At last it came, carried first as gossip among the women, bogeyman for the children and then rumor throughout the land. It swept first the countryside and then dumped its mess directly on the city. No longer hushed rumor or bump in the night – it was landed truth; falsehood’s exactness and real face. People were run-down and enveloped by an amassing darkness, simultaneously singular in actions and collective in instinct. It was a thousand-footstep march that swarmed intelligently onto its prey. It devoured the content while it maintained the form.
People who were attacked disappeared inside. There were still the shapes of body parts and a covering like skin, but now it was amorphous and death-black nothing. Where an arm was once defined and whole, it now rippled and each singular point seemed as much its own entity as it was attached to the rest. Waves of darkness worked their way down the body, following its path with no break fixed around an inner core, giving the illusion that it would begin to extend indefinitely. Eyes no longer were entryways but dead-ends of milky endlessness.
Once it began it happened quickly. By the time it was more than incipient legend people were warned of it almost immediately before they were experiencing it. And as the force grew larger and became the population, all were attracted to and approached the same signed beacon – Myrmidon.
The guard and standing army did all they could to defend the city and subjects as they retreated and withdrew to the stronghold walls. Even Myrmidon’s father, advanced were his years, donned his armor and held his sword in rheumatic fingers. Those few who deserted did not make it far beyond the walls before their cries were heard and carried a message for others that they stand and fight. It was not impossible to defeat those enemies; however they spawned too quickly for all the fertile ground available. In a moment that friend fighting beside you came around as your enemy and crushed you until you were once again comrades-in-darkness. Many laid down their weapons and raised their arms like antennae toward the heavens as they were engulfed and forfeited any divine consideration. The most strident of warriors had shaken off their armor, left to fight the ghouls, ghosts and goblins in their underwear.
Myrmidon saw that the creatures, once human and once his concern, navigated toward him. Already there was hardly anyone left as Nuntius filled out his name and began to earn his fame, dispatching the first round of loud and defiant messages. Myrmidon cut through the first silhouette, moments before his father, and it dropped to the dirt kicking up dust and scattered in all directions as it disassembled its parts and ran off, unmistakably ants as red as blood, moments before pitch-black.
He moved in the direction of the tunnels, which would deposit him outside of the walls and before the city. Eurymedousa, his mother, was still locked inside the palace but Myrmidon had to hope that the onslaught would follow him and she would be safe. As he had just recently inherited the throne, through the forced act of patricide, Myrmidon was responsible to all of his subjects equally – if he could save any at all.
Myrmidon would make his way to the city-within-the-city: The City of Asterion, labyrinthine in design and meant to confuse the uninitiated who were foreign to their land. He hoped that the creatures did not retain the memory of their hosts and he would use disorientation to his advantage as he drew them deeper and cut them likewise.
The Myth Formerly Known as Sisyphus 