In those hermetic days of blackness with photic masses moving of their own volition in the sky and wholly beyond control of the things that spawned them they set out. Making their way across nightland estuaries under skies of purifying fire mandated from the night itself like apparitions or trickster gods annexed to this doomed phalanx.
On the second day they fall upon a hostile band of travellers or at least such sentiments are assumed as this assembly soon becomes a massacre. Armour shattered by rifle rounds from both parties and the rival mob entire murdered. Their corpses lashed to dying trees and incised ceremonially and clothing stripped and doused with petrol poured from a small tin flask and immolated by way of hot coals thrown pinpoint like darts against some fatalistic board. Onward the travellers depart and if any of the six are moved or affected by the gravity of whatever affected this bloodlust, they do not betray it. Late afternoon as the sun sets dim and pale and yellow behind gossamer clouds as the band rest atop a hill under shade of yew trees to sit catenate and silent like some metallic coven in seminar. They sleep through fevered dreams and what they encounter when they awake is this.
Before them a stone monolith looms gargantuan, appearing carved from pure midnight for it reflects no light nor does it cast any shadow. Consider the contours of the monolith, for this congregation do not. As if the cunning of this thing foretold the arrival of the company itself. Consider also the towering lights crackling and thundering in the sky above like the dying beacons of old gods whose forgotten presence in man’s memory is not some broader thing but the sole essence of the thing itself. The party do not speak but bow in apparent reverence and soon one young man is drugged with the boiled root of a plant and unconscious he is gutted and as they feast on his steaming and raw flesh the monolith trembles slightly. The boy’s remains are buried in a mound and covered with oak leaves and nettle picked from a garden far from here.
Dawn of the fourth day. One man awakes early and prays at the burial mound of heaped leaves and to the east a hollow sun rises slowly behind what remains of that city. The man shuts his eyes and visions flash behind them: A company of men clad in grey surrounding a burning church house somewhere to the East in a century obscured by time and dust and riddled with doom like the great distant cannonades from a dying star. The men down liquor and fill these bottles with gasoline and hurl them at the church house and an enormous dog the size of the church wall itself has been nailed rampant in the heraldic style to its side like the charge to some pagan deity.
Somewhere West a priest regards his faith and a matter concerning the flayed bodies of children hung from the chancel with their limbs carved and rotten in the heat among luminous dust motes like mordant pennants and small chattering green and black things that flit about at night, death paranoid.
A serf in Pannonia finds the shrivelled and blackened husk of some outlander beast with pig’s head and satyr legs and scales all over. This thing, whose path is one with his own is weaned on goat’s milk and cherries and lives long and makes a subject of its unwilling sire and eventually the man is quartered in his own basement at the hand of this abhorrent relic. The thing pulsating at a demon frequency that makes able vessels of the man’s family for some primordial wraith, contained wherein is the spirit of all things evil supplicated from the sighing hills and cloaked forest. His wife and child’s bodies catalogued by a charnel hand to be sighted weeks later engorged and wholly networked within the ash trees near which they had been eviscerated and the thing’s tracks covered by blackthorn and the whistling of a carrion bird that betrays no conclusive to the thing’s certification to this world.
