In her beginning, Sandra's dreams were normal: Drifting between radiant stars, soaking up their thoughts and messages, letting her mind be massaged by their bellowing voices and ideas, as they molded her into something that would bring about an end.
Tonight, she dreamt of nothing.
Not that she didn't dream, no, dreamless nights are impossible for someone who has gone through the same mind-bending revelations that she has. In this dream, there was nothing. No stars to comfort her, no bright lights to entertain herself with, no consciousness to anchor herself to. She was alone, adrift in her own headspace and space itself, and it terrified her.
Then she realized that she was barely anything. She couldn't feel her body, or her thoughts, or the squirming of her new self. All she had, all she was, was terror. She held onto this feeling, for she feared that letting go of it would be letting go of herself and losing everything in the void.
She held on for what felt like an eternity, but every rabid animal has its limits. She felt herself slipping eventually. The more she slipped, the more she felt the nothingness worm its way into what was left of her, making itself into a piece that fit into her whole. It moved around inside her remains, cutting away everything that wasn't her and itself, everything that should have already been left behind.
In a swift, terrible motion, the nothingness retreated from her, taking with it a five-sided mass of squirming tentacles and eyes and eldritch meaning. She looked at this new, yet familiar, thing, and felt a massive weight lift off of her. She felt like she could think, like she could actually exist in this space, but she felt so slow, like waking up from a particularly convincing dream.
The New Pentagram reached its tentacles towards her, but it was halted by the nothingness. It squirmed and raged and screamed into the void, but the nothingness turned it's tentacles to stone.
Off in the distance, barely perceptible, something new appeared in the void. A massive white thing, in a vaguely oblong shape, was moving - no - growing in their direction. She was unmoved by its presence, still unable to shake off the slowness from the extraction, but the New Pentagram raged all the harder the closer it got to them.
As the Thing moved towards them, Sandra noticed that it wasn't uniformly white, but a raving mess of colors, all that she knew and some that shouldn't be possible. It bubbled and seethed, and seemed to grow with purpose towards the New Pentagram. The Pentagram all but gave up as the Thing got closer.
The Thing lashed out with a vibrant tentacle, wrapping it around the Pentagram, and pulled it in with astonishing speed. The Pentagram tried to scream in some impossible sound as it was yanked in, but was cut off before anything could come out by the Thing's existence absorbing it.
The Thing got closer and closer to her, and she tried to resist as the Pentagram did, but she was similarly paralyzed.
The instant it was about to touch her, Sandra woke up. She felt like she couldn't think again. But this was normal, right? This was the price of her process.
She slid her arm from out from under her blanket to take a look at the tattoo on the back of her hand. A green starfish, legs splayed out like a pentacle with a blank eye in the center, stared back at her. It acted like a sort of charm, or a meditative idol for her to focus on and think.
In that moment, she could have sworn the starfish was … talking to her? No, this didn't sound anything like the stars that it brought to her. This was something else, something that wormed its way between her thoughts and her perception the same way the void had separated her from her terror. Something that was very interested in the five-sided mind possessed by the starfish and dipped into by those it enthralled.
The voice had a simple message.
“Help us help you. Help us kill it.”