Hey, so this was a story I was going to post on my main account, but it just seemed to...different from what I usually do so I figured I'd make an alternate account and throw it up here. This is meant to be kind of a cross between Teen Titans and the ideas of the Lovecraft mythos, and now I bet you can guess why I deemed this too offbeat for my main account. So, since I've had this lifelong dream of writing like the original, master H.P Lovecraft himself a few of these chapters may seem to have a lot of purple prose, and lots of longs words I'm going to attempt to use to try and make myself sound smart. I apologize in advance, I'm going to try and tone it down for future chapters, so in the meantime please bear with me. Have fun, and please feel free to give me feedback.
Seven days after Richard Grayson noticed the Raven disappear the world began to crack. A good distance from Bludhaven in a sleepy little town that still went by the title bestowed to it by its Eastern European ancestors; the city of Kevi became the staging ground for the worst mass killing the Eastern Seaboard had ever seen since the Civil War took place.
Kevi was a small town located just near the border where the peaks of the Appalachians met sprawling farmland. It would never have been known to Grayson or anyone else from the large New England cities such as Gotham or Bludhaven had it not been for the incident. Lakes and rivers that had beckoned settlers and travelers to the area for generations had made the area inviting though easily forgettable to the passing urbanite. Though, as the settlers would soon discover; as had the natives before them, the area was no place for human habitation. Dark apparitions seemed to hold in the cloudy peaks of the mountains, and formless shadows slithered through the waters by night. The respectable people of the Appalachia had long since avoided the area, leaving the area to squalor, letting it descend from a town, to a village, to a hamlet of decadence and decay.
It was in Kevi, on the last Friday of October that some one hundred and twenty human beings were slaughtered. The locals, a strange inbred swath of every ethnicity and nationality that had ever attempted the call the city home, a swart, naturally disheveled, ill mannered group had, quite unusually for such an insular group of people suffered some sort of attack and had summoned help. A young man of some fifteen years of age had rode horseback for twenty miles and ran the last five before collapsing at the door of the neighboring towns police station to request help. He regaled them with a story so strange, and with descriptions of a slaughter so hideous that the chief requested help from neighboring Bonoeia before leading a veritable army upon Kevi.
The screams from the hamlet, a sorry collection of buildings and farms tucked away at a grassy inlet at the foot of the mountain alerted the men that the boy's story was no exaggeration. Primal cries of fear and agony seemed to echo down from the mountain town and as soon as the first car approached the threshold of the town, two gaunt, thin looking men, their faces painted red went berserk, hollering and charging the vehicle. A stone-faced deputy raised a double-barreled shotgun, aimed it squarely at his would be attackers and opened fire.
The ensuring two hours were filled with the smell of gunpowder amongst dying autumn leaves and the sound of dead bodies hitting the soon to be frozen ground. When the dust cleared twenty one men and nine crazed lunatics lay dead, one cop and countless others lay injured.
An investigation was promptly begun, evidence and dead bodies were collected and witnesses were interviewed. The residents, for men and women just having been rescued from the clutches of a massacre were quite unaccommodating. The xenophobic citizens would divulge that the men were part of a masonic order that met in one of the old town halls, their actions were apparently a reaction to the continued refusal of the rest of citizens to take part in some archaic ancient ritual. The citizenry by and large however, had refused for years to associate with the order. Why the group would choose now to stage a massacre was unexplained.
Frustrated, and with orders to leave the investigation to federal inspectors the police began to close their case. They dragged the nine dead bodies of the orders leading members into view of a dry plate camera. The stern faced cops gathered before the local ruin of the towns one saving architectural grace, the hollowed remains of the once spectacular St. Xenia Orthodox Cathedral. Before the gruesome spectacle of the dead bodies they stood for a photo, the final piece of evidence needed for official documentation before the U.S Federal Government took the case and handed it to the FBI.
Inside the bureau a typist, a silent, diligent worker concerned only with the completion of his type, an outsider to his colleagues sent a copy of the documents to a freelance agent, an expert in the outlandish, strange and paranormal. A Gotham native with a resume listing him as an expert in archeology and forensic sciences, a young man by the name of Richard Grayson.
"You shouldn't be here, leave," those were the first words she'd said to him. Two months before the incident in Kevi, Richard Grayson had been asleep, watching a strangely beautiful figure in a land of fire and brimstone. Piercing violet eyes stared at him from underneath the blue cloak. He meant to ask her where he was, why he was there. Then with a singular push, he found himself cast into oblivion.
As an infant dwells in a state of unwillful ignorance, disregarding the agencies and powers that govern creation so to is human kind utterly unaware of its own existence and stature in the universe. No mind can pierce the black veil that captivates and holds hostage the consciousness, that veil which utterly blinds us to all of space, time and our own sheer, empty mortality.
All beings know, consciously or not that there will come a point of time, a moment in history, when there will occur a final enlightenment of the corporeal mind. The mind will be greeted by the sunrise and the illumination of mankind. The promise of a new day, when suddenly anything seems possible…on that day when those who have strode to reach beyond the ephemeral limits of our own comprehension, this illumination, this sign will be terrible, the signal will be a death knoll for humanity. It will reveal out nature to be petty, literally meaningless, so far beneath the heels of the illumination that it could well be nonexistent. Human in every essence of the word.
One quite curious period of enlightenment occurred in the Fall of 1927, beginning on September 2nd in Bludhaven's historic New England quarter at the Bludhaven Universities Arkham Library, so named for the now doddering and quite insane former founding professor. This new dawn began, as so many others do with murder. Yet, days before that singular incident, for months even law enforcement and artists had recorded and documented the most peculiar of events.
Writers and artists alike reported strange, feverish dreams, with the most incomprehensible symbols and shapes appearing. Twisted, outlandish nightmares, which set the skin crawling and made hair stand on end. They witnessed monsters from the depths of infinity, shapes from beyond the edge of time and old gods long forgotten by human memory. Yet, when they arose they of course could not draw upon anything from their memory to help them recreate the incident. Deep in the prisons, calculated, sane criminal masterminds were reduced to mad, gibbering, lunatics, cackling away in the darkest corners of their cells, only to be deemed sound of mind mere hours later.
There was however, a peculiar item that came out of Prauge in that period. A former archeological student turned artist had concocted one strange, blasphemous creation. Splattering all manner of colors across his canvas in an effort to recreate the images that had haunted his dreams. The image was dry, joyless, an image of a great fire consuming everything in methodical, yet wild frenzies. The great cities of the world, golden Alexandria and fair Constantinople succumbing to the eternal flame, shapeless agony, and in the middle of that blasphemous painting lay nothing but the maw. A spiral of black and emptiness so great that those who examined it soon found themselves quite dizzy, and unable to look any further. Perhaps unsurprisingly, artist Joseph Wilson decided to destroy his piece "Jericho."
Whatever the cause though, almost no correlation between these incidents was ever made, and the civilized world plodded on as it always had. Yet, beyond the dreams of the dreamers and the fits of madness of men doomed to die were the hysterical visions of one Richard Grayson. Perhaps it had been the hypersensitive mind of his youth, one that absorbed any manner of facts and figures thrown at it, a history of study into occult figures, one that had taken him to strange and bizarre locations, or simply a general demeanor that attracted the odd and the curious he was soon to experience the September events as well. Something stirred in his unconscious mind that late September night and well into the early morning as well, a strange fit of delirium also drove him to see the ancient horrors.
Stepping mindlessly across a barren waste, in a daze or trancelike walk that only a dreaming man may preform Richard Grayson continued his aimless journey across the mindscape. Pumice and sulphur melted beneath his shoes, leaving imprints in the yellow and orange glowing ground, marked with flakes of black ash. The inhospitable land echoed with an empty noise, a lost sound like a singular bell in a field. There was no rhythm to the sounds, it followed no melody, but no natural refrain either. Like wind chimes, the sound was erratic and fitful, and every time it sounded it sent shivers up his spine. There would be one, two three long, soul piercing echoes, before a period of silence and then they would start again, multiples echoes at once. It was enough to drive a person mad. Only the bubbling sounds of the ground and the hissing of gasses accompanied the unmethodical noises, and then they were only audible in the spaces of silence.
A red haze settled in the air, obscuring vision even more than the occasional showers of black ash had. The land was barren and empty all around him, the ground occasionally giving way to gaping abyss' of pure blackness. Around him lay craters, holes, regions where the stone and rock had crumbled away.
Then, out of the haze and the fog, out of the dust and ash before him appeared a palace. It was a grand structure, a terrible Cyclopean landscape of ancient powerful architecture. It had to have been constructed with mammoth blocks of stone and marble, large, strangely shaped pillars holding up a circular roof with a design that could only be described as unearthly. It looked primitive, prehistoric, before Rome, before Greece before Egypt, and yet, perhaps due to the size or the scope, there was something awe inspiring about it. Just as old pagan temples create feelings of awe and mysticism so did this nameless loathsome construction inspire fear.
In the center of it all there was a carved throne, one that looked as if it had been shorn straight from the bedrock itself. However basely designed the throne was, the bas reliefs were delicately designed, finely chiseled, detailed to show human beings in agony, in abject fear and subjugation.
The main draw of the whole scene however, was the figure who occupied the throne, a figure many spans tall, his name unspeakable, his visage…
"You shouldn't be here," For the first time since he'd entered the dreamscape Richard felt a degree of clarity enter his mind. He tore his eyes from the indescribable figure in front of him and turned to face the new voice. Standing there in front of him was a woman. He could make out few details beneath her long billowing blue cloak and shadowed face. Only the eyes still stood out to him, two violent almond shaped eyes stared back at him. Mortality, something mortal, yet unafraid in this inhospitable land. Two beautiful eyes…
"Leave," with a single push the outstretched pale hand knocked him from the dreamscape, and Richard Grayson's head shot up from his pillow with a start.