Friday 27 September 2013

The Fiend with Seven Faces

Let's have a story today.

Maybe this story is true. Maybe it is not. Likely it is as most stories, and lies somewhere in between.

Consider a time between humanity's origin and today. A moment, or period, when our kind was displaced from its prior trajectory; turned away from the set of potential future storylines it had at the time. The coming of a Corruption: an external agency, which interrupted the natural development of this unsuspecting race – "natural" as in, determined completely within the cosmic system it existed in – and left it proceeding in a very different direction.

Perhaps it was fifty thousand years ago; perhaps just ten thousand; or perhaps a million and a half. Somewhere in those ill-defined reaches of history, long before we set about trying to record it, an abomination came from outside the system. It shambled upon the Earth.

And we don't know what it looked like, so here's a random shambly-looking-type thing instead.

It did not consume us for sustenance, or aggress us in self-defence. Indeed, its nature and will were beyond our understanding, for the thing was not of a logical universe.

Instead, it inhaled our senses of ourselves; our relationships; our very being. It had us look upon those we once loved, and decide they meant nothing at all. It consumed our courage to be free, such that when threatened with force, we fell to our knees. It cast a haze over our horizons, such that we could not imagine the future, could not even know of tomorrow; only of today. It dripped its venom upon our identities, such that these were lost: we became without meaning; faceless. Truly the thing was a horror whose name no words can speak.

But in spite of it all, we were better than it. We knew we were better than it. So we fought it. And against all odds, we won.

And yet, as sizzling blood oozed forth from the wounds in its unspeakable mass, its seven broken heads each found it in themselves to let loose a final, terrible breath. Gales which infused the air and harrowed the soul – and so did humankind inhale them. And to this day, in our world, in ourselves, we sustain the essence of that which is not of our reality.

Still the breath of the seven heads churns in our lungs today.