I’d like to say we departed almost immediately, but frankly, arranging even a shoggoth army took longer than a few hours. The shoggoths knew what the Faceless Ones were doing at the Tower of Zhaal through their psychic bond with others of their kind and assured me we still had a few days before the Unimaginable Horror broke loose.
I wasn’t so sure.
There wasn’t any way to argue with the shoggoths given our present power discrepancy, and I was forced to wait until they were ready to depart. That proved to be in the “morning” of the next day, for whatever value that word had underground. I discovered I did have to sleep and spent that night in fitful dreaming slumber, visions of indistinct evils haunting me.
Before we departed, I made a note to write a letter to my children, which I handed off to Martha to take with her back to New Arkham. The contents of the letter were short, but I hoped they would convey my feelings to my offspring.
Dearest Anita and Gabriel,
I am sorry for the delay between this correspondence and my previous ones. As you know, I was suffering from a condition which was getting progressively worse. What I kept from you was that it was a transformative one. My metamorphosis from being human—and not.
It is the nature of our bodies that so much of our thinking can be influenced by elements beyond our brain. That the soul, for lack of a better term, is controlled by conditions like hunger or lack of sleep. I feared the being I was becoming would not be the father who raised you.
The thought of losing that connection, of you’re being ashamed of me because of it, was a fate worse than death. I tried to deny my true self but now that the process is complete, I wondered why I was ever afraid of it in the first place.
I am me.
Society may say that I am unfit to love you and be loved by you because I am now one of the monsters that inhabit this world. Your mother has a vague idea of what sort of thing I am, but for all the frightening bits of my transformation, I do not consider myself to be evil. After all, any being still capable of loving you is a being I cannot help but be proud of.
I was going to write about how I would understand if you chose not to renew our relationship due to the pressures of New Arkham or your own beliefs. I have faith, though we may struggle with each other from time to time, that you will understand why I have done what I’ve done.
We are family.
I am going into battle soon, and like all soldiers, I must prepare myself for the possibility that I will not survive. If I do not, and somehow this world manages to continue, I would like to convey one final piece of wisdom to you. Please take this to heart as you look upon a planet that seems to have no hope, no functional ecosystem, and doom around every corner.
This world is worth fighting for.
Do not abandon hope, even in the face of insurmountable odds, and continue to believe there is a chance for humanity to survive in a world designed to exterminate us. Maybe we will survive, maybe we won’t, but you deserve a chance to believe your children will inherit this Earth.
-Your loving father,
John
I sent a similar letter to Jackie, handing it to a shoggoth and trusting they would deliver it to the University without difficulty. I hoped they would understand why I’d done the things I’d done and would learn from my mistakes.
If not, there wasn’t much I could do with it now.
The army of the shoggoths traveled without vehicles, but they provided us with a strange spider-like conveyance capable of traversing the erratic terrain of the few underground tunnels they’d left standing. The device was six feet tall with eight long copper legs that moved in unnatural ways. Its interior possessed weird gem-like controls, pedals, and levers. The thing belched steam every few seconds, and I wondered how the ghouls had come up with such an outrageous device.
Bobbie, August, and Mercury rode with me as I piloted the contraption, none of them having much to say to me since they’d found out I’d destroyed a civilization. All of us wore ghoul-manufactured goggles provided by the shoggoths. They gave us near-perfect vision in total darkness—an immensely valuable gift for exploring the underworld.
The trek took hours and was uneventful, but I couldn’t help but feel an oppressive sense of doom clouding the journey. Part of it was undoubtedly the immense difficulty of the task before us and the guilt I was feeling, but there was something more.
I could “see” through time much the same way I could in the Hinton Library. I didn’t—no human could survive such visions—but some of it was still leaking through. Something was going to happen and soon.
“We’re probably going to die out here,” Mercury said, sitting beside me in the front seats of the spider contraption.
“I’m ready,” I said, staring forward.
“I’m not,” August said, shaking his hands as if to make the statement somehow amusing. He was sitting behind Mercury, looking ill as our vehicle bounced from side to side.
“I don’t want to die, but if it saves the world, I’m OK with that,” Mercury said, sighing.
“You are?”
“Not really.” Mercury shook her head. “A lot of people are dead, John. The Insmaw folk, the ghouls back there, and however many people died to make all those zombies the Faceless Ones sent after us. It’s not your fault, but death seems to be following us around. Maybe we need to find a way to break that cycle.”
“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
“To keep Jackie from it.”
“Huh,” I said, still unsure.
“Are we having a conversation, or are you just going to mumble the entire way?” Mercury glared at me.
“A little bit of both,” I admitted. I wasn’t sure I was ready to die. Ironic, since I’d been suicidal before all this. Fiction often told of the courage of those willing to sacrifice themselves, but while I’d always been ready to risk my life, it was something else to walk into certain doom. I would do it—for Jackie, for Gabriel, for Anita—but I didn’t like it.
Fuck the world for putting me in this situation.
Fuck the Great Old Ones for ruining it.
And fuck Nyarlathotep just because.
Much to my surprise, he didn’t respond.
I was spared having to think more on the subject by a ripple that passed through our shoggoth honor guard. They communicated in strange and otherworldly clicking noises, which worried me, as I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I contemplated reaching out to touch their minds but discarded that thought almost immediately. I didn’t want to become too comfortable with my status as a monster.
“What’s going on?” Mercury asked, calling down to one of the shoggoths.
The shoggoth produced a tentacle with a human mouth on the end. “We are discussing things via the gestalt.”
“About?” I asked.
The shoggoth said, “It is better to show you.”
The portion of the army in front of us moved to the sides of the cave like the Red Sea parting. Reluctantly, I pushed the contraption forward and we walked to the front of the line. There, I saw a gigantic, stadium-sized tunnel filled with shattered and destroyed vehicles.
The exiled ghouls’ convoy.
All of their supplies were scattered across the ground with several of the vehicles burning, their fuel tanks having been destroyed with electric weapons. One thing was noticeable, though—there weren’t any bodies.
“Do you think they’re all—” Mercury started to say.
“Dead?” August said, pulling out a pair of binoculars. “Yes. Probably killed by the Faceless Ones and reanimated as the undead.”
“Five hundred thousand people?” Bobbie said, shaking her head. “That’s impossible.”
“Hardly,” August said, snorting. “I could kill that many with enough summoning preparation. The ghouls weren’t possessed of any magicians to protect them either, what with the shoggoths having killed them all.”
The sheer weight of what my actions had wrought made me clutch the sides of my head. I found breathing difficult and had to take a minute to calm myself. I hadn’t intended to bring about the genocide of Shak’ta’hadron, but my actions had done it nevertheless.
“My God, what have I done?” I whispered.
“It’s not your fault, John.” Mercury reached over and placed her hand on my shoulder.
“It is,” I said, my hands shaking. “Who else drove them out into the darkness if not me?”
“We did,” the shoggoth to the side of the contraption said. “I have hated my slave-masters for generations and wished for their deaths. Yet, in triumph, I did not want to kill them all. The slavemasters, yes. Their children? No. Seeing them massacred to the very last and probably taken to be turned into a parody of themselves fills me with grief. I might have wanted them to die in my worst moments, but to see them enslaved in their own corpses? That truly is a fate worse than death.”
“You’re an eloquent blob of slime,” August said, leaning over the side.
“You’re rude for a bag of meat and water,” the shoggoth replied.
“Touché,” August said, leaning back in. “Do you think the party responsible for this could be preparing to face our shoggoth army?”
“That seems likely,” I said, imagining an army of half a million corpses, all armed with the kind of technology the Faceless Ones’ strange power plant had been built with.
It was not a pleasant picture.
“They could still be alive,” Bobbie suggested, staring out at the wreckage. “They might have been taken captive. At least some of them perhaps.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Do you believe that?”
Bobbie lifted her goggles, able to see in the dark by the way her gaze met mine. “No. No, I don’t.”
I was about to ask the shoggoth how this changed our battle plans when I heard hellish horns. The noises they produced caused everything human in the contraption cockpit to grab their ears while I almost screamed. I could hear the horrible wail on more than a half-dozen different pitches inaudible to my prior self. They were war horns of the Faceless Ones, I soon realized, as the other end of the stadium-sized tunnel began filling with the running dead.
Unlike the slow, plodding corpses found in the tunnels around the Faceless Ones’ power plant, these moved like a tidal wave. Thousands of undead ghouls, all armed with strange glowing metal melee weapons and armor, charged forward with some leaping over each other’s shoulders to get to us faster.
“Holy shit,” Mercury said, staring.
August shook his head. “I should have just fucking stolen my wand back.”
Much to my surprise, the shoggoths closed ranks around us and surged into battle at a surprisingly fast pace. The undead ghouls’ glowing weapons caused the shoggoths’ blackish liquid substance to turn white, crackle, and fall to dust beside them with every blow, but the metamorphic beings gave as good as they got. Their inhuman strength was on full display as they conjured long black tentacles that slashed bodies in half or caused them to explode just by touching them.
Both sides wielded magic, putting to lie that the undead were mindless horrors without a will of their own. The shoggoths conjured as many beasts as the Deep Ones while the ghouls did the same, the caverns filling up with all manner of terrible demons and gods. Lightning, fire, acid, living shadows, gases that ate flesh, cracks in reality, and even weirder effects joined these attacks.
While August added his own spells to the mix, dissolving several of the ghouls’ larger monsters, I felt helpless in this titanic struggle. How little we were able to affect the ensuing battle was highlighted by a lightning bolt getting knocked away by a shoggoth’s tentacle, only for it to reflect against one of the contraption’s legs, sending us spiraling to the ground.
I struggled to get to my feet alongside Mercury, picking up my heavy assault rifle before offering my hand to her. No sooner did I do so than a group of Reanimated ghouls and humans surged over dead shoggoths to attack us. It wasn’t a large portion of the army, a few hundred, but it might have been a few thousand for how much it dwarfed our group. I never thought I’d long for the means of transforming back into my monstrous form, but I did then.
You can change any time you want.
I forced that thought away, spraying orihalcum bullets into the bodies of the Reanimated. The shoggoths had given me several dozen clips of the special ammunition and I expended them all. The mystic metal tore through the Reanimated and caused dozens to collapse. Bobbie’s snake-like whip slashed through dozens as she furiously fought to slay as many as possible. Mercury cast an incomprehensible spell that caused forty of them to transform into salt before my eyes. August, by contrast, ran up to the side of one of the tunnels and started to draw a door on the wall with chalk.
I never fought harder in my life than I did in the few minutes that followed. I’d achieved greater results with my berserker rages and transformation, but knowing Mercury’s life was at stake, I killed one after the other, smashing the Reanimated ghouls’ heads in when they came close, only to gun more down. A massive pile of bodies formed at our feet while I loaded one clip after the next.
Mercury and Bobbie saved my life as often as I saved theirs, the three of us forming a wall that held against the tide. The fact that hundreds of shoggoths had already died, immortals who might have seen the end of the sun otherwise, did not change this glorious fact.
Then, as if fate was mocking me, Bobbie was impaled by a pair of swords from a dual-wielding Reanimated before another leapt on her back. More Reanimated jumped on her body, stabbing or biting her to make sure she died.
“No!” I screamed, shooting them all to pieces but giving the remaining ghouls assaulting us an opening to come down upon us. Only a furious burst of strange black shadows from Mercury’s fingertips, a spell that tore the remaining ghouls to shreds, saved our lives. We’d killed over two hundred together, and Bobbie had finished the rest.
“Rest in peace,” I muttered, staring out into the carnage still going on past the shoggoths defending us.
That was when August shouted to us. “I have a portal! Get over here before it closes!”
He didn’t need to ask twice.