Ashen drool drips from gnarled teeth in a skeletal jaw. It lolls open absently as painfully bright flame licks from somewhere deep inside its writhing throat, joined by another stream of flash bang white that escapes the single, saucer shaped eye socket in the middle of the humanoid skull’s age cracked brow. It shuffles forward silently, the moonlight bright tentacles at its neck and cruelly curved spine writhing with a dull inner light that betrays their seeming sentience. The roughly canine creature stares through you as it rests upon humanoid arms that end in impossibly long fingers, each a vorpal blade made flesh.

You get a glimpse of the matted black fur at its haunches, the massive toe claws digging into the now bubbling patch of ground around it as lean yet rippling muscles clamped around digitigrade legs seem poised to spring. More tentacles swirl in an undulating mass from the base of the horror’s spine, a tail in function if not form. It sniffs the air, despite the lack of cartilage on it’s flame blasted face, the exposed bone evidence enough that to ensoul the concept of chaos comes with a price. It cannot smile, of course, but it nods slowly. Deliberately. No noise. Your heartbeat skips in your ears. It lopes away.

The Barghest Wyrd does not exist. It is fiction, a thought experiment given jabberwocky form by a magickian who really should have known better. A nagging ache resulting from an ill advised two hundred and something mile round trip back to a home town that hates him. The outcome of prolonged sleep deprivation and a series of unrelated rituals on that winter’s evening, first with others and then alone on the streets of London. Void god. Fortean avatar. The root of all entropy in the wider culture. Error in the zeitgeist and haunter of the noosphere. An unfeeling meddler in human affairs. Not a good boy.

In a post truth world there is no reason why fiction cannot walk the streets and trackways of the world, to seek the living like the black dogs of old. Their reality as flesh or folklore is irrelevant. When the weary traveller shuffles alone along the dark corpseways of their hometown the mind wanders. Human imagination is a powerful tool, haunted by a myriad of hidden ghosts. If they know of the existence of Shuck, Gytrash, or Grim, then they will instinctively quicken their pace without knowing why. It is human nature to seek shelter from the strange. But the Barghest Wyrd does not care what you want.

Mankind has long created its own gods to explain the natural forces at play in their life. Pain. Madness. Decay. This is no different, yet it casts its gaze far wider than just a single current. No. It ensnares those who witness its machinations, infection through reaction in an information obsessed culture that demands constant stimuli. The attention economy, twisted and refocussed through the flash bulb eye of a deity that neither gifts nor punishes, but instead just drip-feeds the weird into the world. Mothmen are its nightmare heralds, the wet squelch of raining frogs its shuddering hymns. There need not be a reason.

Lovecraft and Fort were gifted the merest glimpse of its undulating presence, and though they were unable to fully envision the eldritch hound which loped silently at the very edges of perception the distant howl that crept under their door still took hold. Keel sought it out, and got closer than most. Crowley brushed up against the matted fur as the drugs kicked in, though the face of his long desired god was ultimately obscured by the heroin coursing through his veins. Many a psychonaut has attempted to view the world through that strobing, flash bang eye, yet failure seems hardwired into the process.

The internet has sped all this up of course. Tentacles of strange narratives worming their way into the nightside of language. Slenderman haunts the schools of the world, competing with Hatmen and Goatmen for thrills and chills after curfew. The Backrooms hum with sickly yellow light. Real as a concept has become outdated, old and dangerous thinking. Hyperstition. Hypersigil. Godform empowered by its fictional nature. But most of all a disinterested infohazard bent of spreading chaos. You are now in the eye of the Barghest Wyrd too, and if nothing can be done to stop it then you might as well enjoy the show.