Darkness Rose Up

[Robert Crisman]

He went into the room, and there in the center of the room caged in glass on a stand, the heart of the Qneen, beating, beating.
Atop and surrounding the glass, this miasmic...something, a green, pulsing, near-liquid mass, the source of the odor of 10,000 dead that came on him the moment he'd entered the tunnel.
The thing was featureless, shapeless as well, and yet he saw plainly its fustian, slavering essence--the spirit of all the spiritless people now dead above in the town.
Spitting and hissing the thing came to meet him; it closed on his nose and his mouth and jammed down his throat, its smell now a sickly perfume atop trench rot in wartime...
His talons were useless as was his strength--against fog?
Darkness rose up to meet him.