[Dogs Town] King's Garden

[Alex F]

I took a stab at writing a town, based in a verdant stretch of the territory. Here it is.

Bro Matthew and Bro Enoch are lifelong friends, and share an artistic bent. The past three  years they have organised a mural for the Harvest Festival, based upon sketches they produce together. Final approval is given by the Steward. Matthew has a true gift for art, and his yearly contributions ever-more distinctly define the festivities.

Pride
Enoch feels that his efforts are continually dwarfed by his friend, but that given the amount of practise and effort he puts into his painting, he deserves the recognition this year.

Injustice
Over the summer, Bro Enoch has given art lessons to the Stewards daughter, Sister Tabitha, and used his position to suggest that Matthew's art is a bit too sensual to be appropriate to celebrate the King of Life. Tabitha duly reports this back to her father, who has put pressure on Matthew's family to get him to tone down his palette.

Sin
Deceit - Matthew reluctantly agrees to produce only art in line with the orthodoxies of the Faith. However he has begun travelling out to away from town, using the rock face of the nearby crags as a canvas. His art becomes evermore lurid, and he begins to forget about any responsibilities toward the town festivities.

Sex - Sister Tabitha has fallen in love with her teacher, and they have recently begun a passionate affair. Enoch loves his wife Mary but wants to keep Tabitha in his pocket until after the harvest festival.

Demonic attacks

Overnight, the gathered items for the harvest festival - squashes, pumpkins, plums and so on - fade from rich colours to insipid pastels and greys. The food isn't spoiled, but it is drained of flavour and insipid. Over the next few days, the  colour begins to fade from the apples in the orchard, the flowers in the square, and other still-growing life.

The demons want Enoch to continue to connive for his own interests and for the town to reward and reinforce his behaviour; they intend for his mural to be the only source of vibrancy at the celebration. It now lies completed, mainly by himself and Tabitha alone (not the whole of the townpeople as was the norm), on the side of the central barn, beneath a tarpaulin.

False Doctrine
Steward Raphael and his wife, Sister Candace, become convinced that the King of Life is showing them that celebration is shameful, and the faithful ought to live with humility rather than joy. On the morning of the festival, they announce its cancellation.

So what do they all want?
Stewart Raphael wants the dogs to ratify his decision to cancel the festival.
Sister Candace wants the dogs to help her husband, and to find out why her daughter has been acting so strangely recently.
Sister Tabitha wants the festival to go ahead, and the dogs to marry her to Enoch. She will blame everything on Matthew.
Bro Enoch wants the festival to go ahead, and unveil his mural to the town.
Sister Mary wants her husband to quit the art nonsense and spend more time at home, as she's expecting soon.
Bro Matthew wants to continue to develop his rock paintings. He will be eager to show them to someone out of town not under the Stewards jurisdiction.

What do the demons want?
The demons want to purge the town of joy for the King of Life, but they'll settle for splitting the community over the issue of the celebration.

If the dogs never came, then what?
The visual blight would worsen, and a scapegoat would be found in Matthew, who would be run out of town or hanged. The town would fracture between Enoch and Raphael to the point where blood would be shed - blood that falls deep and scarlet on the pallid ground.

I'm a little thin on the 'what nexts'. I plan on the Dogs arriving for the end of the Steward's sermon cancelling the shebang, and I see things running pretty directly on from that. So how's it look? Some of the imagery is a little The Colour out of Space, but that's all good.