Begin Story

I fear to close my eyes when the shadows come.

You run at a loss of breath, the swarming, black pack on your heels. A scarlet sun plummets down on the molten tarmac of an anonymous road and your soles sink into it like softened butter. Each stride is an ordeal. The energy it takes to extract yourself from this molten tar, twisting around your ankles in long rubbery threads, exhausts you, inexorably. The sickening wave, chaotic chitin mass, gains ground. Sometimes, you overtake poor aeons, also stuck in the pitch and which, in spite of **** efforts, find themselves entangled, condemned to an immobility synonymous with ****. Their vain gesticulations do not change anything and the terrible fate that awaits them forces you to speed up. Yet they are familiar faces, people you know. They implore your help, their eyes reddened and their complexion livid. Their mouths twist with terror and whisper "Please Gabriel, please!".

But you answer nothing and do not stop. Something pushes you to cling to life at the expense of an ounce of elementary empathy. Again and again, no matter what. An instinct that was dormant in you during all these years of torpor and that refuses, today, obstinately, the surrender. The pleas turn into screams when thousands of hungry mouths, chelicerae and mandibles tear the skin, perforate the flesh to gorge themselves in an obscene, frenetic orgy. In a flash, a bloodbath gives way to skeletons displaying bleached bones, prostrate in horror as the magma of insects spills out rustling through protruding eye sockets and hollowed-out ribs. You redouble your efforts, your determination. Cramps tetanize your thighs.