ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD

Author's Note: A fic commemorating the new Judge Foil printing of The Gitrog Monster card. Enjoy the story and R&R.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.

Summary:

The Gitrog Monster crawls ashore.


To peer down the Gitrog's horrid, cavernous mouth is to force one's eyes to feast on a darkness darker than the demons' conspirations in the Hellmouth. To go insane sampling the foul madness of man.

For it was man who fed the Gitrog. Fed it livestock, till in turn, the Gitrog fed the villagers' imaginations. Fed their hysteria. Stories of the thing creeping under Lake Zhava. An old god predating the Archangel, who must be appeased and upkept, else horrors, unfathomed by ears growing mouths raving mad prophecies into themselves, rise to take the world.

This was how a no-name mountain hamlet in Nephalia croaked. The townsfolk sacrificing their own. Swallowed whole by the psychosis building across Innistrad, and ultimately, by the thing at the bottom of the lake.

Friends. Neighbours. Lovers. Children.

This was a frog that had you in its throat. The bloodshot, sickly yellow stare no will could combat. Maddening. Hypnotic. The droning of a skaberen's angry machine.

Its fat, slimy tongue sagged along the stinking mud like a corpse dragging its remains out of a seagraf. Worse were the cries coming from the tongue's pitted surface. The lesions could be summarily dismissed as natural decay, the consequence of slumbering underwater for Avacyn knows how long. Yet that is not what they were.

These lesions jabbered and screamed. They had teeth. On the Gitrog's tongue mutated smaller mouths, flapping smaller tongues.

Former victims of the Gitrog? Contemplating it, the mind succumbs.

The land crushed beneath the monster's crawling girth blended into a pool of scum, chub, and largely digested bones swimming in the creature's acid vomit. Alien tentacles writhed starting on its claws and back, and an unfelt wound cut in its foreleg slobbered with thick, gummy liquid and more tentacles.

This was how a plane croaked.

Give a rumour time to swirl, and it'd ulcerate.