The Elder's Undertaking

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A dream spawned by nightmares forced Abigail Fennimore to wake.

As she stared at the ceiling from her bed of logwork, her thoughts swam with traces of the vision she'd been sent in her sleep. Throughout the past handful of months, her mind had been subject to other dreams of similar content, her memories of each returning to her with greater clarity than the last. These vignettes, powerful and painful as they were, were depictions of the world as it might become, filled with scenes of terror and anguish of an increasingly supernatural cause. And in them, she found herself breyond the danger's reach, protected from harm by forces unknown.

The nature of these dreams did not scare her as it might other, lesser women. In fact, the only thing that seemed to bother her was her inability to discern the source of these nightly visions, for their like had never found their way into the back of her mind before now. Their sudden appearance, alongside the profound lack of precedence prior to these months, had gradually convinced her that something beyond her existence and knowledge had chosen her. Whom, exactly, and to do what? She did not know.

Or at least, she hadn't known. But tonight's vision had been different. Tonight, she had been given a small indication of what had set its gaze upon her and what it expected her to do. And for all she had grown to detest being subject to another's will and wish, there was something different this time around. She wanted to know more.

Slowly, she rose from her bed, her bones aching in unsubtle protest. She was old, far beyond an age that anyone such as her had any right to be, and the innumerable pains in her body were only the most glaring reminders of this fact. It took her many minutes just to garb herself (for she slept naked, as she'd done since the long-gone days of her youth), and throughout the process of her dressing herself, her muscles and joints did their best to yell their agonies at her. But she was not to be deterred, not from the matters to which she was to attend this evening.

On her way to the door, she stopped to examine herself in the mirror standing adjacent to the foot of her bed. She had donned a thin lavender shirt, a long gray skirt and her darkest pair of sandals, an outfit which might have been pleasant-looking had it been worn by someone else. Her eyes were sunken and baggy and lacking eyebrows, and her head was bald and waxen-looking from age-ago years of hair loss. Like the rest of her, her face held numerous wrinkles, and none of them would give a stranger the impression that she had smiled very often in her lifetime.

As Abigail opened the door and stepped outside, she became aware of the fact that the sky had gone murky and cloudy. The day had been sunny and warm for most of the day (which had been an annoyance, since the heat had made her daily tasks that much more difficult), but now, the air had turned thin and cold, and the sky was crowded with groups of harsh clouds.

And soon enough, she began to feel as if some unearthly presence was watching her from beyond those clouds.

She stepped past the gate surrounding her wooden home, speaking to the vast expanse of gray above her. "If you were anyone or anything else, I'd tell you piss off and leave me alone." she said. Her voice was as old and gaunt as her features, but the tone of it was strong. "I don't know what it is you want, but I'm not ."

The clouds offered no response.

"What is it you want?" she continued. "I'm tired of seeing the same things over and over. What do you keep"

Still nothing. The air above her remained silent.

"All I need is a direction. Tell me where I need to go, and I will."

Yet still, there was no answer.

Perhaps the feelings had been in her imagination. Maybe, after all these years of solitude and isolation, she'd finally lost all of her wits. As she stood there in front of her house in the middle of nowhere, staring up at the clouds as if she expected them to grow a mouth and speak, she started to wonder whether or not this might be the case.

Then, just as she had turned to go back inside, the sky thundered loudly. The sound, which should have prompted her to seek shelter from the inevitable rain, instead caused her to turn back to the clouds again. Something had come alive in the air around her with the sound of the thunder, something older and far more terrible than any earthly storm or two-bit hurricane. A foreign sensation stirred inside her, and before she could think to put a name to it, a sudden and immense pain drove her to her knees and forced her to scream out into the night. As the rain began to fall, it raged on in her body, unrelenting and all-encompassing, digging its way beyond her flesh and into her bones.

The pain went for hours before the change began, but when the change did come, it swept through her completely. Anguish gradually metamorphosed into numb pleasure, and with time, her cries of agony eventually subsided. Inside her head was an inordinate, alien speech that crawled into every corner of her mind at once. It told her of the goal, laid out the tasks she would need to perform in order to assist in achieving it, then promised her a reward of the highest order.

Then there was a feeling of immeasurable weight lifting from her consciousness as the voice faded as well, taking the pleasure with it. The presence in the air disappeared, and she was left alone in the rain.

Her body felt like a corpse that had been purged of its every disease and dessication and then brought back to life again, replenished and restored and ready to walk the Earth a second time. All of the aches and pains and sore spots that had wracked her muscles were no more, the fatigues of her impossible age stripped away by the layer. There was a feeling of complete reincarnation, as if her old shell had been slain, shredded and rebirthed into newer, better flesh.

And inside, there was power. Power she hadn't held in over three hundred years.

As she rose from the dirt again-- she had fallen the rest of the way to the ground during her spasms-- her thoughts immediately turned to