The Folly of Agreya

In a curious land unknown a mercenary makes a dire mistake

Agreya's craft was dashed upon the jagged shores of an unknowable isle. His crew, mercenary refugees fleeing from the Great Hyperion Cataclysm, was sundered atop the rocky spires and drowned but a distance from the opalescent shore. For 9 lunar cycles he wandered, starving and aimless, searching for any vestige of civilization among a desolate, grey plain studded with crooked and toothy stones. 

On the tenth cycle, after a tiring journey across the jagged, scorned wasteland he came to a line as if drawn across the land. What once was a rocky plain was now a bed of deep blue moss with gargantuan translucent crimson mushrooms pulsating with a vermilion hue within, exuding a gaseous vapor of bio-luminescent spores that rose to the sky, staining it with the color of freshly spilled scarlet.

Agreya was not exalted by this transpiring. Instead he came to fear the colossal fungi, for among his lands red was a sign of poison and of a terrible rotting death. With his bowels clenching from pain of hunger and thirst he grasped a handful of the azure lichen, pressing it to his cracked and bloody lips. The taste of rot filling his mouth he cast the growth aside, wherein a curious event happened.

The battle hardened Agreya perchance to notice a violet robed man lounging among the moss. Though his features were that of the kith of which Agreya battled, upon his face was affixed a mask of pure ivory, twisted and angular in ways that immediately confused the warrior. At the side of the stranger was the titanic stalk of one of the monstrous fungi, of which with a large razor he shaved slivers off of the pulpy fungal stalks and brought them underneath his mask, which then bobbed with a greedy devouring.

Agreya's fears of the crimson fungus were affirmed by the presence of his enemy feeding upon the glowing mass, so carefree in this foreign realm. So as not to alert his presence to the stranger, he skulked away past the towering mushrooms back to the grey wastes. Upon crossing the threshold of land drawn by the line of sea blue moss, his knees buckled in his fatigue and he fell upon the rocks, clutching his empty stomach and chocking from dehydration, the flavor of the wretched moss drained of nutrients by the gigantic fungi still lingering in his raw and parched mouth.

The Host of Faces bent down to the broken man, removing his mask so that he may place upon the lips of Agreya his own pale lips. And so it was the last kiss of the proud Agreya came from the beautiful lips of Agreya. 

Author's Note

Please bear in mind this is one part of a much larger whole, which creates a mythos featuring abstract and metaphysical gods.

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