May I

A child will be born in day of night

As Boreas reaches utmost might.

Through an endless expanse of nothingness a baby wailed; shrieking, piercing, desperate, defenceless.

This heir to Wisdom, Sea and Sky

Could be the gods' greatest ally.

The golden spires of Olympus rose to new, glorious heights, stretching up towards the sun.

Yet when twins collide,

Unleashing Nyx on a noontime ride,

The void will consume all alight

And with this power, grow its might.

The once-roaring altar fires dimmed to suffocated embers. Smoke belched from extinguished torches and braziers, further fogging the air. Overhead, red lightning flared between blooming clouds.

Everywhere flames guttered, spawning darkness. The darkness grew and spread, roiling, twisting, sending out oozing, greedily groping tendrils. Instead of recoiling from flames and light, it seemed to drink it. Once-roaring flames sputtered feebly in useless protest.

On Earth, lights were smothered. The rolling darkness stole from car headlights and traffic lights. Steel crunched on steel and rubber screeched against asphalt as cars slid into each other, unable to see where to go.

The screens of Times Square burst into a billion LED volcanoes of smoke and glass, which wisped to nothing in the air.

The pit will stir as dark devours,

An awakening to crush Olympus' towers.

The godly city moaned in pain. Cracks yawned in the streets and snaked their way up the side of buildings. A cloud of dust billowed from the trembling citadel as roofs sank and walls crumbled. Columns toppled with the weight of a hundred redwoods at the mercy of an insane chainsaw-wielding giant, the marble scattering in skittering fragments on impact like a fortune teller casting bones.

Below on Earth, the swirling darkness birthed monsters. They slid from its cloying depths and fanned out across the blocks of Manhattan. More and more monsters slithered from the night, slime and mucus clinging to them and oozing from their fingers, squelching in their footsteps.

A greyish-green twilight fell. Streetlights fizzled to nothing, shedding sparks to rattle on sidewalks like hail. Windows blanked. Devoid of the light behind them, the panes of glass yawning vertically up from the streets were endless black mirrors, reflecting the monster invasion and the crackle of crimson lightning overhead.

Blood wound over sidewalks and the roads. It puddled in cracks and depressions, slicked over curbs and into the gutters. The creeping tendrils were darker than they had any right to be, only revealing red so deep rubies would be envious when lightning fractured through their surface.

Bodies mounted. Great piles of former humans, now shells, were discarded, heaped to rival the skyscrapers. They were the springs at the heads of the running rivulets of blood. Lightning fluttered over empty eyes clouded like sea glass, gleamed on smeared blood, threw the skeletons that would soon emerge from beneath the cooling flesh into stark relief in faces, ribs, throats and feet.

Here and there, reaching fingers twitched for a rescue that would never come.

The child born below darkness deep

May not get its soul to keep

For it has the power to be the key

To unlock the pit's prison and set him free.

There was a procession through the inky streets. Monsters kicked aside smoking, flaking, blackened lumps, twisted by heat and agony so that they only vaguely resembled the humans they'd once been. Chants rose on the otherwise still air. Spawned deep in the lower octaves of monster vocal chords, they reverberated and rumbled among New York's canyons of glass and steel.

To secure his rise to conquer all

The blood of this innocent must fall.

The monsters moved towards Central Park. The walls surrounding the Park turned to dust, their iron railings bubbling into molten metal puddles. The procession continued unchecked, the grass withering beneath its feet. Trees steamed and leaves burst into ash as the sap and water inside them evaporated, leaving them nothing but husks of splinter-ridden wood.

The Pond frothed a poisonous dark green. Gloopy bubbles snapped open on the surface, disgorging dead fish. Black waves of sludge broke over the shores.

The Door of Orpheus gaped open.

If blood spills before the twins abate

The pit will ascend to end all fate.

A child screamed. A single, piercing note, long and loud, managed to puncture the heavy air. It rang over the city.

Then came a new darkness, one more terrifying and more complete than even the one that currently reigned, black paint slashed across a finished canvas. And then there was nothing. Silence roared like a jet engine.

Rachel woke.

And sobbed.

The bedclothes tangled around her trembling limbs. Her face was wet. Wrenching herself free from the clutches of her sheets, she jerkily flailed for her lamp. She caught the switch more accidentally than by design; her spasming arm swept everything off the nightstand. The accumulated crap crashed to the floor, the lamp spearing a beam into the corner of the room. Pencils bounced and skittered, rolling every which way; her sketchbook splatted open onto the carpet.

Jabbing her legs out of bed she tried to stand but they buckled beneath her; she lost the top layers of her knees to rug burn. Another strangled sob emerged from her throat as she tried to crawl towards the bathroom.

She stopped dead, her way blocked.

A spindly pair of legs bulging with varicose veins and clad in wrinkled, laddered stockings puddled around the ankles loomed in her vision. Rachel's nostrils were assaulted with the smell of burnt sugar.

She screamed and threw herself backwards, smashing her hand into the corner of her nightstand. Pain seared through her knuckles but was quickly drowned by rising terror in her chest. Shoving hair out of her face she looked up at the person standing next to her bed.

The woman was tall but slightly built, with sallow skin stretched tightly over too-prominent cheekbones. Tufts of grizzled white hair stood up in all directions from her scalp. It some places it was short and broken, almost like it had been torn out by its roots and was struggling to regrow.

Her worn and dirty clothes drowned her. Her sleeves were fraying. From beneath a scorched and filthy apron, what could be seen of her skirt was covered in floury handprints and greasy smears of substances identifiable only by the gods. The cut and patterns, the fading and fraying and bobbled material, suggested she hadn't bought anything new for herself in at least twenty years.

The soles of her carpet slippers flapped away from the uppers; on her left foot, gnarled and yellowed toenails peeked unclipped from the tatters of her stockings and the remains of her slipper.

"Who are you?" Rachel managed to gasp out, using the bed to pull herself back to her feet. Her fingers curled into the wrought-iron bedframe. "What do you want?"

"Did you have a nightmare?" the woman asked, tilting her head and stepping more into the erratic beam of light shed by the lamp. As she did so, the light gleamed on eyes that looked clouded by cataracts, but she was totally certain of her steps as she moved towards Rachel.

"Don't come any closer. I'm warning you."

The woman reached into the pocket of her apron and Rachel's heart leapt into her throat. She sprang up onto the bed and vaulted over to the other side, but the woman was impossibly fast for what looked like her frailty and lack of vision. Before Rachel made it towards her bedroom door, the woman had rounded the bed and grabbed her wrist with a grip like iron.

Green sparks leapt between them at her touch. The air fizzled and the room swelled with ozone.

"Here. This will help you sleep."

The woman produced a mouldering sandwich from the pocket in her apron, but Rachel's vision was dimming at the edges. All she could see was the woman's eyes. The cloudiness was swirling away like it was being cleared by a stiff breeze, but instead of blue skies the woman's eyes were glowing green.

Rachel tried to scream again but her voice died to a croak in her throat; as she opened her mouth, wisps of green energy emerged, curling and undulating like the current in a stream. The woman inhaled and they coiled into her throat. Green light began to surround the woman, pulsing outwards from her larynx to form a halo around her head.

Rachel's vision shrank to pinpoints. The room whirled around her. Then blood surged back into her hand as the woman released her grip and Rachel's entire body sagged. She hit the floor hard enough to knock the wind out of her; the last thing she saw before her vision left her completely was a flash of green light and the sandwich spattering to the floor in front of her face.