We all have our secrets. As a 23-year-old woman who’s lived a rather complex and occasionally hyper-social life, I’ve got plenty. There are things about me no one knows, not even my family; and I’m sure they’ve got their own of which I’m completely unaware. That’s just life—omniscience, even socially, would suck.

Of course, some of my secrets are darker than others. Everyone has at least one, what I suppose you could call “dire” secret: an incident, a piece of particularly mortifying or self-damning information; a crime, unreported and unpunished. With those unwholesome secrets we’ll go to our graves—or so we hope. 

I have a few of those. But, given what’s happened to me, I think I’d better share one of them, so that my warning to the world is properly understood—its severity sufficiently heeded. 

Yesterday, whilst working out in my backyard—a monthly recurrent gym membership is unaffordable at the moment—s star, or what had looked like a star, went streaking through a cloud immediately overhead like a missile loosed from an aircraft. It arced in the air, glinting brilliantly in the sunlight, and then plummeted landward. There was no earth-shaking impact, no plume of dirt and debris thrown into the air; it was as if the thing hadn’t landed at all. Intrigued, and more than a little tired of doing burpees, I crossed my yard, hopped the fence that divides it from the open plain beyond, and ventured into the woods toward where I’d seen the celestial object land. 

With the sun out—and the woods being more of a sparsely vegetated grove than anything—it was pretty easy to find the object. There was no smoldering crater, no circle of scorched trees; but there was, strangely, a definite difference in the atmosphere around the object—which wasn’t really an “object”, so much as an entity. 

Yes, I’m completely serious—an alien had landed in the middle of that humble little coppice, where I’d walked plenty of times to decompress after a long day at work or to sit at the little stream that flows through its northern edge. The first—to my knowledge—arrival of an alien species, here in my entirely unremarkable Midwestern town! 

I was speechless, and shamelessly excited. I made no attempt to hide my presence, and went trudging toward the extraterrestrial visitor.

The alien was plainly “alien”, in the sense that it looked nothing like a person; but it wasn’t immediately terrifying. Sure, its limb-less and eerily ophidian body suggested a propensity for lethally constricting prey; and its triply crowned head imparted the sense that it often partook in the goring and impaling of rivals; and I guess, thinking back now, that its human-dwarfing size, its prodigious scale compared to that of any terrestrial creature, gave one the impression that it had never once lost a battle against any conceivable opponent—but still, I was excited!

And then it spoke, and the excitement left my body like a platter of gas station sushi. 

“You, legged one, what world is this?” 

I answered it with my eyes averted, suddenly terrified by its inexplicably diamond-shaped arrangement of eyes. (There were SEVEN of them!)

“This is, uh, Earth. Planet Earth.” 

Its mouth—a grill-like enclosure of yellow teeth behind which flicked black, oily tongues—opened in what I at first thought was a yawn, as if bored by my answer; but then it scoffed, as if it had been to Earth before and was thoroughly unimpressed. 

“Earth? A most disagreeable place. Bagh. Tell me, are those dirt-dwelling harlots still howling senselessly at the moon?” 

I was of course totally confused, and with as much tact as possible, asked it to repeat itself. The eyes narrowed one by one, and had it not been bright daylight out, with the sun’s calming warmth on my face, I probably would’ve fainted. 

“Are you not one of them? The would-be lamia? Daughter of the spell-spinners?” 

Still confused, and now patently terrified—for its body seemed to have grown larger in the few moments that had passed—I shook my head and stepped a few paces back. The alien—now towering over the lowly trees—moved toward me in a fashion that was unnervingly serpentine; its body leaving a trail of grass-blackening slime in its wake. There was a venomous emanation about it, a palpable atmosphere of nature-defying toxicity; and I felt my limbs begin to stiffen, as if I’d been injected with some slow-acting paralytic agent sometime during our conversation. I had foolishly mistaken this horror for some amicable alien emissary.

Now in the shadow of that great bestial nightmare, I fell on my butt, absolutely stupid with fear. Looming titanically over me, it first surveyed the air, and then lowered its bulbous, savagely antlered head. The eyes looked me up and down, each black orb seeming to possess its own expression of disgust and disappointment. I was utterly petrified, and only managed to whimper inarticulately; and this reaction only served to further repulse the mountainous monstrosity. It reared itself high, occluding the sunlight and throwing its already profound shadow over an even greater length of the ground. The sun seemed but a distant ember in a darkening sky.

“You are female...and yet you are not born of them? How can this be? Who sired you?”

I could barely think, but knew that if I didn’t respond, something unimaginably terrible would happen to me; so, I sheepishly muttered, “My uh, my dad? And mom. Together....” 

The thing seemed to contemplate this for a moment, its eyes revolving sickeningly within their sockets, and then it replied, “Yes, but who are your ancestral progenitors? Were they not of The Coven?” 

And like a lightning bolt splitting a tree, the realization of this thing’s words—of its very nature and purpose—hit me. 

Remember that secret I mentioned earlier? The kind that we all more or less have, and would greatly prefer to die with? Well, mine is that I—and many other women throughout the world—hail from a line of primordial witches. 

And I don't mean bored, ye old timey farm-wives who half-assedly LARPed as dollar store sorceresses, with lame-ass rocks and nonsensical “spells” and buckets of animal blood. I mean they were WITCHES, proper partakers of dark diablerie. They invoked Chthonic beings, communed with the formless primal spirits, spun the most diabolical maledictions, placed the most plaguing, the evilest malenchantments upon their victims, and their victims’ children. Before the Light-bringer's treachery, they’d already written volumes of pre-Satanic literature; authored eldritch libraries of demonology.

I am an heiress to women whose very bones were black with ultra-wicked corruption, whose root and thorn-pierced hearts had pumped only the ebon sludge of rot, of manifest iniquity. 

In their quest for the deepest arcana of witchery, they had first lain with the Saturnian warlocks—who'd come to visit that pre-historic Earth in search of alchemical ingredients that could only be found in the soil of nascent planets—but then, when the warlocks’ knowledge proved to be unsatisfactory, they slew the alien mages and subsequently offered themselves to the hypogeal wyrms: those wing-less, undulant horrors who had come from dead galaxies to nestle their cold-blooded bodies within the warm soil of the newly formed Earth. 

This coupling proved to be greatly beneficial, for the wyrms held knowledge of things theretofore unheard of, and the witches—with their undivine abilities—knew of spells with which to endow the flightless serpents with wings. And thus, a darkened marriage was made between the two different (though comparably malevolent) species, and the half-feral witches bore many abominable children. Their wild magic was of course diluted as the generations sped by, as was the power of the wyrms; until both bloodlines came to exist as only power-less, pathetic facsimiles of their super-sorcerous progenitors. 

But prior to this unfortunate dilution, one of the witches’ grandchildren—my great, great, great, (you get the idea) grandmother—foretold that the wyrms would betray them; that one of their kind, who’d stayed behind on their home world, would someday come to Earth and slaughter the interspecies kin; for it had deemed the marriage a most profane and blasphemous thing. The prophecy was heeded, passed along, the severity of its portent taught to every generation that followed. But ultimately, the horror from the outer-gulf never came; and the prophesy went on to be treated as little more than myth.

But the horror had come—it was standing right in front of me. 

“Oh, you’re that one guy. Took you long enough, I guess.” 

The alien-wyrm's body shook with anger at my indignance, and it lowered itself so that the topmost of its eyes was level with my own. 

“So, you are of one of their ilk—that wretched, ill-begotten brood?” 

Slowly, surreptitiously kicking off my shoes, I responded: “Yeah, I guess so.” 

“Then you will be the first I devour; and after I’ve digested your filthy body, I’ll spew the excrement upon the faces of your family—and then devour them too.” 

With my bare feet upon the fresh, sun-warmed soil, I replied, “So, you’d technically be eating your own shit? That’s disgusting, man.” 

The wyrm’s eyes narrowed, and its jaw slackened; revealing fully those slimy, whipping tongues, and the stalactite-sized teeth. Its breath was fouler than the cosmic waste of blasted planets, but still I stood my ground, as the sylvan magic of the Earth touched my bare soles. My paralyzing fear slowly ebbed away, and in its place I felt an ancient power take hold: the old magick of bygone cycles. 

“You will be boiled in the fluids of my body. An acrid death awaits you.” 

The alien’s jaws then yawned prodigiously, filling my vision with its pitch-black gullet; but before the maw could enclose me, I spoke an incantatory phrase of Atlantean verse, and the world—our little pocket of it—changed. 

Spires of primordial rock rose skyward, piercing the fume-born black clouds. Molten geysers spewed their volcanic fury, and unnamable lifeforms choked upon the noxious atmosphere. There was a sallow lambency about the environment, the lands dismally illumined by the Tartarean fires. From the midst of toxic, lightless mires came the howls of the feral witch-folk, my ancient and maddened ancestors. Their shrieks, born of orgiastic self-experimentation in the pursuit of anti-human knowledge, rose above the tumult of geologic activity; and I added my own voice to that eldritch choir. The putrid funk of azoic gases wafted from the sores of the Earth, and I inhaled deeply. To me they were like perfumes, and as I sang, I twirled ‘round, basking in the miasmal emissions.

I became one with the primal sorcery, and the wyrm—who I had transported backwards through time with me—shrank away; unable to comprehend what was happening—or unwilling to accept it. 

Endowed with the infernal fury of that Precambrian coven, I conjured spectral avatars of The Unformable Ones—those beings who may never be brought into physical existence—and set them loose upon the bewildered snake. Effortlessly, those implacable shades entered him, merged with him, and undid him; disintegrating and dismantling and dematerializing his corporeal body, until only his dark animus remained. 

In a final act of ultra-malignant witchery, I formed a perdurable obelisk from the molten rock, bound his raging spirit to it, and hurled the indestructible slab into the sun. The witches, still scream-singing from their blackly boiling swamps, howled in a great, frenzied crescendo at this positively cruel feat; and I of course joined in their hymnal lunacy. Lightning streaked across the sky, and the backs of Gargantuan beasts rose like jutting mountainscapes. Death, always following closely on the heels of life, reveled in the Archean pandemonium.  

Having defeated that anciently prophesized foe, I sent myself forth in time, arriving in the present without so much as an errant flake of primordial ash on my body. The sun—much older, now, and still undoubtedly harboring that snake-bound obelisk—shone beautifully overheard; and the woods, from which I had drawn the earthen power, whispered placidly as the wind filtered through the trees. 

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