Moose

Once, there was something divine. A great beast, whose stride would shake the world, whose back with bristles like forests of golden pines would scrape tiles of diamond and lapis lazuli from the vaults of the heavens, something with a great admirable fire in its bones, something shining, something pure and true and maybe even good. And that beast was killed. Its blood ran out around it as a great ocean that it rose from like a vast crimson mountain-continent at the heart of the world. In the divine flesh of its corpse, there grew maggots of monstrous proportion. They swarmed and writhed and in their congresses they taught themselves and each other love and language and certain truthful secrets, all terrible but many beautiful, that govern the workings of the universe. They laid the foundations of the Bleak Science, necromancy, and upon them they built a Red City with canals overflowing with the precious humors and choked with carrion and refuse, a city of immense tenements and towers carved from petrified muscle and bone, from blocks of sard and carnelian and yellow agate, from basalt and obsidian, a city ruled by maggotwomen crowned in black flame and by certain of their most favored apprentices permitted to think themselves equal.