Prologue: A Dream of Things Long Gone
#gore warning
I sat in a room, watching a man cry.
He wore the gradients of shadows, every subtle movement sending flickers that lit the screen in cracks of grey. Whiteness clung about his eyes, then leaked and unwillingly let loose a single stream that broke the shadows of his cheek into deep, glinting canyons.
His words were foreign to me, speech snagging and slurring with every glitch of the screen. They came to me like soft feathery wings, encasing me with the powdery feel of reluctant acceptance, smothering and overwhelming. Even as the man now gazed in silent contemplation, his eyes seemed to meet mine and yet was off by a hair’s breadth, looking further beyond to some distant place that both he and I knew not. Or perhaps I did know just a little more.
Fizz.
Skeletons gazing towards me with more sorrow in blackened sockets than the living could muster. A putrefied corpse tried its best grin within an eternal grimace, head lolling too far and thumping with grisly thud to the whitewashed floor. Greyness leaked from its rotting and flayed open head and an eyeball whizzed frantically in an attempt to glare at me from its lowly position.
Fizz.
Sticks stabbing into pots of incense, melted to ashes and thrust into the mouths of gaping obese flaps of skin. Their eyes and other distinct features were buried within the waves of coiling skin, meaty and sickening, rolling over and colliding with other fleshy bits to send a ripple through the mass. Behind, a smaller, paler shade of shadows awaited. It seemed vaguely pink. The barely visible hints of black pupils peering from within the flesh flashing at the skeleton slaves that now stuffed a giant decaying pineapple down the gullet of the first creature. And then its eyes caught upon mine.
Fizz.
A single lone ship, calm in the ocean. The skies and the lapping waves were a brilliant azure, no whiteness of clouds to stir their majesty and steal the spotlight. Little in the distance, and yet dots of cargo racked up high upon it, teetering not. No, it was the screen that tilted, the bow angling for the skies, the cargo obeying gravity and defying imagination, and the motion of the screen faltered. A bright red arm, tentacled and giant suckers seeming to inhale the very air and waves, sent the winds to lash the cargo overboard and aimlessly drift from the carnage. It dented, it rent great metal wounds and little spots of red slowly scattered over its surface. Somehow those dots bled into the ocean and the water was pink, now red, hardly a fraction of the inconceivably gigantic creature that burst open a single eye half the size of the ship. It gazed, unreadable even as its tentacles swept the last of the ship’s burdens into the water, cracking the ship open like a nut, corkscrewing about the entire ship and sinking with its broken prize.
Its eye, glazed over to protect its sensitive pupils, met mine.
Generated by Copilot
And so I awoke with the memory of a single eye, gazing at me. A red eye. I turned about and when I awoke again later, I remembered nothing.
