There was great joy in every corridor. Robed men and women wielded axes and swords twice their body size. They staggered and lumbered on with pride, infecting nearby hesitant followers on the cusp of self reflection with their boisterous rah-rahs and hoo-hahs, their impending sacrifices all being in service of the Visitor who was due to arrive this very moment in the heat of battle, they collectively said. Bloody excitement was in the air, coagulating into a solid stream of bodies smushed together, eagerly trampling one another and bumping blades into each other’s arms and eyes on their way out of the caverns. Scuttling in the opposite direction was Zooard and a handful of guards whom Fracaso had assigned to observe him at all times. They retreated further into the cave, intending to reach the former veterinarian’s armory of beasts. Zooard looked on as the ravenous crowd continued to flood outward. This is insanity, he thought, I can’t die now. I have a new world to build.
– – –
For someone who had been imprisoned for so long, Goor would have found the view of the open field liberating if not for the corpses that litter it. By the hundreds, Fracaso’s followers laid in the wet grass, limp and still, and yet they never looked so content. So striking were their stiffened smiles that they could be gleaned from a distance as far as the mound which their good priestess had stationed herself, alongside her squadron of guardsmen. Next to her was Goor, whose body was trapped under a pile of guards who were assigned to park their collective weight over their target, leaving him firmly planted on his stomach against the hard ground. There was nothing he could do except to witness the bloodshed below.
On the field were soldiers of the enemy faction, their bodies buried under bulking gray metal with bright red accents wrapped around each elbow and wrist as if to make certain they are to be seen at all times no matter the distance. They showed no sign of exertion as they ripped apart Fracaso’s followers with their bare hands. They have no other weapons to speak of. For every dead follower, however, five or six more followers would happily gallivant to the nearest soldier and throw themselves with reckless abandon into their clutches. Eventually, the soldiers’ stamina did falter from having to murder at a faster and wider rate than they were typically comfortable with. Several of them were even collapsing from the sheer number of bodies clinging to them. The priestess’ numbers did not seem to dwindle at all as more and more followers continued to pour relentlessly from the cave stationed behind the hill. The soldiers, for as much damage as they inflicted, could not advance onward.
“Who are they?” Goor asked.
Fracaso did not respond, watching over the battle in silence. She brought her hand to her face and began fidgeting. She then beckoned one of her guards over to her, murmured something to him before handing him an inscrutable object. The guard was sent downhill, a small team escorting him to a horizon not yet occupied by enemy forces.
A white flash flickered across the sky. Fracaso and Goor turned to find its source. Likewise, the steady stream of people below them halted in their tracks, stunned silent. A pocket of space was suddenly occupied. The occupant in question which many deemed to be nigh-indefinable had carved its way into the once clear sky above the barrier of soldiers on the opposite end of the battlefield. Goor felt the weight on him lightened as a few of the men scrambled to their feet.
This occupant was a wriggling mass with no discernible anatomy to speak of aside from its mass of pinkish appendages, a thing pure in its wrongness, suspended plainly in the violated sky.
“All who are feeble, lend me your ears.” A grand utterance shook the ruined fields and in one fell swoop, each and every one of Fracaso’s followers collapsed to their knees and tilted their heads to the floating thing above, welding them in place.
“If this is how the house treats its Visitor then let it be known that your collective function has amounted to nothing.”
The title Visitor was enough for everyone on the field to fling their heads to the mud, some grovelling, some crying. The exceptions were the armored soldiers who all remained standing as they had been from the start of the encounter, their expressions helmeted. From Goor’s perspective, they did not seem at all fettered by this creature’s appearance. The only other ones who did not fall to the ground were him and Fracaso. The men behind them, though they were visibly shaken on the ground, did not do so out of reverence but out of shock, detached from any faith-based fervor. The Visitor continued:
“You all lack significance and could not hope in any capacity to prepare a place for one such as me. Yet even when I finally decide to come here by your relentless invitations, here you are now resisting me and my men. Why?”
An uneven chorus of pleas and bids for forgiveness churned the air. From the hilltop, a slight exhale escaped Fracaso’s nostrils.
“There is but one avenue to which you may be found worthy of my potential contemplation in forgiving you.”
The mournful crowd was then enraptured with silence.
“Bring me the head of your priestess. She is a deceiver. She never has any intentions in ingratiating me, let alone welcoming me into your abode. She only seeks a mindless army and nothing more. In quick succession, you will bring to me each of her fingers and eyes. Place them in the palm of one of my men by nightfall. Only then will I consider your sentience to be of some meaning.”
“Bastard,” Fracaso muttered.
All at once, the loyal followers turned their heads to face the hill. They and the soldiers were side by side. But unlike the soldiers, they did not march toward the hill. They ran. Fracaso’s guards on the hilltop rushed to protect her, forming a huddled circle around her as they began their trek downhill. It was clear to Goor that they were not her usual flavor of fanatics, merely hired mercenaries that were called to protect her, in case that a need for a secular touch ever arose. She had clearly foreseen this scenario.
Goor took this opportunity to get up, ready to make his own way downhill, a good distance away from them.
“Fleeing, are we?” Fracaso inquired, seemingly aware of the exact time her prisoner would spring to his feet. She made no efforts to stop him yet her voice appeared to retain its loud domineering volume no matter how far he got away from her.
“I have your steed,” the voice continued, “You will not go far without it. You will know our place of rendezvous if you wish to see it again.”
Eventually, her voice subsided and Goor’s attention was then trained on the impending stampede of people surging uphill to his position.
“They’re after her. Not me,” he thought. As the rabid mob came closer however, Goor felt less confident. A subset of the onslaught was upon him, tackling him to the ground and battering him senselessly. Goor grabbed one of them by the leg, kicking several others off of him before tossing the one in his hand with a hefty spin. He proceeded to carve his way down the flooded slope until he was on the plains once more. Said plains were soaked red. Standing between him and the passage out of this nightmarish territory was a blockade of armored men, stationed on the mound placed before the deity. The deity in question had seemingly retreated into silence and was simply floating with no further actions to discern, almost docile in its inactivity. Before he knew it, the guards were after him. Their iron gauntlets were eager to ornament themselves in bone bits and flesh strings as they attempted to tear into his shoulders before he could even utter his title in the hopes that they would relent. With no such luck, he seized the assailants’ arms with his own and tossed them over his head into the grass. More soldiers continued to descend. Likewise, more frenzied followers were steadily gaining on him. He went for a different approach:
“I am the Doorman! The Doorman! No one but I can accommodate your Visitor! You need me, you imbeciles!”
Just then, another flash of light flickered across the sky. It was a familiar sight: the eye. The great eye that had graced the sanctum with its presence many times before hovered in the distance, far beyond that of the cave, positioning itself much higher in the air than that of the prior creature.
“Love above all,” it decreed, the first instance of it doing so.
A familiar phrase, one that its followers and only its followers can recognize. A shroud of calmness, albeit mixed with a twinge of confusion, enveloped the once rowdy crowd. Many of them, initially at a loss for words, eventually responded in unison:
“Love above all!”
“Yes, truly,” it said, “My dearest children. It is of no pleasure of mine to discover that you all have been grievously deceived. I am the true Visitor to which you seek. That parasite before you only seeks to take advantage of the love which you have earned.”
There was panicked murmuring among them. A few heads turned from one horizon to another. One spun heel begot another spun heel. Eventually, they faced their new object of hatred and resumed their mania once more toward the dormant tentacled mass. Then came stirring movement in the appendages of the creature, as if awoken from an unexpected nap. It came back alive and bellowed a response.
“Heed not the imposter! Do you not realize that this is yet another scheme of that conniving witch? That Eye is no more than a projection, conjured by her. Let her know of my righteous wrath. Turn back and face her, lest you test the value of your pitiful lives!”
Some stopped in their tracks while others slammed their entire weight against the soldiers who had long abandoned their combat-ready positions and were simply standing in place, waiting for more bodies to crash into them. The rest turned around to pursue the Eye.
“Are you lacking in perspective? Turn around and kill that cretin!”
They turned around.
“What are you whelps doing?! Kill the priestess!”
“No! Get him!”
So on and so forth. This rampant exchange continued ceaselessly into the evening. Many of the loyal men and women had either already committed to a side and visualized sacrificing their enemy to their deity of choice in their heads as they collapsed to the ground, mentally drained. Some of them had simply left. A remaining portion proceeded to run wildly into their chosen direction, undeterred by any inner conflict of any kind. Goor walked among the lethargic masses. He eyed the tentacled entity once more to get a better look at it. As he observed, he realized that they were not tentacles at all, merely human fingers magnified in size. He noted the fingernails, the joints, the bundles of hair sprouting from their knuckles. He noted the other tentacles: merely more fingers overlaid on top of existing fingers, seemingly fading in and out whenever the projections overlap with each other.
“Oh,” he uttered to himself. He moved in the direction of the eye: his rendezvous point with Fracaso.