Pentober 2026 - Day 24: Beast

Ok so, what is Pentober? Promptober? It's a writing tradition that's been around the web for a while where you write up a short story every day in October based on prompts. Some go for pen and paper, some digital; everyone has their own style. I'll be posting here, and I'll be using the prompts from https://www.topinfiction.com/p/pentober-2026 

House rules are that I vomit-write the story; no planning, just taka taka taka on the keys. I get ONE edit at the end of the draft (if I even have time, lol), then we post it. House rules also say that I get to play catch up and do multiple days separately on one day or combined if work gets wild and I can't write. Get it? Got it? Good! Here we go.

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Humans amused him. They knew that the beast would have a mark and they knew that they would bare them during the end times. And yet humans, being animals stuck with per-industrial minds and bodies unevolved for the inchoate, cyclopean, and goetic forces their minds had unleashed - that they were designed to release, that actualized their existence - could not comprehend that the mark of the beast would be anything other than a tattoo on the forehead.

He wandered about one of their streets, taking in the sights and sounds. He could see so much more than the masses of flesh milling about him. He could see the gentle vibrations, waves of energy, emanating off of a million different devices on every street. He could see those vibrations being ingested and abstracted in runic learning models, being processed by sacred geometry etched microscopically into the rarest rocks and minerals Earth had to offer. He could see them, most importantly, opening gates to subatomic planes of existence that pervaded the universe.

His kind, residents of a different and far-flung corner of the Milky Way surrounded in darkness had mastered those planes long, long ago. They used them to communicate across vast reaches of their empire, ones that could never be traversed in several lifespans, and used them to shape matter to their will. Most importantly, for these humans walking around on their little rock, unaware of how rare the trees surrounding them truly were, these subatomic planes invited him and his kind in. The apes had, unknowingly, dialed the phone directly to the domain his kind thrived in on their homeworld: psionic predation.

Too dark to see with light, too hot for stable materials to develop, evolution took a different course where he was from. No agriculture, no husbandry, no technology: apex predators evolved to distinguish the beating of a pulse, as much as they had pulses akin to a human, or the buzzing of a thought across the waves. They were echolocators of a higher caliber, able to not just sense the waves of sound but sense the waves pervading all of the universe, and shape them. They had become incredibly good at it.

But, limitations exist.

How can you shape something you couldn't possibly imagine?

Then, suddenly, after eons: a new wave

You trace it, you follow it, you call out to it, you let yourself get lost in it, study it, understand it, and shape a version of yourself where it exists. You study the planet you come to find over its centuries. It's a paradise. It's a place that's created things you couldn't dream of, ways of finding and identifying worlds and traveling to them without even understanding the resonance of the universe.

You know your kind must have it. Must have them. Must add them to your collection of worlds. You start to slip in, one member after another, borrowing their faces and adopting their language, breathing their foreign air and learning all they have to offer.

The apocalypse came not with a bang, not with the trembling of the sky, but with the subtle shaking of the very fabric surrounding them. You could barely even feel it. And, eventually, it would be too late to do anything other than join the darkness. It was already getting hotter.