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Damien, in a rare stint of not-yelling, asks, “When’s your birthday, dude?” and you have been absolutely expecting—no, dreading—the day he would ask you this question. Not because you have any sort of dark secret or anything. All your dark secrets are usually revealed during embarrassing benders with Polly.
It’s just that, well, the question is kind of annoying.
You look down at your food, which you aren’t going to eat. “Don’t have one,” you say. Damien raises an eyebrow and redirects his attention from the (frankly concerning) number of organs on his plate and to you.
“You don’t have a birthday?” asks Damien, and you shrug.
“I mean, being the literal consecration of fear kind of predates… birth, you know?” You try to explain the confusing state of your existence, which is usually quite difficult. You are, by design, a very vague creature in many rights. You not only predate the existence of most entities—as you are a primal instinct carried by most living beings—you are also… not really that old.
You are old, definitely, but you certainly aren’t too old. In fact, you’re a little bit younger than Liam, and you are certainly in the awkward teenage stage of an aspects life.
Damien doesn’t seem phased by your lack of birth, considering the fact that several creatures here lack a birthday. There are monsters who have sprouted out of the ground and monsters who have been created by minor witches and monsters who have been constructed by mad scientists. All sorts of shit.
He says, “Well you did come from something, right?”
“I did indeed,” you say, shrugging, “I was too young to remember.”
Okay, you weren’t too young to remember. In fact, you are frequently reminded of the tale of your origin by certain folktales and human myths, but it’s a very long story and you aren’t quite keen on telling it at this lunch table where you are usually given relative peace for at least thirty minutes. Unfortunately, “relative peace” for you is impossible and Damien insists.
“Dude, you totally know where you came from,” Damien says, and you’re about to wave him off again, but he adds an extra deal to sweeten the pot, “if you don’t tell me I will shove your own head so far up your ass that you’ll shit your eyeballs and chew your anus.”
So you tell him.
It is a long, detailed, and moist story about an amorphous blob very close to the core of the Earth that has been slowly growing and consuming a portion of the world. If you were a more sentimental person, you could call this impersonal, terrifying entity your mom. You are not a sentimental person, and for the rest of your story, as you tell it to Damien, you refer to it as the nightmare.
Frankly, the nightmare is larger than most things, but it’s also severely lacking in tact and intelligence. It mainly just screams obscenely and grows in size as more fears trickle down into the Earth and add themselves to the massive ball of fear. Damien says, “Sick,” when you mention this part.
As the nightmare grows in size, it begins to portion itself off into other, smaller amalgamations of fright. You remember the day that an inconsequential amount of black matter (you!) dripped off of the larger form and became a separate, more independent consciousness. The screaming had been a bit much for you. If personifications of horror could have runts of a figurative litter, that runt would certainly be you.
Fortunately, you were soon sent away from your little nightmare home, and into the jaws of the real world, wherein you deal with constant threats and dangerous arson schemes in the vague hope of achieving a prom date. It’s a lot harder than absorbing the nightmares of the populace and growing into an eldritch horror, frankly.
If you try really hard you can connect to the nightmare and see through its eyes for a few moments, but doing so gives you quite the headache. It has a lot of eyes. Just. So many eyes. You only have, like, six, and four of those belong to lesser beings connected to your body!
You end your story with, “So, I guess if we’re being technical,” and you pause, allowing yourself to think, “I was created at some point in March.”
Damien says, “You could have just said that, asshole,” and he throws a fry at you. You wonder where he had fries in his meal which, as you previously stated, mostly consisted of gratuitous viscera.