Work Text:
Originally coming to this world, I knew everything and yet knew nothing about the world. Roaming around blindly, without aim, leaving a trail of corpses in my wake that would make those gape and tremble in terror in fear that they would be next, that they would become my next meal or toy to play with and test the limits of these fleshy creatures.
To the mortals that roamed the mortal plain that they called ‘Earth’, I was a God — as I grew to learn, to know about the lives that grovelled at my feet, I had originally thought nothing of the human lives that had thrown themselves into servitude, to wait for my beck and call so then they maybe would be able to live to see the next daybreak. Humans were filled with life essence, they were the optimal food to sustain my being.
Food, however, did not sustain my thirst for knowledge.
Being so close to humans, it was inevitable that I would eventually begin to experiment with them, learn how they worked, how they thought, and how they ticked in the ever-flowing passage of time. So easily convinced and so idiotic, always seeming to get themselves in trouble as their thirst for blood, power, and greed grew as material worth made its way into their minds.
Those ‘negative’ emotions were always so easily understood in my mind, but yet those ‘positive’ ones… they baffle me even now. Happiness, love, those were things that I was not born with — to hear a laugh for the first time was something that had alarmed me and the child that I had questioned about the noise had cowered and feared away from my form, away from me .
“Wh-why. have you never heard someone laugh before?” The boy had stammered, clutching some sort of dried leather shaped into a sphere, his act of bravery crashing down as quickly as the tides as I had simply stared down at him, remembering how his blue eyes had welled with tears as he waited for my answer.
A laugh. That was the first time I had heard of the word.
The boy had flinched when I had waved him off to return back to his ‘game’ that he played with the other small children, watching as they kicked around the ball for a moment on that sandy shore before I had retreated back to the cave that I had called my ‘home’.
Whilst the manor held knowledge at my fingertips for as long as I stayed there, the cave by the ocean had felt more like how I had felt back in my own world, the smell and taste of the salt air still burning bright in my memories as I had remembered looking through old scrolls, desperate to find the reason behind happiness as it stood.
Looking back on the events that led to my imprisonment, I couldn’t help but laugh; I was only at a fraction of my power at the time, considered a very young child in the eyes of those that came from my species despite being well over a thousand years old at the time: A curious, frustrated eldritch being, desperately wishing to find the key to achieve this so-called ‘happiness’.
Unlike many problems and puzzles that I had encountered up until then, happiness held no describable answer. To get an answer that is left unwritten, one must approach it with the hope of achieving an answer; all things in life have one, and I as a ‘God’ wanted —no, needed to know.
When I had first decided to conduct my research into this so-called happiness, I donned my first human disguise made up of the features of all the most popular and attractive suitors that lived within my protection, remembering how my reflection never seemed to be perfect, how it never seemed to be able to capture their essence correctly. With each rendition of the disguise, I got closer and closer to the appearance of a ‘human’ that I had hoped for.
Mingling within their social groups had been harder to achieve. What did humans exactly talk of? Listening to their conversations, chattering away with unknown pasts to me, it made it difficult to achieve my answer. With each float between groups, with each failed attempt at trying to receive the answer I so desperately sought, I could feel my anger flare higher, and higher, and higher.
That’s when I met the first human that had brought interest into my life.
I have long since forgotten their face or name, I just remember their skin; kissed by the Gods of the sun and without blemish. I had remembered in my frustration how I had sat underneath the shade of a grand oak tree, rubbing a hand down my face as I felt the dangers of the abyss bubble underneath my fingers. I remembered how they had sat by me holding yellow and white linen fabric over one arm and a wicker basket in the other hand.
“Are you ok?” I remember them asking, long since having forgotten their voice to the ages of time and space that dared fade my memory. Whilst time had faded my memory, turning a lustring memory into nothing more than scratched and foggy glass. I remember the feeling of warmth that had spread through my chest when I had first looked into those cheerful eyes, glittering with a light that I knew that my own would never have.
They spent weeks on that robe, and with each day they spent underneath that oak tree I would sit next to them, working on my own research into the pursuit of happiness.
“Do you think the God will like this?” I remember my first love asking, holding up one of the sleeves of the grand robe, “I’m scared I made it not to his liking.” I remember taking the sleeve into my own hands, testing the fabric underneath my fingertips before looking to the end of the sleeve.
“He may enjoy more open sleeve; I’ve seen him lift men with tentacles that shoot forth from his arms.”
“Oh, you’re right.”
The sleeves were hemmed with shining gold that still shone forth in the crevices of my memory and the day I remember my love cheering with joy, holding the robe in their arms as they spoke about how they hoped the God adored the robes.
They had asked for help carrying it to the cave that I called home, worrying that the robes would become dirty and soggy before they could arrive. A robe far too large for their smaller body to carry and yet they made it, each second in the fabric spent lovingly stitching it together.
How could I refuse to help?
They hadn’t expected me to shift into my true self when their back was turned, the remains of my clothing that I had stolen from the people tattered on the ground with my transformation — yet their eyes shone with so much light that I wished I could’ve turned away, even as they helped me put on the robe, the robe they made.
Those memories shone like gold.
Each memory, while their face has long since faded into a blur, it still impacts me so.
But humans, they never last forever; humans wither and decay, go back to the earth that they once tended and cared for like a forest flame. Death was not a concept I was frightened by but it was the ramifications that came with it: plague swept through my people faster than I could protect them — one of the casualties was my first lover, my first lover who died in my arms as I begged them to allow me to change them, to make them like me.
“It’d be too lonely.”
Instead, I watched as they drew their final breath and closed their eyes. I still convince myself that they were just sleeping , sleeping in my arms, surrounded by the finest silks and cloths I could bring to cushion their body in my cave as I made their final moments comfortable.
I couldn’t even bring myself to consume their body, instead, I chose to bury them underneath the oak tree we used to share by myself. I couldn’t bear the idea of someone else touching them, changing them into their favourite clothes, burying them with their favourite things that would eventually fade with time as the earth would devour them whole.
Grief is what they called this emotion, carried by the winds to my ears as I would sit by the small grave I had dug them, overshadowing the sea by the oak just as they liked it.
Many came after them, each just as loving and caring as the last no matter how much I wished to push them away, and each and every time they passed with me by their side.
The robe always remained, growing old, growing dull, and yet no matter how tattered or patched it became I kept it with me. The first gift, the first love.
Time passed by in waves, rarely a time where things caught my interest enough to care about the lives that devoted themselves to me, but even with the servants and the constant supply of food that the humans tossed my way, my life felt void, dull… nothing. It had only been curiosity that had bought me to the manor when I had felt the energy that came from its walls, beckoning, pulling me to it.
I should’ve guessed it had been Yidhra as to why it was so familiar.
The manor had satisfied me for a while — a never-ending game of cat and mouse that twirled around and around, fear that never ended, a supply of bodies that I could both eat and hunt.
Survivors , as they called them, were kept to their side of the manor, and we, the hunters , kept to our own; sometimes I would hear the survivors on the other side of the wall, chattering, planning, hoping to find a way to escape the pocket dimension we found ourselves in that even Gods couldn’t escape. It was amusing how mere humans were able to keep their hopes up that long, even as they would explode over, and over, and over again no matter how hard they would try.
I never thought I’d care for them, given they were merely just a toy for us, and yet one match where the sky was dim and the ocean crashed against a sandy shore, I found myself in a position I never hoped to be in ever again.
Those eyes, they shouldn’t exist now; they had died eons ago behind closed eyes, in the cave that echoed the crashing waves of the sea and buried under an oak tree.
That voice, the one that had spoken my name with such sweetness in a past life, called me one word; a monster. I was a monster, a monster that toyed, tortured and played with life like theirs until their very hope ran out.
I was a monster that defied the logic of man, one that made people go insane by simply willing for the abyss to come and seep themselves into their mind, twisting every thought in their head until they would become nothing more than a withering mess on the ground.
My first lover trembled and shook, my hand pausing momentarily in mid-air as I reached out for her — I wanted to console those tears, wipe them away and make sure that she would be ok. I wanted to hold them close underneath the oak tree, making sure that they were treasured and adored like the unearthly gem they were.
Yet as I allowed a tentacle to summon itself from the ground to crash itself onto the body that contained the soul that still shone bright, I still had a role to play.
In this life, I am just a monster to them.
In this life, I still loved them.