Baal Dagon (Patreon)

An ageless wind sweeps across that land, carrying the dust of dead civilisations with it. Beneath sands and knolls stripped bare by tireless storms lie buried and forlorn the tombs of a people whose name history has forsaken. Within are the desiccated husks of what can only be imagined to be their leaders, their priests; their hierarchs – cocooned by sand, their eyeless lids ponder the passing of ages with an intellect that yet lingers on. The eyes of the world, of civilizations that surpassed theirs, care not for these mummies, for few know of them. Their legacy is ancient, warped by the passage of eons. They were of an old breed when the other mortal tribes were in their infancy, the demiurges not yet banished to the material. Alone they questioned the nature of the world, sought answers to mysteries that others daren’t comprehend. They ploughed through the relics of the Demiurges’ shaping of the material like scavengers sifting through the putrefying remains of a body. Who knows what secrets they found, what unthinkable lore they stole from the old ones; unintended for the brittle minds of petty mortals? Nought but the relics of their short empire remain, gasping for air beneath the twisted landscape of that desert: Baal Dagon.  


Some say that they lie, not entirely dead, yet still without life; their timeless dreams hanging like a pall over that place, permeating the fragile knolls like water on limestone. Whispers laced with fell promises and cyclopean conspiracies trickle across sand-imbued winds, falling as though by ancient design upon the ears of those unfortunate enough to wander in such lands. Most of these sinister murmurings are ignored; the obtuse minds of the itinerants on whose shoulders they land unable to comprehend the scale of that which assaults them. The few whose thoughts are penetrated by those timeless echoes are slowly driven crazy as, trickle by trickle, glimpse by glimpse, their thoughts are flooded by what foul secrets are revealed. Every last vestige of their mortal selves is betrayed, buried under the weight of despair and madness that envelops them, until they are little more than withered husks; their life extirpated, replaced with something altogether more sinister.  


No creature of the mortal world will suffer the presence of such a being, for there is nothing natural about one so afflicted. The land itself refuses it, growing brittle and grey under its footfalls. Plants wither and sicken at its touch and no beast will stand near one whose mortal vessel is possessed in such a manner. Decay follows the afflicted wherever they go, the trail of atrophy a warning to those who might be travelling: be warned, for abominations wander this land.