Qui Devorat
Terrarian
No one knew where it came from. No one had seen anything like it before.
The moon, which sat above them as an unrelenting orb in the heavens, had been stained an unhealthy shade of crimson, as if some cosmic force was playing a macabre joke upon the inhabitants of the land. Although for that singular appearance there was nothing came of it, this would be a mere mercy lead. For weeks life would continue as normal, this strange lunar occurrence being nothing but a gradually fading memory in the minds of everyone who had witnessed it.
But a mere few weeks later, it appeared once more, and this time, this lunar appearance was by no means a kind one. Invading visions of blood, horror and death had permeated and filled the minds of unwitting townsfolk in a small, budding settlement of 3,620 not far from the capital. Some of those touched by the inexplicable visions resisted the malevolent compulsions they invited and merely collapsed into incoherent sobbing heaps, unwilling to muster up the willpower to put the invading, malevolent mind-plague to action. Others were either too weak to hold it off or all too willing to give in, gleefully butchering anyone they found unaffected by this sudden mental affliction. First-responders reacting to calls for help from unfortunates trapped in their homes by the crazed mob were slaughtered and torn apart. The streets was consumed with utter carnage and nearly every building in town was ablaze, the air choked with ember-ridden clouds of smoke that birthed new fires to whatever they touched. Those immune to this mindless rage fled their homes and to the capital, never to come back. A decision that proved vindicated in time.
When dawn had finally broke and the local authorities that regathered their strength arrived back at the scene to pacify the insane rioters and restore a semblance of normality to the chaos, a sight of utter devastation and bewilderment greeted them, illuminated by the glow of the rising sun. Every single dwelling within the limits of the settlement had been reduced to smouldering husks, the fires having gutted the town almost to it's foundations.Yet despite the horrific events of that night, not a single drop of blood was to be found, contrary to surviving eyewitness accounts of the gory massacres committed by those under the thrall of the moon. But what was struck as even more odd was that despite the state of the town, there was not a single living soul to be seen in sight, just as there were no bodies to bury either. Not a single corpse lay in the streets, not even so much as a severed finger. The whole community gripped by the almost-preternatural lunacy as well as their victims had literally vanished from existence altogether. All that could be found was a sentence scrawled shabbily on a nearby wall:
"Praise the moon."
Months would pass after such a mysterious tragedy, but the memory of such an event was as fresh as if it happened yesterday. Widows mourned at the supposed death of their spouses. Orphans cried themselves to sleep. Parents tried their hardest to search for their children, but to no avail. One elderly woman, crippled by an exceptionally painful case of arthritis asked her carers monthly to put flowers on the memorial in tribute to her grandson, who was among those taken. Nobody wanted to renovate the smoking ruins back to their former glory. They were forever tainted in the eyes of the populace now and would become the origin of many ghost stories to come.
But this wasn't to last, and on the first anniversary of the near-complete destruction and mass disappearance of all 3,500 men, women and children taken by the crazed hypnosis of that fateful night, the bloodstained moon rose again and brought Hell itself with it.
No one knew what was going to happen, not until a gushing red torrent bombarded the city from above. Drains filled with blood and the disembodied screams of those that walked the Earth once before began to fill the night air. Fear locked the populace inside their homes. Andre, one of these citizens, bobbed his head nervously out through his front window as he watched the manholes flick their covers skywards in an almost comedic game of tiddlywinks as the drains overflowed full-force and spilled it's gory payload into the deluged streets. But it was not that which made him lock his door and enclose his shotgun into a death-grip with his pallid hands. It was the sight of a silhouette, rising slowly on uneven feet and with a lumbering stagger from the river of semi-coagulated muck and fix it's glaring, crimson eyes on him through the window.
All throughout the night, the various authorities were besieged with ominous calls for help from people all across the city, one of the first being an elderly woman cowering behind her curtains as the thing that used to be her grandson bangs on the window with pallid, rotting hands. Another, a child fearfully begging someone to save her as the bloodthirsty remains of her parents clamber in through the window and grab ahold of her.
Those who attempted to fight back against the fiends that besieged their homes and threatened to murder their loved ones found to their horror that they were impervious to pain, slogging through beatings and gunshots that would of been fatal twice over, only stopping upon destruction of their head or decapitation. And even then it proved a temporary measure as they would soon rise again from the knee-deep bog of half-clotted blood that swamped the streets , sometimes in grotesque new forms, from humanoid masses of blood that gazed onto the world with jaundiced, murderous eyes to a dripping ball of gore that absorbed it's victims whole and added them to the screaming mass of melted bodies that composed the twisted creature. And their masses were growing, as any who dared to walk into the streets was consumed by the torrent of liquid flesh and spat out as another un-living abomination. All who fell by their hands suffered the same fate. What were city blocks became an inescapable inferno. What used to be suburbs became charnel houses filled with nothing but the screams of the dying and the howling of the risen dead.
This was the beginning of the end.
And the beginning of Terraria as we know it.
The moon, which sat above them as an unrelenting orb in the heavens, had been stained an unhealthy shade of crimson, as if some cosmic force was playing a macabre joke upon the inhabitants of the land. Although for that singular appearance there was nothing came of it, this would be a mere mercy lead. For weeks life would continue as normal, this strange lunar occurrence being nothing but a gradually fading memory in the minds of everyone who had witnessed it.
But a mere few weeks later, it appeared once more, and this time, this lunar appearance was by no means a kind one. Invading visions of blood, horror and death had permeated and filled the minds of unwitting townsfolk in a small, budding settlement of 3,620 not far from the capital. Some of those touched by the inexplicable visions resisted the malevolent compulsions they invited and merely collapsed into incoherent sobbing heaps, unwilling to muster up the willpower to put the invading, malevolent mind-plague to action. Others were either too weak to hold it off or all too willing to give in, gleefully butchering anyone they found unaffected by this sudden mental affliction. First-responders reacting to calls for help from unfortunates trapped in their homes by the crazed mob were slaughtered and torn apart. The streets was consumed with utter carnage and nearly every building in town was ablaze, the air choked with ember-ridden clouds of smoke that birthed new fires to whatever they touched. Those immune to this mindless rage fled their homes and to the capital, never to come back. A decision that proved vindicated in time.
When dawn had finally broke and the local authorities that regathered their strength arrived back at the scene to pacify the insane rioters and restore a semblance of normality to the chaos, a sight of utter devastation and bewilderment greeted them, illuminated by the glow of the rising sun. Every single dwelling within the limits of the settlement had been reduced to smouldering husks, the fires having gutted the town almost to it's foundations.Yet despite the horrific events of that night, not a single drop of blood was to be found, contrary to surviving eyewitness accounts of the gory massacres committed by those under the thrall of the moon. But what was struck as even more odd was that despite the state of the town, there was not a single living soul to be seen in sight, just as there were no bodies to bury either. Not a single corpse lay in the streets, not even so much as a severed finger. The whole community gripped by the almost-preternatural lunacy as well as their victims had literally vanished from existence altogether. All that could be found was a sentence scrawled shabbily on a nearby wall:
"Praise the moon."
Months would pass after such a mysterious tragedy, but the memory of such an event was as fresh as if it happened yesterday. Widows mourned at the supposed death of their spouses. Orphans cried themselves to sleep. Parents tried their hardest to search for their children, but to no avail. One elderly woman, crippled by an exceptionally painful case of arthritis asked her carers monthly to put flowers on the memorial in tribute to her grandson, who was among those taken. Nobody wanted to renovate the smoking ruins back to their former glory. They were forever tainted in the eyes of the populace now and would become the origin of many ghost stories to come.
But this wasn't to last, and on the first anniversary of the near-complete destruction and mass disappearance of all 3,500 men, women and children taken by the crazed hypnosis of that fateful night, the bloodstained moon rose again and brought Hell itself with it.
No one knew what was going to happen, not until a gushing red torrent bombarded the city from above. Drains filled with blood and the disembodied screams of those that walked the Earth once before began to fill the night air. Fear locked the populace inside their homes. Andre, one of these citizens, bobbed his head nervously out through his front window as he watched the manholes flick their covers skywards in an almost comedic game of tiddlywinks as the drains overflowed full-force and spilled it's gory payload into the deluged streets. But it was not that which made him lock his door and enclose his shotgun into a death-grip with his pallid hands. It was the sight of a silhouette, rising slowly on uneven feet and with a lumbering stagger from the river of semi-coagulated muck and fix it's glaring, crimson eyes on him through the window.
All throughout the night, the various authorities were besieged with ominous calls for help from people all across the city, one of the first being an elderly woman cowering behind her curtains as the thing that used to be her grandson bangs on the window with pallid, rotting hands. Another, a child fearfully begging someone to save her as the bloodthirsty remains of her parents clamber in through the window and grab ahold of her.
Those who attempted to fight back against the fiends that besieged their homes and threatened to murder their loved ones found to their horror that they were impervious to pain, slogging through beatings and gunshots that would of been fatal twice over, only stopping upon destruction of their head or decapitation. And even then it proved a temporary measure as they would soon rise again from the knee-deep bog of half-clotted blood that swamped the streets , sometimes in grotesque new forms, from humanoid masses of blood that gazed onto the world with jaundiced, murderous eyes to a dripping ball of gore that absorbed it's victims whole and added them to the screaming mass of melted bodies that composed the twisted creature. And their masses were growing, as any who dared to walk into the streets was consumed by the torrent of liquid flesh and spat out as another un-living abomination. All who fell by their hands suffered the same fate. What were city blocks became an inescapable inferno. What used to be suburbs became charnel houses filled with nothing but the screams of the dying and the howling of the risen dead.
This was the beginning of the end.
And the beginning of Terraria as we know it.
