“Your servants?” I realized he meant the shadows – the foul beasts of darkness that spat those oily strings. “What about the Eldritch Club? The faculty? I thought they were your servants.”
They are my wardens. Nothing more.
A shudder ran through my body – part horror, part hope. I never thought I’d say this, but the god and I had something in common. We’d both had our freedom stripped away. We’d both been experimented on without our consent. He was as much a prisoner of Derleth I was – more so, for he had been trapped here for hundreds of years.
“Why do you give your wardens your power?” I asked. “They only keep you trapped here because you give them what they want.”
If I do what they want, they will set me free.
I laughed. “Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen. If they set you free, they don’t get to keep drawing your powers. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they never had any intention of setting you free.”
I don’t understand.
“They lied to you.” My stomach heaved as the god shifted in the prison, agitated. The screams in my head increased in volume, in agony.
What is lied?
I remembered then that I was addressing a being from beyond space and time. It might have no concept of deception. I couldn’t think how to explain lying in a way that would make him understand.
Instead, I pressed my hands to my head and called up the memories I’d hidden down deep, the secret shame that I’d kept to myself. The lies I’d told the authorities, the school, the Kings. The lies I told myself. The rage that grew and grew inside me like a cancer I could never cut out.
And I gave it to him.
“That’slying,” I said through gritted teeth as I pushed the truth into his screams.
The god’s pain came in a silent wave, his screams so loud they had no sound at all. I dropped like a stone as the screams tore the strength from my limbs. It was the scream of a universe burning, of a million souls that had never known peace, of all the agonies of past, present, and future rushing at me all at once.
I didn’t know how long I lived inside the god’s torment, but it was too fucking long. Finally, finally, his pain rolled over me, and I was able to surface.
I don’t know,he cried with the screams of his victims.
“What don’t you know?” I demanded, struggling for breath. “I have told you the truth. You have been lied to. What will you do with that?”
I don’t know.The darkness shifted uneasily. The god was confused. It had no experience to frame this feeling.
“I’ll tell you what you do.” I scooted forward on my knees so I leaned right over the trapdoor and stared down into that lightless abyss. It made bile rise in my throat, but it was the closest I could get to looking the god in the eye. "You do exactly what I tell you, and we all get what we want."
I will listen.
“First, your servants will protect Greg,” I said. “Because he’s not a part of this. He never lied to you. And then, you will stop. Stop everything. Stop giving them power. Stop taking souls. Stop it all.”
Without sustenance, I am weakening. I do not want to return to my death-slumber. I wish to be free, as you wish to be free.
“I can respect that. Can you go back to your own universe?”
I am too weak. Too changed. I will not survive there.
“What do you mean by too changed?”
I have become… not what I once was. The sustenance here makes me different. I have… feelingsss.”
He hissed the word, testing it on his screaming tongues. He didn’t understand it, and yet he knew that he felt.Of course! When he eats a soul they become part of him, and he experiences all their emotions and memories.Whatever he used to consume in his previous universe, it didn’t have this same effect. “What if I found a way to take away the feelings? It might make you weaker, but you would be yourself again.”
I would be… happy.
Again, it tested the word, unsure what it truly meant. “And then maybe you could go home?”
I do not know. It is possible.
