One shot III Gerk
Dear Fan fiction, please do read the following before REMOVING our hard work because of just one man. Also, this is a LONG author note accompanied with more than 2k+ of story content lies below. According to your guidelines:
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Dear readers and authors alike, this week, a man by the name of A concerned party posted empty threats and hollowed words in order to harass us. After knowing his intention, I decided to let him be; after all , he is a miserable and lonely creature who seeks attention. I (and sir paragon) urged our fellow authors not to contact him in any way (though some didn't, understandable though).
Seeing that none actually care for his 'legion', he decided to dig into the rules of fanfiction so he can find a weak spot for the system and so he did. Our story was deleted due to and I quote "Non story: lists, Bloopers, notes, polls, announcements and etc."
So if you reading this, kind sir, read these words carefully:
You think you can destroy the souls community by targeting me? Why, I am merely a kindler, a keeper of the flames of this wondrous community. Even if you 'took' me down, you will NEVER be able to smother the flame inside each and every author. Another will simply assume my role and so on.
Our community is the strongest community in all of fanfiction. We will not succumb, We will not subside especially to the likes of you. Cut a head and a thousand will spawn. None can stop us.
I pity you, really… How does it feel? To be all alone behind a lifeless screen trying to earn happiness by the misery of others? you see all the joy and fun around you and yet you can not taste it you pitiful, lonely creature.
Remember when I warned you about messing with the souls community? I was not jesting; many, many authors will report you, some might even send you words that are less polite than mine….you will feel the ire and wrath of the souls community. I could not restrain them anymore.
Do you even achieve any sort of victory? Our works is not apparently lost… 84 reviews? 5k+ hits? Pfft Is that the best you can do? Sir Varbos is backing up every story here so your attempts are futile.
And by the way, your plan has backfired. See, with the rebirth of Our dark thoughts, the dark souls society or DSS will arise soon enough. We will stand united and strong like never. So in a wicked way, I thank you for your actions. Do enjoy your fake triumph , kind sir.
Do you desire for attention, very well. Dear readers and authors, do send a lovely private message to him and freely express how do you feel about his kind actions. I leave the rest to you….
One Shot III Gerk
theseeker64!
Atop the webwork of interlacing branches that was the Darkroot Garden's arms, and below the canopy of frail leaves undulating against the breeze and allowing moonlight to trickle down and drown the woods in its pale palette that was the Garden's mane, Gerk stood; as still as the night; as quiet as the whispering of winds dragging fallen leaves across the underbrush. His shirt was torn clean in half down the center, and his bare chest—toned and rippling with the muscles he'd trained so hard to build—bore brazenly skywards to drink in the moonlight.
His head was tipped back, his eyes closed, his dark and lank hair flowing down around his shoulders like an ebony waterfall. His thin lips quivered as a cool breeze trickled across them, transmogrifying his visage from a stoic and statuesque portrait of placidity to and outright rapturous sneer. He fell his hands to his sides and his fingers wrapped the twin hilts they found there sheathed at his hips and pulled; a seasoned and meticulous motion that ended as quickly as it had began, and when it had…
Gerk balanced the dual katanas out before him. They were long and sharp tools made for pain and suffering and Gerk loved them very much. His eyes remained closed as he tossed the blade in his right hand to his left, and the blade in his left hand to his right. The weapons danced in the night, as natural and supple as the wind itself, back and forth, cycling around in a twist of tempered steel and banded leather grips. Gerk's wrists and fingers worked tenaciously to keep the weapons afloat, almost as if moving of their own accord, or as if guided by the supernatural will of an invisible and celestial being.
Gerk's lips pulled back from his teeth, barring them to the moon, and to the night. He let the blades move closer to his chest, and an ecstatic moan slipped from his throat as he felt the vortex of wind conjured by the spinning weapons trickle against his bare flesh, up to his collarbone, beneath his chin, cold fingers running across his neck. He could sense death near, and it made him feel utterly and profoundly alive. His legs trembled. His bladder wanted desperately to release into his breeches. His eyelids twitched and spasmed as if they were two lids on two boiling pots of water, ready to burst and geyser.
From the hollow hole of his chest cavity, Gerk began a quiet, mellifluous, hum that carried its sweet melody down into the woods below to join in the raking of winds and the myriad of small noises a forest was wont to produce in the dark hours of the night, when the moon is high, and fear is never far from hand or heart. He hummed on as his eyelids lifted to cracks. Damp and dark marbles peered out from within the drapery of his long lashes, and Gerk surveyed the woods below. The scene was a picturesque depiction of nightly serenity. He could see a pond of still water nestled between a cluster of saplings, its surface dappling with the intermittent falling of a leaf or the intrepid voyaging of a courageous insect.
He could see woodland creatures, does and squirrels and sparrows ,traipsing here and there, blissfully unaware of all the cruelties of life spinning around them. He could see shafts of moonlight cutting through the treetop lattice work, highlighting a patch of blossoming flowers and a moss-crusted oak, long since fallen to the forest floor. And he could see the man he was going to murder and whose blood was going to fill his belly before the night was through. His prey was a cleric; a tall and round man with a serious, aquiline, face and a heavy fall of maroon robes around his thick figure. In his hands he carried a blunted mace—clean and bloodless—and a talisman; a false idol those clinging dearly to their 'faith' often carried, and of which was said to conjure miracles from the Gods themselves.
Gerk wasn't worried, however, for Gerk knew there were no Gods, and that the only divine deity that stalked the lands at night… was him. The cleric moved from tree to tree and from bush to bush with the pace of one who housed no fear, and his courage was feeding into Gerk's insatiable, glutinous, hunger. Gerk wanted dearly to put fear into the fearless, and to eat the hearts of the heartless, and so he followed. He caught his spinning katanas and the pleasant vortex they'd been crafting waned away at once, and in that stillness left in their wake Gerk moved.
He was long-limbed and spindly, and he could leap from branch to branch in the treetops with great grace and posture. His booted feet landed soundlessly, bending to the supple contours of the branches they sought as Gerk kept his eyes vigilantly locked upon his prey below, still sauntering about without a care or concern in the world . The wind picked up, and so did Gerk. His blood was pumping hard then, aroused by the proximity of his kill, and his cautious pace was gradually superseded by that of a predator's; hungry and closing in for his meal. His fingers worked at the banded grips of his katanas, and a trickle of drool escaped the dark cavern of his open mouth to slather over his bare chest.
He could smell the cleric then; smell the sweat oozing from his pores; smell the morning's meal still pungent on the lingering trails of his breath; smell his blood drilling through his veins just below the soft, vulnerable, layer of his stinking flesh. Gerk wanted to taste it, to bathe in it, to become it. And he would; oh, he would. The cleric halted before the moonlit pond at the forest's edge and leaned over his thick knees to pull breath into his thick chest and fill his lungs with the oxygen they so dearly needed to pump to his hard-at-work muscles beneath his robes.
Gerk made a final leap to the branch jutting just above his prey and folded himself into a small and stealthy figure. He wormed his way to the tree's trunk, slithered his limbs around it like snakes coiling around a kill, and began sidling his way down, down to the forest, down to the cleric and his sweet, sweet, flesh. His forked tongue slipped between his lips and writhed along his chin, eager to taste death. His eyeballs bulged from their sockets; big, bulbous, bloodshot things that looked ready to pop as they fixed madly on their target.
49m ago..
Gerk's humming came seeping involuntarily from within his throat as he neared. Below, the cleric's posture stiffened. Gerk pulled up to a halt at the trunk's midway point and twisted his neck around to an inhuman angle to fix his bulging eyes on the soon to be departed. The cleric was looking right at him. Gerk smiled, showing the man the fangs he'd sharpened to points at the flanks of his front teeth, showing him a glimpse of his own demise, showing him God. The cleric did not budge. His eyes held on Gerk's own, unwavering in their steely resolve. When the man spoke, it was with a determined calmness and a quiet, controlled, tone.
"You're the thing that's been killing all the explorers." It was not a question. Gerk's inane smile twisted further back into the leathery crevices of his cheeks.
He nodded his head. "Geeeerk," the word oozed from between his blistered lips. He began worming down the trunk again, keeping watch on the cleric as his hands and feet found holds to carry him closer.
"What have you done with the bodies?" The heavy man inquired as Gerk neared.
"Geeeerk," Gerk hissed. The bodies… he'd eaten the flesh and the organs, the bones he'd crushed into powder and drank with a mixture of honey and water. He'd consumed them entirely; body and soul. He'd consumed them to send them to God. And he was hungry—always hungry—for more.
"Eat."
"You're a monster," the cleric said.
"Not monster," Gerk corrected the man. "God."
He leaped, and in the air his eyes found a fresh patch of fat flesh just around the man's jugular that he was simply dying to taste. He worked his katanas around before him and clasped them together so that the tip could act as one, mighty, drill to spear the cleric's fat belly and weaken him up for the feast. His tongue rolled out of his mouth and slathered at his lips, running the jagged line of his fanged teeth, tearing the bottom to shreds and filling him up with the taste of fresh blood.
He opened wide and was taken by a gust of elation swelling up from his belly to his chest to his head to his soul. He was Gerk and he was God and he was hungry and he would eat; eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. But then a second explorer—tricky little thing—emerged from the shadow of a large oak flanking the pond and pulled a crossbow up to their shoulder just in time for Gerk's bulging eyes to move that way before a bolt was loosed from the shaft and pierced through his shoulder, ending his forward momentum in a brutal twist of counterforce.
Gerk spun down to the forest floor and crashed face first upon it, swallowing up a mouthful of damp leaves and pebbles and a lungful of dirt and dust. His spindly limbs twisted around frantically to get himself up, but the cleric and his friend were already atop him, pinning him in place with their weight.
"GEEEERRRRK!" Gerk wailed, his head rolling about loosely and wildly atop his shoulders, his fingers clenching and unclenching, wondering where their steel friends and gone and receiving nothing but dirt and leaves instead.
"For the love of the Gods, cast the bloody spell, Walter!" One of his assailants screamed to be heard over his wailing. Gerk twisted his head around enough to see the youthful face of the crossbowman who'd been hiding in the shadows.
"GERK!" Gerk growled, snapping his fanged teeth at the boy.
"GERK!GERK!GERK!"
"Silence you demon!" The cleric demanded from his other shoulder.
"We've got you now! There will be no more blood spilled on your behalf! We baited you, and we've caught you, and now you will face the ultimate wrath for your deplorable ,monstrous, actions… you face the wrath of the God's."
"GEEEERK! GEEEEERK!"
"Cast it, Walt," the crossbowman quiet insisted, his face twisted up into an utterly disgusted grimace. "Cast it and let us be done with this creature from Izalith once and for all."
The cleric nodded, raised his talisman to his lips, and began muttering in prayer. Gerk could hardly hear the sacred incantations over his own screaming and wailing, but the few words that did leak through were 'Gods' and 'Repent' and 'Soul' and Gerk hated all those words and wanted to eat the cleric's organs while the other man watched and hollow out the eyes from their skulls and wear them around his neck and drinking the blood from their bellies and-Golden light filled the forest, emanating from the cleric's closed fist overhead. It permeated every inch of the darkness
With its light, with its warmth, and the violent paint that streaked dark lines through Gerk's mind was cleansed and made into a blank canvas. The light entered into his eyes and burrowed down into his chest and pierced through his soul, and Gerk was no longer Gerk, for he was nothing and no one and never would be again.
Walter took hold of Brandon's arm and wrenched him back as the spell concluded, and the golden aura his talisman had conjured waned away to plummet the forest back into the cool and silvery palette of night. The younger man was panting for breath, but his eyes were blossomed to saucers and held incredulously on the thing lying before them. Walter followed his friend's eyeline and bore witness the miracle himself.
The disgusting demon-of-a-man that had been was no longer, and in his place was a simple mushroom child; a plump little fellow, hardly a meter tall, with a brown, soggy, cap adorned on its pale, stem-like, body. Frail arms wormed from its sides; nubby little feet sprouted below it. It had no eyes, but it still lifted its head and affixed them with a 'look' as if it did.
Walter laid a hand on Brandon's shoulder as he caught his breath. "It is the judgement of the Gods."
"They… let him live?" Brandon questioned.
"Aye. Death, it seems, was too kind an end for a creature like that. Now he will live on as this… thing. Live on forever without eyes to see, without a mouth to voice protest, without the strength to every wield death again.
"The mushroom child looked between them. "Brandon grimaced.
"Our work is done. May the Gods watch over the souls this creature has stolen from us." He turned on his friend.
"Let us leave now, Walt. I can't bear to be in this thing's presence a moment longer. "Walt nodded, cast one last pitying eye on the child, and set out for the long journey back home. The mushroom child watched them leave. It lifted its hands to the nub of its head, and through some ethereal veil, it could see them; even without eyes, it could see. It looked to the katanas splayed out and forgotten on the forest floor. It moved for them and tried to grasp them, but its fingers were too plump and not nearly dexterous enough, and the short arms didn't house the strength to lift such things anyway. The mushroom child was frustrated and began beating at its own body, but it could not hurt itself. It tried to scream, but the only sound that erupted from the very top of its capped head was a single, piercing, shrill whistle that trumpeted a queer two tone melody into the quietness of the woods around it.
It looked around. Nothing came. It waddled off to stalk the lands. And though the mushroom child'd mind was no longer intact, some faint and distant pocket lived on in sentience; lived on and was very much aware of what it had once been. It was a' Gerk', whatever that meant, and like the Gerk before it, it wanted to taste the sweet flavor of death. It wanted to feast on the fallen. It wanted suffering. For the mushroom child was God, and God wanted a drink of the world's tears And so it would bide its time. And so it would sound that queer two-tone whistle from its head, that reminded the part of it that was once something else of a certain, queer, humming it had used to make before a kill. And so it would club those who neared it with its blunt little meek arms, forever if it had to, until they were dead, for eventually, something foolish and curious would come itsway…
…and so it would wait…
…wait for as long as it took…