Nightworld

Arms limp at his sides, Rasalom floats within a tiny pocket in the granite, a pocket he has made. When he descended approximately a hundred feet into the pit, he stopped and hovered as a passage into the bedrock opened before him. He floated into the passage and followed it to this spot.

Yesterday he began the Change above. Now it is time to begin the Change within.

He hesitates. This is a step from which there is no return. This is a process which once begun cannot be reversed, cannot be halted. When it is complete he will have a new form, one he will wear into eternity.

He will be magnificent.

Still he hesitates. For the shape of his new form will not be of his own choosing. Those above—those puny, frightened creatures milling on the surface—will determine his countenance. He shall be an amalgam of all that they fear. For as their fear feeds him, so shall it shape him. His form shall be the common denominator of all that humanity loathes and fears most, the personification of all its nightmares. The deepest fears, from the darkest recesses of the fetid primordial swamps of their hindbrains. All the things that cause the hairs at the back of the neck to rise, make the flesh along the spine crawl, urge the bowels and bladder to empty. He shall be all of them.

Fear incarnate.

Rasalom's body tilts now until he is floating horizontally in the granite pocket. He spreads his legs and rams his feet against the stone wall and screams as they fuse with the living rock, screams as all the fears, the angers, the hatreds, hostilities, violence, pain, and grief from the vicinity surge into him. He stretches his arms and fuses his fists to the stone, and screams again. It is a scream of ecstasy as new power surges through him, but it is a scream of agony as well. For now the Change within has begun.

He swells. His skin stretches, then splits along his arms and legs, from his genitals to his scalp. As he continues to swell, the skin sloughs off and falls to the floor of the stone pocket like a discarded wrapper.

As the night air caresses his raw flesh, Rasalom screams again with what remains of his mouth.