The Two That Came To Ilarnek

Chapter 12

Terror went before Bokrug like an icy implacable wave. The people gathered in the Great Square went mad with fear. They stampeded, trampling each other to escape their monstrous god. The fear that struck them was not the prosaic intangible fear of commonplace peril, but a palpable sensate thing. The terror that swept the gathered people of Mnar was a tenebrous soul-shriveling horror. An insatiable hungry fear born Outside, in black lightless gulfs unlit by any star, before the Earth was wrought.
And then He came, Bokrug, who men called the Water-lizard. His massive hulking body shattered the very ghats as he drew his bulk into the Great Square. In his wrath he slew those that could not get away quickly, and others died, or went mad, from the terror of his very presence alone.
His body was a pulsating mass of mottled mucoid green, at once squamous and rugose, a vast bloated thing, not truly a lizard or any earthly reptile, but a blasphemous mockery of the reptilian.
Marus stood watching the awful calamity unfold with Balloc and his men. They looked to Marus in tense fear. All of them grasped the talismans they wore hidden beneath their tunics, amulets of Lobon made of polished ivory, depicting an ivy-crowned youth armed with a spear. Marus, seeking to calm them and steel their nerves, grasped his own amulet and led them in a short prayer. He too felt his nerve flagging, but fought hard not to let it outshine his resolve.
"To the temple!" commanded Marus, and strode quickly across the small square, the Brethren of Lobon in tow.

Grimm and Freyja stood before the Temple doors watching a scene forged in nightmare. The gibbous moon shone down upon a corpulent and slimy image of the Abyss made flesh. Bokrug was coming, coming for those that profaned his idol.
They watched as the demon-lizard crawled first toward the Akurion, where his green-robed priesthood still gathered. They saw the waters of Thune trickle greasily down Bokrug's spiny back and pulsing flanks, his long tail lashing like a whip, and the strange multifaceted eyes glared redly with a baleful light.
Grimm looked long and hard at the terrible god, and as his eyes tried to take in the lines of its bloated, yet somehow also sinuous, form he began to understand that what he was seeing was but one aspect of a much larger and more complex entity than his limited human mind and senses could experience or process. Bokrug's very lines and features seemed to shift and change subtly, from moment to moment, and it froze Grimm's blood. He had to look away.
Freyja scanned the crowd unsure what to do in those critical seconds. Then she saw the quick approach of Marus and some other men that she didn't recognize. The crowd seethed and rolled violently in their direction. Freyja grabbed Grimm's arm and pulled him along, descending the steps to meet their friend and his companions, before the wave of stampeding people broke upon them.
"Ho friends! The god approaches!" cried Marus, as he saw the barbarians running towards him.

Aphez, the High-priest of Bokrug, stood upon the Akurion in an exaltation of awe and fear as Bokrug approached. His whole being was focused on the reptilian Old One, so that he paid no heed to the sudden terrified retreat of the king of Ilarnek, and his guard.
Aphez broke his fugue-state just long enough to command his equally awed and frightened followers to grab a young girl-child as she was running past them in terror. Just then Bokrug drew his mighty bulk up before the Akurion, towering over the High-priest. Aphez took the girl up before him, by one bony arm, drew forth a curved jambiya blade, with the other, and spilled the screaming girl's steaming entrails onto the smooth stone surface of the Akurion. Aphez knelt in abject obeisance, frantically shouting a prayer for mercy in the face of his abhorrent god, the gathered Acolytes following suit.
Bokrug's blunt batrachian face stared down at the High-priest and at the morbid sacrifice. The lizard-demon's wide slavering mouth opened and a long tongue shot forth. Caustic, viscous venom engulfed Aphez and the dead child alike, as the tongue impacted with bone-crushing force. Those Acolytes that dared to look, saw the High-priest's face melt, flesh slid from bone in a liquified muck as Bokrug sucked the whole mass, man and child, up into his gaping maw. The Acolytes screamed and ran, overcome by a withering terror, and so joined with the stampeding masses.
Bokrug charged across the Great Square, smashing bodies, living and dead, as he moved unswervingly toward the Temple.