BasiliskVeranda
80s Trash
OF BLACK WATERS
THE PAST INFORMS THE FUTURE
I wish to express in this letter one simple declaration: we are fools. We are fools, and we are sorry.
As I write this, I know I am the next to fall.
Deep within the mines off of the sleepy, remote village of Claerview, there lived a legend of rare stones and a rarer sickness. A sickness that breeds other sicknesses. A sickness of black waters. Don't bring back what sparkles, it is a pretty death. This, the old women of Claerview said. And how did they know?
Stories, folklore, and fairy tales. No one is to explore, the entrance barred for good reason. We should have listened, and yet we went as adventurers are apt to do, seeking tales for our own children to tell for years to come.
After constant digging and costly ventures, we hit what we thought to be the end of the whole place. No real treasure to be found, but a flat bedrock with black water up to the calves, and some odd looking glyphs. Jeremy pocketed a few stones; they were but obsidian and ruddy quartz. No real treasure. None came to sickness. The bird of warning made no cries, and nothing was foul enough to warrant concern.
But it was foul, and it followed. It followed, and the weeks since have seen small gurglings of what we wrought.
Fletcher is dead. He died in a pool of his own blood, eyes scooped out of his head. The culprit was his elderly mother.
Kelis is dead. She died traversing the Ferrow Bog, which is home to not much else but frogs. I found her top half in a tree, and the other fused within a large stone.
Jeremy, the light of our troupe, is dead. The youth erupted via a crash of lighting, as made apparent by the scorched marks and debris about the field.
Agatha is dead. Her illnesses was the kind that seeps from the mouth. It just wouldn't stop. I locked her away to prevent the spread. She is now a heap of tar.
I do not write this to let it be known that I know I am to die. To die by sabotage from geriatric, black-watered nightmare, freakish storm, or plague-curse.
I write this to let anyone who may read this know, that this was our fault. It was our fault, and I am sorry.
I also write this because, I feel, that I am the one meant to write what I see taking shape. For why else would I still draw breath, as the others were to die so fitfully?
The months that followed proved more potent. I suspect I am here to tell you this, most of all:
Our world is changing; people who were clear-eyed have snapped at the smallest of slight, killing those around them. I know of a woman who swears she saw a slack-jawed creature erupt from the black waters of a small pond and shuffle her young son away to the world beyond. I couldn't possibly hope to catalog everything I've learned and seen, but I shall try.
I shall try, perhaps, even after death, to do this service. It is the least I can do for damning us all.
I suspect, you who may be reading this, shall now be seeing things fantastical and horrifying. I suspect you shall see what we wrought, and what we wrought was bound to happen eventually, or perhaps, had happened long before.
I shall not see the final culmination of this evil, this I know. I was dead the minute I stepped foot in those mines. And I damned a whole world to die alongside me.
—𝕿𝖞𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖙 𝖂𝖞𝖓𝖓 𝖁𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖘
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