Thrixl lore
Origins & Myth
No one knows where this race of creatures was born from. There’s a legend they flew down from the sky one night in a shower of astral rock, when the world was young and flames still shot from mountaintops to forge stars on the nightsky. And that they nested in the rocky places, and were covered over with ash and stardust, that they slept.
Another old story says the Thrixl were always here, that they were born in the deep heart of creation like a fear, the earth’s forbidden nightmare. That they woke only when a great meteor fell into the warm wombs of their shared dreaming.
Many folks and societies over the ages held the Thrixl in reverence. In their stories, the Thrixl showed them how to build homes, to farm, to exert control over mystical forces, over nature. In response, the people erected shrines and temples, and sent down prayer to their Undergods.
There are even communes, some say, living in far and warren-riddled places, where Thrixl, and Woman, and Man, and Drauv live together, and share a single hope, and breed from it a tranquil, emollient existence.
There have been other peoples of course who knew nothing of the Thrixl. Not by name or vision. But they found artifacts, and heard voices. And by thread, by bead, by sunrise and moonbeam, lives and livelihoods were warped to the shapes the Deepspeakers craved and called for. For all we know, such peoples still live in the wilds somewhere, veiled from this life, fed on the visions the Deepspeakers plant for them.
But oh, there were tribes we recall, tribes in the forests who long whispered of an ancient enemy.
This enemy was capable of invading the mind, influencing thought and imagining, implanting false memory and doubt and lust. Wars were fought in unstoried places. Great barrows were raised and overgrown, and forgotten, and ancient weapons cast to mud, cast to fire, dissolved in the rain of history, the evaporating dance of time.
And these tribes are gone from the world. And only their whispers remain.
Recent epics often allude to an ancient order of beings. Beings with immense cunning, armed with older-than-the-sky power who dwell in the honeycombed caverns of the world’s blackest mountains. These beings can speak without speaking, and sometimes they aid the hero, lend insight or inspiration, lucky deception... and sometimes they twist, and shroud, and enthrall wanderers. They send slaves back into the world, slaves with dark purposes, unshakable indifference to death.
What we do know for certain, and what is clearer than any story... They’re here. Real. And now.
Form and Function
Astronomical variance is the keyphrase when trying to frame a picture of the Thrixl. And maybe toss in one of those other useful phrases like supercosmic terror.
The most pertinent item we found, scouring our library for clues and characters, was this unfinished journal. It seems to have been written by a nerd—I mean, a creature-enthusiast—and describes an encounter in a nameless, mapless glade. The writer meets a trio of smallish beasts, “the bastard children of dragon and spider.” Limbs and features “at home on beetles, mantises, wyrms.”
“They were weaving, it looked like, and digging patterns into the earth, turning the soil up, and marking it with pigments scraped off their own underbellies.
They noticed me. It was unavoidable. Three sets of eyes turned on me: six eyes in this face, five in this one, one eye on the largest of them, a long-limbed, bony creature with armored joints.
I looked in those eyes expecting to see nothing. The mute marble orbs of an animal, a drone. What I saw instead was coyness. Deliberation. The turbid fire of dreamers, thinkers, artists.
The skinny cyclopean nightmare hooted from its horned mouth and wrapped itself in its clear glass wings.
And later I woke, far from the spot, by a lakeside. A travelling mystic saw me attempting to drown myself in the water, pulled me ashore, worked some spell, and I came out of it like a man rising from a night-terror.
And I was both relieved and inexplicably heartbroken.”
The journal goes on to describe other travels and observations, many of them unbelievable or marred by clear exaggeration, but this account, at least, seems consistent with sightings we’ve had, or thought we’d had.
Opinion ranges, but we believe the variance in Thrixl morphology can be tied to family traits. Sort of like humans. There is a relatedness that feels in part deliberate and in part organic to their natures. It must be stressed that despite the dramatic difference, we feel a latent singularity ties these beings together, as if deep in them is a composition that is identical, and changeless, uniting them even as they grow to varied size and display such contrasting traits.
Not much is known about... well the big ones. Rumor paints them similarly, both dragon-esque and arachnid, inectoid, vaguely animal. Appendages both real and spectral. The most troubling thing we’ve observed is how seamless and natural this amalgamation grows on the eye, as if each aspect belonged first and only to them, and it only takes seeing to realize it.
The Wizard Kralar is said to have once walked among them. He wrote this one cryptic line, a message to his order:
“These are the askew arguments of warped gods who one day compromised and birthed to creation every inkling and inspiration their combined perversity could muster.”
A bit extreme, maybe, but the point is solid.
Habitat and Lifeways
The Thrixl dwell wherever they find a reason to, but seem to favor places they can brood undisturbed and spin great webs of dreams in their heads. It is not known what they eat, but the belief is around us how fog is: that they feed on emotion, on the force of livingness, whatever you call that—souls? The word lacks passion. Passion is something the Thrixl harbor and thirst for and need. They stoke their imaginations on it, and more than anywhere else they seem to live in their imaginations.
And they hold the power to turn the imagined into truth...
As you might surmise, the lairs of the Thrixl are afflicting strange to the human eye.
They grow like warped opera-houses somehow native with the rock, the trees, and the earth. They teem with chambers holding scenes out of someone’s thoughtscape, themes made furniture, half-assembled backdrops for dramas that will never play. Tied together with threads, the floors and walls spread with indecipherable vagrant murals. Phantom actors sometimes drip past reality, pressing their faces to the planar glass, and shouting lines off crazed scripts from the depths of whatever beyondering they inhabit.
Whether these places serve as necessary homes, or are merely the decorative diversions of creatures living in seclusion is unknown. What little we know of Thrixl mating is that it takes place in the untouchable mental troves of its participants. It’s thought that any number of Thrixl can join together in this ethereal space, and the dream they share is the life they create, and like an animated flame it crawls from its lofted perch down a wick of unreality into the stuff of being, and makes out of what matter it finds a carapace, and welds itself into the shape its fathers and mothers theorized it might... unless it doesn’t.
And what happens then?
Well...
Ultimate Villain: Sareth the Maylen
Sareth was the dream of a hundred mothers and fathers.
The dream was that a unifying figure would emerge, a wise and powerful Draegon to guide the Thrixl into the next era, which would be one of peace and interweaving with the races of the world, intermingling.
What happened to change that is unclear, only it seems the being imagined possessed a kind of power the Thrixl didn’t fully anticipate. Quickly, it created its own intelligence, and reforged its morality with directives of its own. It allowed itself to take form as a beautiful man, changing to its looser more Thrixillic form only in the darkness of its lair.
What began as a dream of unity through harmony with all things became a dream of dominance. Dominance is much easier and more complete. Oneness in servitude to an emperor who would weave new the world’s fabric.
And Sareth thought himself a weaver. He sought learning from all creatures, for such was his nature that he was unafraid of joining with others, of gleaning their wisdoms, and as he did so he ascertained too their faults.
[Gorgon IE] So he came upon the Gorgon Queen, L’Amysthaia, and as he grew to understand the Gorgon ambition for that special, silent, crystalline beauty, he grew to understand how he might use her to his purpose...
