On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 241, of 266 so far.

The Old Gods

The stories of the old gods are true.

They came from a convulsion of the universe, a chance and temporary order by which future chaos could best be ensured. Birthed in moments that might have been millennia, they found themselves in the void; its sole inhabitants, seething with entropy and separation and light.

Alone, and angry to exist, in their supreme isolation and ultimate other-ness they instinctively lashed out, and in doing so created all the features and worlds of the heavens. Every star, every rock, every planet… even ours.

Our ancestral memory has deliberately blurred and omitted them; a prosopagnosia of atavistic avoidance. Blank places in our genetic recollection, but the contours of the edges are too damnably suggestive. We know them without knowing them, and when we find ourselves afraid without reason, it is them that we fear.

They are every shadow, and every glimpsed shape and unwelcome movement. They are the common wellspring of what we despise in arachnids, and serpents, and rodents, and all the things of the deep. They are thunder and lightning and fire; the abyss below and the vault above. The bare branch upon the windowpane past midnight. They are the unwritten root entry in all that stirs dread in man.

The Old Ones are still here.

Out beyond this sphere, for the most part, but it is also their special nature to not be limited to a single place, or a single moment. As we exist in our limited way, trapped in our precise location, and walled-in by the prison cell of our ever-shifting present instant in time, they surround us in more ways than we can comprehend, as a mountain-range to an insect.

There are those who worship them, and even invite them into this plane. In the dark corners of the world, in the abandoned places, in the chambers hidden from light and logic, there are those who speak to them; in whispers, in chants, in pleading and in ecstasy. And sometimes, for our sins, a reply comes.

The Old Ones have their inhuman servants within the world of humanity. Children can sense them, and those whose minds have become frayed or untethered from what we laughingly called sanity. Whenever sensitive souls dream dark, they hear an echo of these lesser things — here among us in the night, never sleeping, and following strange instructions towards inscrutable ends.

Our best defence against their servants is the Earthen Art, passed down by vanishingly few, and twisted by rumour and disbelief into the nonsense of every type of fiction. Long may it remain so.

Our best defence against the Old Ones themselves is our insignificance, and their comparative disinterest. For now.

Not one in a million can wield the Art, and for most, it means the unmaking of the self. To use it is to know the Old Ones, in general aspect at least, and even that mere knowledge is often fatal. Their unfathomable forms, interpreted and rationalised into horrors by inadequate senses. Like a mighty tree, world-high, quivering in a breeze from beyond our mundane nearby stars. Their shape is inferred, not seen, and utterly unpalatable to the ordinary human mind.

But there are a few who can endure it. A matter of hundreds, at the very most, across eight billion souls upon this world. Of even those few, fully nine-tenths are as unaware as the teeming masses who surround them. They have no idea of how special they are. They will live out their lives that way, afraid of conventional things, and worldly tragedies and terrors. They will be all the happier for it.

Which leaves a few dozen, spread across the face of the Earth. Enough to fill a moderate-sized hall, though they would never gather in any number for fear of extinction.

Meeting in twos or threes, in their own dark corners of the Earth, intuitively sensing the ebb and flow of the Old Ones’ work, they know the omens for what they really are. As humanity’s brief order wanes and its chaos reasserts itself, as the waves warm and the air thins, as hunger and fear and war loom, they know that the Earth becomes ever more noticeable — and ever more appealing.

Even now, the Old Ones’ attention begins to turn. As they intermittently begin to contemplate this tiny, unimportant world on the edge of one spiral arm of an unremarkable galaxy, so too do we feel the effects. Sorrow and despair, self-hate and self-harm, broken sleep and damaged cognition; these are the hallmarks of their regard. And sooner or later, they will set out on a journey.

Across unimaginably vast darkness, traversing the gaps between the stars, they will begin their travel. And when they draw near, this world will meet its end. The Old Ones will intersect our space, end our civilisation, and fracture our minds, consigning us forever to the torment of their gaze.

Until then, we wait, and we listen, and we dread. Those who can wield the Art make such preparations as they can, like a man might fasten his coat against a tsunami. As a sparrow might try to outfly a hurricane that fills the sky from horizon to horizon.

There can be no escape, of course. The Old Ones are our creators, and our destiny; both ends of a path that they know is in fact only a loop in time. They dreamed us into existence just as the universe dreamed them, and the road we must follow was already written on the aeons-dead day when they gave us our small, pale, flat and trivial definition of existence.

Their minds are unknowable, and their concerns are larger than the spaces between the galaxies that are their stepping stones through the cosmos, but their goal, at least, is simple.

To take us — and all life, in all its forms, everywhere — back into the silent, solitary darkness that is their first and only true home.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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