Black Harvest

A lanky, bearded man stared through strands of greasy hair at the harvest moon. His breath was heavy and hot, the stench of his decaying teeth and sweat pouring through his chainmail shirt would have repelled those around him, were there anyone left.

To his right was a nameless peasant wearing a roughspun shirt, tightly holding a shoddily made war scythe. To the man’s left was an illustrious nobleman, born into an ancient and powerful family, proudly bearing their legacy with their dynastic heraldry emblazoned upon his surcoat. Both were dead, maimed and slaughtered in a sudden attack by forces beyond their comprehension. Death had not slowed for the disparities of class, but it had for the lone survivor.

The man had served as a levied foot soldier in the army of a distant king, and it was in a field of flattened wheat that the king’s allies and enemies had met to determine the course of nations. The melee had lasted for hours, grinding to a standstill as both sides whittled away at each other in the darkening skies. It was then that fate was taken out of the hands of mankind and transferred into that of something far more ancient. The armies had dwelt briefly below the red eye of a chaotic and terrible primordial god. It watched as the sides slaughtered each other, peering into the hearts of the combatants, finding their reasoning and moral justifications for fighting wanting.

It was then that the ancient thing decided to take its turn in the bloodletting. Black, half-shaped things wreathed in shadow slithered and roiled through the dark, tearing through metal and twisting bone. The forces of mankind stood no chance with only steel to bear against the night, even as they set aside their own conflict to deal with their new enemy. The creatures tore through both armies effortlessly, expending no more energy than a bear would battling an infant. Revelrous laughs echoed from their gnashing mouths, drowning out the agonized screams of confused and frightened men.

In minutes, a field of thousands was reduced to one powerless worm in an infinite field of marauding lions. It seemed to him that the apocalypse had come. Some of the beasts sank beneath the surface of the world, clutching their prey between nails of sharpened bone as they took the dead with them to a shadowy underland that not even the most righteous of souls could escape. The rest gathered around the one man who was left, flippantly crushing the corpses of men and horses into the dirt as they approached him with unsalted hunger. They would have set upon him, tearing every piece of meat from his carcass and splitting his bones, but the old god’s eye had fallen upon him, and it commanded them to stay their gluttonous claws.

Its gaze bore down on him, confused and intrigued. It did not sense the manic fear that had consumed the men around him in their dying moments. It could hear the rapid pounding of his heart, feel each drop of blood coursing through him, yet it was not fear that compelled his heightened state but awe.

In the unimpressive mortal it felt a bond of kinship unlike anything it had experienced in thousands of years. He was not like the sheep who broke from the herd and thought it made them wolves. He had not been corrupted by the hardships of life, rather he was the corruption, born with a corrosive and violent soul. There was no binding dogma, no self centered desire for vengeance or petulant cravings for power. In such an unremarkable creature the god felt the pure yearning for primeval violence. The eye sunk its gaze deep into his heart, seeking confirmation in his deepest desires. In the pits of the man’s black soul, the eye saw that its feelings had been true.

Unbeholden by the limits of mortal law and unbound by the weakness of his kind the man would lay low all that he had ever known. He would laugh as grand and ancient cities were torn apart at the foundation and set ablaze, dancing on the ashes when the inferno was quelled. When men went to wage their meaningless wars he would butcher them indiscriminately, collecting their blood into oceans to bathe. When a chaste and devoted servant of a righteous god was left unprotected he would defile her, leaving her weeping and forever afraid of the evil things that skulk at the edges of perception. From the wombs of virgin whores his bastard offspring would burst forth and lend themselves to his legacy of unrepentant chaos, leaving black marks upon a land that was once verdant and good. No creed or tenant would command him to violate the world, and no law or relation would stop him from following the path that lay in his heart.

Joy overwhelmed the old god, having found a brother in a place it had not expected. The eye’s servants were overwhelmed by the pressure of their master’s emotion. The more wise among them retreated back to their underworld home, fearful of their master’s unusual change in disposition. Those that stayed watched in confusion as their malformed bodies shone brightly in a great flash of lunar light, looking at one another outside of the darkness for the first time. The creatures were disgusted by the sight of each other, and then they were no more. They fell into the grass, another layer added upon the mound of corpses which littered the field.

“Eat, my son,” it commanded him in a booming, undeniable voice before vanishing into its ethereal realm.

For three days the man fed on the fallen, gorging himself upon the rotting flesh of men and beasts. Even when he was dazed from the heat of the sun and so full that he found himself hurling torn pieces of viscera from his mouth he continued to tear at the dead. What little doubt he harbored about the god’s sincerity was erased as otherworldly power began to well beneath his skin.

When night came for the third time and the eye once again fell on its newest son it saw his flesh warped, though not in the unrecognizable, monstrous form most of his servants took. His limbs were long and twisted like a spider, his frail form stretched to great heights and his aura brimming with visible, malicious energy. The old god beamed with pride to see that the sacrifices of its lesser servants had paid off. The new great beast standing in the field was ready to fulfill its dreams of unleashed agony upon the world.