Mistic Pets

Welcome to Issue 11
Created by The Mistic Pets Team

Origin of Nightmares
Written By Caustic

The nightmare is familiar to us all; bloodshot eyes watching us from every shadowy corner, following us, just a few steps behind but always out of sight. Snarls and the sharp snap of fangs echo through our heads, blocking out rational thought and leaving the mind to its most basic defense: flight. Only the Imps seem to revel in these horrific nightmares, and many wonder where they have come from.

It started with King Mephitic himself -- unsurprising, as the great king’s mind had always been a cesspool of darkness and decay, of creeping things and images to make any sane Mistican scream until they were hoarse. One night he fell into an unusually deep sleep, a slumber so powerful his court later claimed he'd been out for six entire days and nights.

Such a cruel mind in a state of complete freedom - sleep is just that - is a powerful thing, and with this particular mind, dangerous. Ancient magics that none save the likes of Pandoria could even comprehend began working.

So Mephitic slept, and for those six days terrors and frights such as he had never known haunted him. It was euphoric, the darkness and death and decay that surrounded him so fully. Words almost failed him when he attempted to describe the great nightmare to his subjects, but he was adamant that they should be told.

The air around him was hot and heavy, he began, and seemed to press down on him like a great weight upon his shoulders; for once, the king himself was forced to his knees. Every muscle burned and ached, pleading for relief. Darkness of the blackest shade the king had ever seen surrounded him, rendering most of his senses useless. With the rhthym of a beating heart bright, angry red flames spewed forth from the ground, scorching him. Bliss, he called it.

And the creatures… Horrifying was such an insufficient word to describe them, but the king could not think of anything else. Their skin was stretched tightly over their bones and an unnatural, sickly purple shade -- almost the color of decay. They snapped at him with sharp, salivating fangs, above which there were no eyes. No, these creatures bore eyes everywhere but where they should - on their tongues, their paws, their backs and stomachs and tails, eyes everywhere, unblinking, their malicious glares focused upon the king.

This is the manner it continued in, but Mephitic eventually woke, enraptured by what he’d seen. He wasted no time telling his subjects of the horrors. They listened with eyes wide and mouths agape, awe painted on all their faces. Truly their king was great to be gifted with such visions!

What the king -- what no one -- realized until much later was that the nightmare his mind had conjured had been too powerful to contain in one being. Those six nights the Imps around him had had similar terrors in their sleep (though nothing as grand), and from there it grew. Its magnitude had even been great enough to infect some of the animals inhabiting Darkwood Hollow and rare Pandoria Boxes.

King Mephitic took the creatures in to honor the evil vision and his subjects did the same. Soon the shadows of the forest were full of the nightmare, legions of unblinking eyes and snarls and screams…

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