Galthor felt the creature before he saw it.
It was waiting in the tunnel ahead.
He suddenly stopped walking and stared at it.
After absorbing weeping canyon, he began to explore one of the tunnels that surely led outside to the Abyssal land. He hadn’t wasted ti as he began walking instantly.
But now, he felt sothing up ahead. A presence that registered not as physical mass but as a void, an absence of sothing that should be there.
Galthor kept walking.
The creature erged from the darkness like a nightmare given form. It was pale, almost colorless, with skin that seed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its body was vaguely humanoid, but proportions were wrong, limbs too long, head too large, eyes that were nothing but empty black pits.
And it was starving.
Galthor wondered if every thing old and ancient are always starving. The entities. Everything is hungry.
Galthor could feel its hunger, a desperate, all-consuming need that radiated from it like heat from a fire. And one curious thing he could feel wss that this creature didn’t feed on flesh or blood. It fed on sothing else entirely.
He narrowed his eyes and his mouth opened with his conscious effort.
"mory Eater," he said aloud. The na surfaced from the entity’s absorbed knowledge. "I’ve heard of your kind. You consu experiences, while you leave your victims as empty shells."
The creature didn’t speak. It probably couldn’t. But it understood him, he could see that in the way it tilted its massive head, considering him like a predator assessing prey.
"I don’t want to fight you," Galthor continued. "Let pass, and we both walk away."
The mory Eater’s response was imdiate and violent.
It lunged at him with speed that shouldn’t have been possible for sothing its size. Galthor barely had ti to raise his defenses before its claws slashed at his face, leaving trails of frost in the air like forgotten mories.
But the physical attack was a feint. The real assault ca through a different vector entirely.
The creature’s mind slamd into his.
Fuck....why does everything want to fight with their mind??
It was nothing like the entity’s attacks. The Weeping Canyon had used grief as a weapon, battering at his consciousness with accumulated sorrow.
Rhe mory Eater didn’t batter, it infiltrated instead. It slipped through his ntal defenses like water through cracks, seeking the mories that gave his mind structure and aning.
For a mont, Galthor felt himself beginning to dissolve.
His na. His purpose. His identity as Unchanging Warth. All of it started to blur, erased by the creature’s insatiable hunger. He felt his first life fading, the years in the hospital bed becoming distant, unreal. He felt his second life following, his arrival in this world, his gaining of worshippers, his battles and victories all washing away like sand before a tide.
Then the mory Eater reached deeper.
It found the locked mories. The vast ocean of accumulated divine experiences sealed in his subconsciousness. The perished barbarian god, their millions of years of existence, their triumphs and failures and everything in between.
The creature tried to feed.
And the ocean rose up and drowned it.
Galthor watched, not surprised, as the mory Eater convulsed.
Its psychic presence which had been overwhelming monts before suddenly shattered. Information flooded back through the connection like a wave.
He saw through the mory Eater’s eyes.
Felt its ancient existence, stretching back to the Abyssal War itself. It had been sothing else once, before the corruption transford it. A scholar. A keeper of histories. It had preserved mories instead of consuming them, maintaining records that spanned civilizations.
Then the war ca, and everything it had preserved was destroyed. The trauma broke sothing in its nature. Preservation beca consumption. The creature that had once cherished mories now devoured them, trying desperately to fill the void left by everything it had lost.
The mory Eater collapsed.
Galthor approached cautiously, but the creature posed no threat again. Its mind had been overwheld by the sheer strength of Galthor it had tried to consu. The divine recollections of the barbarian god had proven too vast, too complex, too heavy, too mighty.
"I keep saying this...but you guys shouldn’t look at what you should not have."
The creature twitched. Its mouth opened, and words erged....but not its words.
"The anger... the endless anger... why do they hate us so much..."
Galthor frowned. "What’s this...?"
For so reason he felt an urge to listen, as if what the creature would say was sothing important. The surface of the dark sea in him rippled.
"We only wanted to protect them... our people... our children..."
Galthor knelt beside the mory Eater. Its eyes now held a faint glo
"What happened to you?" he asked softly.
The creature’s mouth moved again. "Betrayed... we were betrayed... soone opened the door... let them in...HIM..we hold...I wrote records for HIM..."
Galthor felt a chill. HIM?
"Who? Who betrayed you? Who are you talking about."
But the mory Eater was fading. Its body was dissolving, unable to maintain cohesion without a functioning mind to hold it together. The last thing it said was barely a whisper.
"One of our own... one of our own..."
Then it was gone, leaving nothing but a faint stain on the tunnel floor.
Galthor remained kneeling for a long mont, processing what he’d heard. The Weeping Canyon suddenly felt so kind of new strangeness to him. His eyes narrowed with suspicious. "The force that threw here... then. All of this is connected to HIM? Is that why I am here? And what did this blasted this ant...?"
One of our own. What did that an? Another god? A barbarian? Sothing else entirely?
He didn’t have answers. But he had confirmation of sothing he’d suspected.
Galthor rose to his feet, his expression troubled. He continued down the tunnel. But now he wasn’t really looking forward to things.
Things are changing too fast. Too fast that it almost felt as if sothing or....soone is pushing for change.
He shivered. "First thing first. I need to get out of here."
Reviews
All reviews (0)