Skip to main content

Pale Death

 Prayer comes in muffled, panting words. If that pathetic excuse of a priest were still alive, smelling of tonics and disheveled in his sullen robes, he’d accuse Henrik of blasphemy for his terrible form. But the priest is dead. Devoured by the Devil itself. 


Henrik fights to keep his footing over jagged, black rock. Steam hisses, rumbles out from hideous looking pockmarks in the earth like this place is from an unfinished time in creation. The knight is boiling in his armor. Sweat stings his eyes. He must be careful now, a single incorrect step will snap his ankle or send him tumbling, and he will be lost in the domain of a vast nightmare. 


Step. Watch. Step. Henrik concretes hard and stares out into the primordial murk, fighting to discern if the roar-hum in his ears is his own heart, molten devilish ground, or the monster he’s come to slay. The Sun is hidden, refracted, throws hideous looking shadows in labyrinthine fog. He sees Death everywhere. Terror around every corner. Something small, something sinful, nags far down within him, makes study the broadsword in his hand. It seems so small, so pathetic and worn, the toy of tiny creatures trying to snuff out titans. Henrik babbles more prayer, thumps his gauntleted fist into his chest like he carries Gods will between his fingers and is trying to drive it into his very soul. 


The Earth trembles. 


It’s here. 


Henrik stops. Stands. Tremors run down him as if gale winds struck him. The shape steps out into oily, hushed light. Illuminated from below by so much red-hot rock. 


This is Hell, Henrik thinks, this is a place of death and sinners and nightmares. Dante was wrong. No poetry. No tragedy. Just teeth. 


It is a living terror. It is the envy and dream of every killer, every annihilator ever born; it is catastrophe given shape, pale and white as bone. Huge, muscular legs carry a behemoth trunk with an effortless gait. The head dwarfs the man in armor, heavy and reptilian, knobbed by chitinous looking scales. Pale as fresh snow. It’s nostrils flare, jaws yawning wide and Henrik sees the end of time at the bottom of its gullet, an ever present hunger that will never slack, never be sated. Giant fangs glint obsidian. They laugh at his imitation of a blade. Henrik stares up at boiling red eyes— the eyes of infernal damnation. 


The Pale Wyrm is real, and in that moment, the pious knight feels a hollow emptiness. This thing is alive, vast. It dwarfs his God, mocks the cathedrals and the crusades, it does not even pity the mislead droves— it devours them. Henrik has found the one true lord of creation. Worship, primordial and raw from bygone eras, nags at his very essence. He wants to pray to it.  Do it’s bidding. A far away clattering emerges, the broadsword tumbling from his hands but he ignores it, eyes welling with tears. Arms outstretched. 


Praise—- 


The Pale Death accepts in the only way it’s kind can for these pathetic inheritors of its earth, and Henrik smiles wide to the incoming night that descends upon him. A night ringed by huge, iron-black teeth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time Cadillac

  ”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“ Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time.  Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She glimpsed jagged landscape burbling,  saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full ten minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Tall Grass

 Evan sat in the car and looked out into the tall grass.  The dinosaurs were out there . Up and out over the prairie was a vision of ragnarok, all tall clouds black and bruised purple painted by pinkish sunlight as dusk became night. Shadows grew long in the grass and Evan strained looking into it all, eager for a sighting. Even without seeing a thing for nearly thirty minutes— the thrill was there, he could feel it, ancient mammalian fear mixing with modern excitement.  The dinosaurs were out there! Motion, and Evan as well as his fellows in the car instantly turned, making the Jeep rock slightly. It was one of the guides, a tall and lethe woman with dark skin— she was standing. Gazing out to the left off into swaying, pink-tinted grass. Everyone seemed to hold their breath.  She whistled then— or something like a whistle came out— long and thin sounding and oddly metallic. It echoed out into oncoming twilight.  Silence.  The guide looked back at everyone ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Necropolis

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridge...
Post a Comment
Read more