I've had the virtue of a long and bountiful life, filled with all manner of strangeness. I've seen and experienced things far beyond the measure of many of my peers, and in my later years, I begrudgingly admit that I have likely forgotten a great many memories that I would cherish to have back. Yet as long as I might live, no matter how badly I might wish it, I will never forget the horror I witnessed beneath Kangi Crossing. It is there when I close my eyes. It rests in the dark corners when I try to sleep. I am haunted by it, and I fear it may be the last thing I see when I close my eyes for their final rest.
I was in as perilous of a situation as I had ever found myself, buried deep in an unfamiliar land by my malcontent hosts, and bearing witness to a terrible and frightful ritual that no man was ever meant to see. I was safe for the moment, as safe as one could be in such a situation, perched high above what appeared to be a man-made atrium. I could make out in the darkness numerous ornate columns and carefully etched reliefs. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth, and I imaged that I was in the long-forgotten halls of a forgotten race, one whose grand halls had long ago caved in and filled with dirt and stone.
There was a sort of natural luminescence at play in this otherwise perfect darkness, I could see what appeared to be some kind of fungal vegetation that grew all around, giving off a faint blue emission, a very ethereal sort of light, like the reflections of light under water in a darkened room. And yet amidst the blue-green tint, far down below me a start contrast was made. The same type of faint luminescence, but in a far more sinister hue. It was as though fire burned below fat and flesh, and the sharply angled V shape was all too familiar. Hunger. To Consume.
In stark terror I watched as from the cavern walls poured a flood of wiry limbs and glowing eyes. They resembled human children in size and shape, but their movements were born of nightmares. They moved on all fours, with their joints turned in ways no human could ever contort. They scrambled like spiders with a terrible speed and swarmed the atrium below. Their faces, those nightmare faces, were adorned with a great wide mouth in the same V shape as the Horror itself, and their pupil-less eyes glowed with the same luminescence as the fungus around me. I watched as they burrowed through the dirt and stone, using toothy mandibles like tiny arms shoveling the soil into their mouth. I watched them heave and vomit, spewing forth whatever their bodies could not process for nourishment. In astonishment I had a terrible revelation, the emissions of these hell-spawned creatures was a fine crystal debris, the same crystal mash that was the primary export of this small mining town.
So this was what I had been attacked and left to die for discovering. The mines of Kangi Crossing were not mines at all. The men of the town descended into these tunnels to recover the excrement of these monstrous children and sold it for goods. But then, where did these creatures come from. And what, gods help me, was the great flabby creature with fire burning in its skin?
I peered back over the ledge to get a better look at the large creature. This was the patriarch, the father of the tribe. His great belly burned with the fire, with the V shape like a scar over its terrible obesity. It walked on legs like those of a spider or great crab, carrying its weight with surprising speed and agility. It bore the same mandibled mouth as the lesser creatures, and yet it did not burrow in the ground for food like they did. Those teeth, those terrible teeth, this was not the face of a scavenger. This thing craved meat, and I shuddered with the implication.
A clamoring from far down in the atrium startled me, and I retreated back over the ledge, lest these frightful things become aware of my presence. I could hear the scampering of feet and a soft whimpering, a voice. A child's voice, an actual child! I peered back over the ledge and watched in horror as a child with violet eyes, bound and gagged, was carried on the backs of the nightmare children up to the father creature. Before I could cry out, and really, what good would that have done save for alerting the creatures to my presence, the screaming child was consumed by the toothy, mandibled mouth of the Horror.
I rolled to my back, forcing myself to look away as I covered my mouth and sobbed at the sheer brutality of what I had witnessed. I knew the violet eyed child, the one who had followed me out of the town and peered over my shoulder as I wrote my notes. The curious child who had touched the Hunger sigul and fled in fright when I found the gem.
The gem...
That slightly luminous, perfectly round gem.
I turned back over the ledge, I had to know more. The great flabby Horror was retching now, and his horrible burning stomach opened along the V scar, and from the fire inside emerged another of the nightmare children. The new child was greeted by his brethren, and I choked back another sob as it looked around its new home with those soft violet eyes.
