Cave paintings
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Klonks Cave Drawings
Under an overhang of rock, out in the depression-crater at the crossroads near the old road to Jiyyd, Klonk paints
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_Klonk comes wandering back from the swamp.. he is bloodied and has bite marks on him. He seems weaker than before. The big oaf sits down and stares out into the distance for a long while before building a small fire. He shoves a very hefty piece of dire rat meat onto a stick and begins to cook…
After burping in satisfaction at his excellent cooked rat, Klonk takes out some of his paint gourds and begins to make a new picture
He paints a big green and blue blob, but in his mind it represents a beautiful swamp. Inside the swamp he makes little stick figures with small pointed objects in their hands. He draws a picture of himself in the middle, with the imagery of his axe held high, victoriously smashing little kobolds into oblivion...
He stares out at the dark shadows now creeping in across the surrounding trees. Night is falling soon... he stares for a long, long while in silent contemplation...
After some time has passed, he paints a new scene... a blue glob of a lake.. and beside it a brown little blob, painted with huge white teeth... a dire rat! Then he paints red all around.. blood... and then around the blood green grass...
Klonk imagines how he would paint the grass healer that came to save him... He doesn't remember the person or even a presence.. he just remembers being held like a child by the swampy marsh, and then somehow returning to his feet... and then running.. running and throwing an axe at the rat which landed a lucky blow...
Klonk burps one last time... thinking to himself... "mmmm tasty rat...._
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_Klonk drags himself back to the solace of his little rockpile. Today he was brutally beaten nearly to death, then dragged into the river and almost drown by a helmed dwarf in town.
As he lays in his hole, his mind scrambles to reconstruct what just transpired. He had come back to town from the southern woods. He ran by the fire. Then some little fellow ran up from behind and started yelling in a loud voice, in a language he didn't understand.
Klonk grits his teeth and closes his eyes, straining to put the pieces together… the little person resembled a dwarf, that Klonk was sure of. He wore a scary skull-face... and he was really mean...
He attacked Klonk in town, while Klonk was almost already dead from fighting in the woods... then drown him... but then offered him an ale...
Klonk feels his heart breaking inside.. he hoped to find kindness... maybe all this world has to offer is pain and hate...
He reaches into his pack and pulls out the little doll he found in the woods before the attack... his eyes shift from the doll to his axe... back and forth...
His mind tries to process it all... should he continue trying to be friends with anyone? They don't want him there.. this much was obvious..._
Klonk is startled by the strange drip of water that rolls out of his eye, down his nose, and splats in the dust next to the doll he just tossed away from him
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_Klonk has just returned from another romp through the Rawlinswood… His skin is speckled with little spots of blood splatter, though he doesn't even seem to notice. His war paint on his arms and face is smudged and runny. It had rained on him nearly the whole time he was out there and the constant pelting from above caused the paint to smear and run. He rubs his finger through the blended red-grey clay and pigment and then rubs it on the cave wall...
As his finger meanders across the rough stone surface, his mind slowly retraces the events of the past few days... he makes little grey images of bottles and tarnished mugs.. he takes a burnt stick from the dead fire and scribbles little shadow figures on the wall... Klonk pauses and stares out at the setting sun...
A ribbon of drool dangles down off his lower lip... he sits as still as a statue and stares off into the distance, glassy-eyed and expressionless... an hour passes...
Klonk scribbles a few tall, lanky stick-figure men on his wall. He draws the likeness of a rusty dagger... His mind reflects back to the slow-walking deadies far south that he discovered wandering around the ruins of some shambled old village... The whole town must have been a happy place filled with lots of drunks... because all Klonk could find out there amongst their possessions (after smashing them with his greataxe) were empty bottles of booze and old, empty tarnished mugs that smelled of stale old ale when he sniffed them..
Klonk scribbles the figure of a pig... then another... he smears red pigment and green around the pig, signifying decay and blood...
He makes brown etchings of broken timbers, walls and ruins...
Klonk stares blankly at his images of ghosty town... he thinks he might have liked that place... seems they liked to drink... a lot... Klonk likes to drink alot too...
After using a stick to root around inside the nail of his big toe, Klonk rolls over on his side, settling into a little body-shaped hole in the dirt... he assumes a child-like fetal position.. lays his big noggin on his axe, and gently drifts off to sleep... lucid dreams of grog and happy people fill his empty mind..._
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_Sitting near his small fire, under an overhang of rock, Klonk sits mixing a crude mixture of ash and flower and berry pigments inside a hollowed out gourd husk. He stirs his mixture with a twig, and sprinkles in some ground dried blood to give the colors permanency.
Slowly, over the course of the day Klonk paints, pausing for long periods of time and staring out into space, a ribbon of drool dangling from his lip, and then he marks another stroke on the wall. He pauses, straining his thoughts… remembering how he had wandered past the splintered gate of Norwick.. and into some woods in search of game to hunt for food.
Klonk scribbles a crude rendering of a deer on the wall, then pauses some more…
Klonk thinks hard about what happened next.. and scribbles another figure… then another, this time in greenish yellow.. small, stick-like little humanoids.. five of them.. the crudeness of the work only marginally captures the essence of the little greenies running…
After a long pause and an almost day-dream like expression on his face, Klonk picks up a different twig and paints a couple more images near the greenies… a big grey dog looking image and a smaller grey dog-like image… in the center of the dogs and greenies he paints a likeness of himself and the deer… they are surrounded by green and grey images… He paints on…
Reaching for a red gourd, he tips his twig in it’s crimson pigments and splatters the wall with dark red.. around his likeness… then his day-dream expression returns and he stares off into space once again…
An hour passes, Klonk sits without blinking… drool dangling.. eyes glassy…
He puts down the red, and picks up a gourd full of yellow-white pigments and begins to paint.. above the image of a shattered stick-figure Klonk surrounded by dogs and greenies he paints a beautiful rendering of a brilliant sunrise at dawn, over emerald fields and flowing meadows of flowers.. or well, in his own mind at least.. anyone else viewing it might see a big yellow glob with a long smudge of green and some purple sprinkles…
Klonk stares out across the depression-lake once more.. this time contemplating how to paint the sensation of feeling at utter peace… or how to capture the scent of warm spices and fragrant flowers unlike he has ever known… how… how to paint that?
Klonk passes out from the deepest thoughts he has ever known_
