Something to annoy my friends

My lofty position wasn't always accompanied by the fear of office, and there was a time when I could walk the streets or raise a glass in the tavern without concern for molestation. Faithful as the tide, one precocious village waif made it her hobby to shadow my every errand. It was charming then, troublesome later.
In financial desperation, I struck a bargain with the ancient things that surfaced in search of sacrifice when the moon was right. Their price was the delivery of an obscure idol and one other item of more troubling portent. The pact struck, my new-found accomplices slipped silently beneath the brackish water. A fearful stirring at the edge of the torchlight betrayed a familiar witness and gifted me with malign inspiration.

Under the blood moon, I lured my wide-eyed prey to the pier's edge. Before she could properly appreciate her position, I clamped down a manacle, chaining her to the leering idol. A small push was sufficient to send both into the icy waters. And, when at length the tide receded, jewels of the most magnificent grandeur lay scattered upon the shore.
I had collected many rare and elusive volumes on ancient herbal properties and was set to enjoy several weeks immersed in comfortable study. My work was interrupted, however, by a singularly striking young woman who insisted on repeated calls to the house.

Her knowledge of horticulturalism and its role in various arcane practices impressed me greatly. My licentious impulse gave way to a genuine professional respect, and together, we began to plant, harvest, and brew.

As time wore on, her wild policy of self-experimentation grew intolerable. She quaffed all manner of strange fungi, herbs, and concoctions, intent on gaining some insight into the horror we both knew to be growing beneath us. The change in her was appalling, and no longer able to stomach it, I sent her to live in the weald, where her wildness would be welcomed.
Simple folk are by their nature loquacious, and the denizens of the hamlet were no exception. It was not long before rumors of my morbid genius and secretive excavations began to fill local legend. In the face of my increasingly egregious flaunting of public taboos, awe turned to ire, and demonstrations were held in the town square.
The wild whispers of heresy roused the rabble to violent action. Such was the general air of rebellion that even my generous offer of gold to the local constabulary was rebuffed. To reassert my rule, I sought out unscrupulous men skilled in the application of force. Tight-lipped and terrifying, these mercenaries brought with them a war machine of terrible implication.

Eager to end the tiresome domestic distraction, I instructed my newly formed militia of hardened bandits, brigands and killers to go forth and do their work. Compliance and order were restored, and the noisome population of the Hamlet was culled to more manageable numbers.
Mastery over life and death was chief among my early pursuits. I began in humility, but my ambition was limitless. Who could have divined the prophetic import of something as unremarkable... as a twitch in the leg of a dead rat?
I entertained a delegation of experts from overseas, eager to plumb the depths of their knowledge and share with them certain techniques and alchemical processes I had found to yield wondrous and terrifying results. Having learned all I could from my visiting guests, I murdered them as they slept.

I brought my colleagues back with much of their intellect intact - a remarkable triumph for even the most experienced necromancer. Freed from the trappings of their humanity, they plied their terrible trade anew: the dead reviving the dead, on and on, down the years. Forever.
Prying eyes had become a nuisance along the old road, and so I undertook to receive my most curious deliveries by way of marine shipments. A sheltered jetty was accessible by a narrow stone stair off the back of the manor, and a discreet system of pulleys could hoist even the heaviest prizes up the rock face from a securely tied dinghy below.
I employed a crew of particularly unsavory mariners, who for a time sailed the four corners at my behest, retrieving many valuable artifacts, relics and rare texts. Predictably, they increased their tariffs to counter my intense stipulations of secrecy. Such resources had long been exhausted, of course, and so I prepared an alternative payment.

While the greedy dogs slept off their revelry, I hexed their anchor with every twisted incantation I could muster, imbuing it with the weight of my ambition and my contempt for their crude extortion. At the witching hour, the anchor pulled with preternatural force, dragging craft and crew down into the depths. They must have cried out, but no sound escaped the swirling black waters.
Excavations beneath the manor were well underway, when a particularly ragged indigent arrived in the hamlet. This filthy, toothless miscreant boasted an uncanny knowledge of my ambitions and prognosticated publicly that, left unchecked, I would soon unleash doom upon the world.
This raving creature had to be silenced. But doing so proved maddeningly impossible. How had he survived the stockades, the icy waters, and the knives I delivered so enthusiastically into his back? How had he returned, time and time again, to rouse the townsfolk with his wild speculations and prophecies?

Finally, resigned to his uncommon corporeal resilience I lured him to the dig. There, I showed him the THING and detailed the full extent of my plans. Triumphantly I watched as he tore his eyes from their sockets and ran shrieking into the shadows, wailing maniacally that the end was upon us all
The ways and rituals of blood sacrifice are difficult to master. Those from beyond require a physical vessel if they are to make the crossing into our reality. The timing of the chants is imperative: without the proper utterances at precise intervals, the process can fail spectacularly.

My first attempts at summoning were crude, and the results disappointing. I soon found, however, that the type and condition of the host's meat was a critical factor. The best results came from pigs, whose flesh is most like that of man.

The great thing I had managed to bring through was brutish and stupid. Moreover, it required prodigious amounts of meat to sustain itself. But this was only a trifling concern. After all, I had a village full of it.
My zeal for blood rituals and summoning rites had begun to ebb, as each attempt invariably brought only failure and disappointment. Progress was halting, and the rapidly accumulating surplus of wasted flesh had become burdensome.
I could not store such a prodigious amount of offal, nor could I rid myself of it easily, possessed as it was by unnameable things from outer spheres. When excavations beneath the manor broke through into an ancient network of aqueducts and tunnels, I knew I had found a solution to the problem of disposal.

The spasmodically squirming, braying, and snorting half-corpses were heaped each upon the other, until at least I was rid of them. The warrens had become a landfill of snout and hoof, gristle and bone - a mountainous, twitching mass of misshapen flesh, fusing itself together in the darkness.
Madness can take many forms, but none so contemptible as man's belief in a mythology of his own making. A world view buttressed by dogmatic desperation invariably leads to single-minded fanaticism, and a need to do terrible things in the name of righteousness. This man is an animal - rabid, destructive, and incapable of nuanced understanding. He. must. be. put. down.
Deep within the heart of the Weald stands a gigantic tree that towers above all other trees, and hidden within the gnarled and twisted branches of this tree is the Shrieker's Nest. Like the Noble Raven depicted on our family’s Coat of Arms, this poor creature has seen better days, for the corruption that plagues the estate has twisted this feathered bird into a feathered fiend. Despite being corrupted, this feathered fiend is still a Raven at heart and has an eye for everything that glitters and shines. The Nest of the Shrieker is decorated with all the shiny and glittering Trinkets it has stolen from our Trinkets Chest or taken from the dead bodies of our fallen heroes. Reclaiming these items will not be easy, for the Shrieker will defend its Nest from any intruders. But if Shrieker feels that it is not worth its life to protect his hoard of treasures, it will abandon its nest and escape to live another day, free to steal more of our rare and valuable Trinkets.
They would arrive in teeming hordes, adorned in powdered wigs and pretension - seeking to slake their thirst on wine and indecency. As intoxication invariably took hold, innocuous frivolities would escalate to ever more disturbing diversions. Orchestrating the hideous affair was a hunchedbacked fiend who seemed to delight in proportion to the suffering he caused. I could have stopped him, I suppose, but I was a slave to my own appetites, and restraint would have rendered me a hypocrite.
n those younger years my home was a hive of unbridled hedonism, a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon. A bewitching predator slipped in amidst the swarm of tittering sycophants. Though outwardly urbane, I could sense in her a mocking thirst. Driven half-mad by cloying vulgarity, I plotted to rid myself of this lurking threat, in a grand display of sadistic sport. But as the moment of murder drew nigh, the gibbous moon revealed her inhuman desires in all their stultifying hideousness.
Mercifully, the morbid encounter resolved itself in my favor, and I set to work pursuing degeneracy in its most decadent forms. The air pulsed with anticipation as I revealed the unnatural terroir of the house vintage. But my exultation was cut short, as the attending gentry turned upon themselves in an orgy of indescribable frenzy. A single drop of that forbidden tannin gifted me with a dizzying glimpse of the hibernating horror beneath my feet and in that moment, I understood the terrible truth of the world. I stood reborn, molted by newfound knowledge. My head throbbing to the growing whine of winged vermin come to drink the tainted blood... of the Darkest Dungeon.
The poor Miller — thrice a victim. The seasons took his livelihood, I took his land, and now, uncountable years later, the comet has taken his humanity. My only regret is that I did not live to see that shoddy mill smashed to pieces by miraculous bounty I reaped from beyond the void.
Blight had struck the harvest again that year, and the Miller was desperate. He came to me, hat clutched tightly in filthy fingers, stinking of sweat and manure. Seated comfortably in my observatory, surrounded by telescopes and other delicate apparatus, I recognized his misfortune as an opportunity, and I agreed to lend him my... expertise.
Slabs etched with certain celestial designs were erected around the perimeter of the Farmstead. The Miller, lamentably eager for some early sign of improvement, fixed his watery eyes intently upon the wilted fields and listless mill. My gaze, however, was cast skyward and I marveled at the limitless profanity of the stars, wondering what harvest might come.''
Behold the heart of the world! Progenitor of life, father and mother, alpha and omega! Our creator... and our destroyer. Ruin has come to our family. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. Gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor. I lived all my years in that ancient, rumor shadowed manor. Fattened by decadence and luxury. And yet, I began to tire of conventional extravagance. Singular, unsettling tales suggested the mansion itself was a gateway to some fabulous and unnamable power. With relic and ritual, I bent every effort towards the excavation and recovery of those long buried secrets, exhausting what remained of our family fortune on swarthy workmen and sturdy shovels. At last, in the salt-soaked crags beneath the lowest foundations we unearthed that damnable portal and antediluvian evil. Our every step unsettled the ancient earth but we were in a realm of death and madness! In the end, I alone fled laughing and wailing through those blackened arcades of antiquity. Until consciousness failed me. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home, claim your birthright, and deliver our family from the ravenous clutching shadows of the Darkest Dungeon.