalhaut

As a child Gruxm Goretooth was often alienated by his tribe, getting along with only a few of them—eight, to be precise. Gruxm and the fellow goblins that he called friends suffered daily night terrors involving traumatic visions that both haunted and confused them. When the visions began to intensify, they were drawn towards the occult, learning what they could from the tribal shaman. From these learnings, sinister urges and desires began growing within their hearts. On one particularly gloomy evening, Gruxm and the rest of his following snuck through the tribe’s encampment, murdering everyone in their sleep. After the onslaught they attempted to contact the deity they believed had been responsible for the hellish dreams that drove them mad; after countless efforts and many sleepless nights, they successfully called out to a demiplane whose sole inhabitant was a cosmically vast mass of swirling space dust and interstellar energies.

Final-Hallway-CNearly infinite in every direction for an unfathomable distance, the being is known by only one moniker of its own devising—Fomalhaut. Gruxm and his followers beseeched it to grant them their desires, as well as power enough to spread chaos within their realm. Fomalhaut granted each of them mastery over magic and sent them on a journey of discovery and destruction, asking in return only that they continue to search for a method to release Fomalhaut from its demiplane upon the rest of the universe. These nine empowered goblin sorcerers all went their own ways in hopes of being the one to release the dark entity and to gain its favor. Among them, Gruxm was by far the most talented and respected, and while each sorcerer drew in their own followers to worship and revere Fomalhaut, Gruxm’s adherents have the most loyalty to the cult and its goals.

For years, Gruxm has subscribed to the theory that if he could in some way travel to Fomalhaut’s home plane, he might be able to bring back with him at least a small portion of his dark lord’s glory. Now, ten years after the establishment of the cult, Gruxm has successfully traversed to the demiplane and safely returned, carrying a flask filled with Fomalhaut’s essence. The spell that Gruxm used to travel to the demiplane was far too weak to achieve the entity’s freedom, but its basis paved the way to the goblin’s next experiment—to open a permanent doorway between the two realms, here at the Macabre Manses.

 

[Submitted by Jeremy Kleve]

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