All posts by Bruce Priddy

It emerged from the glowing, seeping wound in wall. A living, human visage of pain. Scars and sores riddled its flesh, too numerous to count. Pieces of jagged, rusted metal protruded from the skin, some bleeding around the base. It had no eyes, bone grown over where the sockets once were. Yet it somehow saw it. It turned its head toward us. It chattered its teeth, exposed from the hooks peeling its lips back, in delight.  

Alternative names: Afflicted, Sufferers

Bodies upon bodies, writhing on each other. All thin, starved. Each had open wounds. None cared. It was a display of utter, animal wantonness. From the middle of that pile of humanity rose a naked figure. Anything that could indicate its sex was gone, replaced with thick scar tissue. Seeping sores and jagged wounds competed for space across its body. Grafted into its skull was a halo-like crown, tarnished, corroded. It spread its hands and spoke with the voice of a sow. “Welcome to Heaven,” it squealed. 

Alternative names: Hesychasts, High Ascetics

We could blame it. That only way to ever sleep again, to go on, to do anything. Otherwise, what? Knot bedsheets and hope the ceiling fan holds? No. It was that thing, bug, grub, worm whatever it was. That did it. That’s what made us do those…things. 

Truth is, it just sat there. Fat off everything we did. It ate what we fed it. It didn’t make us do anything. It just freed us of our inhibitions. Everything we did…we because we already had it in us.

Alternative names: Carrion Grubs 

Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee.

Alternative names: The Dollmaker, Tashkent Ripper, Butcher of Accra, Highway 42 Killer, Alan Perry Nichols (possible)

Alternative names: Feasters Within, Con-Rit 

From the storm clouds above us, tentacles unfurled, reaching toward us. They would have been invisible against the blackened sky if not for the myriad brilliant colors dancing along them each time electricity arced between their tips. One-by-one the tentacles plucked people from the ground, their faces in frozen in pain screamed. 

Darrell clutched his face, blood from his now empty socket gushing between his fingers. The now detached eyeball was impaled on the creature’s long, multi-segmented finger. It brought the eye to its beak and delicately plucking it away. Darrell thought he could see a shiver of ecstasy run through the monster’s feathers as it swallowed his eye. Then it took a step toward him. “What would you have me tell you?” it said in his voice. 

Alternative names: Hungry Mouths, Silent Assassins, Haq’yiq

It ate him! The ground ate him! It opened up right under him and he fell in! I can still hear him! Help! Somebody please help us!

More of the creatures emerged from the piles of brown, reeking refuse at the foot of the yawning god. Things that were once men, but their bodies stretched, distended to hardly look human anymore. Their limbs were thin things, dragging useless as they crawled. Atop their heads they wore the skulls of their old bodies, eye-stalks emerging through the sockets. 

Alternative names: Feces of Lhuaggoglug, Servants of the Slug, Guides of the Labyrinth, Mar-iggu

(Unique Entity)

It is something left over from the most ancient days. Not plant or animal or fungus but something else. If there were ever others of its kind, they are long gone. It alone survived the cataclysms throughout the aeons by learning and adapting. Now it is less a living thing now and more a force of cold, hungry nature. Its form is never fixed for long, always changing to better hunt and hide, thought it may wear one skin for millennia. In these final days it appears as dried, barren tree, its mouth gaping and desperate. Perhaps even this immortal being is coming to the end of its life.