literature

oakrot part 1 work in progess

Deviation Actions

louismorel's avatar
By
Published:
681 Views

Literature Text

Long ago there was just the wild. A never ending horizon of green trees. But then something happened, something so small akin to a spark. But like a spark, something so insignificant that could die in a moment, but if it were to walk down another path it could cause a towering inferno. Man came with sharp axes, hacking away at supple wood. They would skin and gauge it until it was unrecognisable. A chair. A house. Boats. All once were great oaks, torn down and perversely mutilated until their dead corpses were just another tool for man. And they were the lucky ones. The rest were tossed into burning hungry furnaces, fuelling man’s industry and painting the sky black with smog. A world of wood was now one of steel and stone. In the corners of the world, the wilds huddled. A tiny shard of what once was. Soon to be consumed, like all the rest. But something happeded, man made a mistake. And soon the towering cities were empty. Bereft of the lights of industry and the endless uproarious bustle of humanity. And now nothing, not even a whisper. And the wild crawled out of its hiding place. It was so small. Just a spark. But you already know what hell a single spark can unleash. Roots and vines tightly wrapped themselves around man world. Like a noose around a dead man’s neck. The forest hungrily reclaimed its world. Soon, all there would be is an endless horizon of grinning trees. But perhaps, soon, you see another spark. But it could be nothing. But for now all there is are towering oaks and the near twilight caused by a great monolithic tree canopy blocking out the sun. And under there you sit, surrounding by roots and dead leaves. Tiny and huddled. Afraid and alone. But maybe just maybe we have found our spark.  







Oak rot
So you have an interest in living your little village? Exploring the outside world. Escaping from its large fortified walls and making a name for yourself in the wider world. The purpose of this book is to tell you calmly and reasonably why that’s a fucking terrible idea and to catalogue the seemingly endless ways this messed up world can kill you.
First, Oak Rot
Never go to sleep in the forests. No matter how tired, no matter how your body aches, never close those eyes. As soon as you fall to the ground and peacefully slumber, dark roots bore up around you. Tightly binding your body. And if you don’t have a buddy to immediately kick you awake, you risk never waking up. You will sleep more peacefully then the rest of the dead, but the roots won’t just grow around you they will grow into you. A hand will slowly wrinkle and darken, until it’s hard wood. Tiny leaves and flower buds will start growing out of your body. Your peaceful resting face, ever immortalised in wood. But getting to the point, fuck this poetic language – you fall asleep in the woods, you get turned into a tree statue. It’s feasible to cure oak rot if it’s in its very early stages, but you need a sharp knife and preferably have not eaten anything that morning. Otherwise your stomach’s contents are probably going to be all over the floor. Amputation isn’t exactly a calming activity. Some more, I would call backwoods people, personally infect people with their rot. Whether it’s to forever immortalise the dying loved one as a wooden statue, the reasoning is – being a tree is probably better than being dead. Or for our more fucked-up clientele, to turn your enemies into a wooden trophy surrounding yourself in people you dislike’s now frozen wood. It’s considered the pinnacle of cool in some of the more psychopathic parts of society.



Lily’s notes on oakrott. Two hours after subject falls asleep, vines and roots will begin to wrap round their body. After four hours subject will not wake naturally. And only more hours with physical force or excessively loud noises. After 6 hours roots and vines will begin to dig into their skin. Subject can be saved at this point but amputation is necessary. Ten hours is the point of no return. The roots would have sufficiently wrapped themselves around the subjects internal organs, that amputation would be lethal to subject. Around 48 hours till subjects total convertio to wood. Seems the only target pure strain humans, animals are

humanoids who have mutated beyond the homo-sapien classification can seemingly only be infected after consuming large quantities of black oak. Current acceptation to the rule is tarcrose, goats and this guy I once knew called gary. Within fully converted oak rot subjects you’ll find a sticky tar like substance which can be effectively used as lamp oil or fuel for a fire. Note to self, when burning fully converted oak rot subjects fulfil, don’t let of humans with a squeamish dispotition watch. At a glance it looks like you are burning a human being alive, and that does not make friends. Tarcrose seem partially immune to the effects of oakrot, though heavy secretions of the black tar like liquid previously mentioned covers their skin and composes not a significant part of their body. As well as small chips of wood, inedible though maybe marginally used as fuel. The forest frogs seem to eat them but I cant figure out if its because the frogs have the digestive abilities or they are just too stupid to realise they are eating something that would make a starving cannibal gauk at your diet choices. Oak rot infection can be avoided through avoiding close proximinty to black oaks. Avoiding long periods of inactive movement and sleeping. Avoiding black oaks in this world might be a bit of a challenge. But I’m quite lucky. As for sleeping, I don’t exactly need it.  



The lady Of Flies
You thought a single fly buzzing away in the background could be annoying. How about a few million accompanied by a very disgruntled queen? The reason all your farm animals have been mysteriously replaced by piles of white bone. And all your crops seem to wither and die. They are known by many names. The Godess of Rot, the swarm of Hungers, the Lady of many Children. Or, most commonly, Oh Shit its her.
One of the biggest problems when discussing the abominations that are found in our beautiful forest is where truth and fiction begins and ends. When reality can be more or less stark than the most heated fever dream, it can be impossible to tell which is folklore or fact. Especially when in this case our little lady seems to love adding additions to her folklore menagerie, posing as a god of death, an avenging angel, the dead come back to life.  It seems to be a little game with her. The stupider the belief that you hammer into these mortals heads the more cool points you win. Spin around three times, close your eyes and stay perfectly still, and the lady of flies will immediately and seriously vanish. Or to place all your valuable belongings in a very big pile and make sure they are entirely unsupervised. And because the Gods can see you are so trustingly naive you will stop the lady of the flies from stealing them. Unless you go and check up on them, in which case you have broken your secret pact with the Gods and the Lady of Flies will have stolen all your belongings because you are so suspicious and untrustworthy. As long as you never check to see if they have been stolen, they will never have been stolen. One of the more popular ones is the Lady of Flies is a Martyr, who sacrifice themselves to trap all rotten pestilence within them, that way saving everybody else from terrible illness. And you should give tribute and be humble and respectful, because they have sacrificed themselves to save you. And after all this time I haven’t even described what the Ladies of the Flies are.  I just thought it would be wise to inform you of how dubious the information about them can be. So take this all with a grain of salt. The Lady of Flies appears to be a young lady, black hair, pale skin, a rather bizarre browny black, oddly disturbing ball-gown. Apart from the offence to all fashion which is the ball gown they seem pretty harmless. If they weren’t always accompanied with a hoarde of minute, hungry black flies that will slowly eat anything and everything in their path that would make the locusts think they had been overdoing it a little, and our Lady in the centre of them all. I think I will leave you with Lily’s notes: if there is any source I trust when it comes to information about this messed up world she seems to know more than anyone else.  

Subject appears to be a female, age ranginf from 7- mid twenties in appearance. Though after the age of 25 not significant changes in appearance are noted. Age of individual specimens hard to determine. Specimens have claimed to be in the age range of 18 to the few thousands. Though due to the specimens attitude and sense of humour, all claims by then are very suspect aka they enjoy messing with people. Appearance seemingly exists of black hair, very pale skinand a tattered ball gown-esque dress, made out of a fabric with the black and dark browns. Closer inspection of the dress reveals it is actually part of the subjects body. And the dress itself is made of a combination of leather formed from the subjects skin and caratin. The reason of this specimen is of note. There’s plenty of messed up weirdos wondering this forest. Why is this one note worthy? Subject is always accompanied by a massive hoard of very small black flies. They will bite and suck the blood or sap from any organic life form in its line of sight. Due to their relative size it will take a long time for a subject being consumed by the flies to die. Usually plants will begin to brown and wither. And remain in life to get emaciated appearance before deaths ensues. But it may take months. And if the lady of flies moves on, her swarm will follow. And therefore most specimins consumed by the flies wil be saved with a small amount of recovery for them to rest before full recovery. Individual flies appear to have no digestive system. And appear entirely reliant on the ladies. She acts as a hive and a hub for the flies. But unlike most hives this hive is mobile, can defend itself and considerably more intelligent. The lady will tend to pursue farm land. As for the high concentration of highly nutritious plants and animals, most are malnourished due to the flies not being able to consume black oak due to the effects of oak rot and edible life apart from fungi and small plants trying  to eek out an existence on the meagre sunlight underneath the nearly impenetrable tree canopy. Due to
the scarcity of farmer bland and land not infested by black oak. Conflict over territory between the lady of the flies, humans and other lady of the flies is very common. Also due to the amount of land needed to support a single one, they tend to be very very territorial. And the majority of lady of the flies fatalities are due to fighting with others for territory. Their general demeanor and interaction with human beings seems to be mostly bored, detached lonely and annoyed. Due them being unable to interact with sentient life for long periods of time without them being consumed by a swarm of flies, they appear to be lonely with deep seated attatchment issues. With sometimes near psychopathic traits. Due to more advanced testing and research, it seems that these personality traits are purely environmental, brought on by the ladies isolation and rather unique situation. Most lady of the flies have parasitical relations pretending to be a god of death or of harvest that have not given tribute of sufficient food will make your crops fial, your animals die and your children sick. Im very much certain that they are not gods, but due to their abilities they can certainly follow up on their threats. A single lady of flies can be attached to  asmall village for generations and tends to be seen as a mythological creature of worship and if the ladies particularly smart, even some sort of benevolent spirit on which their guidance is needed on matters trivial or massive. Overall they are not a threat to the overlal civilised population. Only immensely large amoutns fo them could cause a post appocolapstic scenario due to their intense in fighting over territory. And large group of them is likely to tear each other apart before becoming a threat  









Hollows

Hollows are probably the most strange and confusing creature to inhabit our delightful forests. Considering that it is not trying to find new novel ways to kill you. They appear humanoid to a degree. The skin and flesh looking like a combination between wood and baked clay. Probably their most notable feature is having a hole where there face should be, revealing insides that, how could possibly be guessed!.. are hollow, mostly. They tend to be filled with bright technicoloured flowers and odd funghi spilling out of the hole where their face should be. Each one tends to be a unique colour and array of funghi. I don’t know how to put this but their general personality and demeanour is more than a little pre occupied. I doubt they would even look up if a planet sized asteroid was about to hit them in the face. They go around doing frivolous tasks that seem to have not much rhyme or reason. Whether it be getting a handful of sand from one side of the continent and then spending twelve years just to get it to the other side, and then to endlessly repeat the process, creating odd totems and rather unearthly churches. Some obscure gods. I would ask them what the hell it is all about, but considering they don’t have vocal chords, getting a reply might be slightly difficult. And even if they did getting them to care enough to give one would probably be even more impossible. In my opinion they have survived on just being, too boring and not threatening enough that nobody is ever bothered to pay attention. They are made of something like wood so they are not exactly edible. They are not remotely dangerous  enough to be a threat, and don’t exactly have some fantastical resource that everybody wants. They just endlessly pursue idle tasks with no rhyme or reason. I got someone to interrupt one going about their unfathomable duties. Admittedly I didn’t think he would go that far…. Setting a church one had built on fire. And then all he/she/it did was stand around, for hours and hours until eventually wandering of, coming back with a bunch of wooden lumber and starting from scratch. It’s hard to sell they don’t exactly have faces, but I can’t help but think he looked a little offended. Some have been taught in a more civilised part of the world. To go around doing repetitive menial tasks. It might take forever to get the idea into their empty heads but, once it’s there they will pursue it endlessly.  Whether it be filling street lights with lamp oil or polishing a floor. This may sound neat but in the case of the one polishing floors, the constant scrubbing eventually led to so much erosion the house collapsed. And our hollow standing in the middle of it looking a little confused and sad. And even when the people have long gone, they will go around their silly routines lighting streetlights in long abandoned cities. Maintaining stately homes where not a breath of human life has been there for hundreds of years. Theyre odd to say the least.  

Some say if you are infected with oak rot and you have a strong enough will, instead of turning into a tree you will turn into a hollow. Lily seems to be a walking dictionary when it comes to the insanity that is this world. She would normally give me a segment of notes on the creature I was currently inspecting. But it turned out she couldn’t be bothered. If it is not trying to rip someone’s face off it doesn’t exactly peak her interests.  

I’ll leave you with this. It always confused me why they are called hollows. At first they look like empty wooden shells. But if you have a chance to peek inside, you will find they are filled with bright colourful life.
© 2017 - 2024 louismorel
Comments0
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In