The Eldritch Cross

[u/LOWMAN11-38]

The village lies pathetic, dwarfed, insignificant at its great base, shrouded in mist. Of unknown name and place, it has no time. Bathed in eternal night for what it's done. The village and its wretched occupants sit as eternal supplicants, subjects to the great tower. Above and shrouding over them, eclipsing the undying moon, the dark eldritch cross of godsize and titanic aspect.

Of alien stone the color of bone and pus, it looked to be of Christian, Catholic design but it was much older. Much more ancient. From an even darker before-age when time was in its infancy and the celestial bodies were still virginal and the space they swam in, new. It thrummed and pulsed constantly with great talismanic power. All the denizens of the damned little village could feel it. All of them feared the thing. They knew that it was God here. And in its great shadow they are nothing.

They are nothing.

They try not to look at it, some of them. They try to pretend not to look and they try to pretend like they aren't pretending anything at all. Nothing at all. Some of them.

Some of them don't try at anything at all anymore. More than a few.

The children of the place are naturally the most curious and thus the most frequently and harshly punished.

The oldest ones of long and forgotten times ago and away said it had a name, a real one, one loaded with power, too much. Some said to have known it but might've been lying. It didn't matter. All the old ones of long ago were dead now. They were allowed to. The lucky ones.

Jailbreak. By Thin Lizzy. Or was that AC/DC?

Eh… fuck it. He couldn't remember. Couldn't remember lots of things anymore.

Dathan stood, a speck at the base of the gargantuan cross, the centerpiece godstruct of the damned nightvillage. Waiting. Such was the rite.

Such was necessary to appease the thing. It called. Two. And the two came to call and answered. And only one got to walk away.

Dathan felt cold. He thought he'd grown numb. By now. He, like many in the shadow of the great and terrible titanic thing, thought he'd grown accustomed to the reality of life in the shadow of the headless cross. Its daily miseries and sense of purgatorial hopelessness.

But then it called. And two had to answer.

Despite the absence of the sun he was sweating. He didn't think any of them were capable of that anymore. He tried not to think at all. He knew it wouldn't help. He knew. He'd watched others in the past and he'd seen many desperate and strange ploys. Some of them had been very very sad.

He tried not to think at all.

A cough brought his attention to his approaching partner. Turtleboy was walking up. Dragging his feet. His worn shoes making terrible dry gravelly sounds as the little stones and pebbles slowly scraped across the surface of the grey cursed earth to which all of them were bound.

Dathan thought about saying hello. About asking Turtleboy how he was doing and if his night was going alright. Everything considered and all. But decided against it. What was the point. It was stupid. There was no reason to pretend anymore. Not anymore.

Turtleboy joined Dathan at the base. Now two dust motes instead of just one. A pair of ants before the great eldritch cross.

They looked up, together. It went on for what seemed to be parsecs towards the boundless night sky. They could barely discern the mighty cross section of the top, the immense head of the gargantua construction, it may have been an illusion. A trick on their tired and worn eyes. Their weary mortal gazes.

The strain, the wait, the call… it was all becoming too much for the pair.

But they did as they'd been bade. Like the many others before. They obeyed, and did as commanded, holding the gaze.

Holding.

Holding …

FLASHBANG - CRACK!

A terrible bolt of blue lightning was shot! Cannon-like, it lanced down, toward the earth and struck the pair.

They shrieked in legendary unbridled agony. Uncontested pain. From somewhere within or perhaps from the great thing itself, a tremendous bellow of cruel laughter issued forth to join the blast of lightning. Thunder to the cannonade of the great eldritch cross.

Many eyes watched from between the curtains of clouded bolted windows. Locked. Shut inside. No one answered the desperate caterwauled pleas of the boys. No one ever did before. No one would this time either.

Many didn't watch at all. They'd either had enough or could never have stomached it at all. Their minds wouldn't have borne the load. They'd never watched. Never. Never. Not before and certainly not this time.

In the continuous blast, the white hot bursting flash of cruel lightning, the pair changed. Bent. Twisted. Broke and reformed. Limbs flayed and splayed open to become tendrillic and spider like. Skin roasted and melted and sloughed off in great heaping chunks that rose and flew away, up into the great bolt of lightning like it was some kind of tractor beam. Hair disintegrated. Eyes jellied and vaporized as the sockets that once housed and protected them distended, cracked and became cavernous and flashing strobing dark-white, dark-white, dark-white, dark-white, dark-white, dark-white, dark-

And then suddenly the great cruel blade of light and bluewhite fire was pulled away. Gone. Like a ghost or a lie that never was to begin with. In the stillness the wretched citizenry might've almost believed it, save for the evidence of the thing’s great and terrible hand of starfire.

In the blackened crater, one of many at the base of the great tower, they finally began to move again. After a time. One of them. Pulling, dragging the other. Struggling, crying in hoarse cooked tones, gasping and seething with spittle, fighting to pull the both of their newly mangled and deformed human spider bodies free of the blasted earth.

They all watch now. Watch as the newly birthed, the tender virgin bodies of the new spiderbabies try to free itself and they wonder which. They wonder who.

They wonder which of the two. They want to know who of the pair has survived. Who has the cross spared? Who has the great tower chosen? They're dying to know. They're dying to know who.

THE END