#eldritch god

Bonus: a while ago my partner said “He’s got a bird crevice for his boobs!” and proceeded to send me this homemade collage:

The neon sign of the diner flickered in a sporadic rhythm, bleeding a harsh red light over the linoleum.

Behind the counter, the lone barista was hunched over, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes as a sudden, blinding migraine threatened to split her skull.

You took a slow sip of your lukewarm coffee. Across from you sat your adoring fiancé.

To the untrained eye, it looked like a man in his late twenties wearing a rumpled overcoat. But if anyone looked longer than a second, their mind would begin to reject the image.

The skin of its face was too smooth, lacking pores, possessing the faint, brittle sheen of cooling wax. When it blinked, its eyelids didn't move top-to-bottom; a pale, nictitating membrane snapped horizontally across its unblinking irises. Beneath the table, you could hear the sickening crunch of shifting cartilage as its knees occasionally bent the wrong way, correcting themselves only when it noticed you staring.

It didn’t breathe in a rhythm; its chest only rose when it remembered that humans required oxygen, resulting in sudden, ragged gasps. When it blinked, the eyelids dragged just a fraction of a second too slow. Every time it spoke, its jaw would slide forward a fraction of an inch too far, revealing a mouthful of teeth that were too numerous and constantly shifting position like a slow-moving puzzle.

The hair on your arms constantly stood on end whenever it was around. Every instinct in your brain screaming at you to run.

But you never did.

Warring perfectly with that sheer, existential dread was a profound, intoxicating euphoria.

Your soul hummed in its presence.

A deep, gravitational warmth would bloom in your chest, a biological recognition of the cosmic entity that had claimed you.

​"This form is an insult to our union," the counterfeit man murmured. It stared at its hands, its extra finger joints twitching in a rhythm that matched the erratic flickering of the neon sign outside. "To fold myself small enough to sit on this... vinyl. To speak to you in these primitive, linear sounds. It is degrading."

​"I know it's a tight fit," you reasoned, adjusting your posture. "But you're handling it beautifully. Just keep your shadow on your side of the booth, please. It's starting to eat the wallpaper."

​It leaned in, the air pressure in the diner dropping so fast your ears instantly popped. The shadow behind it didn't mimic its posture; instead, it reached out with a dozen ink-black tendrils, caressing the edges of your own silhouette on the wall.

​"Come back to the dark with me," it pleaded, its voices blending into a tone of raw, domestic yearning—like a spouse asking their partner to finally come to bed. "Let me peel you out of this fragile cage of meat and bone. We can be whole again. The void is cold without you."

​You sighed, staring down into your lukewarm coffee.

Three months ago, under particular circumstances, your heart had stopped for exactly three minutes. In that short death, your consciousness hadn't gone to heaven or hell.

It had brushed against It. For three minutes, you were married to infinity. You were everywhere and nowhere, woven into a tapestry of stars and dark matter.

Then, the defibrillator hit.

​"We've been over this," you said, using the exact same tone you used when negotiating chores. "I'm not committing suicide today. I have commitments. I have a family, a job, a presentation on Thursday morning that I spent all week preparing for. Eternity can wait a few decades."

​The meat suit's expression twisted into a terrifying, asymmetrical grimace, its facial muscles failing to pull evenly as it struggled to process the concept of indoor botany.

"Plants?" it repeated, the layered voices carrying a note of genuine, offended disbelief. "You are prioritizing photosynthetic organisms and a Thursday deadline over eternity?"

"I am," you said, leaning back. "It's called having a routine."

"It is a delusion," it hissed, the waxen skin around its knuckles splitting open to reveal a localized vacuum of pure, absolute darkness instead of blood. "You belong woven into my fabric. You were woven into it, until those dirty thieves intervened."

"Are we talking about the paramedics again?"

"They stole my ribs," the pilot of the skin insisted, its voice dropping an octave. The air temperature in the booth plummeted ten degrees, and a thick layer of frost began to spiderweb across the window beside you. "They breached my domain, tore you from my grasp, and dragged you back into the dirt."

"They saved my life, love," you corrected mildly. You went to sipon your coffee but stopped; the surface had frozen over into a thin, brittle sheet of black ice.

"They infected me with a disease!" It's voice briefly tore past its human modulation, vibrating at a frequency that shattered a nearby sugar shaker into a neat pile of white dust.

You flinched, wincing as a sharp spike of pressure hit your temples.

Instantly, it corrected. The frost stopped crawling. The crushing gravity vanished into thin air.

The terrifying, reality-warping abomination abruptly shrank back into its seat, looking utterly stricken by the realization that it had caused you discomfort.

​"I am sorry," the ancient thing whispered, its jaw clicking back into its correct alignment. It clumsily slid its hand across the table, stopping just short of yours, its extra joints twitching with an anxiety that felt entirely too human.

​When you didn't pull away, it brushed its waxy fingertips against your knuckles. The contact instantly absorbed the pain, sending a soothing wave of cosmic euphoria straight to your temples to mute the migraine.

"I did not mean to raise my frequency. It is just... you do not understand the agony of this. Before we met in the dark, I simply was. There was no waiting."

You looked down at its hand, your thumb gently stroking the cold, stiff knuckles it had built just to look at you.

You felt terrible. You truly did.

"I want to finish being human," you said softly. "It’s messy, and it’s short, but I’ve built a life here. Think about it logically. You are eternal. What is forty or fifty years to you?"

"It is an eternity of bleeding," it murmured.

"But it’s a blink of an eye in the grand scheme," you reasoned. "People say 'until death do us part'. But for us, death is just the beginning. I promise you, when this body naturally gives out, I am yours."

The entity was silent.

It stared at you, its unnervingly bright eyes searching your face for any trace of deceit. The silence stretched, heavy and profound, as the being weighed the agony of waiting against the absolute terror of upsetting its beloved mortal.

Finally, the stiff shoulders of the shell slumped.

​"I loathe this prison," it finally spoke. "But I loathe the distance more..."

You closed the remaining distance, threading your warm fingers through its shifting, misshapen ones.

​"So we have a deal?" you asked.

It gripped you back instantly—a freezing, solid, and entirely unyielding hold. Pure, static bliss flared up your arm, anchoring you to the entity as the layered voices murmured in unison, "Only if I am permitted to watch."

​"Watch what?"

​"Everything," the layered voices murmured. "I will sit on your fragile chairs. I will accompany you to this presentation. I will watch you grow old, wrinkle, and decay. If I must endure this horrific thing called Time, I will count every second of it right next to you."

​"Deal," you said, a soft smile finally breaking through your exhaustion. "But if you're coming back to my apartment, we're going to have to find you a human name."

"You have forgotten me," your unearthly partner accused, the air pressure dropping. "You have forgotten the sound of my true self."

"​I haven't forgotten," you corrected mildly, "I remember it perfectly, but it’s a bit of a choking hazard on these vocal cords."

It stared at you, the terrifying intensity fading back into that stricken, adoring gaze. "What will you call me?"