r/AoSLore • u/2path2glory • 4d ago
[Excerpt - On the Shoulders of Giants] What a Gnawhole Forming Looks Like
While the gnawhole model in the tabletop game is designed to look like a portal coming out of the ground, the description of a gnawhole in On the Shoulders of Giants has a slightly different description of its appearance, as well as an interesting depiction of what it's like before a gnawhole forms.
But really, this is just an excuse to post an excerpt with some funny gargoylian names.
"The gargoylians knew first,' Theorn said numbly. ‘All of them, the Red Duke, Wartshell, Fred-With-Legs. Suddenly they wouldn't go near the storehouse. But none of us thought twice. You know how they are.' [...]
'People started to complain,' said Healer Grippe, ‘about a sound. Near the storehouse, but not from in or under or behind, just... Well, you could have gone mad trying to track it down. As though it came from a place altogether beyond, but not in any direction one could have pointed a finger in.'
'What sort of sound?' Marieda asked.
'I'm afraid to report,' the surgeon said, 'something of a chewing sound. A gnawing. I heard it myself. A manner of rasping, crunching, grinding. Some thought that the timbers were giving. And naturally we thought of being undermined by some horror, and yet..... as I said, there was no sense it was of the earth beneath us. Just... around, closer, somehow.' [...]'In the last few nights,' Grippe mused, 'there was something else. Along with that ghastly, insistent crunching there were... bells. Great, discordant bells, like those heard from the depths of the sea. Distorted and vile, echoing from some far, vast space.''Then they came,' Theorn said.
The surgeon's long mask nodded, birdlike. 'Yes, then they came.' In the end, Marieda had a whole line of witnesses lined up. No two of them had seen quite the same thing, or perhaps they'd all seen a thing that human eyes were not equipped to parse. Rosforth listened grimly, sitting slanted beside Slobda and leaning on the ogor's huge thigh. The thing that had been eating its way towards Newhalt Amarine had broken through. Not just from the ground, not just a hole into which the storehouse had fallen, but a kind of..... Grippe, the physician, had described it in medical terms. Like a festering wound, they said. A suppuration, but in the world. A place where the skin of things had gone septic and broken open, and the pus that flowed forth so freely had been...
Rats. Regular rats, yes, but also rats almost the size of a human, wearing filthy rags and scraps of armour, brandishing jagged blades. They'd flooded out so violently it was as though they'd been pressed against the walls of the world forever, bottled up in some unthinkable tunnel between sane places as they gnawed away at the membranes that held them in. The defenders of Newhalt had pressed in with shield and mace and blade, hacking at the disoriented and the diseased. Except the rats had kept coming. The wretched vanguard couldn't have retreated even if they had wanted, because the pressure of more rats was like water flooding through a broken dam. They'd vomited out into the world, and behind that first wave of the confused and the desperate came others with pikes and mail, festering with spikes and pustules, blazing with greenish fire.
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u/sageking14 Lord Audacious 3d ago
All behold the glory of Fred-With-Legs.
Always appreciate names like that. Oh they could have gone with reverent names or named them for saints. But nah. These are funny little guys, friendly spirits not unlike a neighborhood squirrel or raccoon who hangs out cause the humies aren't dangerous.
So of course the normal human reaction would be silly, ridiculous names like Wartshell and Fred-With-Legs.
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u/HammerandSickTatBro Draichi Ganeth 3d ago
I love gargoylians
They are like little spirits you would see in a ghibli movie, and need as little explanation
They're just little guys!
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u/liamkembleyoung 2d ago
where are they used again? I'm guessing the Cities of Sigmar use them. And do they have any particular purpose?
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u/HammerandSickTatBro Draichi Ganeth 2d ago
We seen them modeled on CoS models from the Dawnbringer Crusades. The standard explanation for them is that the amount of faith and fervor which humans on the crusades generate interacts with the inherently magical nature of the Realms and these little beasties pop into existence. As far as I remember they don't have any military application or in-game rules. But honestly, random little spirits just...exist in the Realms. They are not an uncommon sight nor a particularly exotic part of relating to one's environment in the setting
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u/liamkembleyoung 2d ago
Yeah, they're still cool though. Nice to have something other than Grifhounds running around and that people can bond with :)
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u/HammerandSickTatBro Draichi Ganeth 2d ago
1000% agree
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u/liamkembleyoung 2d ago
I'm guessing they're corporial? I.e the person who bonds with one can hold them etc :)
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u/HammerandSickTatBro Draichi Ganeth 2d ago
I think so? And I know they sometimes get adopted as sort of...regimental mascots by freeguilders
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u/liamkembleyoung 2d ago
oh cool :) Would love to see a Warhammer animation that features a bond between one and a Freeguilder
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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh Idoneth Deepkin 4d ago
How good was this story? Jeeez
I love the later part where Rosforth prophecies what a Skaven victory would look like in his dreams. Nightmare fuel I swear