The Black Deluge

Why, yes child, I remember that day. I'm old, but not that old. It was only twenty years ago or so, although it feels more like twenty lifetimes... so much has happened since then. Your grandfather and I had rented a cabin for a week in the Rockies for our fifteenth anniversary. I was, oh... forty or so, and had left your mother (who was only ten at the time) with my mother while we-
What? Oh, sorry my dear, I'm getting bogged down by the details aren't I? I beg your pardon.
Well, we first notice something wasn't right when shortly before sundown the mountainside went silent. There was a low rumbling, and we noticed this dark, oozing liquid that seemed to be crying... or bleeding... from a large boulder behind the cabin. We watched as it slowly crept out, blackening and charring the brush as it passed underneath.
This liquid, what we now call a Black Wellspring, began to leek from all sorts of stone and rock around us. We would have run for the car and driven back into the city, had it not already been awash in ooze. There was this poor, poor lizard on the hood of the car. I don't know that I could ever describe what a look of terror on a lizard's face would look like, but the sound it made when the ooze reached it forever haunts my dreams.
Now, Young One, you're the one that asked for this account. This is why I wanted you to wait until you were older to hear it.
Anyway, the ooze began to violently bubble the moment the screaming stopped, and what emerged from that pool was nothing short of a demon, possessed of the poor devoured creature's form magnified a hundredfold. It had eight trunk-like legs and oozed more of the foul liquid, and when it turned it's glowing red eyes on us, we ran... didn't matter where. We just knew we needed to get away immediately if we wanted to keep our lives.
~ Mawmaw Murphy, a Black Deluge survivor, speaking to her grandson.

The Black Deluge. The day the world fell to the Darkspawn. All over the globe, rock and stone began to weep a thick, black liquid that either corrupted, or destroyed, anything it touched. Any life form able to survive contact with the liquid was instantly, painfully, transformed into an abominable reflection of it's previous self. The more rural and secluded the area, the worse the effects seemed to be.
No one is really sure what exactly is the liquid that springs forth from the wellsprings, but it is informally called Gaia's Tears. This comes from a rather persistent theory that the Darkspawn and the Black Wellsprings are Mother Nature's revenge on humanity for their wasteful, destructive, selfish ways.

Type

Metaphysical, Supernatural