Beastly Tales
"The Inexorable Awakening"
June 4, 2025
As long as the beast slumbers, there is peace.
Every creature of any shape is indiscriminately its enemy.
The beast carries the weight of the years it has terrorized this world. It leaps upon your spirit, presses your viscera into wrathful wine, and crushes the hope from your breath.
Its form cannot be perceived. What is the thing? Part canine? Part bat? Part alien to our reality? A lump of fur, a midnight blur, as compact and deadly as a neutron star, directly escaped from the insatiable void. The beast, black as famine's mount, its appetite inescapable.
Hearken now and despair! The beast stirs!
Stare into its bottomless maw! Hear your death knell and sleep no more! Behold its pearly fangs, one for the devouring of each cardinal direction! Writhe and rend your garments beneath the judgement of its unerring tongue!
What wet beast, its hour come!
What final destruction shall it render!
What vengeance shall it wage until its hunger is sated!
What—is this?
A beef-flavored biscuit. A warm lap. A scratch behind the ears.
The beast walks in a little circle and slumbers again, quiescent.
It has been appeased... for now.
There will be but a few ticks of the clock until its rage is reawakened.
Written for my dear friend, the devoted acolyte of this sodden beast called Allie. Allie, thief of treats and uninterrupted sleep.
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