It’s always watching.
This has been my life for as long as I care to remember. A ceaseless gaze lurking just out of sight. It watches my every move. There’s hardly a moment of respite from the endless torment. The gaze is growing heavier, more foreboding. I know not what it wants, only that it hungers for something within me.
Thoughts creep into my head unbidden, while visions steal into my dreams. I am both disturbed and worried by what they show me. By what they suggest in feverish, incessant whispers.
I’ve fought against the urges with every fibre of being, but I fear I’m losing the battle. Gaps appear in my memory. Pockets of nothingness. I do not wish to uncover what transpired in those lost moments, but I fear the worst.
Am I still in control?
When I look at my reflection, I no longer recognise the person who stares back. It does not follow my every action. The eyes hold a sinister glint, and the smile is a twisted thing of malevolence. My subjects cower in my presence.
When did they begin fearing me?
Something squirmed in my grip. I glanced down and reeled in shock. My son slid off my sword—stained with his blood—and dropped to the floor, dead. Screams echoed all around me as people fled in a mindless panic. I cared not as I fell to my knees. My hands trembled as I drew my son into my arms.
What have I done?
I wept.
I buried my son the next day, and my broken spirit, along with him.
Over the coming months, a darkness descended on me, and I lashed out in bouts of rage and sorrow. My hold became as silent as a crypt. My servants had abandoned me after the last execution. I walked cold, empty corridors that had once been filled with warmth. At the edges of my vision, I caught glimpses of something growing in dark corners. A form being birthed from shadows. It was always near, watching and biding its time. I shivered beneath its withering gaze.
I stood on the brink of madness when it came to me. It slunk from the shadows. A nightmarish, amorphous mass of writhing limbs and eyes. It pulled itself across the marble floor towards me with disfigured fingers, leaving a trail of black fluid in its wake. It wailed and moaned from hidden mouths, while its eyes never left me. Within them, an endless void swirled, and an ancient evil waited.
I wanted to run, to escape the waking nightmare that was unfolding, but my body refused to obey me. The gaze was so heavy; it felt like the weight of the cosmos was holding me down. Never had I felt such oppression.
The thing reached the dais and inched up the steps. I sat rooted on my throne as a hand grabbed my leg and it ascended my body. My skin reeled at its wet touch, and bile rose in my stomach. It crawled onto my chest and reached for my face with those unsettling fingers. They ran along my face, finding my mouth. I tried resisting, but it was like holding back a raging tempest—impossible. It pried my mouth open with dozens of fingers, and then, to my horror, it slid inside me. My body shook at the defilement. My eyes rolled back, and darkness took me.
In the darkness of my mind, the gaze remained. Only it now had a presence. A consciousness. I reached out to it in desperation.
What are you?
I am the End.
I watched from the recess of my consciousness as the entity usurped my body, and in my name, threw the world into chaos.
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