[Just having fun, in the overwrought style of HP Lovecraft, and riffing on a recent post]
Across the city, people were frowning, suddenly chilled with a feeling that there was something deeply wrong, and looking up into a sky suddenly dank with a nameless miasma. The moon was become tinged with red, and great shadows were crossing the sky.
Only the shadows, at first. It was as though they weren't being cast by anything, as though the light itself had been projected in a twisted, distorted form, or passed through spaces somehow bent in directions we cannot see. But as the night became longer, a suggestion of looming, impossible forms began to cross the sky.
No one could quite bring themselves to see one entire. The whispered, ghostly suggestion of a great slimy, green foot whose long webbed toes crossed the entire sky made the mind quail and the bowels clench, as dread man has inherited from the most primitive animals reduced the bravest among them to gibbering terror. The light pressure of a gigantic, ethereal hoof, pressing briefly on one or two square miles of land, supporting an immense, incomprehensible weight and bulk whose vastness was only just beginning to enter upon our reality, caused hearts to stop. Some of those hearts started again, hammering in unreasoning fear, and some fortunate few did not. A single foul, blue-gray feather spiralled menacingly down from the sky, passed through all that dwelled on the surface and into the vulnerable earth beneath them, and left all just a little fouler, a little more debased, a little less human than they'd been before, and a little more of something else. Something alien, terrible, and incomprehensible. These signs and manifestations could barely be seen at all. And having seen one, no one dared look further. No one dared strain their vision to try to make out the creatures these things portended. No one dared look, because, somehow, in their hearts suddenly thick with despair and terror, they already knew.
These things had walked the Earth before, in a time before there were men. In days when ancient, reptilian beings built strange cities on different shores. Those beings, grown arrogant and careless, had ignored the warnings as psychics and seers among them had all gone mad. Some members of that strange, long-lost people had called upon these nameless things, and in the years and centuries following, their civilization had been terribly torn asunder. Finally, when there were no more minds to feed upon, when nothing save animals remained, these vast creatures had called down a great firey cataclysm to erase all traces of that civilization, and left the wounded, mourning world until another crop was ready for harvest. And now that time had come. There was no way, save perhaps in the depth of the genetic memory of all living things that feared them, to know how many times it had come before.
They became more visible as they crossed the world, though no one could bear to look upon them. What had begun as shadows, and become barely-visible ghostly manifestations, became shapes made out of fog, then shadowed shapes somehow obscured by fog, then grew steadily more real. It was the barrier between realities, wearing away as they made their journey. As they approached the place where a few mad arrogant fools had opened the way for them.
In a forest clearing deep in the wilderness, in a place to which each had come by a different path, these few now rounded on the frenzied ending of their ritual. Many were smeared with blood, because that was the kind of ritual it had been. Most were naked, or clad only in ritual decorations. They leapt and shrieked and danced and fornicated around their fires, again and again calling upon their obscene idols to become real. Under it all, a wild drumming never ceased. Those drums beat with purpose, and yet they had no rhythm we could comprehend. Their rhythm was inhuman, something imposed on the universe by creatures other than man. Their song was the opening of the path.
These things had not been passed down through generations. Every civilization that has ever beaten that rhythm and sung that song has left behind no one to carry forward that knowledge. Rather, they have been subtly woven into the fabric of our universe. Something a little bit like them is bound to emerge, if only by chance. And then, because intelligent, conscious minds have a peculiar, universal habit of steadily repeating and changing things, guided as often by a frisson of fear as by any other impulse, having emerged it reaches, sooner or later, a form true enough to open the way. If there are conscious, intelligent minds to bring it into that form, that rhythm and that song must eventually emerge. In an obscene and cruel parody of nature, these vast creatures have adapted perfectly, because conscious, intelligent minds are their nourishment.
The words were not the same words, of course. The words that had been sung millions of years before had been sung by inhuman tongues and emerged from strange, reptilian throats in languages structured differently from the languages of men. The words were different every time. But always they conveyed the same intent - to bring the ancient unnatural things from whatever reality held them into ours. And always they had the same result. Those who beat that rhythm and sang those words would be the first to be eaten. As the members of the cult danced and drummed and fornicated themselves ever closer to death, the chant continued.
"It's time to light the incense.
It's time to slay the sheep.
It's time to wake the muppets
From a million years of sleep.
It's time to raze existence
It's time to banish light
It's time to call the Void in
On the Muppet Show tonight!
With apologies to HP Lovecraft and Jim Henson....
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Topic: This thread is like a broken pencil: pointless. (Read 838536 times)