Glowing white eyes pierced me through the gloom. Sunken into the vague gray outline of a stag’s skull, the visage floated closer. Translucent fragments of ink-black cracks and crevasses spiraled out behind it to my unlit kitchen.

“Kill them all.”

The sound that droned out was unlike anything any living being would ever hear or would ever hear again. No one, not even the deaf or earless could escape the sinister vibration, for it echoed in the mind. It cut over the tallest mountains and to the deepest pits of the oceans. It soared over polar fields, lifeless deserts, and into the thickest jungle glades.

Its timbre swallowed the Earth in seconds, and there was silence. As if the entire world held its collective breath, while the briars took root. Then the bloodcurdling, stomach-turning screams came from everywhere at once, a fitting accompaniment. Bodies broke down and flesh ran through the streets like a biblical flood. Flayed, melted, and spined with thorns—terrible and twisted things rose up from the gore.

Howling, they mauled one another to shreds. Victors ungraciously feasted on the fallen, but even the rare survivors were ripped apart, sobbing, by indiscriminate waves and arches of towering black briars that rose and fell through the chaos. The shifting mounds of claret and teeth would merely be reformed, only to carry out the grim ritual again, and again, and again.

As the unfettered catastrophe bled into every natural and civilized corner of the Earth, while explosions of countless wreckages blistered across the surface of the planet like a disease, I turned my attention to Their visage once more.

“You may go.”

And so it did.