The Fright Train

The Glow Part 16

Some time ago...

Deep below the city; so deep she was beyond graveyard soil, the sewers and subways and rank substrata, lay the Great Old One holding court within her bedrock shrine. She lay almost but not quite beyond the reach of the maze of coal mines long closed and flooded, long forgotten or used. Her world is one of darkness for now, but she lives through her servitors, thought forms made alive by her will and need. They work to pollute and contaminate, to spread her viral threads, the blue skeins holding her own twisted DNA. She is the ultimate disease. For those who don't obey, she is death.

I need...

This command, sent to all who do her bidding, sent to those who hold her spark; that neon blue of primordial lightning; the glacial glow that shines through the windows of the soul. Her souls. And she will corral them, truss them into abeyance; bind them to her will. Souls were being collected, harvested, taken; their energy and life force so vital for her own resurrection.

In her great Stygian tomb, she waited. Patient, relentless, impending. Like some immense fungus, she released her threads into the earth around her, diabolical mycelium that reach up for miles, questing, infecting, spreading her spores. Through each human infected, she became a part of them, feeling them, controlling them, absorbing their energy, their nutrients, their souls. They were her children, and in her stasis, she lived vicariously through them. All the while growing stronger and more vibrant. She exulted. She glowed.

I need...

Three of her servitors, clothed in the bodies of old women, were gone; destroyed by those yet to be infested. She'd felt their pain as they withered, the searing agony of flesh destroyed, their screams resonating in her own cells, the horror they'd felt in that part of their minds untouched by her parasitical reach. It wasn't in her nature to care or feel compassion, but as they perished so a part of her died, along with those weak bodies made magnificent by her essence. There were limitations with flesh and blood, sinew and bone. But those attempting to fight her had no idea of her true power and what lay in wait for them.

The Great Old One sensed the strong human, the one who'd found the keys, the one who'd opened the boxes. She knew this one was different but knew too the damage within that one's mind, the drive to help others was the weakness with all humans. And in the dark she smiled, though she had no mouth. The pits that were her eyes burned the prettiest blue, engine bright, fuelled by forces that weren't of this dimension. The breach that brought her here had happened eons ago, long before man got seeded by the visitors from another star. And only she now guarded that portal, the gatekeeper to places of such immense power, it spawned all manner of monster and myth in the world that teemed above her.

I need...

To grow. To be free. To reign.