The goblins gather around Udo's groggy form and look up, trying to see what caused the branch to fall. When it is clear that no more will be coming down, they grab Udo and drag him before their female leader.
She growls something in their native tongue and the goblins toss Udo's body at the now slightly wider fissure in the ancient shrine.
The nasty flay of dark tentacles lash out abruptly and pull Udo in!
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The goblins meanwhile, continue chipping away at the shrine until they have reduced it to rubble - revealing a shadowy pallor that lingers over the site – like some kind of ghostly black curtain that separates the worlds.
The female goblin commands her minions to step back and she calls forth the beast from the darkness. Then lumbering through the now unsealed portal is a pitch-black monstrosity standing vaguely tree-like on three enormously squat trunks – each ending in a bulbous mass of gnarled hide that sinks several feet into the ground with every step. Above, and reaching almost forty feet tall, the main bulk of the thing is a profusion of enormous writhing tentacles, sprouting like the limbs of a tree from a giant tumorous growth of knotted bark-like dermas where the three trunk-legs fuse together.
With a bellowous roar, a gigantic toothy maw opens centrally in what could be called the top of its head and the smell of open grave billows out. The massive tentacles then reach down and snatch up a number of goblins that failed to heed the leader's instructions to back away far enough – who are then carried screaming into the crushing jaws of the monstrous horror. Bones snap loudly as bodies are crunched messily within – blood and viscera spraying out from between a tangle of long sharp teeth.
Again the female leader cracks her whip and the titanic thing responds – shirking back, as if the tiny goblin whip could actually hurt it somehow.
The female goblin then barks out some orders and the tentacled horror slowly begins plodding to the west, knocking trees down as it goes, and leaving deep furrows in the earth, where its massive trunk-like legs sink in with every earth-shaking step.
After letting the thing get a good lead on them, the goblins follow behind it – disappearing up into the foothills that climb higher into the mountains beyond.
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Back in the Underword, Udo suddenly manages to shake off the unconsciousness. He vaguely recalls getting ‘sniffed over’ and then summarily rejected – and tossed into a dark corner. Maybe he did smell worse than a goblin after all – or something about him didn’t appeal to its sense of taste.
Either way Udo was still alive; and found himself in a strange cavernous underworld. Looking around, he could see a faint glimmer of light, shining in through a dark wispy curtain of some kind to one side of the unfathomably huge cavern he was now in. It appeared to be the clearing where the goblins had once been.
As for the cavern itself and the underworld, Udo could not see the depth of it – but noises and echoes in the darkness suggested something of truly cyclopean scale…
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Topic: Udo's Nature Commune (Read 80419 times)