Chapter 8-218: Shog-Shog Shoggoth (1/2)
The incidences of oozes increased quickly as we made for the borderline unnaturally steep slopes of these mountains which should not be here, following the distant wails on the wind.
Listening to a shoggoth screaming its song in various pitches and tones was a nice way to go barmy, so I was humming a countersong as we approached, suffused with the Words of Creation to basically take the teeth out of the Aklo-infused semi-chant of the shoggoth.
I was also tracking harmonics, and was pretty sure we’d heard at least five, but who knew? A shoggoth could manifest as many mouths as it wanted to, all of different shapes and sizes. I wasn’t actually looking at the sounds, but the energies attached to them, which on the level of a Heartsong were as individual as fingerprints, just like a Caster’s spells.
The number of energy signatures was increasing steadily as the wind whipped around the peaks, carrying and resonating with one another in an ever-increasing cacophony. I was flaming down oozes of one kind or another every hundred meters or so now, and the mountains themselves seemed to be trembling in some kind of resonance to wind and the sound the shoggoth were building.
Twenty signatures. Thirty. Fifty...
-----
We pulled up atop the ridge of a valley, madness clashing about us in an unholy scream-chant of voices from orifices not human raised in something as close to absolute discordance as they could manage, and a horrible symphony all its own, hinting and alluding to mad insights and truths about Creation humans should just stay away from.
There were tunnels and caves carved in the mountains here, hidden by clefts and crevices either artful or natural, it was hard to tell. The whine and moans of the winds whipping through them built to a maddening fever pitch, and the insane song chants of the shoggoth came shrieking forth from within them.
It was impossible to tell how many were nearby, and how many were far away. These mountains were conducting the chant from peak to peak, valley to valley, and the multi-layered level of noise made it impossible to tell which sprang from near places, and which from afar.
But I was definitely hearing at least a hundred different signatures...
I looked down the miles of peaks behind us, and the miles of peaks ahead, both stretching to the horizon.
-They are following a different arc. The Transantarctic Ridge is on the other side of these, convex to us. These are following a concave arc towards the Pole.-
Master Fred was surveying it all, eyes narrowed in concentration on my Voice and Song against the maddening interplay of the wailing winds and the moaning, shrieking shoggoth cacophony of teke-li-li-li. -A whole mountain range, coming out of nowhere. Why towards the Pole? It naturally shifts with the planet over time.-
-Just coincidence, or something stirred up by the Frozen Shroud?- I /hazarded blindly. -This line of sonic conductivity cannot be a coincidence. If Lovecraft is right, there’s a city of the ancients of some kind ahead on a high plateau above us. We’re on a line of spatial bending that’s being suppressed by the Shroud, but I’ve got a Lived-Line lock here now. Even if the Shroud vanishes, I can still come through it.
-Let’s follow the Mountains of Madness, get a rough map of at least one side of them, and see what they lead to.-
Ah, exploration. A true vacation, and even picking off every ooze that came into range didn’t change that.
-And the shoggoth?- he /asked reasonably. I pointed, and he turned, his new Glasses sparking as he fed them energy for Eagle Eyes.
The creature was base black, but its insides were swimming with twisted shadows of various organic hues, rippling into view and back out again, both moving around, and forming and unforming within itself. Likewise, the pulsing surface of the thing was constantly in motion, forming and unforming eyes, mouths, tentacles, arms, legs, pincers, tendrils, pseudopods, and other strange appendages hard to describe all over its surface slowly yet constantly.
It rolled like an ooze, bulging and creeping, and at the same time managed to slither, creep, crawl, and hump forwards, the combination moving its multi-ton bulk with incredible speed. Some of the pseudopods could enlarge in reach with incredible speed, whipping out to twice the length of its body with no difficulty whatsoever, helping drag and pull it along in its incredibly uneven, but remarkably quick ambulation.
We were anything but concealed up on the ridge like we were, the darkness being the best cover, but when it could manifest eyes larger than a dinner plate that could see multiple spectrums, that wasn’t a defense.
It had come outside for some reason, perhaps smelling us, perhaps sensing our Aura, perhaps even something as minor as a sudden disruption to the airflow, or the very subtle whine of Sleipner’s engine. Whatever the reason, it had seen us, and was coming our way.
For an instant, starfire ignited on the slopes of these dark and dreary hills, and even the wailing of the wind and maddening song was drowned out by the sudden popping of ice melting, air superheating... and silvered starfire reaching across a thousand meters as almost eighty Weaponized Shards came down on the thing.
Yes, it was highly resistant to energy... but that didn’t include Divine, although it might include Primal. These were elder creatures, from a time before the influence of the modern gods, and it could not possibly have built up any resistance to Divine power, although I didn’t feel the same about Primal.
Shards of jetsilver burning vivic plunged into the ever-changing, protean mass, turning pseudoplasm into vapor like a rain of deadly arrows, plunging for its core. Banefire shot along the equivalent of nerve pathways and weak points, wreaking havoc on whatever forces kept it intact and whole against the assault of ages.
It wasn’t an Evil creature, so the Holy Metas had no effect on it, more’s the pity, and it also wasn’t undead. I wanted to see how many Shards it could handle as the volley played across it, as my Assay couldn’t reach it at this distance.
Five Shards from the first volley embedded themselves harmlessly in the thick layers of empowered cells about it, doing no harm whatsoever, but the rest drove in deep, lighting up things inside it I really didn’t need to see.
The Paired Salvo followed, and something reached critical mass inside it along about the tenth Shard. Fire blew through the entire mass of the creature as a hundred different maws, mouth, sphincters, and orifices suddenly screamed in different tones and keys, and then the shoggoth lost all cohesion and began to fall apart into pseudoplasm, half-made organs, protoplasm, and just plain goo.