It was hell.
Some laughed and screeched with wild hysteria, their voices cracking into fractured, almost frenzied, ear-splitting echoes.
Others collapsed in helpless sobs, their bodies trembling and twitching, their frames bulging and constricting.
Some screamed—a raw, terrifying, and guttural sound—while clawing desperately at their own eyes and throats, nails peeling away with chunks of bloodied flesh and bodily fluids.
Many simply fled, driven by a nameless terror that seized every fiber of their being, choosing to dive into the abyss that surrounded the edges of this horrendous place.
Moments later, all were undone.
In the blink of a cruel moment, they dissolved into a viscous, ebony mire—their forms swallowed by a thick, unholy sludge, as though erased by some eldritch hand.
Alone, a young man stood at the gigantic altar that was encased in some form of unholy darkness that seemed to eat away at the very fabric of the world in which he existed, his feet slowly yet steadily submerging into the pitch black shadows.
His slim frame swayed back and forth, as if he were a conductor performing before a grand banquet with his orchestra, untouched amid the wreckage.
His mind reeled, folded, churned, and squirmed, grasping no understanding yet obtaining every fragmented insight related to the unspeakable carnage that had swept through the iron-stenched cave.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze to the vaulted canopy, high above the towering altar.
And there, at the very top, within the folds of the pulsating shadows themselves, something stirred.
Beyond the boundaries of life and death, hidden within a cacophony so profound and maddening that only the most shattered minds might call it music, a presence danced. In an ever-shifting circle, they moved—the faceless, twisted shapes that encircled the source of all.
It hovered there: a crucible of beginnings and endings, birthing existences too vast to comprehend, only to devour them in the same breath. It unraveled and wove reality anew, eternally cradled in a dream that spewed forth blasphemies the sane mind recoils from and rejects.
Its tentacles, bloated and decayed, stirred—a languid movement, as if diluted will itself surged through them.
The abhorrent forms clung close, writhing in primal dread, yet compelled by some unfathomable authority. Several of the slithering limbs wove together, pointing towards somewhere with uncanny purpose.
Those bound to its will shifted as one, gazing in unison toward which the silent command guided. Even the eyeless monstrosities obeyed the call, their forms tilting in faithful submission and contorting as one.
From its profane grunts, they gleaned a will no mortal tongue could name, and they bent themselves low before it—the One Who Slumbers.
Yet from the throng, one abomination broke the silence—a roar thick with unadulterated, unabashed mockery. Every twitching tentacle and unholy appendage dripped with contempt for the Master it grudgingly served.
Still, it reverently bowed to the inscrutable whim and rose, vanishing into the void to enact Its unknowable design.
Another followed. Then, another.
One by one, like terrifying deities turning into dust over eons of unending time, they disappeared into the endless beyond.
"Ia Ia [ ]."
The man's eyes snapped wide open—
His eyes, swirling—
Billions upon billions of tentacles made of blackened, tainted sludge, coiling as one, a typhoon's eye, trapped within the thin folds of membrane—
Swirling, sloshing—
A drop of blood dripped down his chin and splattered down.
Onto the altar.
And then—
...
..
...
.....
Hello there.
My name is Howl Lovecraft.
No, I'm not an edgelord. No, I'm not related to H.P.Lovecraft. Yes, I'm from Earth.
I'm 25 years old, male, and currently, and to my great shame, unemployed.
And I'm currently in a sort of a bind.
Well, not financially. It's in a quite literal sense.
You see, I'm tied up. By some motherfucking idiots in pointed black hoods dressed up as the world's cringiest cult.
I was minding my business, on my way to an interview for a new job I had applied for. I felt pretty nervous but optimistic, believing that I was taking the right road and making the right decisions.
Obviously, I shouldn't have taken a shortcut in a city that I knew next to nothing about. Five men suddenly assaulted me in a damp, stinky alleyway, drugging me with some kind of vapor spray, and threw me into a sack like some deranged Santa delivery service.
Well, I paid for my mistake, and now I'm in some dingy, musty cell.
Or I should have been.
I scowled, scrunching up my face as if I'm about to sneeze. Actually, come to think of it...
"Ah-ATCHOO!!"
My snot flew at an astonishing speed and hit one of the nearby marble pillars that stretched high above my head.
Yuck. And wow, that's gotta be a world record.
I rubbed my face with my hands that were somehow untied, trying to clear up my blurry vision, and immediately regretted my decision. A thick, sticky substance was smeared onto my face, and some even went into my mouth.
It tasted of iron, salt, and warm, bodily fluids. Yup, definitely not tomato sauce.
I opened my eyes again, and my thoughts screeched to a halt.
I was lying in the middle of a great, circular slab of marble-like rock that looked suspiciously like an altar. As a matter of fact, the more I looked, the more it seemed like it was an altar.
The thick stench of iron, copper, and salt hit me again like a train, and I swayed. My ankles were deep in a substance that I knew was blood.
The gigantic underground altar, as huge as a baseball stadium, was lit by torches that gave out a white, ghastly glow, illuminating and simultaneously casting ominous shadows that danced on the cave walls as if they were alive.
The altar itself was probably shaped like a keyhole if one were to look from above. The round circular altar was surrounded by a 100-meter gap that stretched far down into the earth below, with pillars far wider than my body and more numerous than I can bother to count, positioned in some sort of numerical and symmetrical form, which supported an absurdly big canopy that covered the entire altar from above, like some sort of oppressive circus roof.
A single road connected the altar to the other side of the cave, across the gap, which led to two slabs of rock that seemed like a sort of ancient-looking door mechanism. Thus, making up the shape of a keyhole from above.
And the entire place was flooded with mucus and blood.
It endlessly flowed over the edges of the altar and down into the abyss below, almost as if the blood was being secreted out of the very floor I stood on. I shivered. That's when I noticed something else.
"Huh.....I'm naked?"
Before I could even decide what to do, or think about the bone-chilling possibility that I've been kidnapped by some deranged sex cult, and the implications that followed—
—God, I hope I didn't catch a new strand of HIV when I was drugged—
—The humongous doors shuddered and opened with a thunderous boom.
A magnified voice echoed in the vast underground space.
"DOWN ON YOUR KNEES!"
"Woah, kinky."
A team of about thirty men was behind the now-open doorway leading to the altar, every single one dressed in golden glowing plate armor brimming with arcane power.
In my defense, I was still probably delirious from the sheer absurdity of getting abducted by a potential sex cult.
The fact that they were also dressed like medieval knights definitely didn't help. Paladins from video games in a sex cult?
Seeing that I had no intention of complying, one of them at the forefront pointed their hand at me. A golden chain shot out from his armored palm and lunged straight at my chest like some sentient bullet.
Panicking, I stumbled back, slipping on the floor covered by blood.
I ran, or more like scuttered on all fours, convinced that they were part of the sex cult in some kind of new Demon VS Angel roleplay, and completely neglecting the fact that the edges led to nowhere.
As it happened to be, I was pretty damn near the edge.
FUCK.
A floating sensation.
And I was swallowed into the depths below.