October 16th, 1953

Mr. Cadmon Whittington, since he was very young, had a paralyzing fear of being eaten alive. This fear would usually manifest itself in commonplace situations, late at night while he laid in bed, vivid hues of his organs being stretched, torn, and mangled pulsating through his active mind. Although there was an overarching theme to these phantasmagoric fits, the setting or details would rarely repeat themselves, each fantasy a bit more fantastic than before.

It all started October 16th, 1953, when he was in the 5th grade, walking home from school one day.

In those days, he lived in a small farming community, surrounded by all sorts of mischevious and unfortunate business. The neighborhood kids would find creative ways to distract their minds from their mundane, meaningless lives, usually conceived as some form of destruction. It could have been as simple as dousing an ant hill with gasoline, or as cleverly engineered as repeatedly flattening a gardener snake on the road with the treads of their bicycle tires. They were Lords of Destruction, and the grasshoppers they jammed in the tips of their pellet guns were their unfortunate serfs.

Which is all the more unusual that he was so affected by what he saw that day, walking home from school.

Up to that point, he had been exposed to levels of violence and torture that would have made the Dark Ages squeemish, participated in countless holocausts and senseless homicides. One day in particular, he was out shooting birds with his close friend. He had never shot a pellet gun before, and was filled with an unfamiliar and overwhelming ecstasy when the first pellet he released from his gun inadvertently struck a sparrow and dropped the creature like a grand piano crashing loudly onto the pavement. He stood over the stuffed former likeness of a bird, amazed that a single tiny pellet could render a creature so motionless.

Which is why what he witnessed while walking home from school that day gave birth to a web of nightmares and visions that would follow him for the rest of his life.

His parents were normal, god-fearing citizens, and properly ensured that he would attend Church and worship God in a manner "that was pleasing unto his sight". But Cadmon, like the majority of young boys, never understood why the epoch of Christ's service to humanity was atoning for their sins. Or more importantly, why it was even necessary. The suffering that Christ endured at the hands of the Romans seemed more like vanity than service.

What he didn't understand then was that Christ was a Protector, not a Redeemer.

He was walking home from school that day, like any other day, when he spotted it in the gutter running along the side of the road. It, being the catalyst event of every feverish nightmare that would plague the rest of his life, appeared at first to be two insects copulating. But as he leaned in closer, the situation began to unravel. It was a dragonfly and a wasp entrenched in a battle. What one had done to offend the other was uncertain, but the tangled mass of chitin that lay before Cadmon was far too intriguing to attempt to decipher. It seemed clear that the dragonfly was going to be the true victor, being at least four times larger than the wasp.

And then it happened. The wasp began to slowly and methodically bite the neck of the writhing dragonfly. Oscillating and reverberating perfectly with the date October 16th, 1793, the head of the dragonfly then rolled from the body. Without a second thought the executioner secured the head in it's wiry appendages, and like a drunkard staggering off into the night, departed with it's over sized prize in tow.