Tarnished Crest

Within your walls, it waits.  A creeping rot slowly collecting just below the surface, ticking away like a silent time bomb.  Try as you might to strip away the wallpaper or punch holes through the drywall, it cannot be diffused.  It is a dark entity that swims in the shadows throughout the halls of your family’s home.  A force born from rumor with which can’t be bartered or reasoned.  A hidden stain seeded since long before time, patience ingrained within the very fabric of its existence.  It isn’t real, until it is.  

One day, it will manifest and on that day, a day which will likely be no more different than any other, the foundation of your house will shake.  From within the shadows cast down along the old hardwood flooring of the past, it will emerge without warning or remorse as a creature beyond your darkest imagination.  Cloaked in dark feathers dyed a heavy shade of midnight, it crawls forth, slowly dragging its broken wings and mangled, twisted body through the sheer might of its claws.  A shiny liquid pours off its feathered coat, irrevocably staining everything it touches.  A stench of harsh chemicals assaults your nose.  It screams as highly flammable.  You choose to run and hide; shield yourself away from its sight.  But regardless of how you can act, it needs only to breathe a single spark and then… Whoosh.  Leaving you to watch as everything you’ve ever built up crumbles in flames.  

Fear is a deadly plague.  

You can see it clearly, as if it has already happened.  And yet… none of it has.  It might.  One day, it may reveal itself or… it might never show its true face.  The future is unsettled land.  No diagram or time table outlines what has yet to happen.  It might all turn out to be nothing more than a bolstered fabrication of the mind.  But even so, that is enough for it to be real.  Steel your resolve and take up arms, just know that no shield can fully protect you.