Terra Rasq never much cared for coffee, so she found herself especially irate that dipping out one night for a coffee run may have been her last act on this earth.
The leather binds she had awoken in after being grabbed off the street by cloak covered cultists bit firmly into her arms, legs, chest and neck as they wrapped across her body.
Although she could not move her head, she could tell she was laying on a cold stone platform. The chill sunk deep into her bones through the silk negligee she found herself in.
She wasn't sure how many cultists there were, but she could hear a dull chanting from every direction.
"Good things come to those who wait. Better prizes for those who act in haste!" They repeated over and over in a quiet murmur.
Suddenly silence fell over the chanters and the only sound in the room was the pattering of a single person's footsteps approaching her.
A man in an ornately decorated cloak, with sigils sewn around the hood in bright red thread appeared above her. The same sigils were tattooed all over his arm as it reached out to lay a blood red stone on her chest.
"For thirty years we have heard nothing from The Insidious One." He spoke, addressing what she assumed was a crowd.
"For thirty long years we have paid tribute, only to be met with silence! The elders preached to us that we must wait. That we must worship an absent god. But today the elders are gone! Today we reclaim our fate! Today, we summon Terasq!"
The room exploded in cheers.
"A cult who usurped their own cult" Terra thought to herself. "Just my fucking luck."
The man who appeared to be the leader removed a large dagger from his cloak, holding it aloft.
"That's ornamental right? Like an athame? Because listen the kidnapping charges won't be so bad if you don't hurt me, and I'm sure your god doesn't want to get caught up in legal issu"
The Insidious Priest paid no attention to her words, bringing the dagger down and slicing the strange sigils into her flesh.
She screamed trying desperately to wriggle free from her binds to no avail. And just when total panic was about to consume her, something strange happened.
The pain from the cuts disappeared. She couldn't feel them. She couldn't feel her own body at all. Her senses were suddenly ripped out of this constricting third dimension.
Instead she could feel the pulse of trillions of different potential futures, sprawling out into trillions of different pasts.
All visible. All simultaneous. She could see, not just this world, but every world.
Every planet, every society, every creature who had ever invoked her name played out their infinite iterations inside her head.
She could feel their prayers. Their tributes. Their bonds as they offered up their souls to her.
With an effortless motion she stood from the platform, her binds shredding like paper. She caught the red stone as it tumbled towards the ground and shattered it inside her fist.
The cultists, such ignorant fools, so in love with their rituals they no longer understood what they represented, just screamed.
The head Priest, assuming the ritual had gone wrong, lashed out with his dagger. She caught him by the wrist, breaking his bones as the dagger clattered to the platform below.
"In the name of Terasq, I hex thee!" The man shrieked pathetically.
She laughed, flicking her arm and hurling his body into the crowd of remaining cultists who hadn't fled immediately.
"I take one tiny vacation and you petulant fucks start kidnapping girls in the night? You disgust me. You were lucky to have only gotten silence, but you forsook that blessing, and now you will get what you've asked for."
The News reported later about a collapsed cave on the outskirts of town. The anchor mentioned the victims were suspected of "occult dealings" and authorities assumed that they caused a cave in doing unlicensed excavation.
Neither the anchor nor the authorities knew that everybody was long dead before the first stone crumbled. But they did report on an odd coincidence wherein several people, who were found dressed in the very same cloaks despite being found several miles away, apparently dead from a heart attack, around the same time of the cave in. No immediate connection was declared.
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