🪰 “The Rot King of Lowdrain Hollow” – A Mythical Bastards Tale
Lowdrain Hollow was the kind of place that made mold nervous. A festering trench at the edge of the known realm, it stank of abandonment—where the air itself seemed too tired to blow. Most folks who ended up there had no choice. Lord Verminok was not most folks. He chose it.
They say he arrived one dusk, a black smear dragging behind him across the marsh. Not a mount. Not a wagon. Just… him. An upright thing. A man-sized maggot wrapped in a robe stitched from rotting newspaper and meat coupons. His teeth—sharp glass shards stolen from the gutters of ruined cities—glinted when he smiled, though no one ever saw him do it twice.
The Hollow had once been a goblin outpost, thick with bile cults and fever-sick prophets. But when Verminok came, he didn’t storm the place. He just walked in. The swamp swallowed the sentries before they could cry out. The bile-pools curdled, and the crows started flying backward. One week later, he was the only thing left standing.
And he was building something.
See, Lord Verminok wasn’t a warlord. He was worse. He was a necromancer of rot and filth, a conjurer of swarms and sickness. His grimoire? A stack of old menus soaked in mucus and stitched together with rat whiskers. His spell components? Bottle caps filled with maggot bile, hairballs, fermented spit. He didn’t chant incantations—he gargled them.
But what made him feared, truly feared, wasn’t just his magic. It was what he whispered as his enemies melted into puddles of groaning meat:
“You are not gone. You are food for the idea of me.”
That kind of talk unsettled even demons.
Yet in the middle of his decay-drenched kingdom, Verminok built a throne—not of gold or bone, but of things thrown away. Rusty springs, broken brooms, melted toys. A monument to every thing the world had cast off. And around him, they came: other freaks, outcasts, misfits too twisted for the twisted world outside. They didn’t kneel. They didn’t swear fealty. They just showed up—and stayed.
He called them The Mythical Bastards.
When they weren’t melting mercenaries or cursing paladins with incurable flatulence, they told stories. Traded nightmares like bedtime songs. And on the darkest nights, when the maggot swarms danced in tight spirals over the Hollow, Verminok would sit silent on his junk-throne and hum.
Some say it was a lullaby. Some say it was a warning.
Whatever it was, the Bastards always listened.
And if you ever find yourself near Lowdrain Hollow, and you hear that humming?
Run. You are still edible.
