Our Infinite Fates

FEAR SLICED THROUGH ME like a hot knife.

The Mother looked just the same as she had in the bloody trenches. White hair fell to the ground in sheets. She was tall and rake-thin, her cheeks sunken and hollow, her skin grey as the piles of ash around her. She wore black robes that reached up to her jaw, and the only flesh visible besides her face belonged to spidery hands. Her pointed nails were so long that they curled back on themselves in grotesque helixes, like fossils or snakes or something far worse.

Sitting atop a natural dais of raised ground, her throne, too, was made of bones. The shards had been unnaturally twisted around each other into the shape of roses, their stems woven together like braids. A curious substance swirled around her feet, a dark, metallic fog, as though the evil were seeping out of her in noxious whorls.

A dozen hooded figures swanned around her, spectral and almost floating as they sank to her feet in prayer.