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.
