The Island

[Charon]

This story, The Island, will be a fairly long mythos story set in the not-too-distant future involving the Fungi from Yuggoth and their fiendish uses for certain modern technologies. It does use some Mythos phrases. Any "Cthuvian" words are translated at the end for the benefit of the casual reader.

Prologue: Darkness

Little Red Riding-Hood, when in the street,
Why do I press your small hand when we meet?
Why, when you timidly offered your cheek,
Why did I sigh, and why didn't I speak?
Why, well: you see-if the truth must appear-
I'm not your grandmother, Riding-Hood, dear!
- Bret Harte, What The Wolf Really Said To Little Red Riding-Hood

It was dark. He did not mind the darkness (after all, he had known nothing but darkness for an unspeakably long time; he was amazed that he even remembered what light was at all), but it struck him as bizarre. For much of his second life he had known nothing, a dreamless sleep, endless, timeless, more like a coma than healthy human slumber. Sometimes he saw and heard, could even speak, but such times were rare. Because of his impossible age his brain was addled; he no longer remembered how old he was, what had happened to get him in his current miserable state, even though literally all he was physically able to do was think. He only understood a sort of deep, hot, primal fear before this.

What was he? He was not one of Them, but he was too old to be purely human. No one, no matter how healthy they were, could possibly survive to be as old as he now was. Yet he knew that he had been human, in some fashion, but remembered very little of the person he had once been. And he honestly did not have a reason to care. They did not like it when he thought. Through a combination of coercion and confinement They had all but erased the bulk of his memory. He resented Their treatment of them and his imprisonment, but was too tired to complain. Being a prisoner of Them did have its advantages. Immortality was a decent thing to have, at the price of being unaware of the state of things back home. Not that he knew where "home" was anymore.

It was in principle like hibernation; he had no sense of time in proper any more. Because it no longer affected him, and had no bearing on his existence, he did not care about it any more, just as They Themselves had no regard for temporal things. He was becoming more like Them, over time, subconsciously, than he thought. Like Them, he did not care for human feelings nor did he think about his own. Feelings were ancient vestiges of a useless, murky past. They would not help him, nor could they aid him in escaping his prison. Thus, he abandoned them, firstly the weaker ones and then the more deep-set ones, last of all the truly ancient, powerful ones such as fear and pain.

They were much the same. Their very evolution had done away with such things aeons ago, giving Them a cold, analytical eye and a purely scientific view of other organisms. He was not one of Them, however, he knew; he remembered having emotions but suppressed them and all knowlege of them for his own protection. They did not approve of emotions nor did they respect or have any concept of individual thought. Their own society was almost a sort of hive-mind, fitting for the type of beings that They were. Ah, yes, he had over the years gotten more than a glimpse at Their lives. Each of Them functioned only as a part of the whole, a cog in the great machine, so to speak. Only Their most important leaders were permitted to think fully independently and even then only under special circumstances.

Other species that lived under Them were either specimens, allies, or prisoners. Allies were granted a surprising amount of freedom, allowed to maintain free will and travel on strange journeys with Them in the outer regions of space. They treated Their allies with respect, almost as equals. Of course, allies sometimes ended up as specimens, used for experiments on the consciousnesses of other intelligent creatures. Prisoners, on the other hand, like he was, were little more than slaves, kept in storage areas, rigged to life-support systems to keep what little was left of them alive until they were needed for testing or occasionally slave labour.

He was one of the fortunate ones. Since his capture, he had not been taken out for experimentation once. They occasionally came to collect specimens and he saw them or overheard Their conversations, and as a result knew something of Their language, enough to understand that it was nothing like his native tongue. He had made a few ill-fated attempts to talk with Them in both his speech and theirs, only to be ignored or rebuked sharply, the latter usually accompanied by forcible removal from sensory systems. This was how They dealt with infractions for the most part. After long enough he learned to keep his tongue quiet, only faintly registering that the rest of his storage container was slowly but surely being emptied and Their speech more agitated.

Faintly, that is, until his luck ran dry and They returned to the chamber, this time for him. He understood most of their words, mentally translating snatches of what he understood.. He regarded the group at first with a detatched interest, a useful trait when dealing with Them, not uttering a word in protest or assent.

"...uncertain...unstable individual...cause problems...remember...an enemy..."

"...not enemy...mnahn'og...no trouble... has been conditioned...harmless...ideal choice..."

The head of one of Them flushed a vivid red. "Y'hah, gnaiih. It shall be done as you wish."

One of Them came forward, raising a gnarled claw, and carefully removed the container from the rack. His consciousness shut down and he fell into the comforting, beautiful dark...

When They worked, They worked quickly and cleanly and made no messes, as one would expect from Their bulk. Their movements were nimble and dextrous, bringing awe to the few remaining captives, even those who had seen the same operation or something like it performed many times before or even undergone such a thing themselves. There was simply nothing like it anywhere else; that They were able to do such terrible and wonderful things with surgery amazed and appalled them.

The creature before them stood lifeless, eyes vacant and dead, limbs hanging uselessly while the finishing touches were made. The last nerves were attached, the scaly skin stitched together, and the entity completely prepared for its new life. They approached, eagerly watching their handiwork with what could have been a perverse sort of affection, if They had any concept of affection.

Suddenly the thing's eyes flickered to life, its hands twitched. The inhabiting consciousness felt most peculiar, as if something fundamental about his reality had changed. He felt incredibly tired, realizing with a start that he was inside of a body again. He casually, without thinking, barely aware of the crowd of beings surrounding him, raised a hand to his eye to ensure that what he felt was the truth.

The hand was not soft and fleshy as human hands are accustomed to be, but hideous and warty, coated in pinkish armour. Instead of fingers he had ten wickedly hooked talons. He had a monster's hand, not his own.

He was now a monster himself.

He tried to scream, to convey the sorrow and rage that he now had the means to express. He failed even in that, for all that emerged from his misshapen larynx was a hideously inhuman, bestial howl.


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Notes:

The Cthuvian words are defined thus:

Mnahn'og - "worthless"

Y'hah - Literally "amen", used to give assent

Gnaiih - "father", I use it here to mean "authority figure" or "master"