Hey, so I wrote a teaser for The Styes in order to get one of my bros hooked on the story. Hope you like it, please leave feedback in the comments. Also, feel free to use it for your own purposes.

Without further ado, here goes

The night was noxious. A young man walked down the sagging boardwalk, if he weren't a local, he might have choked on the pernicious stench emanating from the rancid mud in wafts. The young man breathed deeply, sifting the air with his nose for some of the salt that kept the air clean, and finding none. "Almost home," he whispered to himself, nervously whistling. He had been seeing ... things that day, feeling an ominous chill in his bones. The edge of a white tentacle, a many-armed devourer rising from the deep, a chained god howling in agony and ecstasy at once; all these images and more ricocheted around the inside of his skull like a persistent, erratic fly. He needed a drink, he needed a bed, he needed a place to cry his hollow soul to sleep. There was so much he and everyone else on this god-forgotten stretch of land needed. Yet for each of those that had, there were fifty more who had not. He cursed the pit of wrestling blind fools, trying to kill each other by tooth and claw to survive, that was the Styes. "If only there were a light..." he thought.

And yet there was light. Lantern light. Following him...

Fear crawled up the back of his spine like the droning of ten thousand bees intent on reaching his brain, he felt his heart begin to pump like something was trying to escape from it. He silently uttered a prayer of protection and kept on, briskening his formerly meandering pace and trying to shake the light from his trail. The light followed on. The young man became desperate, all-out running and weaving through the many alleys. He felt sweat wander lazily down his face in the cold night air as he struggled to keep his breath in the polluted smog, wheezing and coughing as he ran. Down this alley, down another, promising the gods his soul should they for the love of Moradin LET THE LANTERN PASS HIM BY. Finally, he ducked down the wrong alley, into a dead-end he didn't remember being there...

He faced the wall of the alley as he saw the lantern light in his periphery, telling himself that it must be a nightmare, that the light was a streetlamp, that there was no light and he was just drunk; saying anything to persuade himself that he did not face whatever terrible thing lie behind the lantern, as he knew he did. These thoughts were drowned out by his own fear, a repeating chorus chanting the words, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die," to him an innumerable amount of times. Finally, he turned around slowly, his eyes confirming his fears but his brain refusing to believe them. He began to speak to the terrible figure "Please..."

He never saw the knife that killed him, shooting out from behind the lantern in a savage thrust, flashing in the sickly yellow light of the lantern and carving the life from the boy. A voice like groaning thunder whispered into the night in idle curiosity, "What might he have asked for?" In the end, it mattered not. And so, the thing behind the lantern gripped the knife tighter and bent over the boy's body, setting to his grim work.

This is so cool!!! I love the Styes.

Quote from PenelopeTheWeaver >>

This is so cool!!! I love the Styes.

 Thanks, so do I. I love the nautical/eldritch horror mash-up. I'm going to be running this for a small group of extended family sometime in the near future, first horror adventure I've ever run.