Over scores of mountains, under the comforting shadows of towering forests, there lay undisturbed, a small village.
Peaceful as it was this tiny community. Small houses of treacle thatched roofs that sat atop of the delicate white stone walls like sombreros, littered the empty space in the vast woods, yet occupied by a number of small healthy trees and tiny rocks. A wild light blue stream, dotted with algae, that flowed past the dusty square of the hamlet served as the water supply and the picturesque surroundings of the forest and the mountain in the horizon attracted small but shy creatures, such as young deer and rabbits from the forest miles around. The village left food out for these gentle visitors.
The blue skies were always joyfully open, and this let the glorious sun paint the dusty streets gold, and the plentiful sunshine beat down lightly upon the faces of happy children running in the town square.
The blonde wheat fields, combed and cherished, albeit so small, were tended happily by the men folk and the women at home too occupied by their family’s simple but stretched needs, but only too eager to provide for their children. Every child experienced magic within their pure upbringing, with their free time spent playing, with almost no knowledge of hate between beings, their minds were far from awry. The angels above were among them, in their youthful peace and harmony.
Nothing could morally disrupt such a haven of purity as this.
However, the time of agonising was to fall upon this innocent town.
The men on the farms were to feel it before the rest of the village. They were all talking merrily amongst each other on the crops when the first man, a simple farm hand, experienced tremors of numbness in his tired legs. He downed his tools, unnoticed, to confront a sickly feeling in his stomach. He wanted to address this himself so he immediately made for the barn, a tall brown structure, that lay upon a minute hill overlooking the radiance that was the fields.
He bumbled sleazily into the barn, of which he found was empty. When he shut the big door of the barn, he started to feel worse, and felt like choking. His eyes turned red with ablaze, his black hair frantically stood on end, which let the sweat drip down his hot forehead and he found it hard to breathe.
He let out a cry as he gripped his stomach, an inky lurching in his stomach pounded fiercely in his ribcage. The man collapsed on the hay in the center of the barn, constricted by a sudden exasperation and growing torment.
With his mind swimming, he tried to get back up. What resulted in this physical resistance was a searing pain in his torso that released an ear shattering scream from his lungs. He could even see it through his bloody boiling eyes, a dark oozy gas that leaked out of his mouth as he cried and it loomed above his gasping face, a kind of… ghoul.
“Hssss…”
Suddenly the gaseous form shot back down his throat and into the centre of his chest, where a deep sadness struck his heart and he fell once again, and the slow diminutive world around him turned a poor grey. His eyes felt a cold fire consuming them now, the process was only taking a few minutes yet it felt like a small eternity of agony for him. He could feel his insides moving even, organs squirming against each other, as if given a life of their own.
He cried once more, until the last of his body fibres became bereft of life as the man finally fell to the ground from his knees. In his mind, he was enduring a slow horrible torture. But for reality, he lay still on the floor, cold and embraced by death.
The screams from the barn were not heard by the dead man’s colleagues chatting outside on the crops.
Meanwhile outside, the welcome blue of the sky began to cheapen, and rare, but cheerless clouds were forming. The farm workers stopped talking, to peer up at the usually inspiring skies, but it was encouraging no longer for it was being closed up by a dim hue of greyness, thin nimbus that grew to stuffy, dark clouds. The skies gradually turned black and the farm felt the immediate drop in temperature, to frigid artic levels. The radiant, golden heat of the sun had gone out like a deft blow upon a lit candle. An entwining friendless chill took hold of farm workers, and they struggled to stand up to the sudden freeze. The crops, once so tall and yellow, now petered down to a beige dwarf of a plant and then wilted to the mud, devoid of colour. Vile winds tossed and gathered, and swept past the valleys and unto the village.
Whilst the men found themselves bemused by the sudden dismal change in weather and the fall of their crops, a dark looming figure sauntered out of the barn. It took it’s shape from the body of the man, whose soul it had consumed and left his carcass to be eaten away by the acidic vapour the black entity left in the air beyond it‘s back. The ghoul made its way towards the village, with all the essence of madness in the world, imprisoned in the silent, sickly mind it beheld. The physical, yet gaseous dark figure seemed to abhor all forms of life, as the grass fell dead under it’s feet and the path it created was represented by a stalk of a borish tan. It’s poisonous milky white eyes, the only feature of it’s head that likened it to a human swirled like razors, forever cursing the way ahead.
The figure stopped at the top of a small mound that overlooked most of the dead farm of distrait men, once the figure made it’s bleak presence known, the pressurised men peered up at the mound in consternation. A draught of gloom, much faster than the winds, hit the small legion of farm workers as they flashed their eyesight past the never ending, spiralling milky white eyes.
The latter pair of holes looked up, into the gross draft of black clouds that heaved over the grey land. The faces of the farm workers followed, distracted by the desolate dunes of dark clouds up above, that cut out the warm touch of the sun, and the golden aura it used to provide on the crops.
More gaseous black forms appeared. They emerged and drained upwards from the soil, one behind each man distracted by the observations of the dark figure upon the mound. They prepared to attack and they encapsulated their victims, hitting the deep of their hearts. The endless torrent of pain restarted once again, all at once, as the farm workers and their partners of death hit the ground simultaneously, grasping their necks and their hearts as their minds began to dissolute. The men shared a dreary dank reality of which they heard only each other’s screams, the cries from their friends, brothers, fathers and sons, and saw only other twisted forms cradle the bottomless surroundings in boundless agony.
But to the earth, they existed no more and the mound tyrannically procured an army of dark figures, a legion of ghouls, that floated over their victims, lapping up the deathly atmosphere they had produced. They were to turn on to the rest of the village, onto the newly orphaned families. They dragged themselves with a keen reluctance to life, towards the village and dragged with them, the sorrow and the torture.
The women, children and few men of the village were all out on the charcoal grey streets, no longer dusty or yellow, holding themselves against the cold of the wind. Unaware of the dismal happenings on the farm, they were concerned more about the swirling black clouds that now blocked the sky. Some of the children had never even seen such weather in their lives, and the thoughts within the worrying adults did not bode well to their inexperienced senses.
The arrival of the black figures was coming more evident. The colour of the stream that ran through the hamlet began to turn from a calm aqua blue to a betrayed, distasteful red, the lurching black clouds above started to pour rain sorrowfully and inexhaustible embers embezzled in the buildings, and the angry fires pertained on the thatched roofs, even through the heavy drizzle. The solitary trees in the street, once so watchful and influential over the secure citizens, began to shorten to black trunks with prickly arms as the colourful leaves began to peel away and crinkle into nothingness.
Some of the children were exposed to fear for the first time. A striking realisation of events that etched a frightful dismay in their minds, it was a relatively new feeling for them. Only too convenient was the timing, although they still had no idea what was going on, whether it was bad, or good even. The look upon the faces of the remaining adults spelt alarm and trepidation. Was something coming?
Then, a black liquid seeped up from the soil around them and flooded the drab grass on the wet ground, resulting in a smear of black upon dunned green. The black puddles rumbled, as if harbingering an earthquake. The adults cautiously stepped away, dragging their children gently by the shoulders with them. Some adults decided to run, but curiosity got the better of most of them, as the black puddle appeared to materialise more and more. They watched in fear, yet so curious, and some of the kids in wonderment, as wires of the black fluid from the puddles rose into droplets and into vapour in the air that soon formed the dark figures of the dead men within an instant.
The murky ghouls began to move, against every villager and each of their emotions. Most of the adults began to run away, towards the deep forests, holding tightly to their hightailing children’s hands, dragging them out of the confusion, and the impending pain. Their rapid steps flattened the boring grass, that used to be so vibrant in joy and care. The forests too had been stripped of their summer leaves, and resembled an army of black stalks in the ground, but no matter how little encouragement it gave the villagers, it was somewhere to flee from the ruckus that was tearing apart inside the village.
However, some adults were petrified, their children, unbeknownst of the dire consequences, stood with them. They were all to be the first.
A storm began to dwell within the clouds, and cracked fiercely at the ground. The noise was great, and it was enough to drive the already frantic people mad.
The mother’s face looked so pale and terrified, rhyming uneasily with the dank atmosphere of the village, she had stayed behind, too stiff to move. Her jaw hung open, jittering with the slam of the wind against the clanging doors of the houses. But she cradled her twins to her waist, holding their shoulders, so tightly, with her weak, trembling, bony arms. Her own children, a boy and a girl, began to feel their youthful befuddlement in their mind turn to extreme fear, as the blackness of the first dark gaseous form filled their already inglorious sight.
They all looked in terror at the gaseous figure in front of them, above them, and the strong unhappy wind chillingly silenced their screams before it left their throats.
All the mother could do was step forward, to stand up to the ghoul and offer herself, and she did so with all the courage she could muster, from the small deity of hope that still prospered within her.
She spoke softly to her twins but without turning her petrified face away from the ghoul‘s spitting presence.
“Mimi, Xianxi… Run. Please…”
She stared with a grey look, unblinking at the ghoul looming in front of her. The kids hesitated, but eventually started to run. Away from the cheerless confrontation, heading to the lifeless forest that everyone else headed towards. The loud beats of their feet against the ground was imitable to a stampede, only of small animals, their faces wide, sorrowful and agonised. The two kids looked behind them every few furlongs that they ran, eyeing their mother. But their heart skipped a beat when they finally heard her scream. They were hardly out of the village but they halted, and they saw their helpless mother being engulfed by the gaseous figure, the immense pain of which lashed across her body was evident even to the simple understanding of the shocked and dismayed twins.
The body of the mother fell to the ground, and the boy wanted to stop and react to the ghouls, to avenge her death, but as much as his sister tried to hold back her own tears, she successively dragged him on, to rejoin the mass exodus. But their mother wasn’t the only one, every adult that had stayed behind had sacrificed themselves for their children, and their bodies had been hollowed out painfully by the ghoulish army, their souls devoured and their physical forms left to be eaten away by the dreary and horrifying atmosphere that had possessed the innocuous village, which was now drowning in pain and destruction that the ghouls had brought on. So many lives had been taken now. But the children of the village had been shielded by the sacrifices.
They were not finished either. The gaseous forms rose from their lifeless victims, they were now in their thousands and they infected the air with a sea of blackness. They surged forward, howling after the wavering villagers, still not quite near the edge of the dry forest that they were fleeing for.
The twins were last in this human evacuation, the other villagers, just as frenzied, were ahead of them.
Now they felt the charge of wailing ghouls behind them. Their hearts tore with the thought that many of their loved ones would’ve been felled by the mysterious forces of darkness by now.
The hungry pursuit of the ghouls roared on, their distasteful screeching growing to hoarse levels. Their razor eyes swirled faster and never left the sight of a fluctuating human soul. They were getting closer and closer and they would catch up in time to render the escape route to the woods useless. They gradually caught up.
And the twins were the closest.
The two children ran on, panting with anxiety and exhaustion. Soon they observed the colour of the air around them darken. Their screams froze once again in their throats. They could only dive to the murky grass in fear as they prepared to die. But no.
The ghouls brushed past them, almost soundlessly to their ears, as if the twins did not exist.
The two kids looked up haplessly, and found themselves ignored by the vanquishers. They felt creepily relieved, but totally disheartened in fear. They were covered in sweat and toil, speechless and unaware of what do to now, all alone. They could only watch dismally as the forces bayed towards the rest of the fleers.
The villagers saw the exit to the dead forest in sight, a golden gateway to freedom among black trunks. They were tired and desperate, but they willed all the strength they had to keep on running, to keep themselves from the wails of the-
Their minds froze and their feet grinded to a halt. The damp air between them and the grey woodland before them began to turn and twist, into a form, a portal.
Astonishment, for all the fantasy they had experienced in this horrid hour, most of the people believed they were finally being saved. However.
Black, pure black. Just more black spilled from the portal, it wept the darkness tragically. More and more ghouls were generated, blocking the path to escape. Their faces spelt more emotion this time, although none the cheerier.
The people wasted little time in dispersing. They weren’t encircled but the only escape was by means of the two sides left un-sandwiched, this broke them off. Confusion on where to go now only heaped on the stress of their impending and expected death. The tortured settlement did not welcome them back, for it was now ravaged by wholesome blazes that ate the buildings and terror that spoilt the bloody stream that now looked like a scar on the face of the town. They had no hope, so null of hope to even emit their emotions physically, but could only see point in wasting time by at least keeping their hearts free of the ghouls pressurising and dooming existence.
Their harvest scattered amongst the hellish town, the now gleeful ghouls poured into the once sacred circle of tree break, and each one of them tacked after the villagers, all torn apart.
The number of the adults were dwindling, soon the majority of the villagers would comprise of children, of which were being left alone by the hunters.
The man sped, and pushed past the rubble that littered the burnt streets, desperately trying to shake off the interest of a pursuing ghoul. He had not looked at them for more than ten seconds total in the past hour but he already had the haunting image of them staring at him in his mind, and needed to look back no longer. The expression on his face was fierce, his eyes deeply focused on the objects that threatened to trip and expose him to the ghoul that tore after him. He was hot, sweat upon his crimson skin mixed with the smoke that flashed in his eyes, deep black fumes from the flames that raged upon the rubble around him.
He was just as hopeless as anyone else, but still scoured frantically for a crevice in the buildings, or a niche that he could at least curl up in before finally meeting his departed family from high above. He only looked for consolation.
But he could find none, and it was running out into the open square of the village that left him prone to the final dive of the ghoul that reaped his soul. His last sight was the sorrowful view of the killing of innocents. The gaseous ghoul drained into the man’s footprints created in the dead grass and eventually crept in to the deep of his heart, and a great sorrow contained him. His soul was slowly devoured, and his mind sent to an eternity of pain.
It seemed so done and dusted. The town was smashed apart, and the population were ruthlessly cut down.
Then, just as the adults began to accept their dismal fate, the black clouds in the sky began to swirl again, before lurching violently, and then the dark sea in the air split open within an instant. Letting in a blast of light, from a perfect circle of fresh blue sky that had prospered yet above the storm. From this opening, the powerful white rays dazzled unto the demon infested hamlet once again. The ghouls were distracted by the splash of sun that the blue sky provided, and extended less grace upon it. The disheartened villagers still had yet to come to their senses, believing only that the occurrence was to delve further in their never ending misery.
Then figures were seen to submerge from the heavenly blue circle in the sky, accompanied by the sound of wing beats. They seemed so pure from so high up even, as the light reflected off them to counter the blistering, tainted air that irradiated from below.
By now, all the ghouls had lost interest in hounding the remaining adults in the village, and stopped abruptly. They had the intruders that they saw fit to deal with.
Each of the gaseous forms, devoid of any expression whatsoever, turned from the attention of their prey. Rising from the inferno, they were drawn to the blazing town square. The ghouls merged, to produce a column of hundreds. More and more of the sinners were sucked in and they each fit into to the deathly battalion like a jigsaw. Soon, a hateful legion was created, ready for engagement as they stared upwards cautiously.
They waited silently for the confrontation as they could only see hostilities with the incoming airborne figures. All as one, were the mere minions of darkness.
Still running and confused, the villagers gradually slowed, and distanced themselves from the square, to remain out of sight from the ghouls. They were spent. Exhausted and downhearted, most of them found their tears mixing with their black sweat.
The unidentified figures grew bigger, and their black outlines soon changed to tiny specks of whiteness. They rained down, wings as their guide, and became much more visible, some would suppose they were… heavenly.
Angels. So they appeared. The half naked individuals were more and more closer in view from the ground. Among the remnants of scorched stone, some of the more pious villagers cried desperately in hope on their knees.
The ghouls hissed. They were ready to gather the fibres of life from the newcomers.
But it wasn’t going to be that simple.
A flash, an explosion of light. A beacon of pale brilliance that rivalled the sun. The ghouls were immediately sent spiralling in agony.
And in the centre of the great fluorescence, were the Angels themselves, clad only in white tunics, hovering at head level in front of the dark legion. The light burst from under their fully spread wings and outstretched arms. Their pale eyes were closed, and their minds locked beautifully in focus.
The immaculacy of the beams from the archangels and cherubs blinded the villagers, and one by one they fell from the great ambience to the nearest cover, a rock, some rubble, or a crater even, and covered their bushed eyes with their tired arms, wanting no more.
Nonetheless the powerful white illumination persisted strongly, and it doused the flames that licked fiercely from the torn houses in seconds. It had a lighthouse like effect, only a thousand times bigger and it cleansed the village, prising the evil that had possessed the land.
The gaseous forms wailed, hurtling aimlessly and their milky white poisonous razor eyes turned inwards, blunted and remained still before dissolving and melting away.
Eventually they stopped hurtling, bumping from ground to ruined house. Next they were to finally vanish. The rays of the Angels merely erased their black smudges of an ectoplasm from the air. All there was to be seen was nothing, but to hear was a piercing death cry.
The ghouls were defeated.
As the last of the wails of the ghouls rang across the charred forest, a lonely silence pertained the smouldering village.
The light persisted, and then as the winged fighters felt their presence free of the ghouls, they finally dimmed the rays. Immediately,  the unloving shadow of the clouds returned to fall upon the village once more.
Though nothing worst would dare come to this place again.
The Angels stirred from their trance and scoured the smouldering village. The light they had dispersed was now gone, and they were no longer visible. Survivors that had been left behind were not to see the faces of their life-savers.
From under the hapless, burnt buildings and the black niches of endless rubble, the survivors would be found hidden behind their cooked arms, their emotion for free love in tatters. The women were weeping in deep despondence, shaking distortedly to the cold the darkness folded upon. The men, of what were left of their numbers, were crying to the dark clouds that hung over them, shouting in fury, tearing at the torrid air once occupied by ghouls and Angels alike. An embittered people.
They didn’t even trust the Angels, or whoever they were to them. Even if their despicable forms were no longer observable to their startled eyes. They would all lay to rest, preferring to die from their grief.
For the children however, this was not understandable. They had all been untouched by the ghouls. But they were heavily distraught by what they had to witness, such events that they could never possibly cope with. Most were now left orphaned in the torn streets. They no longer had the cheerful vision of the world that they grew up with. Instead, they took in the adult traits of pain and depression, hatred and neglect, war and death. The boys were men now, but only in the sense that they were beaten into brutes with a churlish view upon life. The Angels could do nothing to change this now.
The twins, Mimi and Xianxi, looked down on their mother and waited for her to wake up. Optimism was still an option. The Angels were among them.