The-Rune-Knight
We carry darkness not in our hearts but in our minds and our stomachs. It is warm, wet and thick. It covers the walls of our skull like mold and occasionally, it bleeds. When it does, darkness takes over consciousness and then comes out the monster that lives under our beds, crawling up and curling beside us, breathing into our necks. Nightmares haunt the night, and if we are lucky enough, by the time the sun comes up, the monster will be gone and we will wake up.
The monsters that crawled out of darkness always exist in it, and they always have. As men raised their civilization, the monsters came out less and less, but they never really left. They surfaced only to devour men, and haunt them. Some humans learnt to control these beasts; some learnt to create them. Some, however, learnt how to end these foul beings and how to protect mankind from them. Die Taste, an underground organization whose roots go deeper than many civilizations, has dedicated itself to hunt these beasts and men who side with them down, and kill the beasts while keeping the foul men under lock. They were the key to keeping the beasts crawling in darkness, making them too scared to surface, and they took pride in it.
After the 19th century, the beast sightings decreased significantly, causing Die Taste to almost lose its place within the world. Their numbers dropped as their name was no longer spoken among people. Yet they stayed, still sworn to hunt the beasts.
This story is about how a boy who woke up only to come face to face with the monster under his bed, and how he realized how much he would have prefered to never wake up from his nightmare as the beasts slowly started to come out of darkness. This time not crawling, but running, with their teeth bared.