One-Shots

🎃 Children of the Lake 🎃

Written By: StellarLit

There was a settlement. The people eventually started running out of food. The famine was horrible, and there simply wasn't enough food for the group of people. An organization of women had agreed to meet up. What they did was likely out of pure desperation to save their children from the darkness they'd be subject to. They brought their infants and young children to the lake and threw them in. They left as quickly as they assumed the lives of the children would be taken. All the mothers, except one. She was the youngest mother and had lost her only child through this. She wept by the edge of the water until it didn't wave. There wasn't a single bubble emerging from the surface. The moon above her only seemed to steal the color that flushed in her face from her hours of crying. When the moon reached the top of the sky, the woman looked to the water's surface once again, and noticed that waves seemed to have come to life...

... it wasn't the only thing to come to life, either. The children in the water hadn't perished that day, and it would be centuries before they'd be seen by anyone who could live to tell the tale. Anyone, of course, besides this young mother. The oxygen left the children's lungs and water replaced them, scales replaced the hairs on their skin. The young mother's child was the first to see the surface, and she faced her mother with as much love as she did before. The mother tried to feed her child, but its stomach was full of the small fish in the lake, and so were the others. She warned the children not to come to the surface for anyone but her, and they did as they said. Years, and decades went by with no problems. As the mother aged, the children in the water did, too, just as they would if they were still human. Sadly, the children had begun to run out of food themselves over the years, and the fish in the water were not growing fast enough to feed them all. This was communicated to the now elderly mother. She tried her best to sneak them food, and she gave them tips on how to properly savor and preserve what they had left, but it was still too late for the situation. One night, the mother seemed much weaker than the nights before. The children were the thinnest they'd been in their whole lives. The mother saw this, and she did the only thing she could: she gave her once baby one last goodbye, and offered herself to the waters, trying to feed the children of the lake one last time. The children of the lake felt they had no choice but to take up the offer, and the remains of the mother were gone before the sun awoke once again. Ever since that day, they'd never been the same- and not in a way you might assume. They stopped aging for about thirty years after they'd finished with their first human meal, but after that time, they began to age again, and with the aging came other side effects. Their human spirits and personalities had disappeared, and they'd grown a thirst for human flesh. Seeing as they'd lost their human morals, they began to hypnotize people one by one near the water... luring them to their deaths.