This week, two poems linked by the theme of hearts eaten away. I was going to save this for Halloween, but I’m sure something else will appear. The first was recorded for Librivox by Devorah Allen, and could be reskinned from the Miser’s Pot in Realms of Power: Infernal. Stats eventually.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also by George MacDonald
The miser lay on his lonely bed;
Life’s candle was burning dim.
His heart in an iron chest was hid
Under heaps of gold and an iron lid;
And whether it were alive or dead
It never troubled him.
Slowly out of his body he crept.
He said, “I am just the same!
Only I want my heart in my breast;
I will go and fetch it out of my chest!”
Through the dark a darker shadow he leapt,
Saying “Hell is a fabled flame!”
He opened the lid. Oh, Hell’s own night!
His ghost-eyes saw no gold!—
Empty and swept! Not a gleam was there!
In goes his hand, but the chest is bare!
Ghost-fingers, aha! have only might
To close, not to clasp and hold!
But his heart he saw, and he made a clutch
At the fungous puff-ball of sin:
Eaten with moths, and fretted with rust,
He grasped a handful of rotten dust,
And shrieked, as ghosts may, at the crumbling touch,
But hid it his breast within.
And some there are who see him sit
Under the church, apart,
Counting out coins and coins of gold
Heap by heap on the dank death-mould:
Alas poor ghost and his sore lack of wit—
They breed in the dust of his heart!
Another miser has now his chest,
And it hoards wealth more and more;
Like ferrets his hands go in and out,
Burrowing, tossing the gold about—
Nor heed the heart that, gone from his breast,
Is the cold heap’s bloodless core.
Now wherein differ old ghosts that sit
Counting ghost-coins all day
From the man who clings with spirit prone
To whatever can never be his own?
Who will leave the world with not one whit
But a heart all eaten away?
The second poem contains a ghoul variant, so its core stats are in Realms of Power: Faerie.
It is read by Allan Davis Drake. He was a fantastic reader, and one of the early Voxers. His contributor note says he passed away eleven years ago, so he and I didn’t overlap by much. I have not followed his material, but he has 655 sections in the database, so I’ll be looking through them for other pieces that are a little spooky.
In the Desert by Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
Games From Folktales 