At the top of the momentous Mount Behr
you will find a wooden cabin there.
Its walls are frail and coated in grime;
a toll of its life, a life of endless time
winding before it like a starved serpent
making final breaths before it must repent
at the base of great Mount Behr.
The eldratire that sleep there–
at the deepest depths of that mountain’s base–
keep their bone blades in hand, and tylweed masks wrapped tight.
For not one of those winged rats dares to step foot atop Mount Behr
as way above the clouds, out of sight,
there resides a greyman named Wyldreth Korshnight,
though most know him as the Toymaker.
Some hold him dear and call him “father,”
others know him only as a witch.
Up at the top of Mount Behr, he sits
alone in his toymaker’s workshop.
That ashen man in his ashen room
does all day, all night, always, the only thing that he knows;
making toys for children
who live at the bottom of the sea.
Hammering and pulling, pinching and twisting,
he sits all day at work.
“May he find rest one day,”
the eldratire say at bay.
“And on that day, when he limps down
that sheer, unparalleled slope,
we’ll rip his skin off his old, ashen bones
and have a feast at dawn!”
But the winged fiends will never see the day
that the old Toymaker shows his face.
For he is a man of his craft,
and his craft children of he.
As the Toymaker sews the last string
around the sullen, tylweed doll’s flesh,
with a bump, and a skip, and a swing,
it springs to life, unwilling.
The toys, newly birthed,
then make their way down the cliff,
wading through eternal ice.
Around the eldratire nests, they skip
in search a home and respite.
The foul eldratire see no interest in those pathetic little things,
some ask, “What’s your purpose, underling?
Are you a messenger or a trickster?
Your flesh is cold, your bones made of tinder.
For what things do you seek?”
But the little men, true to their kin,
stray far from the eldratire's diabolical grip.
They wander, faced with a gambit
between life, or death within a pit
after being dragged there by what lurks there.
And die many shall,
yet still unphased due to their gall.
Watching from above,
overhead like a dove,
is monumentous Mount Behr.
Thoughts of Wyldreth Korshnight
clear their heads of any fright,
for they want to make their father proud.
A goal that is truly profound.
In a land laced with depravity,
such a goal often leads to calamity.
But the matters not to the little people.
Such a death is befitting of abominations.
And then, finally, they reach the sea,
suspended below a clifface as far as the eye can see.
But to their suprise, they claw their way up.
The children.
The children who live at the bottom of the sea.
They take you somewhere you can call home
away from the terrors that lay.
Yes.
I remember that day.