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Hello Everyone:  Lord Baldrith here with a very creepy and awesome story by Lendrick entitled The Stranger.

Here is the text:

Background music:  Zander Noriega:  Song titles:  Abelian, Theorem 199 Variant 1, Bestial Paragon Interface

The Stranger by Lendrick Dawnfire

The Shadow Wood

The forest spoke of eerie adulations of un-bespoken cries of anguish. Fearful glances about, as the bedraggled stranger could sense the worms in the soil with benevolent smirks of doom. Teeth gnashing as they came flying out and bored into the eyeball of his mind. The stranger screamed.

For three days he had run, stumbling and tumbling through the forest, scratched and shaken by thorny brambles and brambly thorns, the stranger grew ever so weary. The witch sisters never mentioned it would be this painful, the hallucinations. Or were they? Scrambling and grunting the stranger picked himself up and continued to run, the worm in his eye blinked away.

On and on he ran, the spirits of the dead climbing their way to the surface and shrieking and screaming ran at him in translucent glory. Each time, the stranger seemed to scream louder.

The sisters were forever in his thoughts, but to get to the end, to achieve the unachievable spoke volumes of his determination. Driven by fear, pushed by loathing, the stranger needed to keep going, needed to survive.

Glancing about again, he saw that now he was in a clearing, with a path leading to a small cottage that had a single candle burning like the sun in one of the quaint windows.

Maybe the occupant was home? Salvation? Redemption? Hope? All these thoughts and feeling burned through the stranger’s mind that he might be at an end to the perpetual torment.

Willing his tired and slashed legs to obey, the stranger half hobbled, half ran along the path to the cottage. Only twenty feet. Two hundred feet? The cottage seemed further away, then further away, and so on and on the stranger kept running, it must be close, and it was only twenty feet. Stopping dead. The carnivorous worms, now poking through the spectral shades eyes, shrieked ever closer behind him.

Closing his eyes, the stranger knew that the cottage was only a short distance away. All he had to do was reach out and….

Opening his eyes, the cottage was right in front of him. Grasping the door knob as if death itself stalked him, the stranger flung the door open and leapt through.

The shrieking was getting louder and louder and….the door slamming shut, the shrieking stopped.

The stranger was standing in a modest room, with a roaring fireplace, a bearskin rug, wine, food and fruit were on a table in-front of him. Warmth flooded through him like a wave off the Bay of Storms. The stranger was home, safe. Secure.

The scene faded, replacing the cottage with a ramshackle hut. No fire and no fruit, dilapidated and ruined, it looked as though nobody had been here for a millennium. Since before the Cataclysm. A figure in front of the fire turned. A blood zombie!

Looking about, the door shut behind him, the stranger needed food, bandages and perhaps a weapon. Why was this happening? The sisters had deceived him!

There was a great explosion, the stranger was knocked to his back as the hut disintegrated around him. Fear threatened to overwhelm him and cause him to recede into the depths of his psychosis, where darkness and despair reigned supreme and he but their lap dog.

Something though, deep down, stirred. A spark. The spark grew and spread, igniting inside his soul, the light of the soul fire purged the fear from the stranger. Warmth and joy replaced the cold.

Rising up, the stranger turned around, the two sisters standing before him. Wreathed in soul fire, the stranger stood before them, unafraid and vengeful.

The fear was gone, replaced instead with a feeling of righteousness and strength. There was nothing this world could do to him now, any-more that would bring him to the same dark place he had just encountered. The wailing spirits, the blood zombies, the eye gouging worms. On this, inaugural day of change, initiation and no doubt a day that would become famous, it was the day he was born again.

‘You have not beaten me” The stranger proclaimed with the light of justice burning bright.

“Very good. You have passed the test, you’re Majesty”. The sisters replied.

At that very moment, the world exploded.

END

Excerpt from The Grim Sisters’ Anthology of the Mysterious & Macabre
By Lendrick Dawnfire, noted scholar of Brittany
Lord Commander
Knights of Novia