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Image by Nottsuo – nottsuo.deviantart and at Wikipedia (Shoggoth)
We fought the Xanee for more than a generation. It seems our peoples don’t mix well, though we do each die with some degree of regularity. At the boundary, where our two cultures collide, where our war rages most intensely, our conflict birthed a ripple.
Not a normal ripple, like from a rock thrown into a pool. This ripple grows from the drama of divergent culture clash. Underneath time and space, it festers, tearing holes in the fabric of our lives. Our dreams, the Xanee and ours, cross the barrier of this nether world and now we fight our wars privately in the quietness of our bedrooms and dream pods while we sleep. We fight, not with each other, but with Them.
I first came across the aching darkness and foulness of the Old Ones in this dream setting after a panic-filled first space battle. I did not know terror like that and I barely made it back from that first fight, dropping in and out of consciousness. Whispers around half-empty mugs hinted at dire things hidden in the corners and darkened places of our minds. Things long forgotten. Things long dismissed to the realm of the mad and possessed.
People said that the Old Ones had fled Earth, chased by humans and abandoned by their Elders, that we banished them from our shores in an age long past. We did not know, we could not know, that in so doing we cast them upon our future enemy, the Xanee. Our fears and our sorrows traveled with the forlorn Old Ones when we rid ourselves of their vitriol.
The Xanee subjugated the Old Ones, chaining them and making them into smallish things. Such is the nature of the Xanee. To rule. To enslave. They forced the Old Ones into servitude like the Elders before had done. The Xanee didn’t understand the power of the Old Ones. The Xanee didn’t understand the will to survive, dominate, and desecrate that drove the Old Ones.
And so, foulness curdled in the hearts of the Old Ones, souring them to their current imprisonment of body and mind. They reached into the depths of the Abyss and created something more.
Something greater and abler.
Something to collide with the Xanee.
And then the Old Ones set this Shoggoth of the New Line free along the rift.
Along our rift and loose in our dreams. It seems they found a way to strike back.
The New One grew strong in its fetid way. It conquered not peoples or lands, but planets and vast swaths of space. It stretched forth its hands, tentacles, and maws taking from its parents the means and will to subjugate other life.
It flourished.
I found it there, too, as my starship faltered in my next battle with the Xanee. As I fled the conflict to make repairs and so rejoin my brethren, it called to me. On the edge of a ripple of darkness and malice, of worlds clashing in ways unseen, I saw it. I must have passed out from the strain of the fight and as the loss of oxygen, perhaps, infringed upon my conscious state. My dream-self awoke in the very lair of the new Shoggoth and sought a place to land.
The world I found, the world shown to me in that nether-like dreamscape, appeared night-shrouded and cold in the deep black. It beckoned me.
I should have remembered the tale of the Shoggoths. I should have noticed that the night didn’t fold over the land in a natural way, but rather writhed in oily thick blackness, that the world had no light side, only dark.
Alas, I did not.
As I descended through that thickened ooze, my starship suffered first. The oily blackness tore at it, peeling it like a tuber for the pot. I saw lightning flashing, quick as thought, and eyes, thousands and thousands of eyes, all around my canopy as the glass and ceramics surrendered next to the malevolent love of the New One’s caress.
The whole of the planet stormed at me and my silver-like dagger. My single, far-flung dagger. Too small, I hoped, to bare awareness of me in the minds of the Old One’s spawn. Too soft to cause pain in something so vast. The New One on the surface stood larger than any mountain and greater than any villain of old.
I think I screamed when the oozing, slick mass breached the canopy and touched my skin.
Yes, yes I did scream.
And when I did, the new-birthed Shoggoth took it from me to wear as a bauble in a chain of other baubles around its many necks.
Now I lie in the convalescent’s ward, unable to speak, unable to move, and with sightless eyes staring at a world that has moved on without me. Around me are the others, the others that have encountered the New One of the rift. Loved ones visit us, but we, the Army of the Damned, have nothing to say.
I am a 20 year veteran Algebra teacher trying to reconnect with his inner writer. I post with fair regularity in the short story and poem links over at Writers Digest under the pen name Bushkill. When I’m not penning prose of some type I try to enjoy a plethora of other interests, though a penchant for beer and food does seem to get the better of me most of the time.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
