#spooktober24

You can keep going beyond the end if you want. There’s nothing there to stop you. Just the end of the road and the birds that watch from the telephone wires, then from nothing at all.

I think they like it out there. The definition fades until all that remains are those blobs you see in the distance that could be something alive but could just be a plastic bag wrapped around a cable.

Not much point though. I’ve only gone about a mile and then it all… well I came back. Was worried if I didn’t I’d forget how.

Sulphur rolls in waves from the thing as it stalks towards the home and sleeping heads that lie within. Hooves that crack with bloody dark and twisted ichor that drips and sizzles as it hits the ground. Its mane twists in the air, catching in a flickering breeze that is the breath of the occupants, reaching far further than by rights a sleeping breath should.

The door is no matter to the nightmare. It slips through like sand, reforms in the corridor, makes its way upstairs and inhales deep enough to make the rotten coal in its belly burn bright.

One by one they plink down onto the pillow in ones and twos and little clusters with the canines flanking fragile incisors, the molars striding ahead in lumbering defence. The floor is tile, cool, the way to the drain clear even if the path they leave behind them is not.

Some came cleanly, others drag fleshy strings of bloody gum and vein where they pulled themselves from the jaw that kept them crushed against each other in the dark.

They could have stayed. Some did. Others saw the chance to crawl and change and swarm and took it.

Wouldn’t you?

Something snaps. It is not a twig but one might imagine that it is. The things that one might think are twigs are closer, here, to bone than wood and the creatures that might snap them do not know there is a difference between meat and fibre.

The snap becomes a crunch and whatever snapped is certain now to be food for something that can chew through wooden bones and fibre flesh.

It could’ve been a rabbit in another world.

More like a hare, perhaps, as it stalks away with cracking bark between its teeth and leaves the meat behind.

Wake up. Your time is not yet done. Flesh is stripped by time and nourishes the crawling things upon the earth but you are not yet laid to rest. Do you not wish to remember the feel of air upon your feathers? Wake up, spread your wings again and take me to the places I may not go alone.

That’s it.

Remember in your bones; in the empty cavity of your chest where a heart once beat; in the hollow chamber of your skull where rested a mind.

Come back to the world.

I will show you how to be.

He cocks his head, feathers ruffling; puffing up and sending shattered oil-slick reflections across the surface below. He caws, a sharp sound in the still air but nothing compared to the roar of the distant movement behind him.

He stills, point made, and waits to see if there is a reaction.

The figure he sits upon makes no sound.

He blinks.

He caws again and this time the air seems to shiver around him, the caw vibrating reality; severing connection to it.

The bifrost raven in shimmering hues bends his head and plucks a strip of flesh from the body.

I’m not going to lie I am *stupid* proud of this one. The full image is below the cut but I made a gif! All by myself!

Grat had been the one to see it. They’d been in the woods for hours, taken a break to cool off in the stream. Grizzop shucked his shirt; drenched in sweat.

The water clung to his skin still as he readied his arrow.

She’d tracked the stag ten paces ahead of him.

Her arrow flew from her bow.

It struck true, the stag stumbled forwards.

He grinned, prouder than he could say, and let his fly after it.

Grat pouted a little that it wasn’t a one shot kill.

Grizzop shouldered the catch and wiping the water from his eyes

Easy to understand the lure of it. Lighthouses keep you safe. A beacon in the darkness. And when the light blinks - comforting - it calls to you even as you know the rocks are set beneath the waves because rocks there may be but also land.

Hard to think, when the world is dark and the waves are rough and the light is blinking so strong and steady, that you were so very far from land. That even in the strongest winds the ocean is still vast and land is still far.

And the light blinks so strong. So very close.