Alright children. Close your mouths and sit down. Grandpa D3trois is going to tell you a story tonight, if you promise to stay silent. Now don’t stay up too late after dark, for the story I am about to tell will leave you trembling and shaking.

This is a story my grandpa told me when I was a kid, a story that he learned from his own grandpa. These are words from countless generations I am going to pass onto you tonight.

The name of that tale is “Crawling Stone”.

Hold on to your blankets and let me remember how the story starts.

*clears throat*

***

The first people to notice something was off were probably the fishermen. The rumors spoke of a strange period of nearly ten years during which fishermen thought they were cursed.

They say that nets always came up nearly empty, something that had never happened in the coastal area for as long as folks were around.

If the fishermen were the first to notice something, it wasn’t one of them who spotted it first though.

It was an old man who used to walk the beach behind the village, past the forest, every day in the morning, even in winter times. He had walked along the shore every day for dozens and dozens of years. And never had he noticed it protruding out of the surface of the water before.

The Lith.

The old man was certain there wasn’t any rock on this part of the beach, especially that close to the sandy slope he used to bathe in when he was younger.

Incredulous but casual about it, the man went back to the village to tell the folk over there.

Only the man was old and his claims were instantly dismissed, like the day he had supposedly seen a dozen mermaids leaping out the sea at sunset.

Days later, the old man was nowhere to be found. People then didn’t link two and two. Maybe his half mind had taken to make him jump off the cliff. You have to understand, in that era old folk like him were a thing of rarity. Winters were rough, as were summers and the other two seasons. Maybe winter had gotten the best of him, if it weren’t his senility.

Past a few weeks, winter turned to spring, the season where young couples frolick on the beach and kids pester them by splashing around. However that year, only one couple ever stepped on the sandy shore.

It was a young couple. The girl was beautiful and pure, the boy was simple but warm. They walked along the beach the first day the sun shone with heat when the boy saw a stone peeking out the waters.

“The old man was right, there is a stone there I’ve never noticed” said the boy, or something along those lines. However the couple remembered the old man saying the stone was almost level with the water, whereas in front of them stood a rock that seemed tall as a person, only slightly less than halfway under the waves.

“If I stand on it, would I become the king of the ocean” the boy joked in order to bemuse his lady.

He went in the water, enjoying the first bath of the season and was about to take a grip on the rock’s surface when it happened.

As soon as the boy’s hand touched the rough surface of the Lith, he was gone.

That was the description the poor girl gave at the tavern later that day when her shocked sobs turned into an uncontrollable panic attack. After a night of crying, when the folk came to check on her, they found her dead body in her room. After the events of the previous day, the girl had preferred to take her own life.

That was the first time the Lith struck people with its curse.

***

The very same day of the poor girl’s tragedy, three men went to investigate the matter. They had brought fishing spears to defend themselves because none of them truly believed that a rock could have caused such a commotion.

The girl had never been stupid but due to the shock, the events might have jumbled her mind.

When the three men arrived to the beach, the rock was exactly where the girl had said it would.

The waters were clear with no trace of sharks or other sea creatures.

With water half way up their thighs, the men circled the large boulder.

The first one used his spear to probe the Lith. He had expected to feel the grainy texture of the rock against the metal tip but to his surprise, the rock offered no resistance at all. As if it weren’t there at all, the tip of the spear disappeared under the surface and reappeared when he pulled it back by reflex.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

To the three confused men, the rock looked like any other, although they agreed to have never seen it on the beach before. And yet to the touch of the spear it didn’t seem like the rock was there at all.

With caution but mostly disbelief for the girl’s tale and their own experience, one of the men extended his hand towards the Lith.

His finger hadn’t yet pushed against the surface when without a sound, the man disappeared.

The disappearance was so sudden that the two other men almost didn’t react for half a breath. Then they both fell backwards in the water, scrambling to find a hold in the sand to get away from the Lith as fast as possible, forgetting their spears in the process.

Out of the three men that had left the village, only two came back, scared for their life and with a horrifying tale to share.

That night, all the folks united in the tavern to listen to them, waiting until they both had their fair share of ale in order to loose their tongues.

The men were pale like never before as they recounted every detail. How the spear had disappeared through the rock and then reappeared. How the water had swashed to fill the gap left by their friend.

If ever people had doubts about the whole story, no one was now brave enough to tempt their fate. After the second incident, nobody from the village dared to go to the beach for the better part of an entire year. Nobody except one boy whose name I don’t know.

If was around the eighth month of the beach being empty that he mustered the courage to face what was now called the Devil Stone.

The boy had at first been terrified by the story of the stone, like all the impressionable folks at the village, but as time went by, a morbid curiosity overtook him until he had to go and look for himself.

Only when he showed up on the beach, past the barriers that the folk had erected between the forest and the cursed shore, there wasn’t any trace of the Devil Stone.

That day when the boy came home, the punishment his parents inflicted on him ensured he would never seek the Lith ever again. But besides that, the curiosity of the village folks was once more aroused by the Lith.

It didn’t take more than a day for them to find the stone. Past the beach, the stone had somehow moved until the edge of the forest. What was even more confusing was that the stone seemed to have gone through the barrier without moving it at all.

That day, people cursed, spoke of the devil and of ancient payan creatures. They accused the Lith of being a demon instead of a rock; of being a sign of the end of the world.

A strange stone that had no substance was one thing, but the same stone able to make people disappear and which could also move by itself was another. The following days, all men worked in unison to build a stone wall around the Lith, an unbreakable wall adorned with charms and old talismans. They worked every hour for three days and three nights.

The third recorded disappearance took place when one of the men stumbled and accidentally touched the Lith while constructing the stone wall. To the terrified eyes of his fellows, the man was gone like a candle flame is extinguished.

The mourning of the man was still ongoing when the village folk noticed that even stone could not stop the Lith from moving.

Over a period of a couple weeks, the grainy surface of the Lith slowly crossed through the solid wall until it was completely free from the construction, to the despair of all people.

What was even more terrifying to them was that the Devil Stone was moving in a perfectly straight line, a line which was headed from the beach where it was first spotted, to their village, their home.

That was when, for the first time, the people of the small coastal village decided to make the matter public and warn everybody of the demon that had come from the sea.

The village had always lived separated from other places for as long as people could remember. In that era communities were small and independent.

However, other places soon heard about the Lith and its horrifying tale.

And such began the legends and the spread of the Lith’s dark influence.

***

I could speak of the fear the people held for the Lith for hours. I could also recount all the names the Lith was called for the following hundreds of years. Devil Stone, Stone From the Sea, Cursed Rock, Crawling Stone, Bringer of Despair… As for me I will call it the Lith, a name it had gained about a hundred years after the townsfolk fled their coastal village.

Generations of priests and cultists had come and gone, all trying to exorcise the Lith with their religion and culture. Hundreds of barriers were erected from all sorts of materials, none of them being able to stop the slow crawl of the Lith.

Fires were burnt around the stone, and even inside of it, to no avail.

The legend says that, once, a rich man even ordered an expedition to the north and built a small castle entirely made of ice around the Lith, confident that freezing it would stop the cursed stone from advancing tirelessly.

Over the years, probably thousands of people disappeared. By mistake, doubt, defiance, misplaced bravery. Kings and aristocrats tried their golden swords, not proving more effective than farmer’s pitchforks and monk's prayers.

Experiments were made by the most daring. Fire and ice went through the Lith. Water, rock and metal were ineffective as well. Wood was a different matter.

Some green wood went through, some disappeared instantly. It took years before folk understood that everything that had an ounce of life in it disappeared, where the dead things remained there untouched.

Fish, cattle, birds, wolves, and of course people would disappear without fail whenever in contact with the terrifying object.

In any case, from the very beginning of the Lith’s appearance, not once had anything ever managed to change its path. Through mountains and lakes, cities and churches, the Lith was unstoppable.

Countless houses and cities were abandoned, to be repopulated weeks, months or years later after the Lith was long gone and the land was deemed un-cursed again by the local priest.

Even this very village we are in was once on the Lith’s straight path. But you need not worry, for it is long gone now.

In fact, as the Lith came from the sea by the west, the Lith has returned to the sea in the east.

***

It has been dozens of years since the Lith was last seen disappearing through the salty waters where the sun rises.

Was the Lith a creature from another world? A terrifying omen? A demon? An artifact of foreign magic?

More importantly, will we ever again see the Lith, its dreaded crawl out of the ocean floor? Probably not in this generation, but as to what the future holds... your guess is as good as mine.