The moment Ethan reached out mentally towards the parasitic entity, he felt something stir deep within his soul. He had barely begun to examine the strange presence when the space around him distorted.
'What the-?'
The emptiness before him rippled like the surface of disturbed water. Darkness seeped through the cracks in reality, spreading rapidly as though something on the other side were forcing its way through.
Ethan instinctively stepped back.
'I really must've been getting complacent to have missed this.'
The darkness twisted.
Then it emerged.
A colossal mass of blackness unfolded before him, its body seemingly composed of countless layers of writhing shadows. There was no discernible head, no limbs in any conventional sense, and certainly no face. Instead, its entire form revolved around a gaping, lightless centre - a hollow abyss that seemed to swallow the very space surrounding it.
From that central void extended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tentacles.
