Solarth

“Anything could happen, and everything did.”

Everything changed when the Xurnons attacked. In the aftermath of the war, the earthly realm of Solarth entered a new age of sparks and shadows. From the frontier towns of the supercontinent to the ghastly Leviathan that circles the world; from the icy depths of Bellow to the burning stars above; these are tales of Solarth’s once and future histories, caught in time’s scabs, recounted in sound and word and image.

The Dread Cthuchoo Part I

Cthuchoo, Hell's murderous psychopomp, Aims to feast its wheels on the folk of the Frontier.

A band of adventurers moves to stand in its way.

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Cthuchu (kuh-thoo-choo) [Solarthan; colloquial]

“There is but one psychopomp in Hell.”

                                 --Unknown

Meaning and History

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From portmanteau of the Portal-Solarthan Chthónic meaning “of the underworld,” and Neander [Human] Choo-Choo (slang for the sound of train whistles). A sentient locomotive and primary psychopomp of contemporary Hell. The train runs on--and lives for--the culling of mortal souls, and sometimes wanders the mortal realm when the souls of the newly deceased are not enough to sustain its murderous urges or necrotic engine.

Cthuchu is descended from an imaginary creature conceived by a young dwarf of the First Chthonic Age. The dwarfling envisioned that people entered the underworld on a mischievous locomotive called “Emperor Choo-Choo.” Hell is the stuff of dreams, and though it exists in a genuine physical location beneath the earth its landscape is largely shaped by the imaginations of its inhabitants. Hell, then, is truly what you make of it, and so when the dwarfling died young, before popular religious beliefs could change her highly unconventional ideas, she found herself chugging towards the underworld on Emperor Choo-Choo. Her train passed many newly deceased souls along a track line to Heaven. Those, like the dwarf, who had imagined taking a train to the afterlife but had never thought about what sort of track their locomotive would ride on typically manifested on this conventional iron-beam track (a classmate of the dwarf, whose idea of Heaven was similarly shaped by their teacher’s reading of Heaven Train, who also died an early death, had imagined both a train from Heaven and the bone tracks that it rode on, and when she arrived in Heaven it was on a different track, made of bones).

Emperor Choo Choo and the dwarf’s journey to heaven took them past another track, where a vicious neander by the name of Dier, whose idea of hell was the journey itself, had spent three centuries laying down a flaming set of tracks.

Dier had seen many a train come and go, both in the afterlife and during her career as a train robber. Dier had fashioned herself a rich hellscape: she laid searing steel bars on the narrow cliffside trail that led to Heaven, creating a track that would only be finished on the day of judgment. Surrounding the mountain was Hell’s endless landscape of manifested torments, and occasionally a fellow worker—former train robbers all—would be trampled by a passing train carrying members of the corrupt upper class, who would then themselves careen off the unfinished track and into the pits below.

Dier was an intelligent person, and she perceived better than most the power of the individual to shape the Hell around them. She had accepted her damned existence because, frankly, she enjoyed pain and suffering and the whole “mountain track-above-Hell/unattainable Heaven thing” was funny as…well. But now she saw Emperor Choo-Choo, with its goofy anthropomorphic face (were those googly eyes glued on the front of it?), and it seemed to her the train was practically begging her to change it into something dark and monstrous. So Dier ripped off the twenty-pound hammer that she’d nailed into her own charred flesh some three hundred years ago, took a running jump off the mountain, and practically flew towards the humming locomotive. It’s actually humming, Dier noted as she landed on the polka dotted chimney stack. She peaked over the roof of the engine room and saw the young dwarf asleep on a pile of coal. The train is actually humming a lullaby to its young passenger, she marveled. Oh, this will be fun.

Readers, be assured that cute animals, intellectual property, and children under the age of eighteen will never experience traumatic suffering or horrible deaths in the retelling of this story. Explicitly. So we’ll just skip over the numerous X-rated details of the hijacking.

What follows in the centuries after Dier took control of the train, dear reader, is a tale of violence and depravity. Screams blending with the hiss of steam, crunching bones crushed under chugging spokes. Where once souls were ferried to the underworld on planes and boats and carriages, crawled beneath the crushing weight a thousand gnawing rats, or were walked under the control of parasitic skeletons that had replaced their host’s bones, there is now little activity but for the crackling of brimstone beneath the hell train’s burning tracks, and the moans of its many passengers, doomed to ride forever or be burned in its ravenous furnace. For the train began murdering all other modes of transportation to Hell until it became virtually the only ride people could take to get there. Dier’s railroad to heaven lies forgotten on the mountainside, but there is no set of tracks on the road to Hell that the abominable engine has not found and consumed.

Dier’s fellow highwaymen have found new employment on the train. They work the unending day building cars to accommodate new passengers. Sometimes they fall, and are roasted on the waiting tracks.

Few damned or living speak the sins of the demon train born of a child’s innocence and a killer’s lived experience of railroad-specific evildoing. This is largely because the train seldom leaves witnesses. But in some instances it is because the crimes of a demon train under the helm of a genius train robber, engineer, and murderer are often surprisingly technical.

And yet the train’s activities are felt in the world above. Across Solarth, myths have spread of the Necrotic Engine, the Trouble Train, the Anti-Caboose. In this edition of the encyclopedia we call it Cthuchu. The train’s appetite has outgrown hell, and it may come for us all.

Etymology and Related Names

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Etymology

From portmanteau of chthonic and choo-choo

Related Names

·      Cthchuchu (kuhth-choo-choo) [Neander; colloquial]

·      Chthochu -or- Chthochoo (thaa-choo) [Solarthan; formal]

·      Chthchoochoo -or- Chthochuchu (thaa-choo-choo) [Dwarvish]

o   Sometimes called “The Choo-Choo,” especially among Dwarvish children, due to similarity in pronunciation

The Heaven Sent

Say that one more time.

It’s a gun that shoots people straight to heaven.

Uh-huh. And the guys upstairs just let you make this?

I didn’t need Their permission.

…

…fine. They rang me up. Wanted to remind me that my diabolical plans were all part of Their Ineffable Design. They didn’t sound too happy about this particular part of Their design though. If you ask me. 

So what exactly are you going to do with it? A gun that gets people into Heaven is kind of antithetical to our mission.

Is it? Think: we’re going to start rolling these guns out in houses of worship around the world. Put them in the hands of devoted acolytes with a hundred different conceptions of divine truth. And explain, very simply, that it’s a gun that sends people directly to heaven. 

You’re incentivizing murder.

Well that’s obviously part of it, but the corrupting impact this technology will have on global social structures is more important to our cause than the corruption of individual killers. You’ve seen how their governments fight over euthanasia, how their religious leaders fret about suicide. 

Oh man. This’ll tear families apart.

Now you’re getting it. These guns will engulf the world in a moral crisis without ever firing a shot. The individuals who pull the trigger? They’re just icing on the cake.

So what are you calling it? The gun I mean.

The Heaven Sent.

lol

The Haunting of camp bassett (2023)

The moon shone bright on the waters of Lake Bassett. It was a full moon, the kind that wolves howl under. Also, fewer people stub their toes in the dark. No one ever thinks about the positives. The air was stifling on this warm summer evening in the Catskills. On a secluded corner of the lake was a dock, and beyond it, a campground. Once upon a time it had been home to a thriving summer camp. Children had roasted marshmallows and climbed trees and paddle boarded in the cool water. A dozen teenagers watched over them, flirting and laughing and earning their pocket money for the next school year.

But now the camp cabins were old and vine-covered, deserted for over a decade. The cause of that desertion was currently standing on the edge of the camp dock, staring silently across the moonlit water, a machete in one hand. Ten years ago this towering figure had turned the cabins into mausoleums and the bunkbeds into tombs. For ten years Camp Bassett had been the man’s place of personal solitude. That few dared tread there can be attributed to the man’s legend; locals knew to keep well enough away from the place, and wayward hikers inevitably discovered the deadly reason why.

            The Camp Bassett Slasher bent over the edge of the dock and grabbed a chain that went into the water. He pulled up a cage containing several fish. The fish flopped desperately, but he reached his hand into the enclosure with lightning speed, breaking them one by one in his large hands. He put the fish in a sack and tossed the cage back into the lake and then headed towards the camp.

He passed rows of cabins and a rec hall before arriving at a small shack. A light flickered faintly in a side window. Inside the shack there was an altar, built of candles and bones, on which he kept various trinkets: a heart-shaped locket, which opened to reveal a picture of two nubile teens canoodling; a camp roster; a blood-stained arrowhead; a yellowed scrapbook. The man didn't think of them as trophies, per se. They were more like holy items, or perhaps offerings to the mother he had lost to those naughty camp counselors so many years ago. For atop the altar sat his mother’s desiccated head, her hair wiry and her skin pressed tight to the bone. He would do anything to please her, anything to keep her safe, anything to be left well enough alone by the world that had abused them both.

            Which is why, upon entering his shrine to find a woman sitting at his fire pit, examining the altar and humming faintly to herself, the killer paused for only a moment before grabbing the machete he kept just inside the door and swinging it with inhuman force at the nape of her neck.

The blade shattered on contact, its pieces falling to the floor. The woman continued humming, unmoved and unmarked. He stood there for a full ten seconds, staring at her. She gave no sign of distress, let alone a desire to move. He looked at the broken blade in his hand and cocked his head to the side. Then he raised his leg and brought it down on her back with enough force to dent steel. It was like hitting an oak tree, and she did not budge.

The killer only paused for five seconds before reaching for the pickaxe that he kept on the other side of the door. He swung it at the side of her head in an arc so forceful that it made the furs dangling from the ceiling swing. The axe should have entered precisely through one ear and exited out the other-- whatever his faults, he had something of a flare for murder—but the pointed tip merely ricocheted off, making the man, who had been holding the weapon in a death grip, stagger.

The sitting woman stirred then, as if only just noticing the return of the shack’s usual resident. “Well this is your abode, I presume,” she said. She eyed the shattered bits of machete on the ground and the pickaxe in his hand. “Is this how you greet all your house guests?” The killer strode past her to a large wooden cabinet in a corner of the room. He flung it open, revealing a stockpile of lethal tools. He reached in and grabbed another machete. He started to walk back towards her before turning around and reaching into the cabinet again, grabbing a large hacksaw. He stabbed at her heart with the machete, but again, the blade simply broke against her flesh. So he brought the saw to bear on her neck, sawing futilely until the teeth began to snap off. He inspected the blade and cocked his head, as if he didn't know that saw teeth even could snap off. Then he walked behind her and put the saw around her neck, pulling in an effort to choke the life from her. It was like trying to squeeze an artillery shell. Almost immediately, the saw blade began to bend.

“You know, I'd taken the resident of this hut for a harmless survivalist,” the woman said, gesturing at the furs on the ceiling. “But it pains me to say I'm beginning to reassess. And I'd fully intended to leave if the owner of this fine cabin was just some ornery hermit who had simply asked me to leave.” She blinked as a log was brought down on her head, splintering harmlessly. “But I must admit, I’m intrigued by the lengths that you‘re willing to go to remove me from the earth itself.” She brushed bits of bark off her shoulder. “As well as”—she gestured to the severed head lolling on the altar—"by your choice of interior decorating. So I think I'll stick around a while longer. I want to see how this plays out.”

“And I could use the rest,” she continued, stretching her arms luxuriously and staring admiringly at the blue sky visible from the holes in the patchwork roof. As she did so the killer abandoned his tools and went for a hands-on approach, clasping her skull in his enormous mitts and pressing with all his strength. “The forest air feels good here,” she said, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. As the killer squeezed with enough force to break concrete the woman lowered her head to examine the broken machete bits as if his hands weren’t even there. He gave up that approach and made a half-hearted attempt to twist her neck, but he might as well have been trying to rotate the earth on its axis. Neck snaps weren’t really his style, anyway. Then he returned to the cabinet and withdrew a sledgehammer that was almost as tall as the cabinet itself, and the cabinet extended almost to the ceiling.  The hulking brute lifted the impractically large hammer with visible effort, hefting it behind him and arching it over his head. He brought it down hard on the woman’s skull. She looked up as it descended, the iron head making contact with the bridge of her nose. There was a mighty crack as the hammer broke on impact.

The moon rose and fell in the sky as the killer used a career's worth of deadly weapons in his attempt to dislodge his guest. He tried to gouge her eyes out, suffocate her with plastic wrap, and punch her head clean off. This attempted decapitation elicited a rare grunt from the stoic slasher as he clutched at his bruised knuckles.

“Are you gonna eat that fish?” the asked him, eyeing his catch, which lay forgotten on the dirty floor. She took the killer’s silence for an answer and she picked up the trout as he brought a chainsaw to bear on her back. From within a satchel she withdrew a small stove. “Not that I require food, mind,” she said conversationally as she put the fish in the pan and lifted it over the fire. “I don't have to do much of anything to keep this body running.” The chainsaw sent sparks flying as it ground against her invulnerable skin. She shouted to be heard over the loud whirring. “I explained my condition to a young girl once, who said I was basically Superman!” She called. “He’s—I don't know much about this man, but apparently he doesn't need to eat or sleep either, if he’s under the rays of a yellow sun. Not that sunlight is what gives me my unique abilities—” she examined her flawless hands as he bludgeoned her impotently with the whirring sawblade—"but you don’t look like the kind of person who’s all that invested in someone else’s backstory, so I’ll spare you the details.”

Having gone through his entire inventory of conventional weaponry, the killer began to wrack his dull mind for new solutions. He thought back on some of the more inventive ways in which his victims had attacked him over the years. He began to walk out of the shack, but stopped short in the doorway. He turned and approached the altar. He looked back at the woman and then reached for the severed head. As soon as he began to lift it the head started shedding bits of flesh and hair. He hastily set it back down, a cloud of dust rising around it.

“I don’t know how you’re supposed to preserve a body,” the woman said, “but leaving it sitting in a leaky shack in the middle of the woods probably isn’t the way to do it.” The killer gave an angry grunt. The woman sighed. “I promise not to touch it.” She dubiously eyed the decaying skull. “Believe me. Just go about your business. I’ll hold down the fort.” The killer moved towards her menacingly. He towered above her, hands clenched into fists, chest heaving. She stared back with polite interest. Then he stormed out of the hut, slamming the door behind him.

He visited a clearing just north of the campgrounds. In the years since he’d taken up residence in the camp the field had become a repository for the vehicles of the unfortunate hikers and tourists who had stumbled upon the camp over the years. He rummaged through the many rusty hoods until he found one that contained a box and cables that looked like the kind one of his victims had once used to electrocute him. He returned to the shack and attempted to shock the woman with the battery and cables, but the equipment didn’t produce a charge. He returned to the junkyard and returned behind the wheel of a beat up Ford Pinto. He drove clumsily, sideswiping trees before finally crashing into the shack’s porch. He left the engine running, then hooked the jumper cables to the car’s battery.

Inside the shack the woman was humming again. The fish in the pan was beginning to sizzle, and a pleasant aroma wafted through the room. The killer walked up and thrust the jumper cables into her sides. She continued to hum as her skin absorbed the current like rubber. The killer’s moist and decaying flesh, on the other hand, proved an excellent conductor. Arcs of blue light spread from his hands and danced across his entire body, making him jerk and shake and start to smoke. “Oh for pete’s sake…” the woman said, turning to look at the spasming giant. And then the killer’s world went black.

He came to several hours later, as gentle rays of light began to fill the holes in the shack’s roof.

He sat up suddenly and swiveled his head to look at the woman. She was still tending the fire, and did not appear to have moved an inch. “Morning,” she said. “Want some fish?” The killer was breathing heavily, his big shoulders rising and falling. His ragged clothes were black and charred. He rose and raised his arm towards her as if to deliver a backhand blow, then dropped it. He gave a very huffy grunt. Then he turned and stomped outside.

            The woman whistled to herself as, outside, the dulcet tones of nature were drowned out by the sounds of the Lake Bassett Slasher having a temper tantrum. He rampaged through the campgrounds, punching holes in cabin walls and breaking what little glass remained in the windows of cabins four and seven. After a full hour of this, he stopped as suddenly as he had started, breathing heavily. Then he began to walk towards the lake. He reached the water's edge and just kept going, sinking deeper into the murky water till only the back of his scarred bald head was visible, and then that too disappeared beneath the surface.

The sun reached its peak and began to set. It had just begun to disappear behind the tips of the tallest trees when the water started to bubble near the center of the lake. A few minutes later the killer reemerged near the dock. He sloshed to shore. In one hand he held a head horribly disfigured with burn scars. Unlike the head in the shack, which spoke only in his mind, this head was considerably more chatty. “Were you lonely without me, little camper?” it cackled. “Wanted to play some more with your dear Uncle Bernie?”

The killer paid the head no mind. He marched to the shack and threw the door open. He slammed the head into the woman’s lap. She stared down at it with interest. The head stared back. “Well, little morsel, who are you and why hasn't the dunce in the mask murdered you yet?” the head asked.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” she said. “He's been at it for a while now.”

“Conventional warfare isn’t getting the job done, eh?” the head said, observing the detritus of broken blades that surrounded them. A gleam appeared in his eye. “I think I know why my little camper fished up old Bernie after all these years.” He looked at the killer, who was looming over the woman’s shoulder. “Not that I’d do you any favors, you big boob,” he said. “But it's been a long time since I've been able to stretch my limbs. He stared at the woman and licked his ravaged lips. I don't think I'll pass up an opportunity to have fun with a new playmate.”

“What do you have in mind?” she asked. “Oh, nothing too fancy,” the head said, as the gleam in his eyes grew brighter. “Why, for now we can just chat. And then later, when you’re tired and can hardly keep your eyes open, I'll sing you a little lullaby.” His eyes shone with an eerie light now, mesmerizing and hypnotic. The candles on the altar seemed to dim, and an unusually warm wind blew through the room. “And once you’ve fallen asleep, I’ll pay you another visit.”

“Ah,” the woman said, looking pained. “Our interactions will have to remain in the waking world, I'm afraid. You see, I don’t sleep per se. When I want to take a break from the conscious world, I meditate. It's really not the same thing at all.”

“Oh,” the head said, frowning, “Do you dream?”

“Afraid not,” she said.

“Well then,” said the head.

“I'll SWALLOW YOUR MOTHER’S FUCKING SKULL, I’LL RAPE HER FUCKING MEMORY!” the head of Uncle Bernie screamed as it sailed through the air. “I’LL—”there was a sploosh as the head hit the surface of Lake Bassett and sank once more to its watery prison. The killer stood on the edge of the dock, the moon rising above him. He dimly remembered the moment he’d stood on this same spot the previous night. It’d been the last moment of peace he’d known. He walked back to the shack but stopped before he got to the door. He stood there for several minutes, just staring at it. Inside the woman was whistling a sweet refrain. He dimly recognized it from a time long past, when he had lived with his mother. The other children used to sing that song around the campfire on hot summer nights like this. The smell of fish wafted out of the cabin window. The evening air was thick with bugs. Flies swarmed around the killer’s head, but as always the mosquitoes gave him a wide berth. It had been several years since he had spent the night outdoors. When there weren't trespassers in his campground, there was little reason to leave his mother’s side. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance. He cocked his head in its general direction. The sound and feel of summer was so much more vivid outside the shack’s walls.

He turned away from the shack and walked through the woods until he reached the camp lodge. The words Camp Bassett were still faintly visible on the porch, faded by a long decade of natural wear and tear. Inside the lodge there was a large chimney. The killer picked up a fire poker and began prodding it up into the dark recess of the stack. He was showered in clumps of soot and dust, and then a large shape fell through the darkness and landed next to him with a dull thud. It was a sleeping bag, one end of which was charred and melted. He unzipped the bag, revealing a corpse. It was horribly disfigured, bits of burned flesh strewn across the bones like bits of a kite torn on the branches of a barren tree. The decayed face was locked in a rictus scream of agony and terror. He yanked the body out of the bag and tossed it back into the fireplace. Then he took the sleeping bag outside. He laid it on a mossy patch of earth. Then he climbed into it as best he could. The flies buzzed about his head, eager to feast on his necrotic flesh. The eyes behind his mask closed. All around him, the wildlife sang.

Morning. The woman was playing solitaire with a yellowed deck of cards. “I found these in Cabin Two,” she told the killer as he entered the shack. “I got bored this morning and took a walk around.” The killer looked at her. “I don’t suppose you play poker?” she said. The killer’s face, covered as it was with a white mask that obscured his mouth and eyes, nevertheless seemed to grow somehow blanker as she asked him about his familiarity with a long list of two-person card games.

“…go fish?” she said, and then shook her head, finally giving up. “Who am I kidding. You’re not a card playing kind of guy, are you.” Then her expression brightened. “But I could teach you!”

It was then, and only then, that the Lake Bassett Slasher truly lost it. He began to scream. He screamed for a very long time. It was like the song of a castrati, shrill but powerful, and it made the cabin walls shake and the crickets and birds outside fall silent. Then he kicked out at the cards savagely, sending a handful of them into the firepit. The parched paper immediately ignited. Several embers landed on the dry, dusty floorboards, and the woman quickly smothered them with a handkerchief. “We don’t want to start a house fire,” she said.

The killer stood, the sound of his breath contorting as it heaved against the plastic interior of his mouthless mask. He looked towards the altar, at the trinkets and at the head that stared back at him with a piercing, eyeless gaze. He exited the hut, returning minutes later with a large sack. He began to stuff the contents of the altar into the sack; the locket, several bracelets, a bloody shoelace, a bloody arrowhead. Eventually all that was left on his shrine of bones and candles was the shriveled head. Swinging the sack in one hand over his shoulder, he gingerly stroked the head with the other. Dust came off it in small clouds. Its expression remained unchanged. Then he walked to Cabin Three, where he set the sack gently on the dirt-caked floor. He walked out, closing the door firmly behind him.

The killer then lifted the tarp off a woodpile next to the cabin. He grabbed as many logs as he could carry and brought them into the shack. “I think there’s plenty of wood on the fire already,” the woman said. The killer ignored her. He shoved a log into the fire pit, and then another. When the pit was full to the brim he began arranging more firewood around it in a circle. The wood was ancient, and he’d kept it in the one part of the shack that was fully sheltered from the elements. Within seconds it had begun to smoke and burn. “Ah,” the woman said.

The fire spread to the floorboards, descending on them with a vengeance. The killer stared at the red flames, and then walked to the altar. He stared at the head as the flames began to climb the walls and leap at the ceiling. He did not move when the fire began to lap at his feet. It was only when his shoes caught fire that he turned from the altar and walked to the door. He turned and looked a final time at his home; at the bed of animal furs, the cabinet of rusty tools, the hooks hanging from the ceiling. Lastly, he looked at the head. It stared at him silently, its gaping mouth whispering words that no one could hear. The gently flickering flames of the altar candles began to disappear behind the growing tendrils of fire leaping from the floorboards. He turned and walked out of the door.

He stood among the trees as the moon fell in the sky. The heat of the flames washed over him as they consumed his home. Eventually there was a great splintering crack as the building collapsed in on itself. The killer stood there as the flames dwindled into smoking embers. As dawn broke, there was nothing but a charred and smoking plot of land, and sitting in the middle of it was the woman. Her clothes were burnt to a crisp, hanging in tatters from her body. From between her folded legs she pulled out a fresh deck of cards. Next to her was her pot, turned upside down. She flipped it over, revealing the last remaining pieces of fish. “The flames seared it real nice,” she called to him. “There's still plenty left for you, if you want some.”

The killer stared at her. She stared back. Then she turned and watched the sun rising gently over the trees. “Seeing all that fire burn around me was pretty awesome,” she said. “But I've got to say, even after so many lifetimes, there's nothing quite like the majesty of that big beautiful fireball as it lights up the horizon.”

Silence followed. The sun rose higher in the sky. The morning mist around the killer’s feet began to evaporate, and the lake’s still surface took on a glistening silver sheen. The woman closed her eyes and listened to the birds in the trees and felt the summer air on her skin.

The killer appeared at her side. He stood there for a moment, among the smoldering wreckage. Then he sat down beside her, legs outstretched, his back straight as a board. He raised his head, cocked it, and joined her in gazing at the rising sun.