Rianna+Stahl

**Not your ordinary town (Sacraficial Snake Pillar):** I walked slowly, looking around myself. Dust flecks reflected the sunlight, drifting round in their perfect spirals of chaos. The hardware store was beside me, and I saw the empty faces of the ghouls looking back at me. I shivered, and looked away, further up the street, to the news agents, where century old newspapers waited for cold hands to grip their decaying pages and read the dark, black ink. This was a town of the dead. No one would ever hold those pages again. The dead had no care for the world. This town was a frozen paradox of empty souls, freely given, to the Snake God, Spot, through sacrifice of their own mortal flesh, in trade for this immortality, so that they could be born with a new skin. I silently trod past the police station, with its cement gargoyles and large oak trees surrounding it’s entrance. I walked past them, ignoring the gathering crowd behind me. I turned left and walked of a stone path, the only thing in this town that was not covered in dust and leaves, the only thing that was pristine and fresh. I saw a dark looming shape ahead of me. Spikes jutted out of red eyes and forked tongues, of curved tails and smooth, scaly skin. The sacrificial pillar to the Snake God. I stepped up the blood smeared steps, up towards my death and immortality. I heard the others begin to chant behind me, their voices rising in eerie tones. //“Only in death are we free”// I took a deep breath and looked behind me, to my past. I looked back past all the shops and empty houses, back up the street, and I realised that this town smelled like death and decay, sounded like the empty wind howling through long abandoned corridors. I realised then that this was not immortality. I looked back up, towards the black obsidian snake curled atop the pillar before me, in panic. But it was too late. The snakes blazing eyes flickered to life, and an unnatural sheen flowed out across the scales. Spot had awoken.