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From: The Storyteller
Date: 16 May 2000
Time: 07:37:06
The hunger inside was growing again, filling the emptiness inside it with a fresh sensation of pain. Around it was steel and stone, cold black stone, black like anyhting, everything. It had sought out the darkness of the world for so long now, it was time to emerge from hiding and find them, those it remembered, those whose faces flashed behinds its blind eyes. So long had it crept beneath the surface, seeing the places and faces in its sleep, the skulls of those still living. The crosses where it all began, the agony, the round smiling faces streaked with red. It was time to emerge.
In the darkness, it had found company. The shades of nighmare beckoned its call, consorting it in the tunnels and pits where it always crawled, tormenting it with their screams of pain and pleasure. The children of Oblivion, and with it they were one, its pain was theirs. Now they were gone. It was time to emerge.
It had traversed the surface in terror, but not as terrified as they who it came across, they fled before the anger and hunger. It knew the way instinctively, its eyelessness mattering little as it felt the surreal echoes leading the way through the blur. It came to a door, a block of wood, there was a noise and its world exploded as a shattered mirror.
There were images of a girl-child drawing, the woman holding her hand and handing her the crayons, of the woman clapping at a girl, holding her. The images dug into its soul like shards of glass, and as the woman cried out, it lashed... "Calandra."
The images were gone, the woman torn and shredded, when it heard a voice close by, distorted and deep. A man closed in, its blind eyes caught sight of the beacon before the images came back, the man combing the girl's long hair, but this time it was quick... his weight was nothing as it buried its claws in him and sated its hunger, the hunger, finally, drinking the pulse of his life just before his soul itself, his nascent shimmering sentience devoured to sustain the darkness. His charred and blackened shell was left in a seat of skin, the wet dark fluid audible beneath its feet. Then it saw, sensed, the other shape... dark and grey, but almost clear against the black mist of the world. It smiled, and the restless soul twitched and smiled back.