Categories
Horror Short Stories

Mors Ex Machina

The grim reaper has been outdated for hundreds of years. Sure, people still die, but it’s automated now. You’ve enjoyed eternal retirement, but one day you’re told that the machine has been sabotaged. It might be time for death to get old school.

The first person was a middle-aged woman who was now in her late thirties. She had a dark red eye patch, and a scar on her upper right thigh from an elbow injury the machines had inflicted. Her shirt was torn open and open again. Death would have taken her long ago were it not for her efforts to disable the machinery of Death. She’d gone into the room and removed some equipment, and she’d gone back into hiding when she heard the scream of the machine.

Photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay

She had been too late, however. The machine had been hacked away the moment she’d stepped foot inside the room. It had begun to scream, and the screams and screams of people nearby were coming in from all directions; they were all deafened in their ears by the noise. They were all now screaming at each other, in horror, in confusion. The machines were no longer the problem. They were a mere secondary concern.

The second person was younger and darker, and was still a bit of a wizened old woman. She had a short silver-brown hair pulled into a loose bun at her shoulders, and the edges of her eye patch were missing. She was dressed in the same pale green clothing as her counterpart, and had a similar eye patch. Her skin was still a little pale, but most of what came down her back had not been removed. Her face was still a few shades too pale, the corners of her eyes still puckered. The edges of her mouth had been cut off.

She had looked as if she had come out from some deep dark space in time that was not this place. There had been a hint of a certain menace behind the grim reaper, a sense that she was the one who had done this, and the screams of those around her echoed this sense of dread. She had not noticed this, and so it was not until the screams stopped that she realized that the scream hadn’t come from a dead person. She had broken Death, and now she was back to summon the Reaper to fix it.

She had no intention of coming out of this alive, though. She would take her own life with her. There would be no more screaming, and nobody could hear her if she did, and she had no need for the Reaper anyway. But now that she’d entered the room, she felt nothing but fear. It seemed the whole purpose of the chamber was to make her afraid, and that made her a little dizzy. The machine screamed and shook, and as the screaming died down it seemed to become less frantic. The scream seemed to go on for longer and it was possible she was going to die before the machine was able to reboot.

The third person stood out like a sore thumb. She looked like you wouldn’t believe this, but this person had not been able to escape the deathtrap. It was still dark within the room, but it was now dimmer and more focused. She seemed to have lost her sense of colour, and the blood of the machine was a dull brown. She was dressed in a white jacket, and white trousers. Some of them were torn, and the fabric had been ripped through.

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pixabay

It took a moment for them to realize that they were all the same person, and they were Death. They knew what they had to do to restore the machine.

There was no time to regret. The machine would restart soon enough.

Categories
Horror Short Stories

The Great War of The Undead Old Gods

This only took three tries to get something coherent and relevant to the topic that was good enough quality I was OK with posting it to the reddit thread. Here it is…

The hellish trenches of the Great War were dug rapidly and with very little regard of what came before. So, when the bones of the old gods buried deep were exposed to mankind once again the rose from their slumber. At first the gods were confused, angry. Then, they picked sides. But they knew what they would do with the dead. And in this way they had their vengeance on the men. The earth trembled with the voices of the dead. There was a great clamor in the villages and towns across the empire:

“The Great War! The terrible wars of the gods in the skies, the bloody battles! The war of ages!”

But what did all this have to do with the men? The men knew not the great deeds they would be fighting for, and the war had its causes. When there was no enemy there was no need to be a fighting God. But what was there to know? What would they gain, what would they lose? The great armies of men who had fought on their own behalf had to wait for their return. So there came a time of rest and quiet. Then they saw the glory of the dead. And when the spirits of the dead began to rise up the men had no fear and no need in fighting for gods and for glory. But there was a terrible curse. In that period of time the people of earth began to become more savage and more vicious. There were wars for food and for war; for women and for men; and it was all very bloody and cruel. They would fight for the dead, but the people were afraid of the dead. Then a great war was fought.

“War! War! The Great War! The war against the dead! The Great War!”

And so the men fought with their own souls as the men fought for glory. There was a great war.

And when the dead had fallen the Great War had begun. There had been war before, but not this great. And now the men had no more fear of the dead than the men had of their own souls. But the war was not over yet.

“The Great War, the war between gods, the war against the dead!”

Rejected Run #1

The hellish trenches of the Great War were dug rapidly and with very little regard of what came before. So, when the bones of the old gods buried deep were exposed to mankind once again the rose from their slumber. At first the gods were confused, angry. Then, they picked sides.

The war was won, for a time, but the war was not lost; the war is not won. And it was not lost for the old gods alone, for all of mankind had something left to be lost. The war was won because men came together to find the answers of the great questions that had haunted them through the millennia, and the secrets to be found therein. The war was won in order to keep the peace of the realm as a whole; it was won to preserve the very fabric of the Realm and its laws upon which it was founded. But in the end, it was all but over. For all who died, all who were slain, for all who were wounded and all who were lost, the peace came to an end, and in the aftermath of the war, in the aftermath of the Great War, mankind’s greatest challenge was put to rest, and that is why mankind, the first generation of man that ever fought in this very war, is the only true victors in the end.

A young man in the war zone in the distant future stands in front of a monument of an ancient god, an ancient god that is said to be the ancestor of gods. His face looks familiar. It could be that he is the ancestor of the gods that were destroyed during the Great War; that his face, the one from the battle, is also the one from that battle.

The young man looks at the monument as he stands at the front, and he sees his ancestor’s face in the monument. He smiles at his ancestor as he turns towards the young man, and he looks up to see his ancestor’s face as the young man turns back to him, and he looks down at his ancestor’s face.

The young man looks back at the monument, and he sees his ancestor’s face again, as he smiles. And he smiles even further. And he smiles even more.

He turns back to his ancestor, who

Rejected Run #2

The hellish trenches of the Great War were dug rapidly and with very little regard of what came before. So, when the bones of the old gods buried deep were exposed to mankind once again the rose from their slumber. At first the gods were confused, angry. Then, they picked sides.

A few years ago we saw this play, which had a lot of the old-world elements. The war was over. The Great War was over and the war ended. The gods were still in conflict and they had their own wars on, but there was still the war.

Now, we’re starting to see a new kind of war in the form of the Horus Heresy, a conflict between the Imperium and the rebellious forces on the other side of the warp. In the Horus Heresy it was the Imperium of Man that tried to stop the war. This was the first time that the world’s gods were involved in this sort of thing and, in the Horus Heresy, we see how the war was fought. The gods fought with a mixture of force and treachery, but they were not completely without support, and they did it with such great success that the war itself was a disaster. It was only by the aid of the gods that humanity was able to stand on its own two feet after being torn apart by the war.

This was a time of great suffering and the Imperium was torn apart. The Great War was finally put to an end, but humanity has never been the same after this event. There have only been the scars of the conflict and the memories of those who fought it, of those that were killed, and those who lost their lives.

The Horus Heresy is a very dark place indeed for humanity.

This new Horus Heresy will be the first time that humanity has seen itself as the dominant force against the forces of Chaos, which is the enemy of the Imperium of Man and the gods. The Imperium of Man, for its part, is now trying to build itself up, to build itself up in the light of the light of the gods. The Horus Heresy is an event which has the power to reshape the Imperium of Man and the gods.

The Horus Heresy is also the beginning of

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