Dreams of a Dead Demiurge

Most of the Old Money in my town lives in a charmingly inaccessible neighbourhood by the name of Arthur Heights. It’s officially comprised of exactly one hundred and forty-four Victorian and Edwardian Era houses with expansive and well-maintained yards, bricked off with high stone walls topped with iron spikes, and lots of tall, century-old trees for privacy. It’s not technically a gated community, but it might as well be. It’s only connected to the rest of the streets by a winding drive that runs along Pendragon Park, and there’s a big stone sign at the end of the drive that says ‘Now Entering Arthur Heights’, in a way that’s more of a warning than a welcome. The residents are insular, elitist, ‘eccentric’, and more than a few of them owe their fortunes to my town’s occult history.
But they’re nothing compared to the folks who live on Crepuscular Crescent.
There’s a house on the west end of Arthur Heights which requires a passcode to get through the particularly insurmountable-looking gates, a passcode my employer was kind enough to provide me. Once the gate’s open, you can see that what should be the driveway leads right past the house and into the woods beyond. That’s the road which leads to Crepuscular Crescent, a set of thirteen large and dark houses which officially don’t exist. The people who live there aren’t just reclusive; they’re unfit to appear in public altogether.
As I drove around the single circular street, I caught glimpses of shadowed figures pulling back thick drapes and peering out to see if the stranger who had come to trouble them was anything to worry about. I don’t know anything about those residents, but I hope those fleeting glances are the closest I ever come to them.
Nobody was outside, at least nowhere I could see them. I imagine it’s standing policy to get out of sight whenever they’re alerted to a vehicle coming up the road.
Not wanting to waste time or draw attention to myself, I parked right in front of house number seven. Looking around in all directions for anything that could possibly be a threat before getting out, I grabbed my deliveries and hurried up to the front door, anxiously glancing around me every few seconds. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see a big, gargoyle-looking iron knocker on the front door, so I knocked with it three times in quick succession. As I had been expected, the door was answered almost immediately.
On the other side, in the unlit lobby, was a disembodied human nervous system floating about six feet off the ground. Its nerve endings slowly fluttered about like it was underwater, and it was almost entirely encased in a purplish black fungal growth that distorted what little light was around it. Only the bloodshot eyes protruding out from beneath the brain were free of it. A dark shawl was draped over the top of the brain to give the creature a somewhat less amorphous form, and I could see the nerve endings of its left hand still resting on the doorknob, indicating that it was fully capable of interacting with the physical world.
It didn’t attack me. It didn’t say anything. It just stared at me. And I, I suppose, was staring at it.
“Ah, hello,” I said awkwardly. “I’m Rosalyn Romero, from Thorne Tech. Erich and Ivy asked me to come out here to drop off an artifact for Professor Sterling.”
“Charlie! Is that the pizza?” a man with a British accent shouted from somewhere deep within the sprawling house.
“Yes, Professor! She brought pizza as well!” the entity in front of me shouted back, the nerve endings near where his throat should have been vibrating the air as he did so. I’m not sure if I had even expected him to talk, or what kind of voice he would have had if he did, but I definitely wasn’t expecting him to have the voice of a preteen boy. “I’m Charlie, if you didn’t guess, though you probably did. You wouldn’t be working for Thorne Tech if you weren’t smart. Then again, I don’t really look like a Charlie, do I?”
His tone was self-deprecating, like he was trying to ease the obvious tension, but there was such a sincere tone of loss and melancholy to his question that it was genuinely heartbreaking.
“That’s because there are so many other Charlies in the world it’s impossible to say what a Charlie is supposed to look like,” the Professor said confidently as he sauntered into the lobby. “I on the other hand definitely look like a Lucretius Sterling, because no one else would ever dare to pull off such a preposterous-sounding name.”
“Lots of people around here have preposterous-sounding names,” I reminded him. Unlike Charlie, Professor Sterling was a perfectly normal-looking person at first glance. He looked more than a little bit like David Tenant, truth be told. He was wearing a leather apron over a tweed waistcoat, a paisley tie, and a vintage, puffy-sleeved dress shirt. He also had a pair of black and gold goggles strapped to his forehead, nearly identical to the ones I’d seen Erich Thorne using on numerous occasions.
“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself. Alliterative names were perfectly respectable until Stan Lee got them associated with all his comic book nonsense,” he joked, I think. “That’s our pizza then, is it?”
“From Stygian’s Classic Pizzeria, just like you wanted,” I said with a reticent sigh as I handed the boxes over to him. “But you know that’s not really why I came –”
“Oh, bloody brilliant! Thank you!” he said as he opened the top box and eagerly grabbed a slice. “The staff at the front house are the only ones allowed to directly order and receive deliveries, and Stygian’s is on their blacklist for some reason. They think it’s a front for a paramilitary shadow cabal or some nonsense like that. They didn’t give you any trouble, did they? Erich called ahead, and I confirmed it, but sometimes that’s not even enough for them. It makes it so difficult to entertain company sometimes! Hmmm, please, take a slice while it’s still warm!”
“Thank you,” I said as I politely accepted his offer. “Look, I didn’t mind picking up the pizza since it was on the way, but I’m not a delivery driver… anymore. I’m a paranormal anthropologist, which is why Erich and Ivy entrusted me with the artifact they want you to examine. Do you want it, or do you just want to tip me and send me on my way?”
“Yes, yes, of course I want it,” he said, ripping off another bite of pizza. “Which, incidentally, is why I won’t be tipping you, just so that we’re clear. Charlie, get the door, won’t you? We don’t want any nosey neighbours peaking in on us, now do we?”
Charlie diligently obeyed, gently pushing the door shut with a quiet creek, then turning the deadbolt shut.
“I wish that lock wouldn’t click so ominously,” Charlie commented.
“It’s a deadbolt; the very name is ominous. You want it to click in place with a pronounced sense of finality so that you know that you’ve barred the gates and the way is shut!” Lucretius rambled. “Plus, it’s mainly just the echo that makes it sound so foreboding. Everything echoes in this house. Echo! …Damn. I’m standing in the only bloody spot in the house with bad acoustics.”
“You can set the pizza down in there, Ms. Romero,” Charlie said, extending his limp nerves in a gesture towards what looked to be the main living area.
“Thank you, Charlie,” I said appreciatively as Lucretius did a few vocal warmups to test the acoustics of his own house. “I know it’s probably none of my business, but is Professor Sterling your… creator?”
“No, just caretaker. My creator was… not nearly so affable,” he replied, his tone making it clear that the matter was a sore topic. Not wanting to upset him, I set the pizza boxes down on a coffee table and decided it was time to get on with business.
Reaching into my jacket and unzipping the inner pocket, I pulled out a small, metallic specimen box. I promptly handed it over to Lucretius, who accepted it with his free hand, his right hand adamantly refusing to forfeit the slice of pizza.
“Heavy for its size,” he commented as he appreciated the box’s heft. Using only his thumb, he flipped open the lid to unveil the artifact I’d been sent to give him.
Inside was a small, spherical stone like a pearl or a marble. It was a clear bluish-green, beating with a soft pulse and shrouded with a nebulous aura. Inside was a small pupa of an insect that I had never seen and that neither Erich nor Ivy could identify, and it had some kind of elaborate sigil marked upon its back.
“It’s Ichor,” Lucretius said softly, pulling down his goggles to examine it more closely, waving Charlie in to get a close look at it as well. “Crystalized, solidified Ichor; the vital fluid of a god incarnate. Haven’t a clue what the little guy inside it is, though. Where did Erich get this?”
“He, Ivy, and Envy had a run-in with the Darling Twins the last time they were at Adderwood,” I answered.
“What?” he asked, abruptly turning his attention away from the Ichor and towards me at the mention of the Darlings. Even Charlie seemed to recognize the name, his eyes shooting towards me as his pupils constricted to pinpricks. “Dear God, they didn’t steal this from them, did they?”
“No, don’t worry. You’re not in any danger. They gave that up willingly,” I assured him. “I don’t know all the details, but from what I understand, Mary had some kind of an outburst, and afterwards she put that up as a peace offering. She said they had plenty of them and that we’d probably be able to make more sense out of it than they would.”
“And did she say where they got it from?” Charlie asked.
“Something about a Realtor. That’s all I know,” I said with a shrug.
“Hmmm,” Lucretius murmured as he finally set the pizza down and fished out another pair of goggles from his apron pocket. “Do you know what these are, Ms. Romero?”
“Yeah. Orville over at the Oddity Outlet calls them Opticons,” I replied.
“No, Orville from Orville’s Old-fashioned Oddity Outlet calls them the Ophion Occult Order’s Omni-Ocular Opticons,” he reminded me. “He and that Circus he used to work for definitely had a hand in making alliteration seem silly. Anyway, put these on. Just be careful not to change the setting! These little beauties can show you some things that are best left unseen if you don’t watch yourself.”
I nodded in understanding and pulled the goggles over my head. Everything immediately became monotone and desaturated, but bathed in vibrating, fractally branching emanations that quickly dissipated into their surroundings. If I focused on them, I realized that I had some kind of intuitive understanding of their meaning, like how you know what a pictogram is trying to communicate.
“Trippy,” I said as I examined my right hand trailing through the air. “Is this clairvoyance?”
“It’s as close as a non-clairvoyant can come to it, yes. Like an infrared image rendered into the visible spectrum,” Lucretius explained. “Now, look at the Ichor and tell me what you see, but look away the instant it becomes too much!”
Turning all my attention to the little orb in the specimen box, I saw that its emanations were not only far denser and more complex, but had a harsh dissonance to them that clashed jarringly with everything else. It fundamentally didn’t belong in our world. Every particle of its being was burned by the fabric of our reality, and its every particle burned back in return. As I read deeper, I began to visualize what I was reading, visualizations that soon became so vivid I was completely lost in them.
I saw a god become incarnate, manifesting himself into a colossal body of cold, alien flesh. I saw a head with a yawning and singular orifice, an orifice which I am compelled to describe as a god-shaped hole, a cyclopean sphere of holy light burning deep within it. A pair of fanged tentacles, flanked with prehensile tendrils and perforated with wheezing spiracles hung from his face down to his waist, and he was enshrouded with a medusa’s head of wriggling, semi-corporeal tentacles bursting out of his hunched back. He had seven spidery, clawed fingers split unevenly between each hand, and he stood upon a pair of theropod-like, digitigrade feet, with a semi-erect reptilian tail for balance.
The story I saw unfold was, at first, familiar. He was an angry god who had become disgusted with his own creation. Their decadence, their depravity, but worst of all was, of course, their hubris. His people had turned away from him, believing that not only did they no longer need their god, but that they no longer needed to fear him, either.
And so, he descended down to their world to wipe them out. Maybe he would spare a handful of repentant followers to revive their race, or maybe he would start from scratch, or maybe not even that. He was so full of rage and hellbent on Armageddon, I don’t think he even had a clear plan for what came after.
But this is where the story diverged from an Old Testament-style parable. When the colossus appeared on the sprawling bismuthine badlands beneath a vortex of airborne quicksilver, his people were ready for him, having perfectly prophesized the precise instant and location of his manifestation. Made in his own image, I beheld ten thousand tentacled thaumaturges chanting dreadful incantations in perfect unison, resonating with one another to increase their power ten thousand-fold.
Outraged further by their defiance and lack of repentance, the god howled a spell of instantaneous putrefaction at the magical army, only for it to be reflected back at him. The spell that was meant to lay waste to ten thousand wizards at ten thousand times their normal strength was still not enough to slay the god, but it was enough to leave him weakened and dazed. A thousand great ballistas of flawless spellcraft fired a thousand mighty spears of sanctified silver, each one hitting its target without fail. Each pierced a vein or artery, and the god’s Ichor gushed forth like a fountain. Each wound was still insignificant compared to the titanic scale of the thing, and once the god had regained his bearings, he charged forwards with the intent of simply flattening his apostates.
He managed only a single step before the ground gave way beneath his feet, and sunk waist-deep into the bismuthine soil like it was quicksand. The ballistas fired another volley, each spear succeeding in drawing out a little more Ichor.
On the rare occasions that the god had made himself incarnate to his people before, he would part with only a single ounce of his Ichor in exchange for a costly sacrifice. But there were millions of gallons of Ichor flowing in his veins, and now his followers meant to have it all.
The god brought down lightning from the quicksilver clouds to smote the infidels, but such a cliché tactic had been anticipated. The thunderbolts were drawn away by brazen lightning rods, which redirected the electrical discharges back towards the raging god. Another volley of spears penetrated his flesh, and now at last enough Ichor had been spilled to flow into the great spell circle that the thaumaturges had carved into the surrounding rock. The Ichor began to flow through the mote of its own accord, rendering the warding spell that the mages had been casting not only self-sustaining, but a thousand times stronger as well.
And it only grew stronger the more Ichor flowed into it.
There was a perceptible shift in the morale of the heretics, as this marked a clear tipping point in their favour. Despite their alleged hubris, they had not truly been confident that their defence would be successful. It had been a Hail Mary at the most, and at the least, it was a way not to go quietly into that good night. The was a great sense of betrayal among them at their god’s decision to wipe them out, and they would neither apologize for nor forsake their civilization just because their god was jealous. Rather than grovel on their knees before him, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with each other. Whatever flaws they had that their god had deemed so abominable, they also had a great ‘humanistic’ love for one another and a meritocratic pride in everything they had accomplished. They would defy god almighty, if only so that they could say they had not forsaken each other.
Now they found themselves locked in mortal combat with their god, and they were winning.
Cries of ‘no gods, no masters!’ rang out across the battlefield. Another volley of spears was fired, another round of stolen lightning unleashed. The ground shook with the agonized tremors of the trapped god, and yet he could not break free. Several hundred of the boldest and most powerful thaumaturges apparated onto the hide of their god, their claws digging into his flesh and the fangs at the end of their facial tentacles impaling his veins and extracting the precious Ichor for themselves. Each time the god swatted at them, they just apparated again and appeared somewhere else, maddening him with frustration.
While he was distracted, the thousands of other heretics flocked to the mote and lapped up their share of the Ichor, several pints each at least. Once they were empowered with the blood of their god, they began chanting a new incantation, one filled with self-righteous anger at the treachery of their creator. They slammed their tall sceptres into the ground, sending thunderous waves of sound through the soil, and luminescent beams of light through the air, each penetrating deep into the god’s flesh. As before, the more mages who joined in their ritual, the more powerful each became, ten thousand times ten thousand, and now ten thousand times again. They became stronger as their god grew weaker, and once the last drop of Ichor had been drained, they turned their heads skywards and converged all of their incorporeal tentacles into a single mammoth medusoid. It reached for an equally colossal scimitar forged by the Machine god, one of many cosmic weapons that littered the alien landscape from some long-ago Titanomachy, and pulled it free from the crystalline hill.
Holding the scimitar aloft took all the warlock assembly’s might, and so with one final war cry, one final curse, they brought it down upon their god, impaling his heart and pinning him to the ground.
Then the mummified, desiccated body of the god fell still and limp. The burning orb in his orifice exploded into a gentle snowfall of wisps, and everything went impossibly silent.
And then; rapture.
The thaumaturges all broke out into unrestrained ecstasy, weeping in joy, howling with relief or screaming in triumph. They hugged, they danced, they fell to their knees, all grateful just to be alive as they tried to process the fact that they now had so much more than that to be grateful for. They had faced Armageddon, and achieved apotheosis. They had slain their god, and now his powers were theirs to do with as they pleased. Immortality was theirs, the cosmos was theirs, and there was no longer anything to stand in their way.
God was dead, and they had killed him; they had the corpse to prove it.
I sat up with a sudden jolt as I was violently thrust back into reality. I had been laid out on a sofa by the fireplace, and sitting across from me were Lucretius and Charlie.
“I said to look away when it got too much,” Lucretius reminded me in a stern tone as he poured tea from an antique tea set, a tea set that contrasted ludicrously next to the pizza boxes I had put on the coffee table. “How are you feeling?”
“How am I feeling? If I had a nickel for every cyclopean cosmic entity I’ve come into contact with, I’d have two nickels; which isn’t a lot, but it’s still weird it’s happened twice!” I shouted facetiously, throwing myself back down onto the sofa and screaming into a cushion. “Tell me that wasn’t real!”
“Oh, it was real, Ms. Romero. Ichor doesn’t lie,” Lucretius said as he pensively held up the orb and examined it once again. “The god you saw, this is his solidified Ichor. His people got it by murdering him, and the Darlings got it by murdering one of them.”
“The Professor’s just speculating about that last part,” Charlie said as he passed me a cup of tea.
“Bloody Hell I’m speculating! Everything the Darlings have they owe to coldblooded murder!” Lucretius objected. “If the Darlings have made themselves an enemy of the race that made this orb, we could have a very serious problem on our hands. The last thing we need right now is to draw the attention of a god-slaying race of thaumaturgical planeswalkers. Not that I can think there’d ever be a better time for that, mind you.”
“Hold on. Hold on. What about that bug or whatever it is in the middle of the orb?” I asked as I reached for the cup and saucer that had been offered to me. “I didn’t see anything about that in my vision.”
“Hmmm. Neither did I,” Lucretius nodded in agreement. “I suspect that’s a secret this little nugget won’t part with as easily, which is why Erich sent it over to me. Did he happen to mention if I’m authorized to conduct destructive testing?”
“They both did. Ivy wants a full spectrum of tests run on that pupa. Do what you have to to get it out of there,” I replied.
“Brilliant!” he beamed as he snapped the specimen container shut and stuck it into his apron pocket. “Thank you so much for bringing this over, Ms. Romero. Go ahead and help yourself to another slice of pizza, if you like.”
“Pizza? How can you still be thinking about pizza after all that?” I asked in dismay.
“Stygian’s is good pizza,” was his nonchalant reply. “It’s not every day that divine revelation and gourmet pizza are delivered together, and if we were meant to take any sort of moral from that cosmogony, I’m pretty sure it was that we shouldn’t let even the mightiest of gods keep us from the things we love most about this world.”
Category:Gods
Category:Dreams/Sleep
Category:The Vesper's Bell