Snow blanketed the hillside.
Stands of living pine trees intermingled with the dead beetle kill, pine boughs, and cones the color of rust.
Stalks of dead grass peeking through the thin snow in clumps.
A cold wind blew across a lake, beaches rimmed with ice, the slow creep of entropy and winter crawling over the surface, millimeter after millimeter.
Two ravens hopped on the shore. Talking loudly to one another in shrill voices not understood by Man.
Above the steel grey sky was dotted with iron, the makings of a blizzard swirling above. The clouds gnashed above grinning broken toothed ridgelines and colonnades thrust heavenwards in defiance of entropy and gravity.
He was there.
Cloaked as the great void. Hood up over leather mask.
Unmoved.
Eyes burning like the dying of galaxies. Visible breath a quasar ejecta plume. The cloak covers broad shoulders and grasping hands.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
The soft things, snow, and plant crushed under the black boot. The wind howling in entropic feedback, the ravens tilting heads, and curious eyes.
“Behold. The Vastness and The Solemnity of winters grasp Ricky Broadway. It slowly wraps fingers of death and darkness around the throat of the land, and it squeezes.
It squeezes until the sun itself no longer shines and only the great astral void above is visible. “
The resonance and reverberation of that voice cut the wind. Tree and blade pulled in the direction of its choosing.
“It squeezes.
Ricky Broadway, I will squeeze from you the voice that sings and the mouth that feels clever is silenced.
Ricky Broadway was not present to bear witness at In Your Haunted House to the final elimination of King Kong Frank. Like all things in the galaxy, he was inextricably pulled to the all-consuming maw at the center.
Ricky Broadway lacks King Kong Frank’s will.
Ricky Broadway doesn’t have the strength to resist even the meagerest pull towards dominance. Ricky Broadway is the all-singing chaff that doesn’t merit more than the passing glance.
Ricky Broadway is beneath the notice of the merest of men. Let alone to stand in the ring where behemoths stride.
So the grip tightens.”
A hand shoots out from under the cloak. It is bare, as is the chest. It heaves up and down. The hand is covered by a leather glove. The tips of the digits curl inwards.
“Do you feel the grip, Ricky Broadway? Do you think yourself clever enough to escape the grip that tightens around your throat?”
The glove creaks under the wind inaudible as the phantom grip becomes tighter. The breathing increases.
“Do you think you can sing your way out of the inevitable? Inevitable as the slow churn of spiral arms always inwards towards the center?
Are you even worthy to spin in the accretion disk?
Are you more than a casualty of the gravitational waves of In Your Haunted House?”
The hand snaps closed, a fist of leather, the cloak flapping in the wind, as sideways snow begins to blow, a faint static haze.
“Do you perceive the task ahead of you? Huginn and Muninn at my beck and command.”
It was that moment that both Ravens hopped up onto his shoulders. Some kind of anti-cosmic Odinic moment of entropic Vallahic uncreation.
Both birds settled on his shoulders eyes forward as the snow began to deepen, a small wind drift begins to pile up against the bottom of the cloak.
“At Classic Wrestling 11.
Ricky Broadway faces finality. Ricky Broadway will look upon the great Abyssal Void, and it will glare back at him, immutable.
Hungry.
For Ricky Broadway, it hungers always. It calls you forth to your destiny.”
The voice drops in octave, distorted.
“To be throttled.”
The Ravens call loudly.
“To experience the event horizon, as time and space invert..”
The extended fist retracts under the cloak. The snowstorm beginning to greatly affect visibility, The towering black visage beginning to obscure.
“To be consumed finally, and the heralding of a new era in Classic Wrestling.”
The storm makes the outline of Lord Colossus ever more obscure, the Ravens on his shoulders shaking snow off of themselves.
“Your consumption to the void will be a lesson to others.”
With that, the storm finally obscured the whole of the scene as the barely visible monolith of Lord Colossus and the Ravens on his shoulder. In the gloom and storm, three smaller figures could be seen around the sentinel.
A Hallucination.
A warning.
The Abyssal Void Swirled.