Sleep is No Escape
The Garden of Heavenly Dismay
The first signs of their coming were detected on the winds by the psychically sensitive. Subtle changes in odors, strange voices at the edge of the wind, discolored sunsets, disturbing omens. In far corners, the mystics gathered to plan how to prevent what might be coming, while others convened to plot how to usher it in.
The Lamb
A Nepalese ornithologist discovered a new species of vulture which laid its eggs in sacs like a spider. He watched from afar in horror as the hundreds of babies squirmed in a jagged nest.
Ithryss the Void Whisperer
In the early months, accidents increased. Episodes of domestic violence. Divorce filings. Betrayals. Rapes. A noticeable trend developed in which workers would attack and try to murder their superiors. Gun sales went up 300%, as did suicides.
Priest of Thrrkxylqnn
In Karamoja, Uganda, a calf was born with three heads. Although severely deformed, it thrived. One morning, its owner woke up to discover it had been slaughtered in the night. Instead of blood, its carcass lay in a thick pool of oil.
Freaks
Nightmares became more intense and vivid, until strong men would wake screaming after only a few minutes of rest. Entire populations conspired to stay awake and keep each other awake, becoming more and more paranoid after days and weeks without sleep, animated, twitching, angry and paranoid, sustained by caffeine and amphetamines, attacking one another unpredictably. Spray painted on the wall of a small town City Hall: "Sleep Won't Save You".
Placenthrax the Afterbirth
A Professor Feng at Northwest Virginia University became convinced that an escape from the torments was possible. By transmitting human souls to batteries to a passing comet, mankind might hibernate until such time as reincarnation was possible. From the third story of the library, he used a sniper rifle to harvest 14 lives before three terrified students who'd hidden among the stacks rushed him and smashed in his skull with encyclopedias.
Bride of Veythryx the Cathedral of Teeth
Basic services in population centers began to fall apart. There were few capable of performing the required jobs, and fewer willing. Neighborhoods devolved into feral, feuding tribes, hoarding resources and performing raids in the night.
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Survivors in a small foggy outpost in Lithuania huddled together at night, sleepless for fear of the midnight hunts of the knife-wielding stranger among them they came to call "akies obuolio kolektorius," the Eyeball Collector.
Mitzvah
Without fuel, automobiles were abandoned, choking the roadways. Cell and internet service stopped, and instead there was filling every moment the faint mosquito buzzing of angry whispers in unknown languages rolling like winged thunder through the haze.
Xaelgryth the Riven Devourer
In Dearborn, Michigan, and elderly woman sliced off strips of her flesh to feed her cat, who had begun speaking in the voice of her dead husband.
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Months became years.
The Skinless Slaughter
Into the confusion, onto heaps of rubble and rock climbed the warlords, the prophets, the priests, and the mobsters, lording over decaying fiefdoms. These were the first years, bloody and brutal, before the dark ones had even manifested. They were still only an impulse beneath the dermis of our reality.
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At night in a small town in Bolivia, a green dust settled from the sky, covering every surface half an inch deep. Within days, fungi sprouted in the lungs of every human and animal in the area, filling their airways. they died in agony, clawing at their throats, begging for breath.
Hero of the Last Days
In areas where shadows touched, the trees turned black, and their roots crept up through the ground and into the abundant corpses, hoisting them into the air, where they dangled like perverse marionettes.
Rupture
Women, having always been tethered to the moon, began to become sensitive to increased tidal forces and strange new gravity. They clawed at their skin, hoping to release the pressure of the blood which felt as though it was drawn toward the sky, trying to escape their bodies. Red streaks from clawed lips flowed upwards along their faces.
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In city remains across the world, mad dogs ran in the streets, blue, skeletal, and devolved, their skin degloved and sloughed off their limbs, bony and breathless, attacking anything that moved or smelled like food.
Crawlking Xul
In Kaifeng, starving homeless lined up on a walkway watched, unable to move, as a small lake silently lifted itself from its bed, flooding uphill, forming a globe of water around a nearby church, and drowning the ragged congregation huddled inside.
Beings glanced in nightmares, names unspeakable, manifested at the edge of waking vision.
Vestige
Under a strange new moon, children in the womb mutated weirdly, becoming ravenous, drawing the very life-force of their mothers through their placentas, vampirically. The women lost weight, no matter how much they ate, and in the rare instances they survived until childbirth, their emaciated bodies couldn't survive the clawing of their tick-like 30 pound infants when they slithered out onto the floor.
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Years became a decade. And this was still all beginning.