The mother rakosh inching toward her killer along the anarchy flag pole!
Very cool XiaoYu.
I have an artist friend in Los Angeles and I am seriously considering commissioning a scientific style drawing or two from him. These are the best parts of “The Tomb” that I could find to give him. Have I missed anything?
The mother stepped out, an eight-foot humanoid shadow, lithe and massive in the dimness. One of the younglings, a foot shorter but almost as massive followed on her heels. And then another. Without warning she spun and hissed and raked her talons through the air a bare inch from the second youngling’s eyes.
There were four or five dozen of them, cobalt-skinned, six or seven feet tall, all huddled in a semi-circular crowd before Kusum. Each had a head, a body, two arms and legs – but they weren’t human. They weren’t even close to human. Their proportions, the way they moved, everything about them was all wrong. Their was a bestial savagery about them combined with a reptilian sort of grace. They were reptiles but something more, humanoid but something less …an unholy mongrelization of the two with a third strain that could not, even in the wildest nightmare delirium be associated with anything of this earth. Jack caught flashes of fangs in the wide, lipless mouths beneath their blunt, shark-like snouts, the glint of talons at the end of their three digit hands, and the yellow glow of their eyes as they stared to Kasum’s ranting, gesticulating figure.
Tradition has it that before the Vedic gods, and even before the pre-Vedic gods, there were other gods, the old ones, who hated mankind and wanted to usurp our place on the earth. To do this they created blasphemous parodies of humans and called them rakoshi. They are us stripped of love and decency and everything good we are capable of. They are hate, lust, greed and violence incarnate. The old ones made them far stronger than humans, and planted in them an insatiable hunger for human flesh.
Jack looked again at the mother. He found it hard to call her a female – there was nothing feminine about her, not even breasts – which probably meant that rakoshi didn’t suckle their young. She looked like a huge body builder whose arms, legs and torso had been stretched to grotesque lengths. There was not an ounce of fat on her; each chord of her musculature could be seen rippling underneath her inky skin. Her face was the most alien, however, as if someone had taken a sharks head, shortened the snout and moved the eyes slightly forward, leaving the fanged slash of a mouth almost unchanged.