The Hinterland Horror
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
The Revealing Eye: It's looking for you! The nightmare terror of the slithering eye that unleashed agonizing horror on a screaming Innistrad!
In places where the sea meets the trees, it's easy to forget the darkness that rules most of Innistrad. However, that hardly means you should ever not be looking over your shoulder for the thing that is out to claim your life. Whatever that thing may be.
The difficult thing is, sometimes what's out to get you isn't creeping over your shoulder. It's in front of you, staring you right in the face!
A hard lesson. Muttered about as the Hinterland Horror, the buildup to the horrible event and its aftereffects were scribed in The Hanweir Chronicle. Understand this was before the Hanweir township closed itself off to the affairs of wider Innistrad. Before the township lurched up and wandered off into the hills.
It happened in an outlying community. It could have happened anywhere.
A magic show peddled by a shady pilgrim.
Specifics were kept secret, but word quickly spread that the show was a must-see.
The people should have seen something was obviously wrong here. It wasn't until the simple folk scrutinized the self-described magician's dead body that they realized they'd been watching and conversing with a chilled corpse from the start.
Not a zombie. Not an unhallowed or a skaab.
The magician was a dead man with brain activity stimulated post-mortem. A psychic puppet, slipped on like a glove.
By who? Or what?
Firsthand details of the attack came from the show's sole survivor, who talked gibberish for days, and who'd never walk again.
Audience members were instructed to keep a close eye on a mysterious set of burgundy curtains.
"What…mysteries…do I…have hidden…behind these drapes?" the enchanter enticed in broken speech fragments.
How deceptively clever, the curtains actually had a close eye on them!
White mist preceded the menace concealed inside the curtains, seeping out the bottom of the blinds. The coldest of colds, freezing the floorboards. Numbing thought, to the lowest degree.
An eye.
The uncovered eye crawled out of the wall, knocking over the end table and vases as it revealed itself.
Its thorny optic nerves slashed the mind. Whipped through the air, taking off the heads of one and then many more gawkers. Bloodlessly.
The eyes of the decapitated became stolen keepsakes on the creature's caruncle: wide and unblinking.
"NOOOOOOOO!" A fleeing girl's leg shattered like ice at the monster's cold touch. But before the eye dragged its grossness to her, her screams brought help.
They hucked torches into the study, and the girl dragged herself free on her other leg.
The eye screeched and it burned, melting like the ice it diffused.
She wished the memory melted so thoroughly.
The eye didn't take the girl's sight. But it took her wide-eyed sense of security. A piece of her mind.
A lesson all too common on Innistrad.