I believe this may have been written shortly after I first played The Great Machine: A Fragment, based on how it is written. I would highly recommend playing that game before reading this. They are only loosely thematically related, but that game is.. to put it simply, one of the best games I’ve ever played.
An hour ago, the forest had been full of birds twittering and creatures rustling through the undergrowth. Now it was deathly silent, the only movement the wind and a small group of humans down a small path.
An hour later, they encounter a huge rusty wheel, the curved blades of it slowly moving the air. A giant fan. It slowly turns in front of them, dangerous to pass through, but moving slowly enough you could make it.
They want to go around it, as there is a weak sense of evil about it. Unfortunately, the fan is walled in, leaving them no choice than to pass through. At least the land beyond the fan was normal, a regular continuation of the forest.
As they pass through, pain greets the young adventurers, and the true nature of the land beyond is revealed. Twisted bodies of the humans that had come before line the path. Blood and gore make up the landscape. Carnage stretches to the horizon.
There is the sweet smell of cherries, disturbingly fresh, not the smell of decaying mass as it should be. Perhaps the scariest part, the half-destroyed and maimed bodies beneath, they are moving, not dead, not alive.
The adventurers now walk across the pool of bodies, but they slowly fall away from their duty, and ache to join the damned below. Their clothes are ripped off, their flesh is shredded, they join their new brothers.
This little story of doom was generated from a script I wrote that takes a list of ~240 words and randomly chooses ten, which I then turn into a coherent sentence with my twisted mind: Nathaniel’s dreaded ground filled with carnage and ether, past his fan.
