The Sins of Sacrophagy City

The streets of Sacrophagy City and the surrounding wastelands were never a pretty sight. The charred brickwork buildings had been crumbling for centuries, and had only survived that long since no invasive plant life had been able to reclaim the vile city as its own. Under the constant dark haze, the sun was always red and dim, rainfall was rare and acidic, and the soil was too depleted of nutrients and tainted with toxins to support any form of natural life.
The land was like this for at least a hundred miles in all directions. That was as far as any of the Sacrophages had dared to venture and still managed to return. As they had never received any outsiders either, they assumed that they were the only city in the world. Probably the last, possibly the first, but definitely the only one.
That made them the best city in the world. Also the worst, but they didn’t fixate on that too much.
Perhaps they had once been Men, perhaps not. They didn’t know. Or rather, if there was any difference between them and the Men of Old, they didn’t care to acknowledge it. At the very least, they surely must have been a great people at some point, to have built such a mighty city and then let it all fall to ruins that could still last a thousand years. The Sacrophages were convinced they were a great people still, which was why they now all shuffled and shambled through the smog and down the wide, rubble-strewn main street towards the ancient and dried-up well in the city square.
In the gloom of the noon-day twilight, pallid and gelatinous skin jiggled and gleamed as the squat creatures waddled their way forward. They were fat and bulging in some places, while being gaunt and sagging in others. Limbs and digits were either too long or too short, too few or too many, and seldomly placed where they should be. Their heads were bulbous and misshapen, no two deformed in the same matter, and their mottled flesh was defaced by a preponderance of profane protuberances.
In the center of the crowd was a Sacrophage of monstrous mass, which was his sole criterion for holding his status as ‘The Boss’. Since The Boss was far too heavy to walk upon his own stunted legs, he was carried in a flimsily cobbled sedan chair by his most pathetically sycophantic servants. With lanky arms several times longer than his globular body, he pushed and shoved at anyone unable or unwilling to get out of his way fast enough.
Leading at the front of the procession was a kind of priest, who pretended to read liturgy from a book he pretended was holy. He couldn’t read a single word, and as such had no idea that the book was a dictionary. Fortunately for him, the other Sacrophages were usually more than willing to humour him, as none of them could read either and feared that calling out the priest would mean outing their own illiteracy in the process.
In any event, today was far too merry of a festival to fuss over such trivial matters like mass illiteracy or a criminally corrupt clergy. The Sacrophages laughed and jeered and sang with one another, dancing and splashing in fetid puddles as they banged upon crudely fashioned instruments, all whilst tormenting the wagonload of screaming newborn infants they were dragged towards the well.
It was indeed a sacrosanct day in Sacrophagy City, for today was Culling Day.
The priest was the first to reach the well, reverently placing his hand upon its rim before awkwardly climbing up on it and turning to face the gathered crowd. They cheered and clamoured for a moment, but quickly piped down when they realized he was about to make a sermon. They were no heathens in Sacrophage City, you see. They knew that when the priest spoke, it was best to pretend to listen.
“Thank you, thank you, and a blessed Culling Day, one and all,” the priest began. “On this day more so than any other, we – the children of Sacrophagy City – remember that we are the descendants of Kings!”
This was technically true, since the number of ancestors a person has increases exponentially with each generation, and one never has to go back too far to find royalty, slaves, and everything in between. The Sacrophages cared only for the Kings, however, despite not even knowing so much as their Christian names. They had been Kings, and therefore great, which meant that the Sacrophages were great as well.
“For generation upon generation, we have meticulously cultivated our Kingly heritage, strengthening our bloodline and dauntlessly guarding against the ever-present threat of degeneracy!” the priest continued. “Look around you with pride and know that we are the fruit of our ancestors’ relentless pursuit of perfection and cleansing of hereditary impurities! It is by the purity of our blood that we have thrived and made this the greatest city in the world, and yet we must never let ourselves become complacent! The purity of our blood is under constant threat of dilution, the weak threatening to drag us down to our demise with them! That wagon holds the greatest threat to Sacrophagy City that any of you will ever know!”
He paused for a moment so that the desperate wailing of the neglected infants could be appreciated without interruption.
“Though our blood is purer than ever, with each new litter we find there are more and more who are unworthy of their great heritage!” the priest spat vehemently, and the entire crowd booed and hissed in agreement, despising the babies for their mere existence. “It is by the Blood of Kings that we remain, and thus we must remain Kingly! Anything less must be cast out to ensure the perseverance of our society! Bring forth the New Spawn, and we shall see which, if any of them, are Kingly enough to remain with us!”
“Let the Culling commence!” The Boss decreed, reaching with his long arm to topple the wagon. The crowd all burst into cheers as the infants went tumbling to the ground in a heap. They cried even louder, but it earned them no quarter from their peers. Instead, the Sacrophages began hoisting them up by their limbs and hauling their dangling forms over to the well.
Setting his dictionary aside, the priest took hold of the first wriggling, wailing child and thoroughly cast a dispassionately analytical gaze over it as he rationally and scientifically evaluated its merits.
“This is no heir of Kings!” he decreed with revulsion. “Look at those ears! Do those look like the ears of a King to you?”
The crowd all cried no, and without pity or hesitation, the Priest tossed the child into the well. It screamed in terror and betrayal as it plummeted down the dark shaft, before falling silent as it struck the heap of bodies below with a sickening splat.
The Sacrophages erupted into sadistic cackling at the infant’s demise, and eagerly raced to find more to throw down after it.
“This one’s no good!” a long-nosed Sacrophage claimed as he held up an infant for all to see. “Its nose isn’t snubby enough! What kind of baby doesn’t have a snub nose!”
The crowd cheered in agreement as he lifted it over the well and dropped it in.
“More rejects! More rejects!” a child cried excitedly as she peered over the edge, taking great pride in having avoided such a fate herself not so long ago. “What about that one? It’s too wrinkly!”
“Good catch, little one,” The Boss said as he scooped up the infant with his arm and tossed it down the well like it was a basketball, its skull smashing open upon the rim before falling out of sight.
“What about this one, Boss?” an old Sacrophage asked as he pondered the baby he held in his hands. “It’s quieter than the rest. Quiet’s good for a baby, yeah?”
“Look around, old man! Does it look like the meek have inherited the Earth?” The Boss squawked as loudly as he could. “Resources are far too scarce to waste on any but the most assertive and acrimonious of Sacrophages!”
To drive home his point, he scooped up a handful of fat and slimy grubs from a cauldron bigger than any of the babies and greedily shoved them into his mouth, pounding them to mulch between his massive molars.
“Into the well with it!” the priest ordered.
“Toss it in! Toss it in! Toss it in!” the child chanted.
With a reluctant nod, the old Sacrophage ambled over to the well and threw his insufficiently demanding offspring over the edge.
“That one’s head is too smooth! It makes the baldness stand out too much!” a bald and bumpy-headed Sacrophage decreed, so down the well it went.
“This one has a birthmark that’s too symmetrical! It looks contrived!” a Sacrophage with a Rorschach test’s worth of birthmarks decreed, so down the well it went.
“This one’s eyes are too pink! No King would ever have pink eyes!” a red-eyed Sacrophage decreed, so down the well it went.
“How about this one? It’s nice and plumb? Pretty Kingly, I'd say!” a Sacrophage suggested as he held up an otherwise unobjectionable baby to The Boss.
“Absolutely not! It’s far too fat!” The Boss shouted, still chewing on his grubs.
This especially blatant hypocrisy was enough to give even the Sacrophages pause, with every last one of them staring up at their boss in confusion.
“… For a baby!” he qualified. “It’s too fat for a baby.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” the others nodded in agreement, punting the fat baby down into the well. “No one wants a fat baby.”
“Slim pickins in this litter, eh Boss?” a tall Sacrophage asked as he bent over the remaining mass of squirming infants on the filthy ground, prodding them with a pointed stick as he went. “I’m not sure there’s a Kingly one in the whole lot! Buncha laggards!”
“This may not be my place to say, but perhaps we’re being a bit too hard on the wee ones,” the old Sacrophage dared to suggest. “We’ll be shorthanded if we don’t pick at least some of them.”
“Weakness must never be tolerated!” the child shouted. “If the whole litter is weak, then the whole litter gets culled! One drop of unworthy blood will taint us all!”
“Truth from the mouth of babes!” the priest declared. “It is better to be shorthanded this season than to be overrun with weaklings and rejects the next! Toss the lot of them into the well, purge their inferiority from our great society, and we will ensure that the next litter is strong and pure!”
The crowd cheered in agreement, and began fighting with each other over the privilege of tossing the last remaining infants down the well.
The squabble was soon interrupted, however, as a deep, resonant moaning erupted out of the ancient well. The Sacrophages instantly stopped and turned towards it in befuddlement, each of them at a loss for what it could be.
The moan repeated itself, louder and more heartwrenching this time. The priest dared to lean over the edge and peered in, squinting into the darkness as he tried to see what was lurking down the narrow shaft.
Without warning, an impossibly long arm shot out and grabbed him by the face with its fingers made of baby arms. With one strong tug, the priest was pulled into the well and left to tumble to his demise. Another arm grabbed the edge of the well, and then another, and then a long, snakelike torso began slithering up like a cobra out of a basket.
The Sacrophages gasped in revulsion as they realized that the creature was an amalgam of thousands of dead infants, the infants that they had rejected and tossed down like rubbish. Each baby was riddled with deformities, either the congenital ones that had caused them to be rejected, the injuries they had suffered at the hands of their elders, or mutations they had incurred as a result of fusing with their fellow outcasts.
The thousands of mouths all cried out as one, thousands of babies screaming in pain and desperation for relief that would never come.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to come back up!” the child shouted, picking up a stone and throwing it straight at one of the myriad of agonized faces. “Get back down there!”
With a single sweep of its enormous arm, the Amalgam batted the child away, splattering her body against a nearby wall.
“Child killer!” The Boss screamed in self-righteous fury. “Destroy it!”
While some of the surrounding Sacrophages were enraged or obedient enough to try to charge the well, they too were knocked back by a second, more aggressive swing of the Amalgam’s arm.
This show of force was enough to convince the rest of the crowd they were out of their depth. A pandemonium broke out, with all the Sacrophages fleeing in random directions, jostling one another and trampling the remaining infants in their attempts to escape the Amalgam’s reach.
“Come back! Come back, you cowards!” The Boss demanded. His servants had abandoned him, and he now sat defenceless in the city square, with nothing between him and the towering column of infant bodies erupting out of the well.
The Amalgam snaked upwards, its faces crying in agony and heartbreak, and when it was high enough it allowed itself to fall upon The Boss. He frantically tried to push himself back, but found he was far too heavy for even his lengthy limbs. The Amalgam dug all three of its hands deep into The Boss’s folds of flesh, with each face that was pressed against his body biting down as hard as it could.
The Boss squealed in pain, squirming impotently as he tried to force the Amalgam off, but he found that his foe was relentless. Screeching in determination, the Amalgam began to drag The Boss back towards the well. It was slow going, inching his ungainly form along the ground, but the viscera of the trampled babies provided a degree of lubrication. When the Amalgam finally managed to haul The Boss all the way to the edge of the well, it hoisted him up with the last reserves of its strength and pulled him over the side as it withdrew back down to the bottom.
Since time before memory, the Sacrophages had rigorously purged themselves of any perceived imperfections in the hopes of one day achieving a perfect being. The Boss had often claimed that he was such a being, and in the end, time had proved him right.
His corpulent form was the perfect size to plug up the well.
Category:The Vesper's Bell
Category:Beings
Category:Lovecraftian
Category:Places