I stood on shingles made of glass, on the precipice of a slanted roof, on top of a tall, petrified homestead that was itself on top of nothing at all. This building, one of hundreds like it, floated in the aether at the center of a storm, a roaring cyclone so fierce that I could not see past its spinning walls.

I felt better than I had in years. My face was clean. My aches were gone. My clothes were vibrant and whole. I therefore stood there with confidence in the face of my adversary. It held no true form here; its entirety was too great for me to truly comprehend and as such was limited by the medium of the battlefield we would fight on. Instead of undefinable terrors it took the shape of vague shadows and colossal shapes. It was monstrous, but I was the slayer of monsters.

The monster, the box, the Elder One inside it, was not willing to so easily surrender to me. It couldn’t simple overwhelm me for doing so would void our deal, but it was ready to fight and suppress my mind until I was as good as its puppet and little more. It could be said that I probably shouldn’t have taunted the new flatmate so much when I met it, but then again its family always had been unagreeable.

Whatever the case, it was time to defend myself from it. Right now.

I leapt off the roof moments before a shadow-covered arm crashed into it. The resulting explosion sent shards of glass and stone and wood flying everywhere, but mostly into the arm itself. I soared high in the air, gliding up and to the left, before landing on the side of another building, this one made from iron.

The creature was slow to respond. Slower than it should have been. It seemed surprised by the damage, however small, it had inflicted on itself. When it lifted its arm it left behind a puddle of viscous fluid and trailing wisps of shadow-stuff.

I searched for the essence. It was here. It could not hide, but was apt at misdirection.

I burst through an iron door to stand on the iron porch of the iron storefront. In my hand was an iron musket and behind me a pile of many identical weapons. Slowly, I took careful aim. I readied my arm and I fired carelessly towards the massive target. The musket let lose the roar of a cannon. A mortar. It whistled through the air as it soared towards the titan and where it struck exploded into a shower of water and light and pure concussive force.

I reached for another gun.

The monster knew where I was, there was no way it couldn’t know, but it was unable to move against the torrent of explosive force. Shadows ripped away from its body in huge chunks even as it was pushed backwards. Back away from the center of the calm and towards the wall of the maelstrom.

The monster thrashed, and it took a step back. It screamed and roared inhumanly, and it took a step back. It reached for a nearby structure, a clock-tower of twine and pewter, and it took a step back, and took the tower back with it.

In the next instant, in the fraction of a moment between the explosion of one cannon and the impact of the next, it hurled the tower. It threw the building backwards, behind it, into the storm.

The tower shattered on contact. Some of it was whipped up in the wall of the cyclone, spinning around on the barrier between madness and our battleground. Most of it simply passed through, becoming indistinct and, somehow, more foreign. I felt the impact more profoundly than if it had struck me. Suddenly a great shift was underway. The storm was no longer merely agitated but actively angry.

I had stopped shooting but the noise was still deafening as the hurricane began to howl. Mostly it was wind, but there was also something unsettling beneath that put me into a cold sweat when I heard it.

You are weak.

The creature, the box, the Eldritch Being that it contained, spoke into my head as it had before. Here, it seemed to come from everywhere around me as well as inside, echoing off the cylindrical walls of the storm around us.

You think yourself above your kind, but you are no less insignificant.

“I don’t just think it!”

The shadows that it hemorrhaged before now once more rushed and swarmed the air around it. They seemed thicker and darker than ever. Beneath them its vague flesh seemed unmarred from my attack.

The only difference is your ability to separate this small fragment of functionality from the broken wasteland that is your mind.

The abomination reached, impossibly far, and placed one great hand over the top of my Armory. Snapped for a moment out of my stupor, I raised the rifle I still held and fired into its wrist. Or at least that’s what I tried to do. When I pulled the trigger only a thin stream of force was produced whereas it had been a river before.

Without thinking I hurled myself off of the iron house just before the massive arm threw it, too, into the maelstrom.

Just as the last, this blow shook the battlefield and stunned me to the core. It was a pattern that could easily have gone on until I ran out of platforms and was caught. If the shadow creature cared about tactics it certainly would have done just that. Fortunately, it was for the moment too absorbed in taunting me to keep track of my movements.

When I am finished, whatever spectre remains of you within this vessel will pray for the kind grace of Cthylla!

Oh no

When it said that word, that name, it was the same as a thousand constructs all being smashed within the storm at once. The whirlwind shrieked and roared, becoming erratic and unstable, while sketching characters, etched into the very fabric of the medium, that spelled out that unpronounceable name.

CTHYLLA

One word. One terrible, unforgettable word, and suddenly everything changed. What had once been a well-lit circle of clarity was now murky with shadows and lit as if by torchlight. The once pristine buildings, when in the pure light that now only occasionally passed, where still much the same as before, but grimy and used outside of it and even pillaged within the darkest shaded tendrils that now polluted this place.

The foreign invader swelled with strength in this new battlefield and yet also became less. Its gathered cloak of shadows grew but the hidden monster within, already indistinct, seemed to shrink against the force it had unleashed.

My own body became pale and splotched and covered in oily-dirt. Even as I felt my strength surge I also felt deep, worrying aches. Even as my vision crystallized into unnatural clarity, I felt a stabbing headache form just behind those god-gifted eyes.

And worst of all, the walls were closing in.

If the battlefield was within the eye of a storm, then the storm now grew fiercer, while the eye narrowed and waned. The impenetrable walls of wind and madness that surrounded us were closing in.

“You’ve made a terrible mistake, beast from the box.” My voice was barely more than a whisper. It was totally obscured by the howling winds. “You shouldn’t have…I threw away my sanity a long time ago, I thought.”

Neither of us moved. We were both too weak from the sudden shift, still adjusting to the changes. Its shadows were growing darker, and more monstrous. So were mine.

“WHY DID YOU CALL HER NAME!?”

My vision split and I was on top of a broken water tower, only it wasn’t filled with water. I looked at myself on a lead balcony as I looked at the shadows as they swelled and contorted while the monster tried to wrestle control back from insanity.

“I can’t even cry anymore…she took that away, though I didn’t know at the time.”

A rogue arm of shadow struck me on the balcony as I watched. My vision split and I watched from two new vantage points even as the battlefield screamed from the impact. What was a little more noise in my head?

Not enough for the creature. It futilely added its own pained roar to the tearing wind. It felt the damage too now. It could no longer control its inky mantle.

The laughter though? That was me. I didn’t know why I was laughing, but I definitely was. A lot. All of me. All of the mes on the battlefield.

I felt as I detonated beneath me, standing on the tower. It toppled forward and towards the immobile, pulsing mass.

BOOM!

Lightning cracked the sky, a flash of light followed by an afterimage that was burnt into the fabric of the medium. I watched that new tear in the sky from the deck of a petrified ship as I plunged into the monster on top of the flaming tower.

This time, its scream wasn’t futile. As I burnt in the fuel of the tower, so did it. As we burnt we screamed and I felt it – deeply – even from all of the fractured mes. Its shadows burnt and dispersed in the flames. Its screams aflame with agony, its exposed body fought and tore and rolled and thrashed and shredded.

And it was caught in the maelstrom.

The eye was still closing and the monster was immobile. Had been immobile. Now the whole wall was burning in every different colour as it was torn apart within it, becoming yet another layer to the cyclone’s constant screams.

That was it, I had won.

And I was still here.

The walls still burnt as I looked at them from half a dozen vantage points. They still closed in and soon the last functioning haven of my mind would be lost within the gale.

I took a deep breath. I sighed. I tried to cry tears I did not have. I screamed and pouted and swore. I tried to pull myselves back together and, much to my surprise, was successful.

“I guess I was lying to myself after all.” My voice was melancholy. The creature was within the storms, but the shadows still remained. While hiding from the cinders they gathered to form a rough circle me. I really didn’t know whether they meant to attack me or protect me, like they had the beast. They would probably do both.

“My intentions haven’t changed, though.” They grew a little darker. “Only my qualifications to follow through on them.”

The walls were so close now. Hardly any space remained within the eye. It was so dark. The storm rained thick something or other on me.

“I’ll miss it, you know?” The oily torrent soaked me to the bone and burnt hot like coals, though it quietly grew cool as the shadows soaked up the heat from it. “I don’t regret my choices, not really. Just…”

The light was gone.

”Just…”

I wish I could have stayed me a little longer

The storm parted and I looked upon the landscape that was me.

- - -

She awoke in a crater. The bombshell had demolished the basement she’d been sleeping in for how many years, but left her untouched. The city was black, with curtains drawn in every window and the only light coming from distant strips of burning London like the one she woke up in. She could hear the bombers high above as they banked and turned for the trip across the strait.

She felt strange. Different. Better.

She knew she could be far stronger, yes. But for now she was free of her petty prisons and had eternity to reclaim all that she was. She could wait a little while.