The strange… strangeness of the pillar wrapped around my fingers. The hum echoed through my body as my mind toppled into the stone. The edge of my vision blurred with black shadows – the servants that would step forward at my command.
With my other hand I held up my chalk stick and drew the sigil on the pillar – the one that allowed me to call the god into my dreams. Keeping my fingers against the stone, I slid down onto my ass, resting my body against the pillar. The stone hummed against my back.
I closed my eyes.
Sleep came instantly, unnaturally. Someone flicked a switch inside my brain. One moment I was in the auditorium. The next, I stood inside a vast burning sphere. Smoke stung my eyes, and the heat felt like it stripped the skin from my bones. I looked down, expecting to see my body boiling away — but I floated inside the flames, apart from them but painfully aware of their presence.
My back still pressed against the pillar, the cool stone the only relief from the primordial heat around me. The flames parted, revealing a ruined landscape of burning peaks and valleys crimson with liquid magma. The air burned in my lungs – thick and viscous, tasting of ash and poison.
The smoke swirled, revealing two more pillars standing in front of me, forming a triangle. Their tips were invisible in the miasma. The geometry of them seemed all wrong. Every time I blinked, the angles appeared different, out of touch with the others, as though each face yearned deeper into some other place beyond where my eyes could see.
I edged my foot forward, and my boot slipped across a platform of smooth, faceless stone. Its edges fell away into the burning landscape below. From beneath its surface, I felt the strangling tendrils of some cancerous horror reaching up, circling my ankles, rooting me in place.
I’m just some poor-ass white girl from Philly. I can’t deal with this.
And yet, here I was.
“Where am I?” I screamed into the void.
This time, the god’s screams came from all around me, from the smoke and the primordial mountains and the poison air.You stand in the origin of all, in the place where I fell from the stars.
I understood then that I stood exactly where I was – on the grounds of Miskatonic Prep, only years in the distant past. Perhaps a millennia. Perhaps even during the formation of the earth itself.
“Why are you showing me this?” I demanded. “Why is this same pillar now in the middle of my school?”
What has risen will sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of man.
“Okay, right. So the pillar signifies the beginningandend of something. Where are the other pillars?” I gestured to the two flanking me.
You have not called them forth. I need more of your power. More of your… truthness. And they too will rise.
I gathered that in god-speak that meant he needed me to burn more shit down. In the moments before the pillar appeared, I’d been in a murderous frame of mind – the same way I’d felt right before I unleashed a hail of flames down on my mother and Dante. Only this time, there’d been a voice inside my head stoking the flames. The god and I had been one. He’d needed someone like me to act as a conduit and call up this blasphemous architecture.
He needed me to do that twice more, to raise the final two pillars. But why?
To free himself? To attract more souls? To act like a giant speaker system broadcasting his power across the world? Or something else – something about his children?
“I promised I’d find you new children, but I’m not going to do anything that will hurt the human race. You said you would stop taking sacrifices and giving out your power, so you can’t—”
I did speak this. I am my truth. But I cannot control what stirs beneath, what is preparing to ascend. That is your domain, because you are the light, and light is required for ascension.
“Whatis preparing to ascend?” My head was all twisted around from his words. It reminded me of that scene from The Hobbit when Bilbo Baggins bamboozled Gollum at the riddle competition. Only in this case, I was Gollum and I was going to lose the most precious thing of all if I couldn’t figure out this riddle.
My children cannot survive here. They must ascend. You are the light to guide them home.
My head pounded. “You’re lucky you’re amorphous and inside my head, because I want to kick your ass right now. I don’t understand. Let’s try something else… why do the pillars attract me? They’re like magnets sucking me in.”
The fire around me shifted, the smoke recoiling from my skin, giving me a view across the platform and out over the edge. Far below, volcanic activity deep below the surface reshaped the earth before my eyes, forming the fissures and peaks that would become the earth’s surface and the ocean floor. The sky crackled with fire.
And I understood. All around the god was nothing. Not even an amoeba to talk to.He’d endured the formation of the earth alone. Completely alone.
When the god spoke again, his voice shuddered with pain.It calls to you because I am…
The god searched his human vocabulary for the right adjective. But he didn’t need to. I knew the word well.
“You’re lonely.” The word choked on my lips. I gazed out into the world as it once was, to the prison where a god who traveled across space had been trapped.
I am lonely.
