The Flock of The Above Extras (Monster Hunters II)

[J. Edward Tremlett]

Hey folks

I hope you liked The Flock of The Above! Since I had to keep it under 3.4 words, I wound up writing more than I could use. So I figured I'd share :)

The Expeditions to the Lost Plateau of Durtro

Sir Charles Throckmore-Addington is something of a controversial figure in anthropological circles. His 1894 expedition to southern Tibet brought him fame and recognition amongst Orientalists, but three short years later his epic story was decried as a hoax. Sadly, he vanished while trying to prove its validity.

According to Throckmore-Addington, the Plateau lies directly between Lhasa in Tibet and Thimphu in Bhutan, its entrance marked by two tall, bonelike spires of black basalt. Beyond them is a plain dotted with the piles of bones of all creatures, great and small. In its center, in a curious depression, lies the fabled, charnel Monastery of the Fifth School of Tibetan Buddhism.

Within its walls, decorated with a strange script, and eerily silent wind chimes made of bones and hair, the explorer saw many unearthly things. He described eyeless monks who could move as though they could see, speak with the birds of the air, and disgorged entire clutches of black stone eggs from their mouths. He even saw them undergoing jhator (sky burial), but remaining alive and conscious through the entire ordeal.

His story was quite a sensation, and for a few years he was feted for his discoveries. But when another, better-funded expedition retraced his steps, in 1897, and found nothing he had described, he was reduced to a laughing stock amongst his peers. Disgraced, he used the last of his own, dwindling funds to finance a larger expedition, this time with neutral parties accompanying, and went to try to find Durtro again in 1899.

The trip should have taken a month from Lhasa. He spent three trudging the same ground, looking for the landmarks he’d seen before. Despondent and nearly insane – and facing an armed revolt from his neutral parties and native porters – he strode off into the night, claiming he’d find it by sunrise. Maybe he did, but he was never seen again, and is today considered a sorry fraud.

Story Seed: All Fall Down

Mount Vernon brought naturalist Randee Barsh in to investigate the weird and fatal goings-on in the abandoned Briggs farm, east of town. Sadly, Barsh is currently in a medically-induced coma, with every bone in her body shattered. She tried to do something at the site where the feathers were found, late one night – something involving a very large gun – and was found the next morning with every bone in her body shattered. It’s as if she’d fallen from a great height, however improbable.

The air people (Notes that fueled this whole thing)

Birds and things from the sky are horror. They are between heaven and earth. We are wrong about what lives in heaven. Things come to remind us.

Eyes are the sign of horror. Birds pluck them out. They erupt from sockets. They appear in incorrect places. They see all.

Wings are a sign of horror. They erupt from bodies. They fly in flocks and attack the unprotected. They carry men away and bring them back changed.

Strange writing explains the horror. It is scrawled in books and written on the walls. Those who stare at the sky too long can read and write it. It normally cannot be spoken by humans, but certain birds come close. (Magic can allow for such speech)

People join the sky by being given to the birds. They gladly undergo air burial: being hacked to pieces, and then pulverized, the better for the birds to devour them. They believe this takes them higher to heaven.

Some are alive when this is done – aware of everything, their consciousness distributed throughout their flesh and bone.

Men become birds by putting new eyes inside themselves. Wings explode from their skin and carry them to heaven, there to learn what has been kept hidden.

Pray they never return to share what they will know.