Consciousness returned in flickering bursts through veils of agony. Gregor's world was reduced to a haze of throbbing pain as he dangled from rusted hooks sunk deep into his flesh. Blood mingled with ichor dripped down his legs into sizzling sigils below.
He had been brought to a place of sacrifice. The ritual stage loomed high above, wreathed in crackling warp energies. The crimson light illuminated a celebratory throng of horrors capering and chanting around mutilated offerings from his retinue.
Gregor's shattered body spasmed against the hellish bindings as he gazed up at the silent black moon. Its dead crater eyes stared back, reflecting the anguish of a billion souls consumed by the eternal night. There would be no dawn after this endless Halloween.
Laughter and screaming rang out as the veiled ones feasted. To Gregor's sorrow, the keening voices of his Brothers joined the mad cacophony between wet tearing sounds. Death was a mercy not granted to all.
From the brooding sky, vast shapes descended on membranous wings. The Old Ones had come for their twisted worshippers, hungry after their long exile beyond. Obsidian idols throughout the city streets wept blood as psychic resonance peaked.
Around the flayed offerings Gregor saw robed cultists sway and twitch in mindless orbit, blood streaming from empty eye sockets. Their life essence gorged the rising entities like bloated ticks feasting. All who looked upon the Old Ones unmasked were bereft of sanity.
Pustulant sacs of ichor scattered from Gregor's ruptured veins as a scalpel-tipped appendage delicately peeled back layers of tissue. The probing thing that wore his brother's skin chittered with amusement at the responses conveyed through corrupted nerves.
Gregor's mental screams echoed unheard across the bloody void. Emperor, where was thy Light in this forsaken place? How long until it touched all worlds, sparing none from the hunger beyond? A wet snap rent the question from his mind as the spine-hook dug deeper.
Through the haze, Gregor perceived a rippling in the fabric of reality itself. A thin, shrieking tear manifested above the ritual stage. The boundaries between materium and immaterium were fraying - soon only Chaos would remain.
The bloated black moon seemed to writhe and twist, sprouting grasping tendrils that probed down toward the world below. Its cratered surface rippled, becoming a devouring maw ringed by fractal teeth. All light was sucked into the vortex, birthing new nightmares.
Green fire rained from the cyclopean breach as twisted beings poured out, trailing warp flame and miasma. They flew in impossible geometries no natural life could replicate. The Old Ones had mortal forms beyond sanity's grasp.
Mewling shadows drifted from the rent veil, flocking around fresh vessels. The once-dead jerked into a blasphemous mockery of life as fiery spirits filled their clay. Grinning skulls turned to survey the gory rites with renewed malice.
Atop the throne of defiled saints and martyrs, the flayed remains of the bull-god rose up in manic orchestration. Behind the dripping red veil, something vast and ancient now wore the flesh-robe in a deranged ritual.
Gregor's soul shuddered at the psychic resonance cascading across the planet. Insane revelry gripped cult and spirit alike as the moment of apotheosis approached. The allegorical made real - spirits crossing unbound back into waking life.
Cold terror gripped Gregor's heart as he beheld the landscape of this world unmasked. Cyclopean ruins from before mankind dotted the surface, silhouetted against an impossible sky of black suns and writhing clouds.
The veil was mere mist now, dissolving away under the torrent of invading spirits and banished deities. Reality reverted to the raw stuff of consciousness, malleable to ancient thoughts and cruel imaginings made manifest.
In the sky, the cancerous black moon engorged on stolen radiance as its bulk spread across the heavens. The crater eyes peered hungrily down through the thinning barrier at the ripe mortal herd awaiting its hunger. Soon all would be consumed.
Screams rang out from those unshielded from the piercing mental drone as blood vessels burst across the population. But louder still was the howling of freed spirits racing across the lands to materialize in nightmarish forms. Flesh was only another mask.
The world shuddered as warp geometries overlaid physical space, birthing impossible shapes and non-Euclidean angles. Those unlucky few still clinging to sanity wailed at the unfathomable architecture of this newborn hell.
And amidst it all, the mocking laughter of children rang clear and cold. The ancient rituals had called them forth to play anew. At long last, Halloween had truly come with misrule and terror for all. For this was the secret 13th Hour that existed only on the Planet of Perpetual Shadows.