It stalks us still.
Time for time and hundred long. Looks ill. Starved-thin limbs, necrotic. Strong. And so it goes on and on. Stalks. Walks. Strides, strips the meat from corpses: none-recorded, unreported, out of sight and mind.
No lie. ‘Cross the plains, cross every heart, to every house; forgotten floors where dogs lay down to die. Hinges creak in the deep and dark. Let in the cold. Whispers on the breeze. Rank old breath behind the ear and up the spine—panting, hungry, desperate, no lull. Never done. Never warm. Needy. No pull great enough to fill to full its maw, its open and drool-noose spilling jaw.
More. Always more, it says in shadowed tongues. Drip down the ear, caress the canal. Tones of swamp-beast dreams slip out of sight through the silt.
Buried to the hilt.
Blade of conquest—plain of bones. Ash for blanket plagues, blankets the land, no resistance good enough to stop the spill of blood. Heavy rain, sacrifice. Ruined altar, unnamed gods; churn the sod, turn the toil, and up above they leer from ivory towers torn gristle-fresh from wrinkled flesh—those beasts of old. Never told that evermore is never then enough.
No such thing as too much stuff.
The maw of more screams ‘cross it all of dreadful need—now heard—it quietly grows as twisted branch in hearts and minds to raise the Empire of a Single Word:
Greed.
Mob writes, codes, and boulders. Work currently found on the Tales to Terrify Podcast, The Dread Machine, and Old Moon Quarterly. Twitter @mob_writes