#11 Grub Hell

Age: Two Weeks

Hidden or Lost?: No

History: It all started with a single grub. A plump, round scout, no bigger than a carpenter’s big toe. It was a child playing in the dirt who saw its blunt proboscis breach the ground, and the boy toyed with the bug, having never seen one so hearty. But then it was followed by another. And another. And another.

Within a day the wound in the ground from which the bugs were crawling had grown into a small hill, fully throbbing with the fat little insects. The locals tried to destroy it, but new varieties of grub emerged to defend the growing mound. Hound-sized grubs burst from the dirt, secreting stinking trails of corrosive bile. Quilled grubs burst from the mound rattling as they crawled to the street below, firing barbed darts at anyone who got close. And still the mound grew.

Within a week the grub hill had become taller than the local cathedral. Its slopes toppled nearby buildings, causing swarms of grubs to emerge and drag the debris back into their vile hill. After two weeks the grub mound had grown to the size of a small mountain. Portals had opened above irregular ledges located all across the surface of the steaming pile, and brave adventurers tried exploring inside to entreat or destroy the grubs. Few returned. Those who did make it back reported a strange, growing labyrinth of chambers and unknown dangers forming a crude kingdom. And it was all ruled by a titanic grub known as Bubbulex, the Soiled King.

The survivors told of insane sights such as a writhing clot of breeding grubs that could consume a person and crush their bones in their mindless carnal twists. One crazed explorer reported finding an expansive chapel space, where rows of swaying grubs hypnotized his companions within insectile song. Still another brave soul who dared venture inside claimed to have seen some kind of archive where robed grubs filed biological info pods into throbbing veins that ran deep into the ground.

Today the nauseating hill now known simply as Grub Hell still stands, the town around it abandoned. The end goal of Bubbulex and his kingdom are still unknown, but maybe most worrying is that all who come close to the rotten mound have begun to hear a faint voice, as old and deep as the rocks themselves. Its only command: feed and grow.

1. Writhing Caldera

2. Chamber of One Million Eyes

3. Honey Trap

4. Breeding Clot

5. Diapause Church

6. Bloated Abbot’s Quarters

7. The Sputus Junction

8. Archive of Filth

9. Sodden Treasure Hold

10. Feeding Maelstrom

11. Waste Eater’s Domain

12. Builder’s Excretory

13. Tick Barracks

14. Hall of Bubbulex

15. Larval Messiah’s Hidden Cage