Shroud of Idolatry
Prologue
The African hut’s interior walls stretched vast and circular, disappearing into shadows no firelight could dispel as smoke coiled upward from the hut’s central pit. The serpent-like tendrils redolent with burning herbs and decaying meats, substances meant to open doorways, doorways better left locked and barred. It held and intesified the heat of the fire against that stung against the cold desert night.
She sat elevated above them all, a figure carved in the flickering darkness. Her scalp gleamed in the strobing light, smooth and sleek as a river stone. Once, perhaps, there had been warmth in those eyes. Once, perhaps, she had been wholly human. Here, they held only vacancy, a terrible emptiness suggesting she was a shell for something older, something patient and hungry.
She sat upon a monument to death, one built of bones, leopard and buffalo, antelope and hyena, the sinew and pelts of once mighty creatures. She wore little else but that throne’s authority and the metal sphere that hung between her breasts, suspended by a cord of braided leather. The container was ancient, older than memory, inscribed with symbols predating any language spoken in these lands, symbols shifting and writhing when the firelight caught them.
Before her, the tribe knelt. Thirty-seven souls. Men and women, once neighbors, friends, even lovers. They swayed in unison, their voices rising in a chant that belonged to no tongue meant for human mouths. The syllables came harsh and guttural, scraping against the throat, leaving only the taste of copper and ashes.
She rose.
Extending her arms outward in a fluid, unhurried movement, palms facing the congregation, she spread her fingers into the points of darkened stars. The metal sphere at her chest began to vibrate. A sound that resonated in the bones and the teeth, in the spaces between brain cells.
The chanting intensified, and the tribe began to move.
At first, the dance was ritualistic and beautiful. Bodies swayed in serpentine rhythms, hips rolling in ancient patterns, evoking feelings of fertility and creation, the eternal cycles of life. Hands traced curves through smoke-thick air, palms sliding along torsos in movements both intimate and selfish. They circled one another, advanced and retreated, their bare feet drumming against the packed earth in hypnotic cadence. Backs arched. Shoulders rolled. The movements were primal, sensual; a celebration of flesh and desire rendered in motion.
The dance continued, but the movements grew more exaggerated, more intertwining. What had been sinuous and flowing became sharp-edged and aggressive. Bodies no longer swayed; they jerked and twisted. The intimate gestures transformed into something possessive. Fingers tracing curves now clawed. Rolling hips thrust with violent emphasis, each movement an act of domination and lust rather than communion.
The rhythm changed. Faster. Harder. The drumming of feet became a ferocious stomping, rippling the earth with vibration beneath them. The dance was no longer about creation but about consumption, about taking. The circles tightened, bodies pressing closer, the space between them charged with something dark and hungry. Penetration. Faces contorted, not with pleasure but with rage, with a building fury buried beneath skin and civility, waiting for permission to emerge. A crude sexual explosion, one where sweat and tears interwove, weaving moans of pleasure and screams of exquisite agonies.
They began to collide rather than caress as shoulders slammed together. Bodies crashed and rebounded. The dance had become a battle disguised as ritual, each movement bled with contained violence. Their eyes rolled back, showing their whites. Lips pulled back revealing teeth held in grimaces of blended ecstasy and pain. Spittle flew from their mouths, forming minute puddles of agony upon the flattened earthen floor. Their faces emotionless, as empty as their eyes.
Drool seeped from the corners of her inhuman smile as the metal sphere grew hot with a hellish glow.
And then the restraint shattered completely. The tribe moved as one body possessed of many minds, each surrendering to impulses that bubbled up from some primal depth. Teeth tore through flesh. Fingers buried deep into tissues, splitting skin in search of the freshest of meat. The carefully maintained evolution of their civilization, already thin in this isolated place, dissolved entirely. They became creatures of appetite alone. Ravenous for flesh, for power, to feed some insatiable urge.
She watched as they fed. Her smile, the barest curve of lips, stretched into a crescent moon of malice. All the fear and ecstasy, the pains and pleasures, the final gasps of the dying along with the savage cries of the triumphant, all of it flowed toward her like a river, as the metal sphere blazed hot against her skin, drinking deep.
Her eyes ignited, deep crimson and pure black spilling from the pupils, spreading until her gaze burned with infernal radiance. Her body swelled with terrible presence, an expansion of being, filling more space than her physical form should allow.
She was feeding.
Like an afterthought, flames licked up the reed walls and clung to the thatched ceiling, spreading with hungry speed through black smoke. Screams of raw terror tore through the surviving tribe as they realized what they had taken part in, what they had become, what they had done.
She settled back into her throne of bones.
Bodies thrashed and then fell still. Heat waves shimmered separating her and the destruction. No fear touched those glowing eyes. No concern creased that smooth brow. She simply watched her tribe burn, watched as her temple crumbled, observed the culmination of her dark hunger with a patience perfected by centuries and could now wait for centuries more.
Yet, her smile never faltered.
When the roof collapsed inward in a shower of sparks and smoldering timbers, when the walls buckled and the screaming had long since ceased, only she remained. Untouched. Unchanged. The metal sphere at her chest pulsed with a satisfied warmth, gorged on the feast of debauchery, she had offered it.
Support beams cracked and splintered, sending cascades of embers into the air like malevolent fireflies. The heat was unbearable. It seared lungs and melted flesh from bone, yet she sat serene in her throne, a dark queen in her burning palace, as though the flames recognized her sovereignty and dared not touch her.
The power coursed through her veins like molten gold, filling spaces left hollow for far too long. How many times had she done this? How many tribes, how many villages, how many civilizations had been consumed in the endless wandering? She had lost count centuries ago. Millennia, perhaps. Time was meaningless, a bore, when you carried eternity in your mind.
The metal sphere had cooled, its hunger temporarily sated. The souls within stirred clawing at its etched steel walls. Thirty-seven voices occupied the void, already screaming in that impossible space. Their essence would sustain her, fueling the next migration, the next seduction, the next harvest. It was always the same pattern. Arrive. Assimilate. Corrupt. Consume. Move on.
She’d worn the face of many things during her long existence. A goddess. A demon. A prophet. A witch. The names changed but the function remained constant. She was hunger given purpose. She was the shadow that follows faith into darkness. She was the price paid for power when desperation outweighed wisdom.
The tribe had fallen particularly easy. Their previous leader, a man of genuine spiritual strength, died six months before from a serpent bite. The community was left fractured, uncertain, vulnerable. She appeared on a night much like this one, cold and clear. The stars scattered across the sky like shattered diamonds. She came with gifts: knowledge of herbs that eased pain, techniques that improved their hunting, stories that made them laugh and dream. Along with her came an unseen passenger, and It would revel in their praise.
They welcomed her. Gave her shelter. Gave her trust.
Sheep for the slaughter.
She took her time, weaving herself into their daily rituals, their ceremonies, their prayers. She spoke the words they needed to hear, performed the miracles they needed to see. When they made her their leader, their spiritual guide, they did so with joy and relief. They thought she would protect them, lead them into prosperity.
And she led them, certainly.
The walls finally gave way, collapsing outward in a bloom of flame and smoke. The cool night air rushed in, fueling the inferno, turning the entire structure into a massive pyre. Through the opening, the desert stretched endlessly in all directions, painted silver by the full moon. Somewhere out there, another village waited. Another community ripe for harvest.
But she was patient. She mastered patience when the world was young and humans still painted their stories on cave walls. Haste led to mistakes, and mistakes led to exposure. She had been exposed before. Burned at stakes, drowned in rivers, buried alive, torn apart by mobs. None of it had killed her. Nothing could kill her, not truly. He wouldn’t allow it. But it was inconvenient for him, and it disrupted his feeding.
Better to move slowly. To be thorough. To leave no witnesses.
Almost no witnesses.
She opened her eyes, that hellish red glow dimming to something more human, more manageable. The sphere at her chest calmed and lay dark and icy against her chocolate skin. She felt the first stirrings of hunger beginning again, but not with the bite of desperation yet, just present. A reminder that her appetite was infinite, that satisfaction was always temporary.
She stood, the bones of her throne creaking beneath her. The fire began to die down, having consumed everything flammable. Soon there would be nothing left but ash and charred bone. The desert wind would scatter the evidence, and the story would become legend, then myth, then forgotten entirely.
As it always did.
She stepped down from the throne, her bare feet finding purchase on the scorched earth. The metal sphere swung gently between her breasts, a pendulum counting time that meant nothing to her. She walked through the burning debris, flames parting like subjects before a queen. Her skin unmarred, body untouched by heat, the smoke or destruction, she moved on, the furs at her hips fell to ash and scattered in the wind.
Outside, the night was cold and clear. Standing stoic at the threshold of the ruined hut, her eyes turn, looking back one final time at her work. Thirty-seven souls consumed. Thirty-seven voices contained at her feast. Thirty-seven lives ended to sustain one that should have ended long ago.
Guilt and remorse were human emotions, and she was no longer human. She was beyond such things now. Beyond morality, beyond judgment, beyond everything but the satisfaction of the hunger. She stood, naked in the moonlight, enjoying the satisfaction of a meal well consumed.
In the morning, a traveling mission would find only ash and bones being picked clean by scavenging wildlife, and a sole survivor, with no explanation. They would speak of tragedy, of tribal war, of the mysterious ways of the people here. They would not know, couldn’t know, that she had fed, and walked out through flames that parted before her like curtains, carrying with her a terrible hunger, satiated for the time.
She turned away from the dying fire and began to walk. The desert stretched before her, vast and indifferent. Somewhere in that emptiness, she would select a new land, a new people.
Her body was tired and deflated. She had long been driven mad and consumed. The husk could only be sustained for so long before It’d need to migrate.
But she’d do, for a while.
It would hunger again, but It was patient. It was eternal. It wasn’t human. It knew of their God, and the power that He held over His people. It had tasted that power once, long ago, and found it wanting. Their God demanded faith, obedience, sacrifice. But He gave nothing in return, only empty promises and hope.
It demanded the same things. But, at least, It was honest about the price.
The missionaries would arrive with the dawn, full of their righteous purpose and their holy texts. They would find the destruction and weep. They would pray for the lost souls. And they would never suspect that their next convert, the traumatized survivor they would take under their wing, was the very thing their scriptures warned them about.
She smiled in the darkness.
And It was never satisfied for long. But the next meal stood before It, not yet visible on the horizon, but coming. They always came. They came to save the lost, to bring light to darkness, to spread their gospel of salvation.
They never realized they were simply delivering themselves to It’s doorstep.
The metal sphere pulsed once against her chest, a heartbeat of dark contentment. Thirty-seven souls to sustain her. But thirty-seven would not last forever. Nothing lasted forever except It, and the hunger, and the endless cycle of consumption that ruled over her existence.
She walked on into the desert night, leaving smoke, ash and the lingering scent of burned flesh in her wake. Behind her, the fire finally died, plunging the ruin into darkness. And before her, somewhere beyond the horizon, the missionaries continued their journey toward her, believing they carried salvation.