They Arrive Before the Slaughter



They arrive for the slaughter that is to come, watching with eyes of marble white and filled with the prospect of a deep hunger sated. Like vultures eagerly awaiting the expiration of the dying, they stand silently with dark forms that are a grotesque mockery of man, waiting patiently... Shifters of form but not of the mind, they take on the skins of those that fit their vulturous nature. The skins in which they hide are those of scavenging avian whom feast upon putrefied corpses of the murdered dead - skins of buzzards, crows, ravens, and the nightmarish hybridization of avian and man. They are the Gorekrows, the harbingers of Him.

A precious few know of their comings and goings from this world and theirs, and those that have the unholy privilege of such rarely speak of it. With a gaze unwavering, they stand as foreboding statues crafted by the hands of some fiendish artisan. As one contemplates these ethereal sentinels, a question cries out to them...

What do you want?

The words hang in the cold, damp air like a curtain of listlessness. A reply is not forthcoming, for they do not abide by any commands but their own and Him. In what seems like a measureless span of reticence, the agonizing silence is broken by the swift slapping of feathered wings as the forms that were once the vague proximity of men, now fashioned into something that could resemble what we would call a crow. And as the bird-forms depart on wings as black as void, a whispered voice echoes in the air -

He is Coming!

Author
Hayden Larsen