#radix malorum

[lilarctos]

Gorgoroth -  Radix Malorum

Album: Instinctus Bestialis Year: 2015

[doyouwanttoseeabug]

Little demoness doodle because I’m gay. Her name is Mastema and she hates you

[blckmtl]

Fucking Gorgoroth. 

[mrfergusdoyle]

Colony - The Last of His Kind

The last of the forest had been cut down to make another coffin, and another cross. The last coffin, the last cross. According to the captain, the cargo had been very precious to those in the old country, the country where his mother – may God have mercy on her soul - father and the rest of the crew had been born. They had lived in a wide, fertile land called “Spain” many years ago, where you didn’t just have to eat fish and whatever fruit you could get your hands on in the sparse forest in the middle of the island. Antony was a child of the island, and had no concept of what else one could eat apart from fish and fruit; in the same way, he could not imagine a country larger than a few miles across, or with a population of more than 50 men, or with any women.

He stared at the boxes that had been scattered around the island. He knew what was inside them; they were full to the brim of gleaming yellow metal, some set into bars, some in patterned disks, others... Why the people of the old country had gone to such efforts to shape these lumps of useless metal, why they had put such value onto it, was beyond Antony. The captain had explained that it was rare, but the sheer abundance of it here proved that it was anything but. There was enough for each of the sailors from the ship to claim a substantial share each when they had first found themselves on the island, but Antony had never understood why they coveted it so much; after all, they did nothing with it, only stare at it, and count it. He had given his share to the first man who asked for it. They didn’t do anything with it; it was too soft to be of any use; Antony knew that he would rather have an extra fish at dinner than a hundredweight of gold to stare at.

Years passed. When the sailors started to die of old age, the future of their share of gold was in doubt. Before that point, the only deaths had been before the distribution of the gold; the sailors who had been too eager to taste what delights the island had to offer and had picked the wrong fruit from the wrong tree, Antony’s mother while in the throes of childbirth... Wills were out of the question, as paper and literacy were both as rare as each other on the island; as such, some believed that the dead man’s assets should be redistributed evenly throughout the colony, others that they should be given in full to his closest friend; a sailor usually found himself with a lot of friends after his death. Many people brought up tenuous verbal agreements, none of which could be proved. Things came to head when old Pedro died, and Ferdinand shot Philip over who had a right to the money; it was the shot that started the war.

At once, every sailor decided that if they were the only man left on the island, then they would have won. They could live out the rest of their days in the company of the gold. Antony went unnoticed during the massacre, as his death was without monetary value; as such, the greedy sailors never went after him. The killing only stopped when, like the old story, only the most cunning and the strongest of the crew were left. The one gifted in cunning was shot dead by his adversary, while the adversary himself fell dead when he gleefully enjoyed his dead enemy’s meal. The cunning rouge had anticipated such an eventuality and decided that if he was not destined for victory, then neither would his opponent.  While waiting for his fate, he had laced his lovingly prepared dish of fish stew with the poison that had laid low those sailors who had first made landfall.

Antony had been brought up as a good Christian and, as such, knew that these men all needed a burial in part of their passage to heaven. A small plot had already been set aside from the main settlement of the island to act as a cemetery, and Antony had seen a few funeral services. He fetched the old Bible from the Captain’s Cabin, which had been moved, plank by plank, from the ship to make a small hut at the head of the settlement – he’d had something like an education from the captain and could just about read and write in Latin – and got to work.

First, he dismantled the ship to make boxes for the corpses (coffin does not quite describe these basic containers), but that only brought enough wood to bury half of the dead sailors. He fetched a hatchet and began to cut down the trees of the island. It took every last twig of that meagre forest to make enough boxes and enough crosses to mark the place of their death. Finally, he interred every last body, scratching a single Bible quotation onto the horizontal beam of each cross: “Radix omnes malorum est Cupiditas”. Love of money is the root of all evil.

All that remained on the island was Antony, a worthless amount of gold and endless graves. The graves had been laid out in a circle around the centre of the island, where Antony heaped up the gold into a large mound, topped with a makeshift golden chair. With no business left in this world, Antony climbed the mound, grasping the pistol which had slain Philip in an act of avarice in one hand and a bejewelled goblet in the other, which was full of the toxic juice of the island's fruits. He sat at his throne, drained the cup and relaxed.