Peering into the void

The room was unimpressive by many standards. She had known this the moment stepped through the door and pulled back her dark red hoodie; spectacles nestled upon the bridged of her freckled nose. The room was already occupied by people dressed no different than the people that walked the streets but they were different. Aware of the world that existed beyond the thin veil of lies they all so comfortably lived called their lives. Time and time again they had reached out with scrabbling hands only to be beaten back by the cruel hands of the cosmos. A force unwilling to allow them to expand their minds and to know more.

“Is it ready?” She questioned in serious tone, brushing aside a scarlet dyed bang from her forehead and stepping forward. A circle of symbols composed in a language no human tongue could speak or mind comprehend chalked onto the sterile stone floor. It was red, with five black candles placed in five points of the circle itself. Releasing their own, unsteady flickering red light like the color of blood. There was obviously some manner of magic at work here. Any mundane fool could have felt it with their atrophied senses. One of them coughed to clear their throat, speaking up with an uncertain voice.

“Y...yes. We procured the sacrifice and everything this time,” A pale hand extended from his loose jacket directed towards the bound woman. Black duct tape pressed over a quivering mouth and a large pronounced bruise over her right eye, dark enough to have been a day old. Her expression did not betray the annoyance that came with seeing the sight itself. Not like her condition would matter for long.

“Good. Hopefully you’ve actually learned the damned chants this time,” She stood at one section of the circle where one of the five candles lay.  The  click of a book hanging from her shoulder sounding off and flipping through pages saturated with the same sigils that composed their ritual circle. Yet they glowed brightly when exposed to the dim light of the candles flickering around them. The others did the same, producing smaller pocketbook forms of the massive tome and flipping through pages until that came upon what one could assume was the same one.

At once they began chanting.

Speaking in a unified voice that seemed to be in a tongue that sounded strange from their mouths. Hard and sharp consonants that were nearly impossible to speak; yet they did so. As if they air were crackling and breaking from each syllable. Nothing happened for minutes with this chanting until a high, sharp sound began to echo through the air. Light flickering even faster until they all went out and yet there was light. An unknown light that pierced darkness despite there being nothing that could project such illumination. Sound faded from the room despite the continued chanting then came the screaming.

The tape had ripped from their sacrifice and she had begun to wail like a Banshee. Until her throat bled and then skin split open to a fountain of blood that rose and shaped into a human form which nothing left of the woman but pulpy gore. All at once the chanting stopped and that form became something new entirely.  A woman.

She was dressed in black with hair that was disarrayed with many black locks that fell over her shoulder. Skin pale as death with a large potion of her face seemingly burned an ugly, charred black.  Eyes closed opened wide, looking at the people arrayed around this form with barely contained disdain. Her breath was a ragged inhale and exhale as if in pain. No one could speak for a long moment before the sharp question came from the woman that seemed to be running the show. She was the first to disappear. Struck by a fluctuation in the air before becoming much like death and so the others met the same.

Death had been brought to this world and it was not the first.