The floorboards of the abandoned parish in Oakhaven still bore the black enamel scorch marks from fifty years ago.
That night, six men in gray robes had locked ten-year-old Clara in the center of the subterranean chamber. They burned salt and dried nightshade, chanting long, guttural incantations to drag something cruel up through the earth to tear her mind apart. They told her to wait, to sit still, and to take what was coming to her as penance for a bloodline they despised.
Clara had sat. She folded her small, bony hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and waited.
What the cultists mistook for paralyzed terror was actually absolute, silent focus. Clara was used to waiting. She had waited in this very room many times. At home she waited for her mother who never came. She waited for food that never arrived. She waited for school to start each fall to be safe and to be fed. Clara’s friend became the wait, the pain, and the darkness; she spoke to them, she whispered to them, she slept among them…
While the men yelled, summoning entities of power and lust, Clara reached deep into the lonely places within her immortal soul. She beseeched Judgment upon her tormentors and Harm everlasting for her devourers. She summoned her ancient friends and family who would avenge her and protect her mind, body and soul…
When the ritual reached its climax, the cultists’ summoned terror materialized—a writhing, shadow-bound mass of teeth and malice. But before it could take a single step toward Clara, the cellar walls began to bleed.
Out from the walls stepped three ancient ones of impossible scale. One had six eyes glowing like dying stars and skin like polished obsidian; another was a towering shape of bone and raven feathers; the third was a shifting phantom of pure, platinum and ivory. They did not attack Clara. They stepped in front of her, turning their immense, terrifying gazes onto the cultists and their summoned terror.
The men’s chants turned to shrieks. The cult’s demon was devoured in seconds, and the cultists themselves were struck instantly as the Reaper shackled them and cast them into the abyssal cold, leaving behind nothing but empty robes and ash.
Fifty years later, Clara still lives in the tiny cottage bordering those ruined woods. She is a wise woman now, tending her rosebushes and sipping hot tea on the porch. Developers once tried to seize her land; muggers once tried to corner her in the alley behind the market. None of them made it past the woodline. They are all officially missing, presumed dead.
She is never lonely. When the evening mist rolls in over the garden, three massive, towering silhouettes emerge, always gently around her. They are her family eternally, keeping eternal watch over the girl who summoned them so long ago.
Moral: The innocent one you sought to hurt has already destroyed you.
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