Scribbles and Horrors

Terrifying and wise, the Ormyful are too subtle to be understood.

The Ormyful are huge four-limbed creatures with an eye on each fore-shoulder and a gargantuan mouth opening out where the belly should be.

Although they live for millennia, the Ormyful are not knowledgeable about historical events, or geography, or politics, or magic, literature, chemistry, astronomy, theology, agriculture, engineering, mathematics, architecture, urban design, philology, mycology, or anything at all about the world at large. Instead they stay, for their whole awful and infinite lifespans, stuck in great underground passageways. The Ormyful remain in these dark places, whispering and murmuring to one another an inimitable discourse. They are philosophical animals.

Their philosophy is good—the best, in fact. The Ormyful possess subtle, penetrating, brilliant, perspicacious minds, and keen, light-footed tongues. Nothing matches them. They are very wise. However, it is well known by those who know that it is impossible to converse with an Ormyful.

Firstly they despise people. The existence of others is maddening to the Ormyful. People are too loud and small, with rude projects and pathetic aspirations. Their policy is to do away with humans on sight, and they are very fast. Ormyful cannot eat, but they do chew.

Secondly the Ormyful are too subtle to be understood. The most heated arguments are bare whispers to human ears, and it is in a language convoluted and ancient.

(This has not stopped people from trying—the sage Martin Trench spent his livelihood attempting to capture Ormyful discourse and succeeded, in a sense. The result of his decades-long study, augurs, and spell-work are thirty-seven volumes of dense, scribbled text, all but impossible to read. The prose wraps around itself; it is a maze of terminology and allusion, self-referential, dichotomic, poorly phrased. Words had to be invented just to describe other words, and even these are inscrutably vague.)

One thing the Ormyful cannot stand are books and the written word. It is a horrible to an Ormyful that a creature capable of thought would restrain its words in books–intentionally forget what is necessary, forsake real knowledge, which, to the Ormyful, is intrinsically oral. Books are wrong, disgusting, horrifying, maddening, terrible, fearsome, destructive, evil, noisy, genocidal, and all-consuming. An Ormyful fears nothing more than a library.

On sight of a book the Ormyful shudder into shrieking. This shrieking goes on and on, until all traces of the offensive object are stamped out. They do not want to touch it, and so the Ormyful will collapse ceilings, start fires, smash walls, pulverize the whole area out of manic fear and obsessive terror.

As is widely known (by those who know), the Ormyful are wrong. Their way of being is, simply, and obviously, incorrect. Here are beings who thirst for knowledge but refuse to seek it. They possess impeccable minds and tongues, but broken souls. They are incapable of true learning. In this way they are the most lonely, wretched, hateable creatures. They deserve something like pity and a wide berth.

Some say that they are demons, lost in their despair until the end of days when The God will sweep them up into himself in his all-encompassing benevolence and knowledge of certain Truth.