Cloak Games: Tomb Howl by Moeller Jonathan

Author:Moeller, Jonathan [Moeller, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Azure Flame Media, LLC
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9: Tentacles

My first choice of word to describe the myothar would be “ugly.”

No, “hideous” would be better.

But that would be understating it. That would be like calling the sun “bright” or the ocean “damp.” Both descriptions would be true but inadequate.

The myothar…how to adequately describe the myothar?

First, imagine a man standing about ten feet tall. Also, instead of skin, he has a glistening gray hide like leather dipped in translucent slime.

Next, imagine that this man is morbidly obese, so fat he shouldn’t be able to move without a motorized wheelchair, but that he is nonetheless able to move with remarkable speed.

Instead of a head, he has a massive squid-thing bulging from his neck, a squid thing with long twitching tentacles. Instead of hands, dozens of smaller tentacles sweep back and forth from his wrists, some of them lined with glistening suckers.

Drape the entire thing in a heavy black robe the size of a tent, and that would be a myothar.

And the smell…God, I don’t even want to talk about the smell. I had always thought the breath of an anthrophage was the worst smell in this world or any other. The myothar gave off a smell like dead fish left in the summer sun for three days, a horrible mixture of a fishy odor and rotting flesh.

I called all my magic to me, preparing to strike, and the myothar walked towards me. Or it sort of flowed towards me. I saw thick, fleshy tentacles lashing out from beneath the hem of its black robe, pulling it along the crumbled asphalt. The tentacles left a trail of translucent slime behind it.

The creature stopped about twenty yards away, the tentacles around its head waving. Behind the tentacles, I saw two huge black, red-glazed eyes watching me, weighing me. The thing had absolutely no expression that I could interpret, but I somehow had the impression that the creature was surprised to see me.

Then it started to speak.

Its voice was just as unpleasant as its appearance and smell, a bubbling rasp that sounded like exactly the voice that a horrible squid monster from another world would use.

It spoke the Elven tongue. Quite well, actually.

“You are not an Elf,” rumbled the myothar.

“I am not,” I said, using the Elven tongue. It took me a bit to get my brain around it. Morvilind always talked to me in English. The last time I had used the Elven tongue had been six months past or a hundred and fifty-eight years ago, depending on how you counted.

“You are one of the apes that inhabit this world,” said the myothar.

“We usually call ourselves humans,” I said.

“Apes.” There was no mistaking the disdain in the gurgling voice. “The Elves are apes. The humans are apes. Both are apes. The humans are simply dumber apes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but at least we’re not giant dripping squids.”

I don’t think the myothar cared about or even noticed the insult.

“You appear human,” said the myothar, “but you wield aetheric force beyond the capability of humans.

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