“C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu…”
The dark dozen chanted rhythmically as they circled an iron pit in the center of the stage. I’d watched them light a great bonfire within it and its flames grew higher and higher, illuminating their swishing robes in the burning glow. The alien hieroglyphs that adorned the walls and floor pulsed with unearthly power.
“C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu…”
A few of the ominous chanters, Vik included, broke off from the circle to light more candles. I’d never seen so many candles in one place in my life! I glanced nervously to the dusty red curtains, to the old wooden boards of the stage floor, to the rickety catwalk, flashing in and out of sight above the tall lapping flames. One or two wayward sparks, and the whole place could go up in as many moments! I tried desperately to get Vik’s attention, to get any of them to listen to me, but to no avail.
“C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu… C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu…”
Epistola came down from her podium and spread her bare arms to the fire.
“Oh greatest of the Great Ones!” Her breathing was labored and her words breathy, building into utterances that seemed both painful… and pleasurable. “We who are nothing, who are but your dreams, we call to you!”
The enormous fire belched higher as if in answer.
“Hear us, Nuclear Chaos!” she ululated. “We bring you the Heart of Cthulhu!”
“C’tharanak Orr’e Cthulhu!” the cultists cried.
But I wasn’t the Heart of Cthulhu! I struggled futilely against my chains. Why couldn’t I make them understand? I was nothing to Riley. Even if he had cared for me once, I no longer made his song take flight. It was over now. Our beautiful music of the night had ended forever.
“Listen to me,” I cried. “This won’t work! He doesn’t love me.”
“Your lies cannot save you, my dear girl,” Epistola chuckled tauntingly as she returned to the podium and opened the Necronomicon. “You are the Heart of Cthulhu. And you will awaken the mighty Azathoth. Vivek!”
Vik turned to her in blind obedience.
“We begin.” And she proceeded to read from the book, the alien words sliding past her moist lips like thick snakes.
Vik took up the largest of the candles and walked toward me with dull, shining eyes. The cultists began to chant more loudly.
“C’fm’latgh ftaghu Cthulhu orr’ebthln… C’fm’latgh ftaghu Cthulhu orr’ebthln…”
“Let the Heart of Cthulhu be purified with fire and water!” came Epistola’s horrifying prayer. “Orr’e d’faechlk!”
Closer and closer, Vik came. We locked eyes. His were cold, lifeless, enslaved. I tried to fill my own gaze with sympathy. I tried to bring him back with just one look.
“Vik… please,” I whimpered, tearing, “don’t do this.”
“You’re wasting your breath,” Epistola sneered down at me. “Vivek is mine now.”
That thought terrified me more than the pain I knew was coming. It couldn’t be true! Vik, my Vik, had to still be in there somewhere.
“Vik, please,” I begged. “Try to remember… She has you brainwashed! Fight back! It’s not just my life that’s at stake. Don’t you see? She’s insane! She wants to destroy the whole world! All of existence as we know it! Fight her! Or you’ll die too—”
He thrust the candle in my face, stopping only an inch from my skin. The heat of the flame clawed at me, and my words froze on my tongue.
“Yes.” Vik leaned in close, the flickering light illuminating his features on the other side of it demonically. “I know,” he spat. “I would rather die than exist any longer in this world which contains such pain as that which you and your selfishness have forced me to endure.”
I knew he couldn’t possibly mean them, but Vik’s words lacerated me with the blades of a thousand cutlasses. Even if he could have fought Epistola’s mind control, he did not want to. Because of me.
“Orr’e d’faechlk,” he hissed, and he lowered the flame of the candle to my embarrassingly bare stomach.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Vik…”
“Orr’e d’faechlk!”
I screamed as he pressed the fire against my flesh. But the pain of the burn was nothing compared to the pain of knowing, fully and finally, that Vik was lost to me. My best friend was truly gone, taken over completely by that pathetic shell of a woman, a woman who was nothing but the casement of her skin and what little she did to cover it up.
I could only barely hear her next command over my own sobbing.
“Purify!”
A deluge of icy water fell upon me, filling every crevice of my body with wetness and dread. It was everywhere, permeating my very being. I could not escape it as the cultists poured and poured from some giant ceremonial shell.
When the last drops had trickled out, the chanting increased in volume. I was gasping for air erratically, sweating and shivering at the same time.
When I looked up, Epistola was on the stage before me again, her meteorite knife in one hand and the Grimoire in the other.
“Now,” she recited, “let the flesh of the Heart be broken.” She pressed the tip of the knife to the exposed flesh over my own heart. I winced as a droplet of blood oozed up around it. “Let it be marked with the Seal of Azathoth.”
“Y’hah! Azathoth! Nog! Y’hah! Y’hah!”
As the cultists shouted their chorus of amens, Epistola scraped the knife along my skin. My eyes were glued to the horror of the lines she scratched into me, but my vision clouded with pain and I could barely discern the shape of the bloody Seal she carved.
When she was done, she threw back her head with a cry of ecstasy. I wanted to scream too, but my throat only made idiotic choking sounds. Shock came over me, shaking my body so hard the heavy chains around me clattered. Blood was running down my chest, past the burning welt on my stomach.
Epistola turned back to the fire and thrust the bloody knife into it. At the same moment, another downpour of frigid water assaulted me, drenching me further, flowing into the open wound over my heart. Now not even my innards were safe from that terrible liquid’s reach. I could feel it clawing its way through my body, seeping into my bloodstream, consuming every fiber of my being. It seemed to go on eternally, and when it was done, stars filled my vision as I sputtered and wheezed, too shattered to cry anymore.
When my surroundings finally swam back into focus, the fire consumed my attention. There, in the heart of the inferno, where the knife burned, the flame had turned a very distinct shade of green…
Oh god, no!
How could it be? I didn’t have Riley’s heart. I didn’t!
“AZATHOTH COMES!” the witch exclaimed ecstatically.
No… It was working. But it couldn’t be working! Riley didn’t love me. They were wrong about everything. I wasn’t the Heart of Cthulhu! Unless—
Unless he did still have some sort of feelings for me and that was why he was letting all this happen. If I did possess his heart, he must hate me for it! He did not want to love me. He’d made that indubitably clear. Maybe he had started to care for me a tiny bit after our time together, but once he’d made up his mind about how worthless I was, he needed to find a way to end it. End it definitely. Allowing Epistola to sacrifice me to awaken Azathoth was the surest means of eliminating the loathsome feelings he could not rid himself of. If the universe ceased to be, then so would I, and Riley would be free, as he longed to be. Free of the burden of caring at all for an ant like me.
“Uln Azathoth! Spurg’scnduim! Uln Azathoth! Spurg’scnduim!”
The green-hued flame shot upward, upward, upward, until it chomped at the chandelier. With a whistling scream, the whole thing came crashing down, slamming into the front of the stage. Crystal shards flew in all directions.
“Uln Azathoth!”
I was sure the stage curtains were about to ignite in wide, roaring flames, but then something strange happened to the fire. Its green hue paled and it narrowed into a tight, twisting pillar, as if being suctioned mightily from above. My eyes followed it up to the place where the chandelier no longer was.
It had become a place where all no longer was.
“Spurg’scnduim!”
A vast swirling pit of absolute nothing bloomed, portal-like, across the theatre’s ceiling.
“Behold,” Epistola cried, “the Daemon Sultan! He has slumbered through the long and dreary day of our pitiful existence, but now is the twilight of the universe! Now shall he awaken!”
Vik and two of the other cultists descended upon me. Brutal hands grappled over my tortured body, pulling the chains from me, tearing me off of the hand-truck, lifting me high into the air above the tub. The briny water within it churned as if boiling with rage.
“AZATHOTH! SPURG’SCNDUIM! Y’HAH!”
And with that final cry of “Y’hah,” I was thrown into the water. Vik, stronger than I ever thought, held me by the throat, preventing me from rising. I struggled and thrashed for the first few seconds, but quickly realized… there was no point. No reason left to survive. All my instincts abandoned me then, just as Riley had, just as everything that ever mattered to me had. I let the terror and the water consume me forevermore. It was over. My life… ended.
~*~*~*~
Don’t lean over too far Andi, sweetie… Don’t you know if you go too far, you might fall in? If you fall in, we’ll never be able to get you back…
Never…
…Never be able to get you back…
~*~*~*~
As I felt the last faint glimmer of my livelihood evanesce into the dark emptiness of the waters, Vik’s hand released my throat, and a very different hand reached down to encircle my shoulders. It lifted me up out of the darkness and into a new light.
I expelled what felt like very real water from my lungs, but as I looked up through my soaked hair, I beheld a vision of that which I knew had to be a dream.
Riley.
He gazed into my bleary eyes with those brilliant, green spheres of light—those spheres which reflected the eternal beauty of the cosmos, and everything beyond it.
Was this what the afterlife held for me? Oh, if I had known I would be so blessed, I never would have fought my end!
But then as my eyes focused, two details grew clear that told me at once—I was still alive and very much in reality.
The first was the look I began to recognize in Riley’s eyes. The dark, simmering look of cruel contempt that had always filled them in the first days I’d known him.
No, if this were a restful plane for my poor soul after existence, that look would have been the last one I’d ever dream up for him to bestow upon me.
The second detail was the sight of Epistola over Riley’s shoulder. She was standing beside the pillar of fire, bristling with rage in her red leather straps as the swirling ball of darkness above her began to crackle with livid lightning.