Archons

The archons love to laugh. Only their laughs are bitter, twisted things, enough to shatter eardrums. They are immense, and they lurch and rub together in obscene movements as they look at their followers before them, prostrate, cloaked in black. All of them chanting backwards in a forgotten tongue that sounds like machines fucking.

Great and scaly beings that play games of chance with fate and misery.

I remember Father Duncan’s face when I told him what I saw. He turned ghost-white, and his trembling caused his cassock to strain against his heavy shoulders. His hands clutched his rosary, and he turned upwards to look at the crucifix that hung from his wall. He was muttering to himself, and the expression that he wore was not of hope but of dread.

The next morning a young acolyte found him. He was dead, hung from his rosary, still staring at the crucifix.