The clock struck midnight, but no sound marked the hour in Blackwood Cemetery.
A thick, unnatural fog began to crawl over the dirt paths, rising like cold steam from the damp earth. Above, dark, heavy clouds drifted across the sky, completely swallowing the pale light of the moon and stars.
It was truly a silent night, with occasional soft wind flutter, calming owl hoots, insect noises, all which further made the night even more calming and giving a nice ambience to it for anyone's sleep.
Suddenly, the wind died. The leaves on the tall ironwood trees stopped rustling. The usual night sounds, the chirping of crickets, the hooting of distant owls, vanished in an instant. The entire graveyard fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
Then came the whispers.
They didn't come from a single direction. They rose from beneath the mossy stones, from inside the dark soil, and from the empty air itself. Thousands of tiny, raspy voices murmuring at once, overlapping in a cold, shivering chorus.
...mother... cold... so cold... mother... why...
Deep in the older section of the cemetery, right beside the broken wooden cross that B had swept clean earlier that day, the one that had part of the cross on the grass, the air began to twist slowly.
Then, An intense and sharp spike of black ghost energy erupted from the ground, thick and greasy like black tar. It pooled in the dirt before swirling upward, forming a floating orb of pure, concentrated malice. The cold around the cross became so intense that white frost instantly snapped across the grass and stone.
The whispers inside the swirling orb grew louder, turning into wet, gagging sobs.
...mother... why deny my birth...? why leave me in the dark...? mother... where are you...? MOTHER-
CRACK.
CRACK.
CRACK.
A pale, grotesque hand burst through the black orb of energy, reaching out of it as if it is a cocoon hatching.
The hand was unnaturally long, with three sharp, bony joints on each finger and long yellow nails. It clawed desperately at the empty air, dragging the rest of its hideous body out from the swirling void with intense and reckless pull
With a sickening, wet SPLAT, the entity crashed onto the cold dirt path.
It pushed its upper body up, revealing its horrifying form. It had a huge, hairless baby head, but its skin was pale grey, cracked, and covered in blue veins. From its hollow, pitch-black eye sockets and wide, lipless mouth, thick dark blood dripped endlessly onto the ground. Its chest was lanky and skeletal, showing every rib, but its belly was grotesquely fat and swollen, bulging like a heavy leather sack filled with liquid. Around its waist was a filthy, stained cloth that resembles a dirty diaper, and sticking out from underneath were two tiny, twisted baby legs that seems absolutely out of proportion to the rest of the being's body.
This was a spirit.
A malice spirit born from pure, concentrated grudge, the collective despair, anger, and sorrow of every unwanted child left to die in the cold dark.
It had cold deep deadly aura that can give everyone information that this is a high-tier threat, if ranked with Aegis Sanctorum's ranking, it would be a dread. A being that is capable of tearing normal humans to pieces with absolute ease and eradicate a city.
The monster turned its hollow head toward the sky, its wide, blood-dripping mouth opening impossibly wide.
"MOTHER...! MOTHER...!" it wailed, its voice sounding like a hundred crying babies screaming in a small, closed room.
It lowered its body onto all fours, its long, three-jointed fingers digging into the dirt as it began to crawl forward. Its grotesque belly dragged across the ground, leaving a trail of black, foul-smelling slime behind.
It was hungry. It needed warmth. It needed life to destroy. It needed life to take for its own.
It's empty eyes looked up and then around it with desperate yet crazed desire.
As it crawled through the fog, its empty eye sockets caught sight of something in the distance.
Right in the center of the graveyard stood the small wooden cabin. A faint, cozy light seemed to shine from within, radiating a soft, gentle warmth. To a spirit made of pure cold hatred, that warmth was like a shining beacon.
"Mother... inside... warmth..." the baby monster gurgled, its three-jointed arms moving faster, reaching farther as it scrambling over stone graves and crushing dead leaves and made them scatter as it rushed toward the cabin.
It reached the open patch of grass just thirty feet away from the porch steps. It raised its bloody face, opening its wide mouth to let out another ear-splitting wail-
CREAK.
The baby ghost froze instantly in its path as its faced the cabin it is heading.
The heavy metal door of the cabin opened slowly, not letting out any noise it should have probably make.
It didn't slam open. It just swung inward with a quiet, rusty creak, revealing the pitch-black darkness waiting inside the doorway.
In that exact split second, the air around the entire cemetery changed. The silent deadly ambience that came with this being's awakening is gone, replaced by something else, something much stronger, much deadlier... much unknown than its own.
The heavy, cold ghost energy radiating from the baby monster was instantly crushed. It didn't just fade, it was smashed flat under a sudden, incomprehensibly vast pressure that fell from the sky like an invisible mountain.
The baby ghost’s hollow eye sockets widened in sheer, instinctual terror, like a mouse inside a plain room with no place to hide noticing the gaze of lion, a lion whose sole attention directed at the mouse and solely at the mouse alone at that moment.
Above the cabin, high up in the pitch-black night sky where the clouds hung heavy, six massive, cosmic eyes opened all at once.
They were not human eyes. They were vast, void-black spheres rimmed with faint, pale light, staring down from the heavens like ancient gods looking at an insect. The eyes didn't look angry. They looked cold, indifferent, and infinitely hungry. They glared down at the small baby ghost on the lawn, fixating on it as if a terrifying apex predator had just spotted a tiny, delicious snack.
THUMP.
THUMP.
THUMP.
"A AAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"
The baby ghost shivered violently. Its three-jointed arms collapsed under its own weight, its grotesque fat belly quivering against the cold dirt. Every single atom of its spirit form screamed one simple word, RUN.
"WAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"
The monster let out a horrific, desperate cry of pure panic. But it didn't crawl away. Driven by its own blind, broken instinct that screams at it to extinguish the horrifying thing staring at it from above, to be a mouse that bit back the lion, so it scrambled wildly toward the cabin steps, its long fingers clawing frantically at the grass as it tried to reach the door to stop whatever was waking up inside.
"MOTHER! MOTHER! MOMMY! MOOOOMMYYYY! MAAMAAAA ! MAAAMAAAAAA! MOOOM! MOOOOOMMMMMM!!"
It reached the edge of the wooden porch. It raised one long, bony arm to grab the wooden railing.
So close.
So so close.
Oh, so very close.
SNAP.
Before its fingers could touch the wood, the darkness around the porch bent.
A pair of invisible, monstrous jaws, vast enough to swallow the entire cabin whole, snapped shut right over the baby ghost's body.
"WAAAAAAAAA-"
The creature's final, terrified scream was cut off instantly.
CRUNCH.
There was no blood. There was no explosion of ghost energy. The terrifying baby spirit, along with all its black slime, cold frost, and centuries of accumulated grudges, was simply erased from existence, crushed into pure, raw spiritual fuel in less than a second.
The suffocating pressure in the air vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
From deep inside the quiet cabin, sitting on the plush brown couch in the dark, a small, soft sound echoed out into the night.
"heehee~"
It was a gentle, girlish giggle, sweet, sleepy, and filled with deep, cozy satisfaction, like a child who had just enjoyed a tasty midnight treat in her sleep.
High above in the dark sky, the six giant, horrifying eyes slowly closed, melting back into the peaceful night clouds.
The thick fog around the tombstones thinned out, drifting away into the trees. The heavy clouds parted slightly, letting the soft, silver light of the moon shine down once more on the quiet graveyard. The crickets began to chirp again in the grass, and the cool night breeze rustled gently through the ironwood leaves.
Inside the cabin, B rolled over onto her side on the brown couch, pulling her blanket tighter around her shoulders.
She let out a long, quiet sigh, her soft face resting comfortably against her pillow, fast asleep and completely unaware that she had just eaten a terrifying monster for dinner.
Author's Note
EliteToeCollector
Thanks for reading!