The Gastronomic Oracle Of The Primordial Swamp

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In the ooze-clad hinterlands of Yhal’thuum, where the green mists rise eternally from the ulcerous marshes, there existed a creature of abominable antiquity known as The Gastronomic Oracle. Few mortals had seen it and retained their sanity, for its body was a conglomerate of soft and suppurating masses, its sole emerald eye gleaming with both wisdom and famine.

The priests of the forgotten city of Vhoor came to it once every century, bearing offerings of salted marrow and sun-blackened flesh. They did not worship the Oracle as god, but as the remnant of one—a deity half-digested by the aeons. They believed it remembered the first hunger, the ancient appetite that gnawed before the birth of stars.

It spoke not in words but in flavors. Those who approached its dripping maw would taste visions on their tongues: bitterness that foretold death, sweetness that promised betrayal, and umami deep as madness, heralding truths that melted the mind like fat in a cauldron.

When the final priest of Vhoor, clad in bone lacquer, approached the Oracle, he brought no offering. The city had fallen to pestilence, and its last inhabitants had fed upon each other. The priest himself was hollow-eyed, his faith reduced to a trembling question.

“O Oracle,” he whispered, “if the gods are devoured and the faithful are carrion, what remains?”

The creature’s vast lipless mouth quivered, and from its gullet came a sound like a million bubbles rising through rot. Its tongue—mottled, pulsing—extended toward the priest. Against terror and instinct, he allowed it to touch his brow.

In that moment, he tasted all that remained of creation: the flavor of stars reduced to broth, of planets simmered to paste, of souls rendered down into the thin, grey stock of eternity. He fell to his knees, weeping not from horror but from an unholy satisfaction.

When the green fog swallowed him, the Oracle licked its teeth and uttered a sound like a belch through the cosmos. It had eaten many things since time began—gods, demons, and dreams—but never before a question so pure, nor a man so hungry for the end.

And in the silence that followed, the swamp rippled with a strange music, as if the world itself had begun to digest its own meaning.

Thus ended Yhal’thuum, swallowed not by night or fire, but by the appetite that even the void could not refuse.