Non-Artpunk Dungeon Poem: Myth Bazaar of the Godliver Krait

Summary: This is a dungeon I wrote for Prince of Nothing’s “No-Artpunk Contest”

The contest was announced here.

This dungeon is compatible with all systems.

Did this on my tablet with my fingers oh yeah

I

Verdanum

A weaving green enlocked in shade

A trilling hum on high

The brightlit boughs brow shadowbars

Where cherry manes abide

Mark yon cream petals shivering

While squirrel couples flee

Below espy black ribbed earth

Cut windward neath the tree

There’s a glen of murky soil

Clove sorrowful alone

And more a veined windy gate

Agaping in the loam

And there are the marks of anima

The mothman and the snail

They are not beasts ye well may know

But deeping men in mail

II

Ambuscade

That bluelight transom irontide

Bears symbols on the frame

A wolfen arch hangs numinous

Chert graven-clad, voluminous

To transfix human game

For as you root bewitched by this

Ill tiding in the hollow

Thirty malforms heralding wrath

Draw apex’d oer the lowling path

Like ferric wraiths from east of Gath

Their quarry hart to follow

TREMBLE, STAGS and draw thy swords

Thy morning stars and staves

Though on the morrow they shall track

The blood of thy caressed backs

All glorious twirling haversacks

And make you into slaves.

No more tumescent sun to kiss

No more the sweet one’s hair and lisp

A-windward down the boiling tide

And dimward shown by transom wide

The cavern and the core

Away a stained-glass blur of light

And armored forms in catch or fight

At peace the hart and roe and stag

Record the cherries’ half moon crag

And rue the blood-churned battleground

The sprig-strewn lissom sparrow-down

From where her skin was tore

III

The Kingdom of the Night

A gremlin hall affixed on high

Dodekatheon of beasts

In graven alabaster shades

With gleaming ebon fireblades

The gargoyle kingdoms feast

High laughing statues mar the way

And bend to jeer the soul:

First Ganasar the looming light

Who only slows when he’s in sight

Then Banetar, sectioned cosmic wight 

And Jastor, to whom stone is flight

Escort you down the hole

IV

Oil Grotto

In wan gray pale lavender light

Doth spread a shade abode

A darkness not of shadowfall

But of shadebinder’s choking call

Sunk deep in the commode

Now in yon fountain doth abide

A sticky limbic tower

A mass of joints and gleaming spines

Like superstructural oil vines

Osmotic in a stickbug’s frame

But manifold and without name

It rises up and glowers

The slick castellan of the Queen

The keeper of the way

Then standing in a pool of oil

His gore turns lance and dart and foil

Throw fire tincture at your peril

He will not fall, but become feral

And suck the air away

Beyond this superable havoc-lens

Appears a cruciform cavern-bend

And left and right do flit the wraiths

Of shear-crushed cities ashen-laced

A rank ethereal gate

V

The Fanged City-Lake

And past the crucifix, looming-lake

Caws katabasis, shimmering plate

Served upon which are stalac-spikes

And caressed down by towers tight

Upon the cavern’s pate

In gelid lake a swarming seed

Fed eons back by divine need

(Gesticulated into time

By xenocosmic pantomime)

Awaits you for its mate

Past pearl lake espy the forms

Black armored, nude, or clad in storms

Of stygians and their ancient slaves

Of smote antediluvian clades

Repurposed as of late

XI

Stalactites

Now lower still and still more low

Doth drape the city down

A heathen’s nest of rancid quills

Whose windows ring like sounding mills

Stalactites full of warring souls

Tenebrous armored vertic poles

Hang pointwise from the crown

XII

Stalagmites

Peer down the murk from greenstone bight

And see the coming towers

As bloodstained steeple obelisks

Bouqueted stalagmites flower

And gloam the graven crystalpanes 

Illume their inky steepleframes

Murk sidelong in the city-sea

The incandescent filigree

Titian infernos scour

VIII

The Slavers and the Sacking

The slavers’ faces fall as one

Alike where they abide

Their fort consumed with anarch flames

And hearthwise spilt their lovers’ brains

Right dashed out with their unborn babes

Their triumph like denied

The naked sheaths clack hollowing

And square the shoulders set

Now with a curious conchen ring

The solemn choken column sings

And charges down the murder-things

But you the braves forget

IX

The Godliver Krait

Now once the party reach the lake

Up to the surface comes a snake

Spined taenia carnivore

Tragedian, lachrymator

A-wisp in dew-phlegmed ebonhide

His lance an impregnation spike

The surface now he breaks

“I am, fair globs, your seaside chum

I’ve marked you on the make

Ken, hear to me, for I’m your worm

Where water’s wet and stone is firm

Your truth and telling snake”

Here he raps the stones with a flagellum.

“Your tootling quest of folderol

Twixt sooty void and fireball

Has ended up in anarchy

A warzone as you well may see;

In direific straits

Now what you need is armament

To cut the very firmament

A weapon from the ages sent

From frightened eons burnt and rent

By woundhound consummate

But there’s one thing I ask of you

A meal which I’m overdue

(Though this is not your fault)

Traipse you to the thoroughstair

You’ll find a striped marrella there

(Not yet to fly the vault)

He’s mocked me, stranded in this sty

So that cocksucker has to die

Go tear the trilobitic twat

From what insouciance has got

(He sneered a cave bird’s bijou brow

A swallow’s low phrenology

They’ve got him as a captive now

‘Twas not the time for repartee)

Then I will cough up what you need

And you will be rewarded

A gashplough of the ancient breed

And you will leave me sworded”

X

Returning with the marrella

“Well tut-tut-tut and my-oh-my

What has the cat dragged in?

A benthic filthtongued mockingfly

Yanked yowling from the bin”

“I bid you, sir, please stay your throat

Papillae and keratin

Take this time and have a gloat

Give me my civics lesson”

“Alas, my crab, it’s you, not me

Who’s wry and winded long

I shall eat my lunch posthaste

You make my choler strong”

And with these words he ate the rogue

And coughed up what’s to party owed

“Wormfeeder, she is aptly named

For in my gut she’s ages lain

And in a wound she instant seeds

Grubs, larvae, mites, and millipedes

Watch supercilious foemen dance

When blows raise bug mounds at a glance

And take your mirth and pleasure”

With this the blackworm slithered back

And settled in a hairline crack

Which scarce the sight could measure

He winked up once with opal eye

Then closed it, finer things to scry

And in his dreams took leisure

XI

The Bazaar

Approaching now that myth bazaar

Which rings littoral fluorspar

That wist harmonious haggling, now

Bloodstained rag-forms fixed in row

Set there the bones of fate

Behold the froth-tossed warring breaks

By solemn tribes of Veth

Clad in their centrifugal snakes

Whose skin is stone but breath

They press the priests of fallen realms

Hallucigenian remnants

Each potentate in human morn

Now stone-clad shadow brush forlorn

And in fresh genocide is shorn

His torc and scepter regnant

XII

Tradefruit

But scattered here amongst the waste

Of troglodytic bones

Are treasures from a thousand caves

The murdered ones called home

That dead thing there whose shell is spined

Like katakanic adamantine

A-looped throughout his puissant back

Is tied a twinegirt shale rack

Of coral figurines

And tiny over shattered stalls

Do fungible trogloxenes crawl

And twixt phalanges clad in bronze

Roll poison letheleech somnobombs

Intended for the Queen

XIII

The Vault of Stairs

Pictureframed in fraying shade

A chamber high and graven

Where apexing the vault unfold 

In budding reams of white-blue gold 

The gables of a temple sky

Envisaged but never espied

By pilgrims lean and laden

Now the sacred fane is thronged

With thousands from the towers

The deepingshrine of exiles weeping

Singing dirge-knells deathly keening

What civil war devours

Look about the shivering shade

The flitting shadows stride

A chamber which by natural right

Adrifts in stygian chasmnight

Bathed chatoyant in mushroomlight

Where crowding phantoms glide

And in the gloaming from below

Is shown the tearstained heights

Seams red mercurial pittering

Stone aventurescence glittering

And fissure fluestreams tittering

With burning vein’s delight

Now merchants push upon the throng

With treasures for review

They’ve petals plucked from heatherbrae


And lichen laced with caraway

Marrella held in gilded cage

By swallows astral blue

But holding up the surging tide

A warrior clad and vorpal

Who those nearby his graven plate

With sidelong glance interrogate 

Twin sistine witches trailing bright

Perambulating signal wights

All bathe him in a flashing light

Where he stops up the portal.

——

S̷̟͚̥̍̽̀͋͐͌̀͒͛̊͋̚͜t̸͓̤͇̤̥̘̣̙̖̱̱̭̊̅̒́̾̚͜͠ą̶̛̮͇̻̖͙̝̑͌̉t̸̲̅̉̑i̸̧̘̱͚͈̠̘̠̤̘̤̽́̑̓̇̀̆̾̑̃̂̀͜͝c̵͚̜̎̒͑̉͗͗̌̑̌̐̇

His panoply is feared by all

For its impertinence

For plate and greatsword madness are

In tunnel confines 

(Of the stairs)

Xxxxx Which are

All verdigris and satinspar 

Xxxxxxx abound

Yon separatists afurther field

Deputation xxx (wight?)

(But blocking)

While at the luminal cavern’s hem

Bleaks work the fresh expired

To shadow-salved abominry

Embalmed by necroartistry

All laced with gears and wire