Neytopia › Part 3: Night › Chapter 6

The last hour

The raven had no time to spare. He knew the System would send more watchers when it stopped receiving reports from the ship. He sent the deathless to kidnap specific scientists and engineers that he needed to build the device. Meanwhile he swallowed cities whole, growing beyond measure. But as he grew, he also became more exposed. Men started seeing him in visions, witnessing what he wanted to do. What would happen if someone found him? What if someone trespassed the garden and stopped him? No, it was impossible, the ivory tower would rise. The watchers had failed and no man could stop him now.

Still he missed one thing: the location of the ivory tower.

The feeling that he knew where it was grew stronger by the day. He could almost see it now, but still he needed more souls. He increased the pressure on his kidnapped scientists, threatening to tear apart their children and wives in front of them if they did not build his device.

He did split his engineers… into separate teams, so none of them could ever understand the purpose of their machine. To ease their conscience, the engineers told themselves their devices were probably just a power source, at most a small weapon. The bright men obeyed.

The disappearances of prominent minds did however alert the human authorities, and they bureaucratically slowly began to collaborate with each other. After a long investigation, some people came to the forest where the raven was working. The locals dreaded setting foot in it, recalling the ancient stories about the things that crawl at night. Stories which were witness accounts of the deathless on their way out to find fresh offerings.

After years of work the machine was nearly finished, but people were about to learn about his hideout. The loud barking of dogs sounded closer as a special taskforce moved toward to the garden. The hostages who were working on the machine heard the police come, and thought it would all be over soon. But the raven wanted to prove to them that they would finish their work, no matter what. Sixty-four special forces men raided the forest. As they walked toward the garden they were sucked into the ground or torn in half by the deathless, who crawled unseen through the roots and foliage.

Their screams of horror were heard both in the garden and outside for some hours, before dying down into the peace and tranquility characteristic of the forest. The hostages were terrified. Now they knew the lengths to which their captors would go to fulfill their mad task. Some even believed their captors might be more than regular madmen, that it was all not just a sick joke.

The disappearance of the raid team was a shock to the entire country, and soon, the rest of the world. A few hours later, the army began to gather around the forest. They used thermal imaging, satellites and other scans; all of them were blocked. They used devices of all kinds to scout the terrain searching for traps and the raid group, but they found nothing. When they were about to step into the forest, an enormous vision of his nightmarish form appeared in the sky above the garden. It was so large everyone outside could see it. The news helicopters filmed it in all its splendour.

It was clearly not human; not even close. They saw an amorphous, continuously-changing mass, with two hundred and fifty-six long legs stretching out of its center. It used a mouth turned inside out to speak slowly with a grave voice. The mouth didn’t move, but the words appeared in the minds of those who watched like the whispers of a snake,

Humans… Hello. Sssstay out of my forest. Don’t step on me or you will see.

Some soldiers were frightened by the horror that had just spoken, but their superiors dismissed it,

That cheap magic trick is just some sort of hologram with fancy speakers for the audio. Remember they have killed a lot of people and have at least thirty-two hostages. You must be brave now, we are going in there and taking those cultists down.

The order was given and the attack began. As soon as the first soldier stepped into the forest he was swallowed into its darkness, his screams fading into the foliage. His helmet camera broadcasted everything. The officers and troops back at the camp outside the forest watched in silence while somebody taped the footage to sell it to reporters. Then the whole world stood in silence to watch.

The camera filmed the man being dragged by his feet at an incredible speed through bushes and plants, taken by some tall dark slender figure. He took the gun from his holster and unloaded the entire magazine on the figure. The bullets went right through it. Then he reached the great clear. In it there was the device, the well, four buildings for the engineers and the bloodtree, but all that passed almost unnoticed. What caught everyone’s eye was the pile of screaming people next to which a large abomination was crouching, taking them and eating them whole.

The soldier was thrown in the pile. The Thing stopped what it was doing, turned to the soldier and grabbed him. After something that resembled, or tried to resemble, a smile, the man fell down into the dark pit that was its throat. The last images showed a massive stone gallery where pale, skinny corpse-like things moaned and flailed their arms helplessly.

The president and his military advisers held an emergency meeting. Shortly after jets took off from the nearest military bases, instructed to bomb the forest. People from all around the country came to see the horror show. A new church spawned, proclaiming the Thing to be the one true god and commanding its believers to kneel before It. When the jets were near the forest, they were caught mid-air by some fleshy masses which could be called hands, but which had no fingers. The jets were crushed before they could release their bombs.

Due to the futility of regular weapons, the president decided it was time to dust off the forbidden nuclear weapons. Those would surely erase the Thing from the face of the planet. The army cleared the town and its surroundings. The raven wasn’t afraid of nuclear bombs, he could just stop them mid-air too. Not that it mattered, because the machine was finished.

He breathed life into it. The world in his visions, previously confined to his nightmares, now expanded outward from the machine. Everywhere it reached, the air grew thick, green and suffocating. But when the last hour had just begun, he felt something strange.

There was an intruder at the garden. How?

He rushed back to the garden, as his world kept expanding and sinking everything into his nightmare. The man was running toward the machine. The raven approached him and swung his mighty hand, but it just went through the man without effect, and the man kept running.

For the first time in a long time, the raven was truly afraid. He called the deathless,

Where are you!? There’s a man in the garden! A man in the garden!

But no one replied because they were all floating above in the sky in pure bliss. The raven stood directly in front of the man,

Stop what you are doing right now, I command you!

The man took off his shirt, revealing he was strapped with explosives.