Possession

Recruitment Drive

The mysterious white haired man stumbled through the alleys. The other street people avoided him, as he was covered in dried, crusted blood, and spoke seemingly to himself...in two distinct voices. However, his most disturbing feature were his white-on-white eyes. He should be blind. Yet somehow he could focus on the faces of those he approached.

The others scattered from him en masse. Some primitive impulse sent them scurrying for cover. However, that was only the human vermin. The actual rats, they gathered and followed the white haired man, and he led this parade of vermin like some macabre pied piper.

First the vermin that followed him numbered in the dozens, then in the hundreds, now? Now more than a thousand rats followed him in a verminous tide. The massive hordes of rats was strangely silent and seemed to move with a singular purpose.

Eventually he came upon a camp of the dispossessed, this one was larger than most, having at least a dozen makeshift tents. Also, what set this one apart was that it was set in a large cul de sac. It was just turning dark and several fires were burning in large metal barrels. As the white haired man approached from the deepening gloom it became apparent that the silent vermin tide that had followed him had grown into the thousands...the first people stood paralyzed, not comprehending the sight before them, this great moving, living carpet of flesh. The dirty white, gray and brown piebald mass was a moving shadow in the flickering firelight, almost invisible,  but for the eyes, those thousands of pinpricks of red, that glared back at them with a single purposeful malice. Those eyes filled them with dread, and they turned to run.

The white haired man raised his arms from his side, outstretched and palms up as he cried out words of power in a voice that did not match his appearence, a rich and feminine voice, but deeper than any mortal woman could produce. The voice spoke, no shouted, these words of power, these words of deep and dark magic. These Blasphemies. At which the horde of eerily silent rats ran as one after the fleeing humans. Eerily, the only sounds produced by the verminous tide were the clattering of thousands of small claws upon the dirty pavement.

In seconds the horde was upon the runners, and new sounds were heard, the screams of the people mixed with a ripping sound, and then a horrid mewling noise from each fallen human. The horde continued into the camp, overrunning the hapless people before they could flee. In a space of a few moments it seemed to be over. Everyone lay on the ground, writhing in horrid agony. The white haired man walked into the camp, approaching the first of the fallen. Watching the rats melting into the bodies of the people on the ground. For the rats were not eating the humans, they were merging with them. 

The white haired man sat down in the dirt as the unholy transformations proceeded. After a few minutes he began to hum, then to sing. He sang The End, by the Doors, over and over again. But again, it was the rich, deep female voice that emenated from his throat. After a  period of time, the first one stood up slowly, on shaking legs like a newborn foal. It was a massive, humanoid figure, at least nine feet tall, broad chested and heavily muscled. It was covered in filthy, piebald dirty white, and brown fur.  It was a true horror in face and form, an ogre-sized humanoid rat. Its mouth was filled with crooked fangs, and each twisted digit on its paw-like hands sported a great cleaving claw, the likes of which would shame a badger. It turned its head to the dark sky and hissed a disturbingly squeak-like roar.

The white haired turned to look upon the abomination with a smile upon his face, gone were the white-on-white orbs, and back were the eyes of a serpent. He quickly stood and walked to the creature. "Welcome my child. You are the first born. Well done! Come, let us watch the birth of your brothers together."  The white haired man took the mostrosity by its massive right paw and turned it to the spectacle. The abomination, for its part, regarded the white haired man with a look akin to affection.

As each grotesque birth took place, the white haired man clapped and gave words of encouragement, in the end there were twenty of these living obscenities. Several had not formed, seeming dying during the transformation. "Oh how sad...oh well, waste not, want not. Feed upon the remains of your brothers my children! That way they will be with us in spirit." 

With that, the greatures greedily devoured the corpses of their fallen fellows on the ground. After about five minutes of this, the white haired man spoke again: "Hurry my children. We musnt dawdle. Dear Silas' friends have found him, and we musnt keep them waitng."

"After all, I have promises to keep. And many miles before I sleep."