Closer By than you think

   We live mundane lives, we wake up, we eat, we go to work so that we can eat and live in some semblance of comfort in our everyday lives. We dream of fanciful things and secret societies and fill our media with them. We are blissfully unaware of the truth, even those who believe they know the truth are blissfully unaware of the true horrors all around us. There are some who know, many more than one might think who make it a point to cover them up and distract us from them should we discover how close we all live beside these horrible things. It is the continent we call North America, isolated and alienated from the world; an untold story of horror lies buried here, horror that was unleashed once and nearly killed every man, woman, and child with its breath alone. For there are ruins, ancient structures of unknown build by unknown means buried about this country. Those who lived here before the Europeans were no more the wiser than the invaders of their land. No more the wiser as to the source of the great plague that nearly wiped them all out prior to the arrival of the Europeans. There would be some who would believe the Europeans to be ghastly things sent by the breath they had unleashed, their stories are few and esoteric.

 

  So many of these horrors remain, spotting the landscape, they knew, some knew to leave them be. This knowledge had been lost to one foolish youth who opened the tomb of Yangiath the keeper of deadly mists. How unfortunate, the timing even more so. This however is not just some ancient tale, some excuse passed down by oral tradition. There are those who know of many lesser and many greater things, Viara the lady of vines, the mother of shadows, the indiscernible beast beneath the mountain, and many more still of increasing horrific powers. Some would even tempt fate by detonating the most powerful of all explosives upon their sleeping forms beneath the ground only at their best to have no effect at all and at their worst unleash the nameless horror upon the land to roam once more; some lesser thing yet still unphased to haunt the bygone place in the guise of a ghost from the past.

 

   Many awoken would be anchored to places, or be sighted only to vanish into obscurity via some hidden talent of masked forms or preference away from man, giving rise to many a tale of devils and strange alien things. Those who know of those still sleeping or those who lurk in anchored spots have done well their jobs to obscure the things to make them legends and hoaxes to the public. Fencing off their random abodes from public eye under harmless guises as a patch of forest in the middle of a farmer’s field, a fenced off “wild life preserve” in the middle of a city,  an abandoned mine field, bomb range, government property that holds only some empty base or bunkers as a cover for the truth that lies below, a truth hidden from even almost all who man these places or maintain them. A low paid government garbage picker who goes to the edge of a park past the field to collect debris would never know that the murky pond he is never to step into, and would have no occasion to do so anyway has at its bottom an ebony coffin in which sleeps a witch of black shadows awaiting a human hand to touch the black wood to awaken her, even as children play no less than a hundred feet away on old metal equipment and men scrounge around the pebble covered streams for crayfish. A stone among stones, some odd glyps that are a gate, a tiny hole that goes down a thousand feet to a nightmarish worm, a tombstone monolith covered up by an empty building that no one may enter, so many, far more than the public would be safe to ever know about, dotting this continent, the true dark continent, home of the forgotten sleepers, the land in the west.