There is a dark tower, tall and cold and silhouetted against the pregnant moon. There are monsters in this tower. Everyone knows that. But they've never bothered the village, so no one tried to attack them.
The villagers are setting up a stage. A performance is about to begin. Max stands behind the stage. Waiting. Heart pounding. Breath quickening.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Max's friends stand around him, confident. Patient.
Then a bell chimes. The sound, clear and beatific and ever-so-slightly ominous, rings across the dark plain, reaching the village, down the dark hill upon which the shadow castle sat.
In the sound's wake, soft disembodied mutters pollute the air, doors creak open, and a clatter like an army readying for battle disturbs the night.
The last sound, unfortunately, was not some spectral conjuration. This the villagers discovered as a horde of monsters poured from the tower. Nightmarish monsters of every description. Monsters that drove you mad to look at them. Monsters with no faces. Monsters with too many faces. Monsters with no heads. Monsters with too few heads. Monsters with no bodies.
Max screamed in fear and watched in horror as his village burned around him, as friends and family pleaded and died.
A monster turned to look at him. Blue fire dropped from its jaws and red light shone from its eyes, and before Max could blink it was bounding toward him, taking outstretched-
Max's eyes fluttered open. He was in a room made of stone bricks, and firelight flickered over the rough surface. His hands were tied. He'd been thinking of something just now, something horrific, but he couldn't remember what. He made to get up and found that his feet were tied too. The lights went out.
Darkness. Complete darkness. Max's eyes darted wildly about, but as mentioned before, he was in complete darkness and couldn't see anything.
He could hear, though. And he heard squeaking. Rats. Max squeezed his eyes shut. The squeaking grew louder.
"Go awa-" Max's tongue went limp in his mouth, and his jaw muscles slackened. He couldn't speak. He couldn't close his mouth. He allay there, on the cold stone floor, his mouth becoming dry as the squeaking approached. Something touched his barefoot and he jerked away. Then, pain shot through his foot. The rat had bit him. The rat was crawling up his pants, towards his face, fast and unstoppable-
Something snatched the rat off him and he cried out in pain as the claws of whatever had snatched the rat slashed him.
A long, agonizing silence. Something warm dropped onto his face. He smelled blood. The rat squeaked pitifully, then fell silent.
The lights flicked on. Max was on a cliff. Strong winds blew his hair.
The sun shone brightly overhead. A bird circled over him. That must've been what snatched the rat away.
It shot down towards him.
Max realized two things, very, very fast. One, it was bigger than he'd thought, bigger than him, bigger than his house. Each one of its claws were as big as him.
Second, it wasn't a normal bird. It was a monster. Each feather was actually a face, and all the faces ran into each other, melting into one another like wax around the edges. Their eyes were pure white, and they were slack jawed. Dead. Some faces he knew. Some he had glimpsed. All were familiar in one way or another. Some only vaguely resembled the people he knew, and had been twisted to monstrous proportions, with cat eyed pupils, sharp teeth, forked tongues, no noses and more. Some were angelic or even androgynous in their perfection. The claws were not claws but massive human hands, albeit with six fingers instead of the normal five.
Max screamed, writhing against his bonds. As the massive monstrosity neared, hands flexing, Max found a surge of strength and tore apart his bonds. He ran away from the cliff, away from the monster. He glanced back. He was doing it! He was escaping. The monster was far behind him now. He-
His foot- and his hopes- sank as the ground suddenly became like quicksand beneath his feet. He tried to backtrack, but the ground behind him was just as gloopy. He struggled forward. He looked back. The monster was nearing. He forged forward, each footstep no longer causing him to sink lower. Each step took tremendous effort. The monster screeched.
A pale hand burst from the muck and caught his ankle, tipping him over. He looked back. A man, gripping a bottle of beer in his hand was sunk into the mud behind him, all the way to his neck. His skin was translucent and pale, and black veins stood out prominently. His eyes were wide and white, his mouth slack. He was grabbing Max with impossible strength. His white eyes were rimmed with red from the alcohol.
"Where... d'you... think... yer goin... boy?" he snarled.
"I..." Max stared into the familiar face. The man raised the beer bottle. Too drunk to even swing, it flopped back uselessly.
"Get... back..." snarled the man. Overhead, the monster screamed.
There was a hissing bubbling sound and then an axe materialized in Max's hand.
Max stared at it. He closed his eyes. Then he swung the axe behind him. There was a strangled gurk and the man died. Max looked overhead. The great monstrous bird screamed. Its faces were changing, twisting. Every face became leering, snarling, twisted. Max blinked, and there was a forest around him, but the bird didn't seem troubled by this, for its body glided through the trees as though they weren't there. Not far away, torches and firelight danced.
Max closed his eyes. It was too much. The torches, the screeching, the throbbing in his leg, it was like a-
Max opened his eyes.
The bird had landed in front of him. Its eyes glinted in the firelight of the torches, which had surrounded him.
"You're not real. Not anymore," said Max to the bird, to the torches, "I left you behind. I'm my own now."
The thousand slack faces moved in unison, a hundred dead vocal cords speaking together, forming a ghastly symphony. "You must die!"
Max shook his head. "I did what I had to. Goodbye,"
"Your sins will follow you!"
"I sincerely doubt it," muttered Max as the bird and torches lunged at him. In the split second before they touched him, he looked up. The crescent moon and two stars glinted in the sky. It looked like a sinister smile.
The torches and bird vanished. Max looked at the face.
"Hello," he said.
Lightning flared from the sky and hit the ground in front of Max. When the smoke had cleared, Max could see a figure standing there. He was unnaturally tall, and his cloak was black and seemed to reflect no light. Max could only see it because it was darker than its surroundings. He wore a black mask that was marginally less black than his cloak. And yet as Max stared at the figure, where there had once been irrational fear and paralyzingly shock, there was now only calm. In one gloved hand, he (it?) held a black raven's feather.
"You're him," said Max.
The figure inclined his head, "I am."
"I thought... I thought that the only way to escape you was to run. To put the past behind me,"
"The past is the past. It is behind you, yes, but inevitably, it surfaces. The only way to defeat me is to face me. And that is a challenge in itself," the shadowy figure walked towards Max. And yet with each step his great height was diminishing, and as he neared Max, his mask shattered, and beneath it there was nothing. In the next step, the hood unraveled, and then the rest of his cloak. The remnants of the cloak shifted as though to take another step, and before it was completed the cloak had unraveled completely. A black book with silver stitching forming words on its cover and a raven's feather was all that remained. They floated closer. The book flipped open, revealing lines of black words on creamy white pages. The book stopped at a blank page, and lifted to Max's eye level. The quill wrote swiftly-
THE END
And then, for good measure, added a
?
At the end.
Max smiled at that. "Time to wake up," he sighed, "I've got real things to deal with."
