Deepist Lore
A description of minotaurs
We are calling these beasts Minotaurs, a name that will no doubt sound familiar out of legend. There is no question in our minds that these incredible masses of muscle, horn, and hate, are the very monsters that inspired those eldritch tales. Still, biceps like these simply don’t translate to the page.
What we now know is that Minotaurs share key skeletal and muscular similarities with Drauvs, making it highly likely that the two starkly different monsters are somehow related. The obvious differences are possibly indicative of a split early in the dawn of history, and we have heard tell of ancient sorcerers whose canvas was the world, whose paints were living beings and the forces of primal energies... These are merely myths, and myriad reasons exist why such a split might have occurred (sorcerers, though).
Minotaurs are shaped like massive men, with the heads of bulls encasing shockingly human-like brains. They stand a good foot or two taller than the tallest man, and are half again as strong as our best warriors, on average. Their powerful bodies are covered with fine hair, and they commonly weave jewelry of bone, and whatever other materials are at hand, into their hides. Like Drauvs, they show disturbing social tendencies, but are much more solitary, appearing more high-strung and unlikely to cooperate than even their famously violent relatives.
The behavior patterns we see are mostly nocturnal, and they show a preference for dark places such as caves and dense forests, away from the sun. Minotaurs, it would seem, have a deep affinity for music. Often, when the noises in the dark feel rhythmic, or hauntingly tuneful, it is the strange soft music of one of these bull-creatures, a tune to give pace to the solitude, or possibly, to calm the nerves in the midst of the hunt. Almost strictly carnivorous, these creatures prey upon other cave-dwellers, no matter how ferocious. A Minotaur seems startlingly incapable of calculating survival-risk, and they will start fights with creatures or bands more than capable of destroying them. A deep rage appears to suffuse their thought-processes, in the moments when a human would normally be weighing the risks and rewards of fight or flight.
Possessed of undeniably deep emotions, Minotaurs are generally proud in bearing, belying their monstrous appearance with sensitive ideas of respect and honor. What little language they use seems borrowed, as if it were merely a convenience they thought to implement, not at all a necessity they would care to develop. They seem to favor elegant, extravagantly powerful weaponry, and rarely possess armor, or even clothing. Normally found alone, Minotaurs show little regard for prioritizing or strategic combat. Some breeds, however, appear to be learning to hunt in threes, favoring simultaneous, multi-directional pincer-movements. One of our mystics has remarked: “That’s just bully.” Take a wild guess who said that…
Do Minotaurs mate? Do they live forever? Both seem unlikely. Perhaps they just congeal out of darkness or cave-mold. Perhaps their propagation is a mystery we should make further attempts to investigate...
--These Informed Opinions submitted by the Order of Kralar on <Date>
A Deepist Poem
"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"
In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,
We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs
Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms
And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.
Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried
In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes
And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old
Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.
Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of
Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.
I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.
I am your founder
Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,
You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness
And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You
The boastless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens
I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing
what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”
And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.
While his song split the stones and unsteadied the stabled hearts,
We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,
And took from timorous hands the morsels and the troves
And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,
Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves
Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.
