ScareS 4, no pairing, no particular fandom
What the title says, you can really put it in almost every fandom, so feel free to imagine as many details of your favorite fandom as you like. Enjoy!
As long as you can remember, it had always been there. Surrounding your village like a wall and veil all together. Impenetrable, thick, colorless.
The Fog.
It's impossible to see anything past it, aside from the sky, that is. The Fog is always there, no matter the weather. Be it the freezing cold winters or the searing hot summers. Be it rain, hail or storms.
The Fog is a constant.
It surrounds your village: the houses, the barns, the fields, the pastures, the stables, the rivers, the forests. Creating a large valley with pristine white tinted walls, with them blessedly inside.
It is the perfect life. They don't have to fear predators. Or attackers. Or diseases. Nothing comes through the Fog. Not even them. But why should they leave? They have everything they could need here!
The Fog takes care of them all.
The cattle is prospering, the fields are overflowing with fruits and vegetables, the rivers and lakes and forests are clean and full of life. If they need something, the Fog provides it, or not, telling them without words, that they didn't need it after all. They want rain? It would create a downpour the next day. They want sunlight? It retreats to let more warm rays through. They need more space? It would surround an old house they aren't deeming safe anymore, swallow it whole and leave the new free space for them to build whatever they want.
The Fog asks for so little in return.
Of course, being this blessed affords a price. The Fog wants part of their prosperity for its efforts to keep them safe. The harvest had been extraordinarily successful? They give it half of their piled up products. They have more cattle than they could ever eat or milk? They'd lead the excess into the Fog.
You don't know, if there is something or someone else living in that Fog or if it is a sentient creature itself. You only know, that everything, that is engulfed by it, disappears.
Sometimes, when the harvest and amount of farm animals hadn't been great enough, they offer a villager. Usually the elder ones, who wouldn't live much longer anyway and happily give their lives for the greater good. For the Fog.
You would be among the next offerings, you know as much, as you have no strength to help with farm work anymore. You would just go into the Fog and disappear.
The Fog knows best.
Once in a while, it refuses the grownups and rather wants a child or newborn. The optimistic ones think, that the children and grownups and cattle and food are taken to a place outside the Fog, or to another region of it, that you just can't reach. The cattle kept and bred, the adults allowed to live until they reach their final days on their own, the children brought up to fine adults and then maybe they are allowed to leave the Fog and go into the world beyond it.
You aren't naive enough to think, that there isn't anything outside of your little paradise. From time to time, there are large, loud objects flying high above them, disturbing their peaceful routine, showing, that there are other people just outside their valley, developing faster than them. Building machines. Flying through the sky like birds.
The Fog takes care of these, too.
Sometimes, there come new people from outside into their idyll. They always claim to not want to be here, to have been abducted, talk about something called 'hidden cameras' or 'jokes', demanding to be let out.
They speak about the things they had have outside the Fog, as if they are worth leaving this perfect paradise.
As if them, the ones born in the Fog's grace, agreeing to leave this place would make the Fog disappear.
Foolish.
The Fog had chosen them to stay.
Sometimes, you have to laugh to yourself watching their fruitless tries to escape. Really, who would do such a thing? And in which ways, too! They run like fools into the Fog, using things they call 'flashlights', as if the weak artificial flames could penetrate even a layer of the white veils, just to appear in a random spot again. Some even throw random things at the Fog, which has you and the elder ones just laugh and shake your heads at their foolishness.
Some break down and cry or find a way to kill themselves. It has all of you disgusted and you always burn the body to not poison your Fog with the obvious mental disease they all had had.
You had been diseased with this mental instability once, too. You had been young, a teenager, and like many teenagers, you had wanted to escape the daily routine. You had thought hard, in secret, at night, when your parents wouldn't notice as you knew they – the whole village – wouldn't approve. Over time, you had just forgotten about it, though, so your halfhearted plans hadn't ever been executed. You had been healed from your mental disease. By the Fog.
Why would you go anyway?
The Fog protects you. All of the village.
A noise makes you raise your head. It's a sound you have never heard before, sounding like a song a beautiful voice sings.
You stand up, stiff from not moving since this morning and look around your village. Your eyes stop on the Fog. It looks as pure and white as usual and yet, it is somehow...more appealing.
Calling you.
You only hesitate for a very brief moment, before you begin to wander towards the nearest wall of the Fog. It is calling you, you realize somewhere in the back of your mind. It is your time to feed the Fog.
Yes, the Fog itself is alive...in a way.
Like many of your peers, you had explored the Fog during your youth, trying to find a way past it, to see what's behind the forests. And once surrounded by pure white on all sides, you had been able to hear it.
The whispers of voices, the rustles of something – not heavy, not loud, but so definitely there. The sounds had surrounded you like the Fog itself, going around you and despite nobody in your village knowing the dangers of being attacked by predators anymore, you had been able to tell, that something had been circling you. Going in circles around you, but never disturbing the Fog building a veil, a round wall surrounding you.
The formless creature had circled you just long enough for you to get the message, that was since then ingrained in your very being.
You belong to the Fog.
If it decides to feed you, it can do so and you have to eat.
If it decides to starve you, it can do so and you have to starve.
If it decides to feed off you, it can do so and you have to perish.
And right now, it wants you.
Something deeply, deeply buried inside you, too deeply buried to do anything but cry out in uproar, protests as you set one foot before the other.
Claims, that you want to live, that doing all this is wrong. That it has no right to just take the lives of your people, your life!
But your feet carry you towards the Fog, undeterred by your subconscious struggles, your true feelings and wishes, allowing the whiteness to engulf you and your vision one last time.
Title: The Fog – Villager Edition
...You guessed it, there will be another "Edition" following shortly, so stay tuned!