The Horrors of Marlorne

The Altar

In the small town of Nightbane, history had been swamped by the present.

Two centuries earlier, a group of wayfarers from far away reached a wide valley surrounded by mountains and decided to make it their home. They cut down trees, dug into the rock, dismantled the landscape, and reassembled it in the form of a town suited to their needs. Roads, like gray rivers, soon reached the newly born Nightbane and put it in communication with the rest of the world. More people moved there and, before long, its population reached such a number that it needed to be added to the maps.

However, without knowing it, each of the people who set foot in that valley became complicit in a dark event that the so-called "founding fathers" had kept hidden because they were too unaware or, perhaps, too aware.

When the group of travelers had arrived at that place hidden by the mountains, they were confronted with ruins. Perfectly preserved, though largely absorbed by vegetation, granite columns rose skyward, finely decorated porticoes served as entrances to that earthly paradise, and slabs of stone branching into a road network looked like the corpse of a giant marble serpent twisted in on itself. Wayfarers soon discovered that the place lay abandoned, and, for years, they blindly demolished what little ancient beauty had survived the millennia. With those stones the main buildings of the town of Nightbane were built, and tons of asphalt were poured on the stone roads. Nothing remained of the history of the ancient inhabitants of the place, and none of the people who moved there had any way of suspecting anything; they were doomed by a mistake of their ancestors.

Because the past, like secrets, always resurfaces.

In Nightbane, three generations after its founding, a little girl was born who was named Damia after her grandmother. She spent a happy childhood, lived the years of her adolescence with serenity and dispensed with university studies. She met a young man with many dreams in his suitcase and a good dowry and married him; thus they had three children. They settled in a large, cozy house in the old part of town, and he found substantial employment in the famous local excavation company. Everything seemed to be flowing smoothly, but it could not go on like this for long: every time they left the house, they stepped on the sidewalk and crushed it with the weight of their cars, they touched a soil steeped in hatred and meditating revenge against them. Every molecule of air they breathed tried to poison them, every ray of sunlight wanted to burn them, the shadows of the mountains leaned forward to smother them; but they did not feel it.

Not even their oldest instincts could warn them of the danger looming over the lives of Nightbane's inhabitants.

One night Damia's second son, at the age of nine, disappeared into thin air from his room: his parents found the window wide open and the bed, empty, still warm. The only trace was a few shavings of a stone resembling marble scattered on the floor and along the road, like a trail. The trail broke at a point where work was in progress to fix the road, which had been collapsing inexplicably in several places for several months now.

The police did their best, but in the end the case was dismissed as unsolved. The parents and siblings were devastated, and the balance of the family was upset. Damia, in particular, showed such serious signs of breakdown that she had to consult a psychiatrist; her husband was also grief-stricken, and neither could comfort the other.

Just as things began to improve, the family was further decimated. Amid cries of fear and tears, a friend of the youngest son explained to the police that the child had disappeared during a game of hide-and-seek. He seemed sincere when he claimed to have seen the tree grabbing his friend, yet those in charge of the case decided to consider it the figment of a child's imagination.

That same day, the father was alerted with a call that his eldest son had died in a traffic accident, due to his failure to see a stone sticking out on the road asphalt. Damia collapsed into a complete catalepsy, and relations with her husband were severed completely. With fragmented hearts, each in his own way closed in on himself, becoming a shadow of his former self.