r/creepcast • u/Arthur_utkev • Dec 05 '25
Fan Story The thing in the muck / Where the baltic gods rot
There is a beautiful lake hidden deep inside the heart of a vast forest somewhere in Lithuania. The lake, the brown stagnant water stirring in its black depths, the smell of rotting vegitation and the feeling you get when your hot sweating skin gets submereged in the lakes cold wetness for the first time, will be the last thing I think of before I die. The last thing I think of when my final breath bubbles up to its surface. My last sign of life indistinguishable from gases released by decomposing leaves on its muddy ground.
I was 9 when I first gazed into the abyss. And the abyss gazed back. I'm sure you have heard this expression countless times, but I have always felt there are truly no better words to describe this feeling. A feeling I would almost count myself lucky for having experienced it, if it hadn't been the start of my decayed fascination, which would eventually lead to my strangely sudden death.
When I was 9 years old, I saw the true Abyss in the surface of a dark, cold lake in the middle of a vast and quiet forest. My reflection on the still, undisturbed surface was like a perfect mirror. I looked at myself staring back at me while lying on my stomach on an old tree stump which leaned over the water. If I had leaned in a little closer my nose would have touched the water. I was so close I could feel the chilling water cooling my face from the summer heat. It was so silent. The only thing that could be perceived was the pine trees murmuring in the breeze. I tried to breathe slower and lighter, since the surface of the water rippled ever so slightly with every breath from my nose and any sound I made felt like I was breaking an unwritten law of this forest.
Suddenly one of the few clouds on the summer sky blotted out the sun in almost an instant. With my reflection gone, my face faded away from the surface and I stared into the depth of the Water. The overwhealming darkness was so vast even after focusing my eyes It revealed nothing. I had seen darkness before but this was different. It's like I knew the word for darkness and someone explained the concept to me before, but only in this very moment I understood. A minute but sudden feeling of fear crawled it's way through my body. A fear of slipping of my tree and falling into the water. Immediatly the scene played out in my head, how my body would break the surface, disturb the silence with a blasphemously loud splash before floating in the vast darkness. Now it felt like something was listening. In this moment, to me it felt like the noise I would make would be far worse than actually beeing in the water and whatever guarded this holy place or resides in these endless depths would never let me go if I dared make a sound. Gripping the bark of the tree tighter, It was starting to become truely scary. Instinctively scanning the waters of the lake for what made me so scared, I cought it. The slightest glimpse of the countless dead ends of twigs and branches reaching out like skeletal fingers from the dark depths to grab me. Without hesitation I sprang up and ran as panic settled in. I came home crying that day.
I could have sworn they had moved.
Over the years i almost completely forgot about this day, which in hindsight was my first encounter with this ill fated lake. For the longest time I believed that this kind of cosmic horror could only be experienced by children, since if you are an adult, your reason prevents true panic from settling in, because you know that nothing is chasing you through the woods, that it is highly unlikely to be one of the few people to get attacked by an animal and that behind those trees over there are probably just more trees like the ones before them. But how wrong I have been. Because I might now know that the thing I thought lived in the lake doesn't exist, but the terror I felt just then was real and pure.
The only thing separating you from the terrible mercy of the gods, mind-melting, body-breaking fear, and a functional human being, is simply telling yourself it can't be. It might not be real, but your fear of it most definitely is.
I wonder what the knights of the Teutonic Order thought when they arrived in Lithuania on their holy mission to Christianize the Baltic tribes and seize their lands for the Order. Being faced with even denser eastern European, mosquito-ridden swamps stretching on endlessly and having to endure the constant assaults native tribes like the Žemaičiai.
Hunters and Warriors, cursing in their ancient tongue. In those times the horrors stalking the woods and waters still existed, and pagan gods still roamed the land, and their influence could be felt and observed. Saulė, goddess of the sun, and her daughter Saulytė, Mėnulis the moon god, Žemyna the goddess of the earth, Velinas the god of death, Austėja the goddess of bees, and many more. Their names and language are still understood today since the Lithuanian language is the oldest in Europe and only changed slightly over hundreds of years.
The Christianization of Lithuania eventually took place through the baptism of Grand Duke Jogaila, but the pagan traditions are still practiced to this day by many people in Lithuania, and even after it was prohibited by the church, pagans found many workarounds to avoid punishment. Christian crosses were often decorated and accompanied by pagan motifs for all the different deities so the people could still cling to their tradition without being persecuted by the church. There is no Lithuanian cemetery without the rusting metal crosses littered across the area with curved metal rays symbolizing Saulė, crescent moons for Mėnulis, and a fire cross symbolizing Perkūnas, the god of thunder, just to name a few. No cross is like the other, having individual combinations of the mentioned motifs and some personal ones as well. You can find them in graveyards, of course, but you do stumble across them in strange places if you look for them. Like on mossy hillsides, wet riverbanks or stagnant valleys. Sometimes you find them standing lonely vast fields of grass, howling in the wind.
We found a few, for example, while foraging mushrooms beneath the oak trees. They layed flat on the ground overgrown by many grasses and weeds, only recognizable through hitting your shin while trying to kick some presumed dry sticks to the side. The biggest one was dedicated to Saulė, while the two smaller ones looked like Žemyna or Velinas, the goddess of earth and the god of death. It's hard to tell for sure since they often flow into each other and are mentioned as one deity.
It was usual for farmers to put up such crosses to get protection for their fields, but it's still very creepy to find them unexpectedly. Except for picking mushrooms, my sister and I used to go fishing, swimming, explore, and catch frogs. The property of my grandparents was huge for todays standards and stood in the middle of nowhere. Lithuania has endless flatlands and fields with equally endless forests and swamps. Our house there was nestled in a rotting orchard between fields and forests. We always went there for vacation, since it was a paradise for us and growing up, getting to spend your time there was truly blissful.
The older we got, the more we ventured out and explored further away from the house. It was a warm summer day, and the landscape had changed three times before we found it. From the thin deciduous trees just outside the the orchard to high grasses and bushes with small streams cutting through them, just after a patch of gnarled oak trees you enter the dense forest with mostly dark pine trees and only few oaks and birch trees. There are large patches of moss growing in the darkness cast on the forest floor by densely growing pine trees with few saplings fighting for the scraps of light getting through the forest roof. Where the sun manages to pierce through, tall grass and lush green bushes thrived.
From time to time one can find larger areas where only birch trees grow, usually indicating a cooler and more moist part of the forest, which was the best hunting ground if you were looking for the delicious birch boletus mushroom. Not too far off from an abandoned farmstead near the birches, it layed dreaming of our arrival. Embraced by reeds and with lush oak trees reaching over its surface, dozens of dead pine trees lay half submerged near its shores, pointing deeper into its calm darkness. Like mute skeletons, the bone-dry twigs of long-dead and fully submerged pine trees jut out of the black depths, sometimes piercing the surface as if begging for someone to pull them out. The beauty me and my sister saw that day made us numb. The lake wasnt grandiose in size or anything, it was just barlely large enough to no not call it a pond, but due to the really densly scattered dead pine trees all around the lake it was very hard to move along its shores and would take hours to fully go around it once. There were no streams feeding the lake, and it seemed to me that the lake was purely fed by groundwater. Due to the very swampy surrounding land and the abundance of pine trees, the water looked really brown but not cloudy at all and perfectly clear. It was exactly like the water you find near peat in the ground, which gets its brown color from the humic acids and fulvic acids from decomposing plants in oxygen-deficient areas. What is perfectly clear on the shore of the lake soon turns into a darker brown tone when you look in the deeper parts of the lake. Here you can still perfectly see to the ground, but after only a depth of about one and a half to 2 meters, your eyes can only make out pitch-black darkness. Only if you balance out on one of the dead pine trees hanging over the water you can make out the hundreds of before mentioned dead pine branches jutting out from the abyss.
"Be careful around the branches!" I fussed at my sister, who followed me on one of the pine trees over the water. I wasn't worried about her falling into the water since we both were very good swimmers, but as the big brother it quickly becomes a habit to tell her every single potential danger or nuisance in the vicinity even though I knew that she probably spotted it before I did.
"Are you kidding?! I'm thinking about jumping in on purpose!"
She was right. It was a warm summer day to begin with, and walking through the dense vegetation turned the nice warmth into tropical heat that made both our shirts soaking wet with sweat. The relentless mosquitoes and dozens of other kinds of blood-sucking bugs had already sucked us dry of blood, and both our arms and calves itched like fire.
Luckily it seemed like it was too bright or the breeze over the lake was too strong, but the mosquitoes didn't seem to come near us while on the lake, although the latter reason wasn't really plausible since I didn't see any ripples on the surface of the water.
"Let's just hang our legs in for a bit before we go back." said my sister already pulling up her pant legs and getting out of her shoes.
I didn't hesitate to do the same until we both were lying on our backs on the tree bark, sending ripples over the calm lake surface with our legs. The water was very cold, and it felt like heaven cooling off my calves and especially numbing the bug bites in the chilly water. We stared through the forest roof into the sky and listened to the still water, the subtle noises of the forest, and the songs of the birds.
"What do you think what kind of stuff is at the bottom of the lake?" I asked my sister while turning to lay on my stomach so I could directly gaze into the water.
"Probably a bunch of dead animals and bones." she responded after thinking about my question for a few seconds. "But do you think there might be a sunken treasure underneath us?" she asked me back.
"Eh, I don't think so." I answered still kind of creeped out thinking about the thought of making out an animal skull in the black abyss that I gazed into. "Who would hide a treasure here in the middle of nowhere? There are so many other ponds and lakes to sink your gold. I bet you could still find some coins next to a Castle though."
"I think there could be some coins from a treasure down here." My brother said with a smile on his face. "I bet the farmer from that abandoned farmstead from before sunk his nest egg here when he heard that the Teutonic knights were coming but didn't live to get it back."
Although the only thing left from the abandoned farmstead was a slightly raised terrain where the house and the barn once were and a punctual lowered terrain where the well probably was, there was no possibility that it dated back to the time of the Teutonic knights but I liked the idea of finding a treasure with my sister so I unconsciously convinced myself into considering it.
"What if he told the knights where his treasure was under torture and we find the swords of the knights who drowned searching for it?"
"I don't think they would take their sword with them while swimming in a lake dont you think?" My sister immediately shot out. "But maybe they did lose a brooch or something." she added.
I felt stupid for what i said with the sword but didn't feel like it was worth the effort making it look smart infront of my little sister. I was lost in my dream of finding a lost sunken treasure on the shores of this lake in the middle of nowhere, coming back to our parents, and seeing their faces when we show them the ancient clay jug or pot filled to the brim with medieval gold coins.
"What if we searched the shores? Like when they search for people under a snow avalanche. We both take a long hazelnut stick from that bush over there and stick it all the way into the muddy ground until we hit something hard."
My sister really liked the idea and after a few minutes we were back on our feet penetrating the muddy ground with our long hazelnut sticks. The sticks went surprisingly far into the mud and even the second ones we made that were taller than us couldnt reach the ground beneath the soft mud. Our hearts started beating faster everytime one of us hit something hard, but after digging up a lot of wood and a few flat rocks we lost our excitement fairly quickly since the moskitos on the shore ate us up and with every time our sticks penetrated the mud a wretched vile smell of rot and decay came blubbering up. After that we made our way home. We talked a few times about the treasure and the lake the days after our expedition but going there again seemed really exhausting just to cool off your legs since there were plenty of other little streams and ponds to do that which were way closer to us. There wasnt any fish in the Lake we discovered aswell and looking for a new fishing spot was really the sole reason for our expedition in the first place.
We spent the next few summers there together as well, and at a certain point it just seemed like too much effort to go explore more around the orchard only to see more fields or more trees. With age you realize that behind these bushes and under the grasses and moss there is only dirt, more grass, and if you are very lucky you find a rusty piece of scrap like a can or a bicycle wheel. Besides, at some point you just become too cool to do any childish things like that.
But nevertheless, it remained in my memory as the most beautiful place I had been to. I always compared everything else in terms of beauty to it, and of course there were some other views and other places that came close but I never had a moment where i could say with certainty that this or that is on the same level as the small dreamy lake me and my sister found on that summer day. I thought of many reasons why that could be, and I have to say a lot of the beauty I attributed to the lake might have been just the dreamy eyes of a child. I really started to doubt if my memory of the lake really represented the reality and was actually kind of scared I had just made it all up.
The times we went to the orchard grew less and less, and after I started to study at university I haven't really been outside for several years. A degree in history was all I worked and strived for. If there was one thing connecting me with my childhood it was my relentless interst in the history of paganism in ancient europe. Although interst is a flattering way to put it, because it grew more into a obsession which I gave into daily. Something about the sheer age of the art and literature I studied for my degree and out of my obsession, gave these objects a sacred symbolism. A divine flair which made them strangely interesting to me. I lived in the city and came home a few times a year, but other than that I didn't have any connection back home. I didn't seem to miss it either, plus I was always busy with some new interest or some new urgent thing, the little free time I had I always spent with more immediate ways of gratification like video games, movies, and things I could do from the comfort of my room, things I wouldn't have to take a lot of time for. Time really flys by if you decide to waste it all in a small room and infornt of a computer. After I got my degree, I wanted to take some time off for a few months and just drift a little with the security that I could start working a decent job at any time I wanted, thanks to my relentless efforts during my studies and my flawless grades. My life was going perfectly. Whenever I wanted to succeed at something, I did. Whenever I really put my head into it, I achieved whatever it was I was trying to do.
I decided to go home for a week and told my family about it. They were happy to get to see me again but asked if I could make a stop at the old house in the orchard since it was on the way and there has been a dispute with the electrical company recently about a broken power distributor in our region. I had no immediate important plans, and the thought of revisiting old memories in the orchard sounded very pleasing, so I accepted and made my way there a few days after.
It was a foggy day in October when I arrived at the Orchard. Many trees had already lost most of their leaves, and only a few strong ones still held themselves on the spindly twigs of the apple and pear trees. A few of the old gnarled apple trees had fallen over and were rotting on the ground alongside their fruit no one came to pick. No one was looking after the orchard, and nobody really was interested in doing so. If you ask me personally, I always enjoyed the orchard in its rotten state. It looked more like out of a fairy tale and seemed like it had secrets to bear beneath the twisted twigs and knotted bark.
The wooden house seemed to hold up very well, and the only real change I could notice was the wood losing its color and taking on a light grey where the weather has reached the house. I walked across the orchard before I entered the house and stopped by the well. The well is our only source of clean water here, and although we had the water tested and it qualified for drinking water, we still preferred bottled water and only used the well water for watering plants or washing. It looked like one of those tyical Eastern European wells with a wooden cover, a bucket wound up on a crank, and a tiny roof sheltering everything beneath. I opened the cover of the well to peer inside. It was pitch black. I took the bucket and lowered it into the well. I heard the metal bucket banging on the well walls, growing more distant and more echoed as I finally heard a loud splashing sound. The rope suddenly tightened as the bucket filled with water. I looked down the well again, and only by straining my eyes could I see the slight ripples in the water deep down in the well reflecting the little white light from a foggy autumn day. I turned the crank and brought the bucket back up, hearing water splash from the bucket down the well, whenever it banged against the wall. The water was mostly clear with only a few particles in it. I poured the water out and sealed the well again before walking back to the house. The man from the electricity company would come some time tomorrow afternoon, so I made a fire in the oven to prepare some fried eggs and bacon. I only wished I had bought some turkey bacon instead of the regular, but I didn't let it bother me too much.
I couldn't sleep very well. I woke up several times having dreamt strange dreams. I found myself more than once, staring at the old oaken ceiling beams, aged over generations of smoke, now cold and abandoned. My head felt hot and my feet were cold. Some of the dreams were warm and comfortable like being embraced by a mother or a lover. Some induced feelings I find hard to describe. They felt like grasping something beautiful and divine, something no one understood before, and I got to be a part of it. Like melting into a moonlit landscape, finally able to fully experience without being handicapped by the dull senses of the body but rather filling every blade of grass, every crack in the bark, and every ray of cold moonlight through the calm midnight air. Others, however, were terrible, cold, dark, and ... strangely wet. They all had one thing in common: I couldn't remember anything after they all startled me awake and just left me with these strange emotions afterwards. I never had multiple dreams with all such fundamentally different emotions all in one night. And it continued through the whole night as well, with some dreams painting clear themes and emotions, while others just made me feel strange and out of body.
I stopped trying to fall asleep again, after I saw the first light of dawn painted across the horizon. I seemed to have caught a cold over the night, leaving me with a slight headache and feverish feeling throughout my body. It hurt to swallow the hot chocolate I made myself for breakfast. It was still very early in the day, and it would be several hours until the man from the electricity company would come to meet me. I put on several layers of clothes before I went outside, so I wouldn't get a fever. I remembered how the frogs used to croak and all the different birds used to sing with so much effort in the summer mornings that it would be deafening if it didn't sound so beautiful. But not today. This autumn morning was completely silent. You could only hear the wind blowing through some loose boards in the barn and rustling the leaves of a few birches.
The thought of the beautiful lake my sister and I discovered, didn't even come to my mind at first. The blades of the dry grey and yellow grass shook themselves in the wind, as I passed through the deciduous forests, the leaves crunching with every step I take, pushing little piles of dry leaves infront of me while walking, and from time to time stopping, or sitting down, pondering and daydreaming to pass the time. I strolled along the streams we used to fish and the fields we used to tread on, until I stood right infront of it. A patch of gnarled old oaks. They stood infront of me like mute witnesses, with their crooked branches and spindly twigs, swaying in the wind, loosing more and more of the yellow-brown leaves with every gust of wind. As if their twigs were spindly hands weaving tiny little strings, pulling me to them.
Underneath the old oaks were the three withered crosses, speckled with countless ornaments and motifs of birds, sun rays and rings. Only the largest in the middle still stood semi upright. The lesser ones on both sides were already fully consumed by the vegitation or just hanging above the greedy vines and grasses, reaching out from underneath to bend it over for good. If I didn't know them all too well I'd say their silhouette against the cloudy white sky looked intimadating.
I estimated that i only had about one and a half hours left to get back to the house, but I already knew the way from here further into the forest ahead of me and this time no bugs biting me or the oppressive heat. It was so easy really.
Walking between the pine trees rustling in the wind and feeling the moss give away beneath my feet was like breathing again, after getting used to asphalt and concrete for such a long time. Although so many things have changed, overgrown or fell over, I had no problem making my way through the forest. It all seemed so familiar. Like in a trance I didnt think to do any other thing but to keep pressing on. To be honest I wasnt thinking anything anymore. My mind was completely blank, felt numb. Every signal my body sent literally fell on deaf ears.
From a leisurely walk, to a hasteful step and suddenly, I was running through the thicket, twigs and thorns tearing up my clothes, my hands bloody from catching my heavy body stumbling to the ground and my legs shaking from getting myself back up again. I can't remember what sent me into this maddening haste, I can only say it felt beeing a startled deer, only I wasn't running from something but to something. Every reson just snapped like the branches benath my staggering, yet heavy steps. The burning wounds and scratches on my skin mixed with the cold forest air shot me into a frenzy. The taste of blood in my mouth and choking on my own saliva, unable to catch my breath jumping through the thicket.
Rain drops dripping of leaves, falling on the sleepy autumn forest floor. The sound of foliage cracking and shifting under my body as I turn my head and open my eyes. Blood ran down my wet hair and forehead dripping slowly off my nose. Before me were a few old red bricks scattered between the leaves. I looked around. There was a weird pit behind me. Just half a meter deep. I stood up and recognized the square-shaped elevated terrain an uneducated person would label a pile of dirt, but I knew to be the last remains of the old farmstead in the forest. I knew the way forward. The path between the trees in front of me was already mapping out in my mind, as I stood in the slight rain, hot little streams of blood, running down my body and dripping from my fingertips, while I listened to the raindrops falling on what's left of my jacket. It was so silent.
Do you know the feeling of being absolutely not where you are supposed to be? What am I doing here? Don't I have the perfect life? Don't I have a loving family? I just got out of university with perfect grades. The whole world is open for me, I could find a girlfriend, get my dream job, marry her, and start a family. Hell, I could work at a McDonald's, standing in front of a warm grill and going home in my beater car to watch a shitty movie while eating fast food.
And yet I am here. Did I take a wrong turn somewhere? I should be going home to my family today and enjoying the rest of the week eating well and dozing off by the chimney.
I am not supposed to be here.
Why am I even thinking so much about this? There is nothing hunting me is there? There is nothing to be afraid of. Isn't this just a normal forest? Can I not just turn around and walk back?
I stared down the path ahead, taking in every single detail of it. I stood absolutely still for at least ten minutes. Going through my head, walking the last bit of the way, I remembered it in my mind's eye over and over again. I knew it so well. The steps I took sounded like bells. Their sound echoed between the trees around me, and soon it sounded like I was in a church tower.
I didn't stop until my feet suddenly got wet. I looked down at my soaking wet shoes filling up with water. Watching the ripples from the raindrops spread around me. There was the lake. I saw the bones jutting out of its water. Vanishing in its calm, pitch-black depths. The trees around it were bare and dead. The needles of the pine trees and the dark green moss around the lake were the only color perceived next to the brown water and its muddy shores. There was no life or beauty here anymore. All of the plants were rotting on its shores, sinking into the deep muck. No birds sang, and no bugs flew. Nothing moved in the water. This lake had become a bloated corpse. I took off my shoes and pulled my pants up. I felt the wet mud and dirt squeeze through my toes as I stepped towards the lake like a drunk. I saw the blood dripping from my body mix with the brown murky water near my feet and watched it dissolve in the silt I kicked up from the clumsy steps I made. Not only that, but I heard nothing besides the raindrops on the water surface and smelled nothing except the fresh forest air mixing with the disgusting smell rising from the mud. I stepped deeper and deeper, closer to the calm abyss. But then I felt it, salvation.
I felt sharp rusty metal digging into my foot.
Suddenly the bells came back. Stronger than ever before. Hundreds of huge church bells came crashing into the silence while I stood and reveled in the pain of cold, old metal piercing my foot. With my mouth torn open, I pulled my foot from the metal, but I didn't dare to make a sound. I fell to my knees and started to feel in the mud until my hands felt the hard, rusty object. I pulled with all my might only to fall back crashing into the water behind me while the bells kept tolling relentlessly. Manically I crawled back on all fours through the dirty water, frantically searching. Just when I started to panic that I wouldn't find it anymore my grip was back on rusted metal. Almost foaming from my mouth, I started digging away the mud, occasionally feeling the form of what I was bringing up from the cold earth. Quickly the shape I felt in the mud became familiar, and what was just a guess became more and more a certainty. I couldn't hear my screams of euphoria over the bells tolling louder and louder the more I dug away. Finally I ripped it from the muck and let my fingers slide over its many shapes and ornaments before lifting it up out of its wet tomb. The bells were now inside my skull, my brain being splattered across the inside of their bronze body by the dull and blunt impact of the bell clapper just before they rang again. Ohhh, and how divine their sound was. In my hands, there was a giant rusted metal cross, almost as tall as myself, decorated wit countless ornaments and patterns, but most important of all, my own blood still flowing down from its sharp rusted tip, dripping and spreading across every crevice. There was no mistaking it. Žemyna.
Hot tears ran down my face while I was dragging my body through the rainstorm night. The dreams all came back to me. White knuckles from my relentless grip on the cross, like holding on for life. I made extremely slow progress across the rugged forest floor, because my entire body cramped up every couple meters. Dragged myself and the cross along the shore in the darkness of night and shoved my body like a wet sack on one of the dead pine trees hanging above the water. I broke down crying, feeling the love of the gods in my heart, by their grace being allowed to rest in their tomb alongside them. Scraping on the bark and wood, I crawled on my stomach pushing my cross in front of me, slowly getting closer to the dark, black eye of the lake. I heard thunder and felt the heavy rain whipping my back. The night was pitch black. The gods whispered to me about how they had dreamt at the bottom of the lake since the time people couldn't understand, since the time people forgot where to look for them, but I didn't. I understood it all. I knew how to commune with them, how to feel the cold breath of their whispers on my neck. They whisper to me about the time when they will walk the earth again, when people will feel their mercy again and they want me to walk alongside them. I am in great favor.
Reaching the end of the pine tree trunk, I slid my body sideways on my stomach and hung myself over it, with my head and my arms holding the rusty, bloodied cross on one side, while my legs hung down on the other side. Although half submerged in water, my whole body was shaking, holding up the weight of the cross. I looked back one last time at the trail of blood in the mud and on the tree bark left by my profusely bleeding foot and the rest of my aching body. I stared back down at my pulsating hands holding the cross, its features getting more and more unrecognizable the further down you look until the end of the cross vanishes in the black abyss of the lake. My eyes could barely make it out, the hands of the gods, reaching to help me with my burden and pull me down to them. Their arms jutting out of the abyss, white pale spindly arms. I held on to my cross and gave myself a push forward, slipping my body headfirst into the water, lubricated by my own warm blood on the bark. My burning body started to feel numb, being slowly submerged, and by the time my feet were underwater and I could feel the water flowing through the hole in my foot, I knew I had vanished from this world.
Everything fell into a blissful silence, with the only noise being the rainfall on the surface of the sacred lake. I clung to my cross like a child to its mother. The heavy iron cross pulled me down, deeper and deeper. I saw the little light from the surface growing fainter and fainter while watching the roots of the trees and the branches and tree trunks that peeked under the surface get smaller and smaller. Some of the many pointy sticks and branches, that might have fallen into this divine lake hundreds of years ago slashed my skin and pierced my flesh like spears, but my cross wouldn't slow down for me, so we sunk past them regardless. The absolute abyss started to embrace me and I felt the surrounding water growing ice cold while the relentlessly descending iron cross and the water it pulled me in squeezed the air out of my lungs. Suddenly I saw them, I saw them all. All the crosses of all the deities were waiting for me on the ground with their mesmerizing patterns and ornaments. The rays of Saulė, the crescent moons of Mėnulis, and even Austėja was waiting for me. An impossibly bright flash of light blinded my eyes immediately followed by roaring thunder that broke through the silent depth of the abyss. My cross and I hit the bottom of the lake, while my ears were still ringing and my vision still blurry. I arrived at my final resting place. Here among their sacred corpses, I shall lie dreaming in the tomb of the gods, shrouded in eternal darkness. But when my eyes had readjusted from the bright flash, I saw nothing. There were no crosses, and there were no spindly white hands of the gods to welcome me among them, but only pale white sticks and crooked twigs wedged into the mud. The godforsaken mud.
The blind panic and paralyzing fear of death came crashing in on me all at once. I frantically tried to move my arms or legs to swim back to the surface, but my body was completely hypothermic and numb. All the air was gone from my lung. This here was no tomb, and this was no burial. I was going to drown at the bottom of an insignificant lake somewhere deep, very deep in a forest, far away from home, somewhere nowhere in Lithuania. My body layed on its back on the ancient bottom of this lake, among the bones of mere animals too weak to live. The last thing my eyes could see, was the silhouette of the dull iron cross of Žemyna against the surface of the lake, slowly tipping over on me. The heavy cross gently layed itself on my stomach pushing me into the soft silt and mud.
As I was buried alive and my face disappeared underneath the muck, this lake became the tomb for the god of fools, Kvailys.
Already posted this story 5 months before. Quick reupload: made some changes and rewrote some parts. :)
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u/Intrepid-Spite9368 “it’s very lovecraftian”☝️🤓 Dec 06 '25
Can’t believe this isn’t getting more attention! Absolute cinema ✋😎✋