Written and Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
Mild spoilers for the Curse of Strahd Campaign
How did William feel in his final moments, as Frankenstein’s monster wrapped its frigid, leathery palms around his neck?
His last memories: the enthralling amber of the creature’s eyes like glow-worms basking in the heat of a summer night, morphing into the haunting flame of a dying torch in a second.
Perhaps this may be too romantic for Shelley, though it’s not like gritty gore would’ve been much better. The tightening of a young boy’s trachea, his cervical spine crackling with the fury of a bonfire… All that agony was lost to the narrative, overwritten by the smug vindication of the Monster and Elizabeth’s hysteric woes.
Would William have yelled? Begun crying, begging for mercy? My own tear ducts shied away from the sight of the animosity before me. Powered solely on fight-or-flight adrenaline, my heart channelled a frantic yet reliable rhythm, grounding me just enough to dish out Eldritch Blast after Eldritch Blast. Columns of water erupt from the swampy pool beneath the creature from where my palm is directed, the streams piercing through its twitching tendrils and drawing blood of pus-like viscosity.
An exasperated laugh from Percy at my side, whose dishevelled hair was braided by streaks of red pouring from a head wound sustained moments before. I smiled weakly. A moment of triumph between us, acknowledging each other’s relentlessness against the monster despite being the first ones to extend caution towards fighting what we knew was once a thing of innocence.
Walter was his name, for the brief time he had been allowed a normal childhood. A bastard born of an affair between the owner of the mansion we found ourselves trapped in, and the peasant governess he employed. Scandalous, our party initially murmured. We had thrown around tabloid-worthy conspiracies about the wife in the family portrait we encountered on the ground floor – Elizabeth Dhurst, and her dispassionate gaze. Though as we ventured further and unearthed what lay beneath the manor’s floorboards, the pulsation of her tell-tale heart crescendoed: dried remnants of bloody rituals, entropic whispers behind our ears, the starved skeletal remains of two young children… Whether mortal desperation or demonic possession, something drove her to lash out at the byproduct of her loveless marriage, sealing her descent into the occult.
Now it towered before us: a slug-like foetus of staggering height. Heavy mounds of muscle cut through the pool it sat under as it crawled towards me with ape-like fury, restrained from exerting its full force only by its limp. Full muscles connected to forearms housed tumours throbbing beneath its sallow skin. Gaping mouths with jagged teeth grew along miscellaneous joints and crevices, revealing craters stained brown by their past victims. Writhing tentacles grew from cysts resembling branches of pollarded willow trees. Blood-shot eyeballs darting around at its ends, it kept track of the various projectiles being flung at it by the rest of my teammates.
Mounted atop all this was the deformed head of a baby. Velvet bruising strewn across its forehead, otherwise still pink and raw and newborn- a patchwork of every mother’s horror. No longer was he Walter, but a fleshy chimaera suspended in Limbo by necrotic magic.
Yet as my outstretched arm began channelling another blast at its abdomen, a gust of green foam splattered out from one of its mouths, searing into the silk linen of my nightgown and down the skin of my arm, stray blotches inflaming my eyes. Blinking once, my eyesight began to blur. Blinking twice, I watched a vague silhouette of a tendril slithering its way towards me.
So maybe William would’ve tried to run.
Backing into the wall, I shrank away from the monster’s radius, guided by Percy’s shouts in my periphery. Heels tugged at the corners of my fraying dress: Who knew a Lucy Westernra-esque get-up would be unfit for scuffle? I grit my teeth at the unending sensation of hot wax branding my upper body, the Armour of Agathy’s spell cast earlier rendered completely null against the poison.
A reverberating shot of José’s pistol sounded from the opposite end of the dungeon – his metal bullet pierced through the sickly amber of one of the creature’s sclerae. What followed was a dissonant chorus of pain: the vague noise of a baby’s high-pitched wail dis-harmonising with the screech of a dying animal.
And the tightening of something slimy against my waist.
Hoisted in the air, my head rammed against the eroding ceiling concrete, then the sharp snapping of my knees as I was flung back down on the tiled floor. Then the cold sting of its fangs impaling me, encasing me, silencing me.
A wet warmth pools at my torso, and my vision turns black…
One is never really dead in the realm of the gothic. If vigour fails to compel your spirit to haunt humanity’s hubris, supernatural machinations envelop you in their frigid embrace, reanimating you as a nocturnal dweller. Corporeality is but another layer to be peeled from you bit by bit until you remain a husk of your former self with nothing to offer the inferno to toy with. I string these words knowing my reality would not grant me this mercy.
The iridescent stained glass of my escapism shattered in an instant, becoming the shrapnel that would cut my life short. As my heart sunk, its once vibrant beat coming to a quiet close, an unknown voice rang through my head:
“You guys do know that you can stabilise a PC by succeeding a medicine check, right?”
