The Seed of Corruption - Prologue

The very beginning of my current project (name is tentative). It's the first serious excerpt I've written in years. Excited to keep going!

The sun was absent, and everything was falling into place. Nearly fully aligned, both moons shone of blood, and the world below walked in an uneasy half-darkness. There was no wind. Upon a hill stood a ring of torches, breaking the dark in flickers to illuminate three tall figures near its center. Their skin was pale as death, their features cold and sharp, and they had piercing yellow eyes, themselves almost seeming to supply their own light. Their robes, wrought with cunning hands and dark as shadow, fit their forms as though a part of them. Their hair was long – white on one, and black on the others.

The night was not dark to them.

At the center of the ring stood a cruciform of wood. A fourth man was bound to it by cords at his feet and his hands, his head hanging forward. In appearance he was much akin to the others – he was tall, lean and with black hair, but there was a discernable difference about him: his skin, though also pale, had more color, and his yellow eyes seemed to have a diminished luster – not as a result of failing strength or health, but as if they were more human. They did not pierce the night as the others did.

The white-haired man now stepped forward, producing a long knife from under his robes. The other two had begun a low chant, their awful language crawling through the air like a living thing, evil and malformed. Above, the more distant moon was nearly behind its companion. Grabbing the hair of the bound man, he roughly pulled his head up to expose his neck. His lips curled into a sneer, revealing two cruel fangs.

“How… weak you are,” he spat, each word imbued with unmasked hate. His harder, colder eyes regarded the bound figure as one would a rotting corpse. He said no further words. In the quieter eyes gazing back there was no panic, and no plea for life came. There was merely sadness, and at length they shut with acceptance.

Denied the satisfaction of fear or supplication, the man snarled, and his knife flashed across the other’s throat. Blood began to pour out of the wound. The others’ chanting grew in intensity, and they held their hands above the ground beneath the cruciform where a pool of red was gathering. The larger moon now fully obscured the second, and as the voices grew its hue seemed to fester and deepen. The white-haired man held the knife out above the pool, and dropped it.

The ground was no longer still. Around the pool it had begun to shift and churn, and soon both the blood and knife were lost from view. The cruciform’s foundation failed, and it fell forward into the changing earth. Reaching limbs became visible from below, horrible, twisting and strange, wrapping around the wood and the man bound to it. The air had grown sick, and now bore an awful clamor of squelching, the splintering of wood, and a terrible, maddening groan. A horror beyond description was making its way forth into the waking world, its very existence a stronger blasphemy than any curse man could utter.

Having fully emerged, it became still. Whether it now stood, sat or otherwise could not be told on account of its inscrutable shape and many members – but it was clear it was waiting. The white-haired man alone had remained close; the other two had involuntarily retreated. He regarded the abomination before him with awe, his eyes shining with rapture.

“At last…” he breathed. “The diminished will be purged.”