Fear Mythos Shorts
Animal, Cannibal
A man made of calfskin. Animals with human faces. People in the masks of animals. (Better stay away from them. They will rip your lungs out.)
Peter. Peter. Peter, wake up.
I open my eyes.
A smile above me.
“You should’ve stayed asleep.”
Aspects
The Archangel is a man in a gas mask and a trench coat. It is a priest dressed in white. It is a man who died of a heart attack eight years ago. It wears the faces of the dead like a man might wear a mask.
The Black Dog is not a dog. It looks like a dog, but you know it’s not. A dog gets aggressive out of fear or hunger. The Black Dog will hunt you down and tear something out of you—your secrets or your throat, it doesn’t matter to the hound.
The Blind Man’s eyes are hidden beneath his hat, behind his glasses. He can make you forget everything: your past, your name, your own face. He can make you forget how to walk, how to move, how to breathe. He takes it all away until all that is left is age.
The Choir is a blur at the edge of your vision that speaks at the back of your mind. It tells you everything you’ve ever suspected is right: that you are hated, feared, an outcast. It does not use its own words, though; it warps those of the people around you, twisting them to bitter criticism.
The Cold Boy is a child made of ice whose only friends are the fog and the rain and the snow. He takes your friends, too, makes them disappear into the mists so that only you are left.
The Convocation is a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, a wake of vultures. It is a storm brewing and the terrifying thrill of falling. It is the lightning that forks and branches and it is the birds of prey from which that lightning arcs. It is so huge, so ancient, and so very hungry.
The Dying Man is many things. He is the shiver that runs down your spine for no reason. He is the panic of seeing yourself bleeding when you didn’t even know you were cut. He is the thing that looks back in the mirror and smiles with your face.
The Empty City is a place you can enter through doors—no, not doors, Doors. It is very cold and very lonely. You are certain there is something wrong here. The farther you walk, the more wrong it feels. Was that building always there? Were the stars always black? Was this street always paved with human teeth?
The Eye watches ceaselessly, tirelessly, a hundred hallucinated eyes lining every wall and staring at you. Is it whispering everything you’ve ever done wrong, or is that just your own mind filling in the gaps?
The Ichor is not water. It’s the sensation of drowning, the feeling of having yourself replaced by something else as it enters your lungs, the eternal evolution of our ever-hungry planet, but it is not water.
The Manufactured Newborn is a factory that does not stop producing. All it does is destroy and crush and tear open everything in its path and churn out more of itself, more factories to blot out the sky with smog and burn the planet and leave the whole world covered in unused concrete buildings and rusting metal pipework.
The Nightlanders are blacker than night and yet blurry at the edges, indistinct and hard to pick apart. Their motives are as inscrutable as their nature.
Beneath My Skin
I can feel her strings
Weaving in and out
Beneath the surface of my skin
Playing me for a fool
Using me like a tool
Does she think I don't feel it?
Does she care either way?
She isn't subtle
The way she gets under my skin
And looks at me as if I'm crazy
When I snap at her
And tell her to leave
The way she moves me around
Making my limbs
Shudder and twist
The strings take hold
And my jaw opens
And without thinking I tell her
To keel over and die
And she looks hurt
Like she's the victim
Like I'm the one
Putting strings beneath her skin
Like it's everyone else's fault
The way she acts
The way she treats people
Like flies in her web
Actors in her play
Pieces in her game
And then she lets my strings go
So I can reset
So I can forget
So I can pretend
That my life is normal
That she isn't in control
That she hasn't shaped me
All along
Into her puppet
Into her victim
So she can throw me away
When she's tired of my play
The Bogeyman
Come on in,
See the sin
Punished by the bogeyman.
Gather 'round, hear the sound
Of the drowned.
They are children
Of an upstart land.
No mercy
For the damned.
The world has turned
Its back on them.
They must be burned,
Held to their sin,
For they've given in
To decadence.
Bring More Knives
There is no power great and high
Save that which gazes from the sky
And sees with each unblinking eye.
It relishes your every thought,
Every second of your rot,
As you recall the agony,
That pain so sharp it shouldn't be,
You've caused the others in your life,
Forced to feel by watchful eyes.
It knows what you did.
You know what it is,
And it knows who you are.
You feel yourself sinking
In feathers and tar,
Can't hear yourself thinking
Above the noise of the voice
Of a mouth made of mold,
A chorus of shades.
The muses take hold.
The eyes will not fade.
You are the ghost that haunts you.
Something in you wants you
To burn like a match,
To burn down to ash.
Want like a fever,
It wants nothing more
Than to catch
Everything alight,
Burn so hot and bright,
Blinding watchful eyes,
Leaving voices quiet.
Don't you want to try it?
You can make it stop
With the light of a god.
It's not about revenge,
It's being possessed
By burning deep inside,
A yearning sharp and bright,
Like a knife,
Forged in the fire,
A burning desire.
So cut out their tongues
And silence the ones
Who say they see it all,
Say they'll never fall.
You can hear the call
That drowns out their song,
Says you're not wrong,
Says you are loved
And fits like a glove.
You'll never need to hide
From the fire that's inside.
It's all that you are.
It burns out the tar,
Hides all the scars,
Hides every mark.
Turn the lights down low.
You already know:
You're one with the flame,
So desolate your shame,
Light up the way
With burning hot hate.
If this is what it takes,
If these are the stakes,
Just be glad
To walk this path.
Burn out the eyes
And those who criticize.
Turn off the lights.
It's their turn to hide.
And you are the monster
That stalks them
All through the night.
Confessional
I am in a confessional. The priest wears a bone-white mask. His form shifts to that of a man in a gas mask and then to a robed thing, only barely human, that wears a skull behind which flame seems to pulse.
“You have not yet been baptized, my child?”
Water begins to pour in. It rises, threatening to drown me.
“You will be.”
Dance of Death
It isn’t chaos.
That’s the part that sickens Robert. The bloodshed he is watching isn’t chaos. It’s not mindless, thoughtless slaughter. It’s rhythmic. It’s almost like a dance.
One person steps up, into the center of the ring of people dressed in military uniforms and hunting clothes and butchers’ aprons, all the clothing stained grey with smoke and red with blood.
The one across from the challenger walks to meet them.
When it is over, the victor stands over their kill. The other lies on the floor until their still body is taken away to the butchers’ room, to be cut up and… used.
All the while, the music grows louder, the flame grows higher. Robert cannot tell what the music reminds him of, but something in it sets his nerves on edge. It is insistent and pounding and rhythmic.
In spite of all that, in spite of himself, in spite of the carnage he’s seeing take place before his eyes, Robert can’t help but tap his foot to the beat.
The circle grows gradually smaller, fewer and fewer people still left in the ring. As Robert gets closer to the center of the circle, the scent of blood somehow becomes present again. He thought he had grown used to it, but something in his closeness to it, something in the way more and more of it is spilled on the ground in front of his feet as time wears on… it sickens him all over again.
Robert throws up, and someone laughs. He claps Robert on the back.
“We’ve all been there,” he says, and the familiarity of it makes Robert’s stomach churn even more than the stench of gore.
Robert stands up and backs away. He wants to run, but he knows he can’t. Not with the chains around his legs.
Besides, his turn is coming up.
Death
There are many kinds of death.
There is bodily death, the flesh becoming unable to work and subsequently being rotted away or cremated or preserved with chemicals and placed in a box beneath the earth.
There is spiritual death, becoming a living corpse, hollow and empty and grey but still expected to go through the motions of a world that has lost all its joy (if it ever had any to begin with).
There is the slow death of a place, the streetlamps failing to work, the mold and rot of cobblestones on a street nobody has visited in a long time, the decay of a library with the misfortune of finding itself in a town where nobody reads.
And then, of course, there is Death.
He is all of these and more.
Desolation of the Flesh
She stares at you
Across the table
In an all-but-empty room.
You know it's not fair.
You know it's not right.
But there's nothing you can do
To try to fight.
Something flickers in her eyes,
Something she doesn't bother to disguise.
You can feel the warmth coming off of her skin,
The heat that whispers, "Let me in."
She laughs to herself as you get up,
As she knows you won't get out.
Soon fire is rising, burning bright,
Giving off a blinding light.
You try to run, but the flames are too fast.
And she just sits there, starting to laugh.
The Distortionist
Look at him. See how his form flickers and shudders when you catch him on video, the man you didn’t even notice was there when you took it in the first place. See how the video warps and blurs and pixelates. Hear how the audio spikes and distorts and cuts out abruptly.
Do you see it? Look closely. Notice how his face is always masked by the distortions, as though deliberately scrubbed out, or perhaps as though never there at all.
Now think about every time you notice something in your peripheral vision that doesn’t seem quite right, every little oddity or glitch you can only barely see.
Have you seen him waiting there?
Well. You’ll notice him if he wants you to.
Elementals
The elemental of air is a fog bank hanging in the air, a voice on the wind. She haunts the unholy and reminds them of their choices, reminds them what led to where they are now. That doesn’t last long, though. Eventually, she always tears them down, and all that is left is dust in the wind.
The elemental of blood pumps through your veins, a heartless heart that urges you to give into your urges while still retaining your senses, leaving you hating yourself for what you do even as you do it.
The elemental of chaos is the unshapen everything. It is another world, a world that was never ordered into earth and sky, flame and water, life and death.
The elementals of darkness are living shadows. They work out of our sight, in the places nobody thinks to look. They work towards unknown ends, and no living soul can say whether their plans are unspoken or unspeakable.
The elementals of decay are personified rot, the stains on our hearts that we seek to keep hidden from others, that corrode us from the inside.
The elemental of earth is an old man whose teeth are made of metal, carrying a set of heavy keys. He haunts places where people feel trapped—caves or office buildings, it doesn’t matter to him.
The elemental of fire is alight with rage. She burns from the inside, her heart itself a pyre.
The elemental of life is an angel dressed in flesh, eternal life brought to all those who die, cancerous in his immortality.
The elemental of light is an eye that never stops watching, forever burning through the bodies he wears but never failing to hunt down those who would hide in the dark. His vision is infallible, his judgment swift.
The elementals of lightning are a flock of birds that shake the sky with thunder. They make their nests on a beach whose skies are never clear.
The elemental of metal is never finished building. It is always arriving, always assimilating, always becoming. And in the wake of its eternal creation, the world is always left ending.
The elemental of sand is a serpentine goddess. She is the queen of glass and of deserts, the lady of shining scales. She is what you do not want to see when you look in the mirror.
The elemental of smoke is cold with anger. He is dressed in chains of black iron that do not hold him down. Furor est ferratus.
The elemental of void is a great absence. Neither matter nor energy exists within its stomach, and it grows greater and more terrible the more of our world it consumes in its ravening. With time, all of reality will return to the emptiness it once was, when all that existed was the void.
The elemental of water dwells beneath the oceans and seas, within every drop of water. Can you feel the cool, soothing touch of her grasp? Can you feel her begin to pull you under? Do you feel her eternal hunger?
The Elf-king
Empty City
Evolution, Adaptation, Transformation
It can be seen throughout the fossil record that life tends towards both complexity and diversity. Life grows ever more complex, ever newer.
While it is true that life does what it must to survive, that natural selection does not innately favor the complex, that orthogenesis is a discredited theory, it is just as true that there simply were not multicellular organisms when life first originated. Therefore, there is, if not an innate drive, an overall trend towards growing complexity as life develops.
And even as countless groups of life go extinct, whether in the background or in mass events, new life appears to fill those empty niches, just as the cetaceans replaced those marine reptiles that went extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
Life adapts to its circumstances, and it always has. Those organisms suited to their environment survive and reproduce and mutate, while those unsuited die out. All the while, life evolves and adapts and transforms. The flexibility of life is its survival.
Do you know where it all comes from? Do you know where not only the first vertebrates, not only the first animals, not only the first multicellular organisms, but the first organisms originated?
The answer is, of course, the ocean. Water is the mother of all life, and it has continued to nurture life for as long as life has continued to grow and change and evolve.
Water, too, evolves.
The Fifth Foundation
The Firebrand
The Frozen Prince
The Giant
Give Us War
The House
The House of Cain
A guided tour of the House of Cain. Strongly inspired by American Murder Song's eponymous album.
I: Orientation
Spirits of terror who dwell in the walls
We call on your number and walk through your halls
Killers who dwell in the hearts of us all
We bring you to witness as each of us fall
Spirits of horror who hunger for more
We enter your world as we walk through the door
II: Seduction
Red bleeds the mattress and red bleeds the wall
Red bleed the veins that through the room crawl
Do you see the dark scarlet stains
That mark the man who killed her in shame?
Red were her eyes when she realized
As in the bathroom she silently cried
Back in the bedroom he sharpened a knife
She tried to run and she tried to hide
But he was too quick
And his aim was too sure
Red flowed the blood
The color of passion
To free him from sin
His dark deed complete
He walked away
But the doorknob
It stuck in place
Wet to the touch
His hand came away
The color of blood
Ever since he has been trapped
Within the House of Cain
III: Interrogation
We call you to answer
For deeds that you've done
We know all that happens
Under the sun
His blood, his blood
It cries out to us
We are called
To witness
So tell us your crime
For you know that it's time
Subject, submit
To the gaze of our eyes
There is no hiding
And there are no lies
We see
All that you do
IV: Transformation
Out in the wilderness
Devils do cry
Inside your heart
They claw and they pry
Your skin starts to sallow
Your throat starts to dry
Hold your breath patient
And do not look down
You know full well
That you don't touch the ground
Rotten the floorboards
And rotten the eaves
Rotten the branches that cough up their leaves
Skin starts to slough off
And throat starts to rot
Thus is the mark
That Cain's curse has wrought
You feel your breath shallow
As he fills your lungs
(How long?
Not too much more)
V: Checkout
You know full well
That there is no way out
This is your punishment
This is your hell
These are the tendrils
That round your feet swell
There is no leaving
But nevertheless
I bid you farewell
In your final rest
The Hunter
The Idea of Deserving
In Your Skin
The King of Trees
Let the River In
The Library of Babel
Lifeblood
The Lord of the Labyrinth
The Maiden of the Moon
March
Memento Mori
Midnight Religion
Smallness
Do you ever think about how small you are?
Humans have only existed for a part of the Quaternary Period, which is only a part of the Cenozoic Era, which is only a part of the Phanerozoic Eon, which is only a part of Earth history, which is only a part of our solar system’s history, which is only a part of our galaxy’s history, which is only a part of the universe’s history.
We are nothing. We are beings of hubris to think that we are somehow important, simply because we are the first known organisms capable of conceiving of ourselves. We project our own minds onto everything else: dogs are good or bad, strong winds are angry, nature is cruel. But the fact of the matter is that we are alone.
And we are small.
And we will not last forever.
(Do you hear the silence screaming? Can you hear the black void howl?)