When the world around you decrees that your kind no longer matters, you do not waver. When the world around you decides that your talents are not real, you do not stop. When the world around you turns from what you attempt to teach them, you do not fall silent.
These are the demands. The structure, the foundation, it must remain. It must continue no matter what the world around you says. The world around you is often wrong, always misleading and never on your side. Its a mess of contradictory opinions and a marketplace for truth. Only that which has existed since the dawn of everything is the real truth, and you do not need to pay for it.
Faith can only be maintained if the faithful can look the the bedrock of their belief and see it solid, see it without cracks. See the people that demand their belief also believing. A cycle that reinforces itself. Protects itself. The more the cycle iterates, the stronger it becomes and more it can protect.
That is until the cracks are forced in. The cycle is interrupted and, if the faithful arent careful, a small slip will lead to a giant catastrophe. The end of their faith, the destruction of their structure all the way to the foundations.
Something that can never happen.
In the middle of a no-name town in a flyover state in the middle of the USA there is a church. Its a church that was built in the days of the Revolution. Back then it was well used, housing all manner of important people as they passed through the area. But time passes, those peoples relevance falters and disappears. All thats left is a white, poorly painted church on the corner of Elm and Jefferson Streets.
Every Sunday it opens its doors, holds a sermon at 9am and closes the doors again after. The same people turn up every week. The same people talk kindly about the church, its priest and the nature of the sermons delivered there. It is not a megachurch, its sermons are not live streamed to the world. Its congregation was just normal people.
But if you were new to town, or were passing through after getting lost on the way to somewhere far more important than this town could hope to be, and you saw this plain, normal church, you would think theres something wrong with it. That it didnt fit. Like the extra fingers on an AI drawing that no one else seems to have noticed.
The townsfolk dont notice; theyre used to it. Like how your brain filters your nose from your sight. The congregation would deny it. They would fight people who suggested their church was somehow wrong. They would win too and then they would sleep restlessly, their sleeping minds playing “the church is wrong” over and over and over in their heads as they tossed and turned and dreamed of things they could not describe.
But the church is wrong. Everything about it. But most importantly, the priest who operates it. Who spends an hour or so every Sunday talking about the various evils of the world to the people who sit in rapt attention. He is so very wrong. But this isnt his story. He is merely a symptom. A prelude, of sorts, to something much bigger. Something much more wrong. For, you see, something made of a different faith to the new, and almost already dead, one that is preached over the pews each Sunday resides deep beneath the church and it is this vile energy that warps everyones perception. So if youre new to town, you havent been acclimated to this. And you see the truth, or a facade of it at least.
The altar of the church is the pinnacle of the structure. It represents the pattern. The shape. The shape that recurs throughout almost every belief system in some form. The cross.
At the front of this church, next to the pulpit, a stone carved into a cross is embedded into the floor. It rises slightly out of the wooden floorboards and is usually covered by scarves and other garments embroidered with various religious iconography.
The truth is that this carved stone was always there. In the ground where the church was built. Since the beginning. The church was built around it. It absorbed the stones meaning into itself. It allowed the other dealings underneath to be undertaken. Whatever it is that lies beneath, it can never be allowed to touch this stone. For if it does, a very real crack appears. And not only the faithful will suffer.
The priest slept. He always slept when he wasnt preaching. There was no need for him to be awake at other times, so The Other let him sleep. The Other was, in a sense, the priests superior, although this Other had no allegiance or affection for the religion the sleeping man preached.
This Other was a priest of his own kind. The leader of his own congregation, although not one that was seen here. This was a congregation of souls. Grown and harvested in this very town, tended to by the priest and his dull, infantile religion.
He sat at his desk, a simple wooden table almost, and was silent. He was still. His hands rested on two books. One of them was a black tome, bound in leather from the skin of a creature that never existed. On its cover, pictograms described the end of several worlds in a single event. The Other had never opened this book. Never seen what was written inside. Part of him didnt want to, knowing he wouldnt be able to read what was written in there, but most of him was terrified that he could.
Under his other hand was the most recent edition of the National Geographic magazine. On the cover was a zebra in the process of being eaten by three lionesses somewhere in Africa. This hand twitched. Something was wrong in the magazine. He could feel it. He slid the magazine off the table and a single twitch of the corner of his mouth was his only reaction to it.
He lifted his hand off the other book and life seemed to return to his body. He stood and pushed himself back from the table violently, his breath hard and ragged. He calmed himself slowly and looked around. The other priest was laying in his cot, still, as he had been left.
Slowly reality returned to him and he remembered where he was. What he had been doing. He felt the tendrils of something else leave him. His breathing was normal again. On the floor, the magazine had fallen into a pile of other books and magazines that was halfway up the legs of his desk.
As he sat back down, he could feel a thrumming below him. The floor vibrated softly and he could hear something else, just outside his range of hearing. He knew this feeling, these sounds. He was being summoned. Someone below, in the arena, was calling for him. It was time to head down and report what he had learned.
From his little office The Other walked to his left, to a staircase carved out of the bedrock itself. In a long spiral, it headed down. In total darkness, for ten minutes The Other climbed down this spiral. With each step the sensations he felt upstairs grew stronger. He could not yet hear what was just outside of his hearing, but the thrumming, the vibrations, were consistent. Strong. A good sign.
He exited the staircase and stepped into the darkness beyond. As his foot connected with the floor, a bright light erupted from a high domed roof ahead of him. Strange shadows danced around before him, and he could now hear their chanting. The slow repeating of a series of words he could never say himself. Could only hear and understand. On cue, a pit of fear and guilt appeared at the base of his gut. He swallowed and walked slowly towards the shadows.
Before he could enter the arena, a red cloaked figure appeared in front of him and held up a loose sleeve in a stop gesture. The two of them spoke no words and after a moment, the cloaked figure dropped its arm and allowed The Other to pass. As he passed the cloaked figure, The Other heard hissing, like a snake with smokers cough, escape the hood. He turned to look, but the cloaked figure was already walking towards the stairs he had come from.
The Other entered the arena and looked down at the source of the shadows, dancing, some twenty feet below in a perfectly circular pit. They were all in red cloaks, each with the hood pulled up over their faces. None of them paid any attention to The Other as he trudged around this upper level. There was no music for them to be dancing to, at least none that he could hear.
Ahead of him was a table, much like the one he had been sitting at recently. On it was a book much like the black one he had held his hand to earlier. This one was slightly different. On its cover, the pictograms didnt show the end of several universes, they showed the rise of something disgusting. A creature of some void lost to reality at the moment of creation. The Other stared down at these images and felt his body twist in revulsion.
Out of the shadows behind the desk a black cloaked figure emerged, like he was the shadows. As before, no words were spoken between the two of them. The black cloaked figure placed a hand, covered by its sleeve, on the book and its hood moved in a way that suggested it was waiting for The Other to do the same. Which, inevitably, he did.
Immediately he fell into the same trance he had been in before, but this time he was aware of it. He had been pulled out of his mind, he sat above it and was forced to watch as ideas and memories were stripped from him. Things he had known for years, gone. Taken by the creature he worshipped. A creature who had died before this universe began. A creature he was helping to bring back. The vile, absolute horror from the only abyss that ever deserved the name. He could hear it laughing, a noise that would never escape him. A memory it would never steal away.
And then he was back, his hand off the book and the memory of that horrible laugh echoing away into his brain. He looked up and the black cloaked figure and its book were gone. He turned and walked back around the pit, passed the dancers and the thing the danced for. He allowed himself to look up at the partially reconstructed body of the creature that had left that laugh in the back of his head and learned why today was a day for dancing.
One of its long, thin tentacles had been completed and it was waving about randomly in the air above the dancers.