Reminiscences of the Tiamat's First Born (From a Journal of the Demonic)

The Tiamat was no dream of woe?
But rather a wicked-warrior so real and cruel:
She had several shades of green,
And was a demonic beast large and wormy
with no match; and long nightmare to be.
—Dlsiluk

Discontented is he to whom the reminiscences of youth bring only dread and gloom. Pitiful is he who looks back upon separate days in vast and gloomy chambers, halls and forest huts with brown cobwebs hanging, maddening rows of dead bodies and limbs, animal remains, or upon fearful sights in twilight orchards of which my mother, huge and ugly, gigantic, and burdened with me, she’d silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot, her and her demonic friends were, demigods gone wild—to me, they dazed the population near the city of Yort, in the land known now as Asia Miner, I was disappointed in my early youth; back then, back in 6008 BC, when her and her friends made the land barren, the broken. And yet I am somehow, oddly I say, somehow, satisfied, content, and cling desperately to those old reminiscences, which my mind for moments—now and then, threatens to reach out and beyond the normal, if indeed I do not hold them back, and absorb them little by little.
Where exactly I was born, I know not where, nor care, save that the forest is where I woke up to see light, and breath air, finitely old I already felt, and considerably horrible; full of dark thoughts running ramped throughout the passages of my mind, and having high thick walls, my eyes could find only shadows, and my mind seemed always hideously damp, cursed from birth, as my surroundings were piled high with corpses, and I never got to know of whom the dead were. My youth never saw much light. But my mother would say, “You are the first born, and feel lucky you were born here, on earth, not under it where there is no light, where I was born.”
High up in the tree tops, I could see many things, it was likened to a great tower, or at least for me it was, and the sky seemed to hold so many mysteries back then, but that was to a degree, cleaned out by my mother and her friends, especially Murdock, when he came around I’d climb that tall tree branch by branch and hide; little if any time to dream, or reminisce back then.
I lived in this forest for quite a long time (until my mother had a temple build in the city of Yort for her by its worshipers of her), or so it seemed, a long time, I suppose I cannot really say for sure how long, I didn’t know how to measure time back then. Nor do I remember who cared for my needs, yet I recall going through the forest, and talking to a man named Sinned occasionally, a dread to my mother in later days. And my brother, he was born sometime down the road, can’t remember exactly when, he seemed simply to show up one day, and I had to keep an eye on him, or get a whipping from my mother. And likewise, I met my sister not sure if she was older than I, or younger, she was although brought up from the pits of the underworld, so I suppose she was older, Gwyllion was her name, and there was the demonic Mantocore, a friend of my mother’s from the netherworld who came to visit her off and on.

I do remember now, —somewhat that is, beings of another nature caring for me now and then, but I cannot recall, for the life of me, recall any one person. I think whoever nurtured me, or nursed me, was an animal, beast or something worse; I’ve blocked it out of my mind, and to this day do not care to surface it. In any case, spiders and bats, and rates all seemed to run from me, and I liked that, and I liked eating them, not for the flavor or because I was hungry, but rather, to get used to killing, my mother said it was good practice, work on the reflexes. I didn’t have a conception of a living person in those early days, but when I saw Sinned, I mockingly did, yet perhaps distorted, for he was a good man, but there were many good men as my mother would say later on, “All good men decay and taste just like bad men.”
To me there really was not a thing wrong with eating human flesh left in our front yard, its bones, I never saw the person alive, so it was nothing grotesque to me, bones were simply bones and skeletons of a being once alive, or in crypts deep in the ground, brought up for dinner. Back then, these things I write about now in my diary, were simply every-day happenings, nothing out of the ordinary, they were more natural to me, than unnatural. I had no human teachers to guide me, no human voices to teach me; my characteristics were a matter of unthought-of associated steps (I learned by association) in a developing personality (observations you might add), equal to my mother’s; somehow instinct is rolled up in this process also, as any son to a mother would unconsciously develop aspects of hers, so I did the same.

And so as time passed, and seasons came and left, I did as most children would do, waited to grow up, but I grew fast, real fast, but old, no, I did not become, in the sense of aging as humans do. In this process I longed for more than what I had, much more. The climbing of the great tree became boring. As did my mother’s temple in the days to come. And at last I started to venture near the edge of the forest, but never beyond it, and to be quite frank, several miles from it. I though I might fall off the edge of the world should I venture any closer, folks talked about that back then. Yort was high up on a mountain top of sorts, it came out as if to a plateau though. If you glimpsed from its edge, and jumped over it, you’d parish, mighty waters were far below this edge. To the other side was the forest, and beyond the forest was another world.

I journeyed away from my mother’s camp, deep in the thick forest, climbing over roots and rocks until I reached an opening where it all ended, and I clung onto the last tree, fearful I‘d never find my way back, I told myself, yet, I was running away (was I not) or at least in a way I felt I was. Ghastly and hauntingly was the dread of letting go of that last tree, to walk into a land unknown. I had created a small foothold where I stood. The land in front of me looked isolated, desert like, and rocky. No noise like in the deep winged forest. I didn’t make any progress for a long while, I just stood there. Then I climbed up the dark tree, as if it was the tower I had climbed so many times before, near my mother’s hovel, it was dusk. The tree was thinner then the tower, yet it supported my weight, and I found my body had a new kind of chill to it, a recurring chill, as it attacked me.
I folded my arms from the shivering, “Why…?” I asked myself, “…do I not go into the unknown land,” for I dared to come this far. I fancied myself an adventurer now, vainly so, one free hand one clutched to a tree. I embraced it like it was the last bone to chew on in my mother’s back yard.

All of a sudden, after an hour of climbing this tree from limb to limb, or branch to branch, crawling up it like a snake in slow motion, below laid a desperate sheer drop, should I let go; thus, I felt my head touch something, some kind of something. In the darkness, the moon shedding a lace of light above me, I raised my eyes; something stared at me, immovable. Then it came at me, deadly, clinging to me like a slimy worm, but it was hairy, it had paws, it pushed at me; I started to make a fearful decent. I fumbled about the base of the tree, and for the first time, I looked upon it, saw it, the stars above it shed more light, it was a red-tailed, winged Mantocore (head of a beastly man, and body of a beastly lion, and a tail that stung, with needle like knifes attached to it).
I had heard about them, seen one of them visit my mother. More and more I reflected upon it, as it did me, we both had stopped in our tracks to check out the other. I thought looking into its yellowish eyes, ‘…what gray secrets reside in them,’ for here was a creature like me, cut off from the rest of the world. And here we were unexpectedly, his eyes like stone, rough and strange, trying to figure out what its next step would be, if it was supreme to me, if its strength, could overcome me, was I an obstacle? Or should it make its escape. There was a kind of ecstasy to all this, it was testing me, and I stood shining in tranquilly as it did, iron fists ready to fight, stone like muscles, I never before was put into a test, like this.




With an utmost burst of strength, I grabbed it by one of its wings, dragged it down to my level, fancying now I had attained the very peak of conquest, but the sudden unveiling of the moon, by a cloud, allowed it to gain better sight and jump, and it did, and I stumbled, slowly falling from branch to branch in the dark, for it was still very dark. It was on top of me, and I carefully tried to unlock its teeth which were into my right forearm. Falling from this astonishing height, with a beast on top of you, the moon shinning on top of it was most demoniacal of all shocks.
It was the most unbelievable moment in my life, and the most unbelievable tragedy I had to undergo in my life, and a terror, a bizarre moment.
But I learned marvels do happen; the sight itself was horrendous, dizzying to say the least. Here was this creature stretched around me like a snake, and I, I was heading toward solid ground, his paws, like slabs of stone hitting my face, I was at this point, half unconscious only.

We hit the ground like a falling stone off a cliff, rolled a tinge, I staggered out of the forest, I had fallen on top of the beast, directly, his mind was stunned, and his twitching body, moved chaotically in circles, but his eyes still held the frantic craving to chew on my arm, yet it could not move much, its spine was cracked, I heard it crack, fantastic wonder of mishaps. I neither knew nor cared to be exact on the results of its wound, for me myself knew not who I was for a moment, neither of us any longer fearsome of the other. I had walked around him like a curiously tired cat.

I was now in the forest, ready to vanish from this part of the world, yes it took all this to push me out into the venerable new world, unfamiliar, maddening, perplexed, but I was now there. The trees branches were demolished, the wings of the creature were crushed. Accordingly, advancing I looked back a few times, saw the creature moving about, vaguely moving, but moving, it couldn’t hold any one expression, then as I got farther away, it looked incredibly remote (such recollections).
I now stepped further into the unknown world, the nightmare was quick to come, and now quick to go away, should I return to help the creature, I’d surely pay a price, and so I told my terrifying self, for I had a harsh demonstration of its kindness.
Scarcely had I made it out alive, when I heard wild dogs in the distance, they were dragging the Mantocore away, it was panicking, I head its cry, and madly I was fleeing into the deep unknown picking up my pace, blindly plunging into an awkward world, an escape. The cries were shocking, yet I kept my faster pace, still dazed, listening to the dogs yelp, and the creature cry. The cries were indescribable, unmentionable, vivid, but I took my delirious legs and kept walking.

I was nearly mad trying to escape now the dogs, and hearing the cries of the Mantocore in my brain. I did not want to face a second cataclysmic nightmare with the jackals as I did with the beast, there were many; I did not shriek, I simply walked faster, the jackals could smell me, the wind came down my way and onto the forest. There yelps were like fiendish ghouls, swimming within the night-wind. I remembered the fright I was in, most terrible it was. In this ultimate horror, this black reminisce, this chaos, listening to the echoing of the dogs, my mind created images, as I fled from a world I actually was safer in. I wanted to head on back, but I knew the dogs would not allow it. Perhaps the dogs were mocking me with their cries, hoping I’d come back to face them, they probably knew my mother, and hoped I’d be meat and bone for them. But they never clamed me, I was now an outsider to them, and they did not want to venture into this unknown world, where there was little green, and cold weather, and only spots of water.

1-1-2008