There once was a village on the edge of a jungle, and in the village were three curious boys. Now the boys had been warned time and again not to go to the cavern deep in the woods, for it was a place of evil. But they were full of the heedlessness of youth and one day they decided that they would go and explore that place, so they set off down a hunting path and eventually began to push their way through the undergrowth towards the cave
As they approached the cave, a dark gaping maw in a mountain of black rock, the jungle was eerily silent around them, as if no living creature but they dared to go near this place. But they pressed on, for the promise of adventure was still stronger in their mind than the voice of caution.
Their footsteps were the only noises they could hear besides their pounding heartbeats as they approached the entrance, scoured clean of any undergrowth as if the vines themselves refused to grow near the dark mouth of the cave. One boy, hearing caution's warning clearer than the others, stopped, and would go no further. He urged his companions to do the same, but they only laughed at him and pressed on. And so he remained at the entrance of the cave
The other two continued in. The floor and walls of the cave were slippery with seepwater, which dripped from the stalactites like venom from the fangs of a leviathan. The boys began to stumble as the cave floor sloped slowly downwards and became ever slipperier under their feet.
They came to a strange tangle of rock barring their path. As their eyes adjusted, the rocks became stranger and more frightening. They were twisting, turning, fractalizing into nothing, and they gleamed as if polished. Their impossible eternal spirals curled and tangled around each other, forming an intricate spider's web. One boy reached forward as if to brush his fingers over the fantastical sight, but he slipped on the slick floor and stumbled forward. He put his hands out to catch himself-
And, just like that, he had no hands.
His arms were sliced clean to ribbons, and the second boy only had time to blink before the crimson fountain of his life began gushing out to paint the spiral rocks, their infinitesimally sharp edges sharper than any knife and glistening with red. The first boy had no time to scream before the shock of it sent him stumbling once again, inexorably toward the perfect twisted rock, and the second boy could only scramble backwards and scream enough for both of them as his friend fell to pieces with barely a touch from the impossible knives. Viscera was everywhere, on the boy, on the stones, on the spirals, and beyond them, for the last beats of a heart are powerful indeed, and can spill blood where none had ever been spilt since the formation of the cave. Indeed, where none should ever have been spilt.
For the cave had not always been like this, twisted and lifeless and glistening with hunger. Once, long ago, before the boys, before the village, before the jungle, the veil between worlds had worn thin in one spot, and one consciousness had pushed a questing tendril into that hole. The hole had sealed tight behind it, breaking off the scouting consciousness, but even as a severed infinitesimal part of an unfathomable whole its power was beyond mortal comprehension. And in the cave, with no life to nourish it, it stagnated, and did nothing but exist and sculpt the living rock with nothing more than the fact of its presence for millennia.
Until the first taste of life's blood.
They say that what happens in the womb dictates what happens to the child for its entire life, and that what the mother takes in will change the child as it incubates. Perhaps the same happened here. For the consciousness tasted pain, it tasted fear, it tasted death on the very knives twisted by its unconscious power out of the living rock. And just as adults crave the dishes given to them as children, so did the consciousness crave more of its first meal. And so, strengthened by the last vitality of the dead boy, it surged out of the cage of fractal-edged stone spirals and into the second boy, still screaming for his friend. But the consciousness knew nothing of the limitations of mortal bodies. It only knew existing, formless, between worlds, and then becoming a part rather than a whole, and then millennia of shaping the living rock into mathematical impossibilities.
And so the third boy, the one cautious enough to keep from entering the cave but not convincing enough to make sure his friends did the same, waited outside the cave entrance. He heard the scream, for his companions were not far enough in to muffle the horrified keening of the second boy. Then he heard the scream turn from grief and fear to pain. To agony. To silence. And then nothing.
And then.
Footsteps.
Footsteps, but not the patter-patter of two feet on wet stone, not even the rhythm of four feet running. It was a slap-bang-slap-bang, crashing, lurching, coming out of the cave. He took a step back from the dark yawning mouth of the cave, then another as the uneven gallop increased in tempo, as it became louder, closer, closer-
Then it was upon him, flying out of the cave like an arrow from a bow, and he saw only impressions of arms bent double, knees folded backwards, bones protruding out of blood-soaked flesh, hands and feet propelling a body with jaw unhinged and sickening redness seeping out of its rolling eyeballs, and before it was upon him he cried out because he saw in that malformed face the features of his friend-
That evening, one boy walked back to the village.
The villagers crowded around, wondering where his friends were, what they had been doing, what happened to him, was that all his blood?
He lifted his hand off of his neck, and they saw the great bite in it. They saw the glistening of bloodied flesh, the flexing of muscles sheared off at the ends, the edges of his windpipe rustling feebly as he spoke of the cave, his long years of solitude, the gift given him by the boys, the gifts he would give to the people. And the people were afraid. And the people saw that this was a boy of their village, and this was not a boy of their village, and this was a dead man, and this was a dark and terrible god.
And the god said "bring me more."
And the people obeyed.
Author's Notes:
Written 6/22/2015. Back in high school/early college my then-girlfriend and I had an extensive AU of some fantrolls that was a lot of edgy evil god horror-erotica stuff. This was the origin for Straxiel, who was the evil god. I had also been playing a lot of Eternal Ddarkness: Sanity's Requiem at the time, which I think shows.