Chapter 31: The Great Beast

31

Not far from where their conversation begins, some five hundred feet beneath the streets of Decatur, something very old and very powerful begins to stir.

A long-defunct train depot, recently refurbished, added to the historical register and reopened as a motley collection of flea markets and second hand shops, rattles and shakes with the sudden movement. The still serviceable train tracks which run alongside the depot, built atop a centuries old, decommissioned coal mine, buckle from the tremors.

Deep down below, a monster shifts in the darkness. It had been many years since she had been roused from her lethargy. Many years since she had sensed a meal worthy of her attentions.

In truth, the Great Beast had no reason to feed, as satiated as she was. It would be many more years, perhaps decades before it would need to do so again.

Its fortunes had changed greatly since that time, long ago, before the town above had even bore a name. The Great Beast, a demon of unspeakable hatred and darkness, had been hunted down, harried until near unto death and left for dead here where the prairie grasses grew tall. It's heart's blood, its essence, leaked out into the soil, leached into the lands and fertilized it with its chaotic potential. The beast's consciousness drifted, unattached.

It was a Majora Shitani. A much larger, much older form of demon than Pickle-Me-Jack had been. It possessed abandoned spaces, occupied the souls of the forgotten. Now it slumbered in an abandoned mine shaft, sunk deep and long forgotten beneath the streets of Decatur.

There it had managed to manifest, to stitch together the remnants of its shattered mind and an insubstantial wisp of its corporeal form after it had been nearly destroyed, left for dead in a final battle with the Anasazi, the Last Peoples of the North American continent. They had sacrificed themselves in order to stop her, having been forced to call down an extinction-level power from the mountains, and thought themselves, their efforts, successful.

She had managed to persist, however, insinuating herself into the very ground and eventually into the life cycles surrounding the prairie, so that her existence was remembered in the plant's own genetic histories.

As the prairie schooners began to arrive, first in a slow trickle, and later in a deluge of fortune seekers, her essence would begin to stir. And when they dug down into the ground, began to probe the Earth for treasures, they fed her with the sacrifice of workers killed repeatedly due to the mine's treacherous and inhumane working conditions.

Soon enough, those mine shafts were left abandoned, forever stained by a callous disregard for life, for the sanctity of profit over the quality of humanity. It was to become the perfect cathedral for her adulation. The perfect offering place for her appetites.

Here now, she awoke.

 

“The Felani,” the Great Beast rumbles. It smelled the sharp scent of blood. The iron tang of it resonate with the powers of the descendant of a god. Or more likely, a goddess. 

The Felani manifested along matriarchal lines. It was then the demon's good fortune to have clung to life beneath such a repository of lost and floundering souls.

The people who initially came to this place, populated this space, were a hardy, stubborn lot. The Great Beast's blood had tainted the soil with its festering malevolence, but it also lent the area a tendency towards a cyclical rise and decline, and they took advantage of its natural and creative resources.

Over the years then, they experienced great periods of booming prosperity, built up simply to be sacrificed upon the empty altars beneath the city streets.

The beast below would have found sustenance enough to maintain itself forever simply by feeding on the triumphs and tragedies of these peoples. This was a nation of immigrants, most all of whom left their homelands not by choice, but through some degree of necessity. They fled to America and migrated towards its heartland. They were the forgotten, the perfect repositories for her spoor.

The tragedies of their German and Italian and Grecian and further European roots were enough to allow the beast to grow powerful, to become somewhat significant amongst its pantheon.

But fortune was to add another factor into the equation. Decatur, the town built up above the lair of the beast, was to become a place of refuge for many of the lost souls fleeing their Southern oppressors.

And she was there to greet them, intrigued by the first migratory wave of recently freed slaves as they fled the South. She found their miseries, their tragic tales and dire circumstances a delightful and enriching form of sustenance.

It was no surprise to her that they should come here. Decatur stood at a crossroads. It attracted the wandering soul.

Here, once before, there had been copious ley-lines and groundswells through which the Source protruded into this world. It was here that the Great Beast had turned to meet her pursuers, here that she chose to make her final stand.

She'd dug in, drew all of the magical energies in the area into herself and with it, slaughtered the Anasazi by the hundreds, the thousands. She left the soil here in these prairie plains red and wet with the blood of their fallen mages, their holy men and the powerful Earth Mystics, the mothers who channeled the powers of Creation.

The ground shook from shoreline to shoreline as they battled on, neither side showing signs of faltering, through two winters and a summer season.

It wasn't until the arrival of one of the Felani, finally roused from her slumber high up in the South American mountains where she'd answered the call of the Anasazi, that the impasse was broken. 

She was able to disrupt the energies feeding the Great Beast. She took the power into herself and unleashed a storm that raged for thirty days. When the lightning that strafed the ground finally ceased, the murderous winds had died down and the torrential rains dried up, the black clouds receded above a scene of total devastation.

The Felani had shredded every living thing beneath her as she unleashed her fury upon the Great Beast, the Majora Shitani. Beneath her clouded form, the Earth had been razed clean, not one blade of grass left standing.

The Felani thought the beast dead, as well. Could sense no portion of its remains throughout the physical and the immediate dimensional planes. She made her way back to the South American mountains, where she was to disappear from the minds of men.

The beast, though, had survived. It had remained as a distant idea. A fleeting thought flitting across the genetic memories of the plant life that eventually grew back across the scorched Earth.

She was able to take root, she found shelter, found sustenance enough to recover a tiny, insubstantial portion of her form. She grew stronger, incrementally, her power and influence expanding along with the fortunes of the people who occupied the ground above her. She reached out and was soon able to open her eyes, to manifest and walk the streets.

She enjoyed their little lives, their small stories and desires. She grew content.

And then the first of them arrived, the descendants of slaves, those unknown to themselves. But she knew them. She could sense the latent magics within them, taste it in the sharp smell of their blood, even if diluted by so much time and so many defeats. They were, many of them, the broken, scattered children of the Last Peoples, set adrift here in far-off lands.

The Great Beast laughed with delight as she sampled their essence. It was very much like the Anasazi, though most contained only a middling fraction of the Blood, not enough to express itself in any meaningful way.

But combined, carefully curated and planned, she could create such a source of power. An unwitting collection of living batteries upon which she could feed, that would allow her to rise back into the fullness of her form.

So she helped to recreate a shade of the Felani within them. Found the perfect intersection of bloodlines and worked her minor charms to encourage their intersections. Over and over she did this, until the perfect female child had been born.

The girl's powers weren't to manifest until puberty and wouldn't come into their fullness until she had evolved into motherhood. Upon giving birth, her womb quickened thrice over, the full measure of the Felani bloomed within her.

The beast then had a small window of time in which to operate, in which to ensnare her creation. She wrapped the fledgling Felani tight in her web and tucked her away beneath the Earth. Here she fed upon the endlessly abundant power.

She grew fat. The city above her grew as well. It continued to coax newcomers from the South to come and try their hand at upward mobility. Over the more recent years, though, since taking the Felani with her down beneath the Earth, she had been less involved with the goings on up on the surface. There had been no need. She'd grown uninterested in their progressions as she lolled about, satiated from the unlimited power at her disposal.

She'd lost track of her prize's offspring. Hadn't even considered them to be important.

The beast had completed her task in the recreation of the Felani bloodline, she had what she wanted and saw no need to concern herself with anything further. Now, as she is roused from her slumber, drawn by the sharp tang of a familiar scent, she immediately recognizes her mistake.

She had never thought the offspring to be of any significance. The Felani bloodlines she'd curated terminally intersected within the child she had carefully created. In order to do so again, to recreate enough of the Blood to draw the interest of the Beast, she thought that it would have taken many more years of cultivation.

And yet, there it was. A pulse, an emanation of power unlike any that she had experienced since the first Felani she had encountered. The Felani that had scrubbed her nearly out of existence. This time, though, the Great Beast knew of what she dealt with. Had spent many years feasting upon and learning of its nature.

She would either add this one to her collection, or destroy it altogether. There could be no other way.

Rising up in its fullness, the Great Beast fills the empty chambers beneath the city streets with its great and bilious form, and with a tremendous crack of the overlying bedrock, announces herself once again to the world above.

She rose up to meet the Felani.