Darkness Waking

The field stands barren, a craggy and uneven square forgotten beyond the edge of anyone's property lines. A bent and burnt tree stands in the middle of the field, casting contorted shadows across the stony earth. Nothing else grows here; nothing has grown here in a long time. Looking, the field feels...wrong. It's borders, the swell and shape of the uneven surface, the skeletal reach of the tree limbs are just...wrong in a way you can't quite touch. The lines don’t seem to be right. The perspective shifts wrong. The light bends weird. Its wrong and looking too long hurts the mind and strains the eyes.



If you were to dig in this field, you'd find many things. Terrible things. Bones, unnaturally big and heartbreakingly small, litter the stony field, just below it's skin. But if you dug at the base of the tree, you’d find a book. A powerful book, an old book, a book that no one should ever possess and has been sleeping, quietly, under the shadows of a lonely tree for a very long time. It was a cold, grey day. The field sat silent, still. The only movement a shadowy figure, walking with intense purpose.

He was wrong, like the field around him. His shadow bent weird, his profile shifted in ways the mind couldn’t follow. When he knelt at the tree, the ground itself seems to try to pull away from him. Even its wrongness recoiled from this interloper. The silence is broken by a harsh rasping sound. It might have been a language, or it might have been a hateful laugh, or it might have been choking breaths. It was wrong to the ear and, in such, was impossible to capture into a neat meaning. It clawed across the brain and left only scars, not understanding. The stony, bony ground parts itself, rending itself apart at the figures wish. It contorts and parts, till a dark hole opens before the figure. Leaning far into the hole, the figure pulls out a bundle of leather, crusted in salt and knots. With a slash of his hand, the leather falls away, revealing a book.

The field grows…faded. Like a dream viewed through mist in contrast to the cutting reality of the book in the figures hands. It was too much, too real, so much so that the world around it gave up trying to compete and faded, wilted. The figure throws his head back and, this time, there was no mistaking the harsh, horrible peels of laughter that crashes through the silence of the field. It’s the sound of madness, the sound of hate, given horrible life.