When Gods Fall to Summer

https://vocal.media/resources/a-transparent-look-at-vocal-challenges-and-top-stories

^inspired by this post, a prompt I left in the comment section. I do hope it will be selected as a running option in the challenges. This is my take and hopefully inspiration to others who are so inclined and want to leave their own version tagged below in the comments.

Writing Prompt Idea: "When Gods Fall to Summer".

Open your story with this line: "I knew something was wrong the night strangers began kneeling in my yard to pray."

The summer the gods returned, they came back quietly. A storm uncovered something buried in the woods behind your house. Soon, strangers began leaving offerings at the edge of the trees. Candles were left burning on your porch steps overnight and flowers appeared along the edge of your forgotten curb. Some could be seen kneeling in your yard to pray. Others peered silently into the forest as if waiting for something to answer back. But soon, the letters began appearing. Warnings. Promises. Confessions. All written in unfamiliar handwriting. All writing to the thing behind your house.

Voices whisper through the floorboards at night, inside the walls, from the dark beyond the trees. Around town, people are disappearing by the dozens and buildings are burning to the ground. Animals are found, stunned into silence. Nowhere is safe. Chaos spreads like wildfire, and it all leads back to whatever was uncovered in the woods behind your home.

Is this thing beneath the Earth a fallen god, a sacred relic—long forgotten by time, or something far-worse pretending to be holy? Let this story inspire you to create your own and see what magic you uncover in this world and the next.

Thank you for reading and participating :)

I knew something was wrong the night strangers began kneeling in my yard to pray. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t subtle. It came through the tidings of an errant midnight storm, ripping through the middle Earth—its clutches sprouting out of nowhere like a seizing willow pulling everything into its swampy grave for safekeeping. If only it would have killed me, if only it would have pulled me in with the rest of the nearby forest, I wouldn’t be here having to clean this mess, or hide what was left, what I found—what happens when Gods fall to summer.

A coffin sized trench was abandoned in its wake, a body sized hole dug so deep in the mud where the preserves started and the trees ended. Thousands of shiny, smooth black stones littered the ground where weeds used to roam, sparkling in the sun like tiny little demon seeds. This wasn’t going to be any old regular Sunday morning.

The yard, and this life, would never be my own again.

I thought the newspaper had been placed on the mat when I awoke to the sound of something soft being laid against my doorway. Heaps of bundled flowers rested silently on my front porch, completely unaware of what, or why they were summoned, or who they were supposed to be mourning. Handfuls of melted candles flickered reverently on the steps, the wax pooling in rivers on the concrete.

I began to wonder who had died, or if, in fact, I had died and didn’t yet know it.

“Just my luck,” I muttered to no one in particular. My words caught in the hum of humid air that gathered like a wall of syrup and mosquitos in my throat. Down by the tired curb, just near to where my mailbox was lay a trail of more candles in tall, cylindrical glass votives. At the edge of my grass, roses, tulips, daisies, and other assorted flowers scattered into growing piles. Their myriad of colors bled together in an otherwise drought-filled morning against the darkening pavement—a sudden rush of watermelon fuchsia, blue, and purple filled the quiet.

By the following Tuesday, this place was no longer my own.

I had never felt comfortable looking out at those trees. It always felt like something lived out there, searching, waiting for me. Now, the tables had turned. It felt like it was watching me back as I stared out, paralyzed, from every window in my house. Day in, day out. Strangers walking by in single filed lines, some in droves, others grouped in couples to kneel in the same dew-soaked patches of grass as though there was an invisible preacher at the pulpit everyone could see but me. Many had their foreheads pressing into the dirt as an offering of gratitude, others held their arms upright towards the skies—all in prayer. Their frantic, murmuring hymns flowed through the dead air like the charge of a tepid summer rain, electrifying the clouds for the faintest touch of lightening to strike them down. They prayed for chaos, for calm, for something I could not yet see, taste or hear.

“All in good time,” I whispered. Once again, not sure as to whom—or what—I was trying to reassure.

They couldn’t hear me. They couldn’t see me. It was as though myself nor my house existed outside this altar. I worried about the strangers who waited at the edge of the tree-line. I wondered if they also saw what I had seen—the black stones, the hole that looked like Earth had swallowed itself whole. The indentations where fingers raked—clawing at the edges, like the footings of a bird on a baked pie crust—I swear it true. Markings almost inconceivable, incredibly light—shallow, easily erased. But I had seen them. The rain hadn’t washed them away. They were there for the world to witness.

Those brave strangers stared at the verdant tops of the lush cedars that towered over. They were waiting for an answer that hadn’t appeared, for a god or a monster to show its face. But none came—just blind faith.

In the midst of it all, I hadn’t dared step foot back into my yard. Not once since this whole thing started.

It had been nearing on three days and the sun hadn’t dropped from the sky. Dusk and midnight still appeared the same dusty gray of impending night. The moon never showed. The skies never grew darker than they had in that weekend storm.

We were living in shadows. The shadow of something great, something that eclipsed the very sky we worshipped. The sun didn’t break to drop off to the other parts of the world that were so desperate for warmth. Or was it the other way around? Was the rest of the world frozen in darkness, while we were trapped in this eternal, suffocating twilight?

Maybe we were being graced with the scraps of sun from a sky that had long burned out.

**

By that next morning, the letters came. Not by way of mail or hand.

Sheets of parchment, scraps of paper, and oiled birch-bark began pouring from the very air I breathed. They moved with the errant sound of rustling wings rubbing together, drifting through the rooms like drunk, overweight moths. They levitated down the hallway before plopping into the corners, left to pile up in the hope they would soon be forgotten.

More appeared just as soon as the last had been cleared. Some wedged like stoppers in my doorways. Others shoved themselves into the shingles of my siding, and so many more pushed into the slots of my mailer.

They were scrawled in desperate, trawling script, their thoughts mirroring through the parchment. The faint, echoing sound of whoever wrote them could barely be heard through the sealed glue. Their words begged, their names unfamiliar. I dared not open their seals. I dared not invite that trouble into my house.

I didn’t have to. It had already invited itself in, making a home in my very confines. The words welled up through the silence of my chimney: “We know you are back.” “We pray for forgiveness.” “Your wrath will soon be upon us all, have mercy.”

I tumbled their words over and over and over in my head. They weren’t writing to me—at least not yet. Every letter was addressed to the same person, a name I had never heard before: Vohamanah of Lagrat—Son of the Chosen Night, we seek you.

The name felt heavy, like the wet collection of earth and compacted rocks in my mouth. It felt unnatural to speak, and yet, it felt like home. I wasn’t sure how I knew it, or how I spoke it so easily into existence.

But I did. I had, I'd become comfortable with the gaping hole.

Vohamanah of Lagrat

Son of the Chosen Night

They were writing to the thing in the hole, or rather, the thing that had crawled out of the hole.

The sound of heavy envelopes sliding through every orifice of my house was maddening. Just as maddening as if I could hear the pen scratching the very paper I was trying to desperately to avoid.

It clattered through the mail slot, forcing itself under the doors and scraping jarringly against my window screens. Hundreds of them poured into the rooms, a relentless deluge of thick, heavy paper raining down onto the vibrating floorboards day after day. Piling around my ankles like dying autumn leaves, each one desperate to reach the presence rising beneath my feet.

Outside, the throngs of strangers all simultaneously fell to their knees and in that moment, I felt the ground shake around me. The floorboards trembled to a final halt and the endless whispering went silent as the mail stopped.

**

By the next Sunday, the stifling quiet had passed entirely. I woke to whispers and crying. Wailing groans crept between my baseboards, their words coming from somewhere deep in the woods, slithering up through the foundation cracking at my feet. The entire house pulsed with every utterance of that name, matching the rhythm of the frantic crowd outside.

I now wished for the ordinary, silent mail to return, but it didn’t.

Instead, my house sounded like a hundred thousand voices trapped in an abandoned cathedral, reciting a sermon in a dead language that made no sense. Their screams, I felt in my bones.

The walls didn't just shake; they seemed to breathe with the cadence of the chant.

The entity wasn't just in the woods anymore. It was coming up through the center of my home.

A place where the air tastes of burning paper and ashen rain. As I looked out towards the rest of my street, it appeared they too had split open. I wondered who was left, like me.

Even the deer and squirrels had grown silent. Sitting upright amidst the brambling briars, their eyes wide, glassy, frozen as they stare blankly at nothing. Stunned. Their eyes glued to my house.

Tonight, the whispering chants inside my walls are growing louder, shifting from a whisper, to a murmur, to a thought, to a demand. I clutch my flashlight. A small drizzle forms off in the tree-line, I know I have to look. I have to know if the thing beneath my house is a forgotten god demanding its throne, or a starving demon wearing my face.