20,000,000 BC - No fucking clue where I was

848

There’s something strange about these orbs. Apart from the obvious, “They’re magical glowing rocks that can tear apart spacetime.” Ever since I started collecting them, I’ve been hearing whispers. Not from the orbs, but from inside myself, as though the orbs have been drawing them out. It was barely noticeable with the first orb, but getting the second has made them clearer.

They’ve been directing me to a certain place. At first, I resisted the compulsion, wanting to focus on finding more orbs. But they were so incessant, that eventually I just gave in. Which is how I ended up in the prehistoric past.

It would be useless to give a geographical location. Any modern locations are meaningless that far back. There were a lot of weird looking plants around the place. And weirder looking insects. Didn’t see any dinosaurs, unfortunately. Were dinosaurs around in 20,000,000 BC? Can’t remember. Not important. I might have been able to give a better explanation, had I not been paying almost exclusive attention to the enormous black pyramid that dominated the landscape.

Thing was huge. Mountain-huge. Thing looked a helluva lot like a gigantic version of the tomb I’d seen in Egypt. As with that tomb, two immense doors barred the entrance. As I approached, they noiselessly opened.

The inside resembled a temple. The evil sort of temple you’d expect out of Indiana Jones rip-offs. A dull green light illuminated the place, and an altar the size of a cruise ship was at the far end. Madly drawn murals covered the walls, depicting monsters and gods. Those murals seemed to draw me to them. Underneath each figure were strange symbols, and even though they weren’t in any human language, I could perfectly read each one. They were labels, naming the being depicted on the walls. Some of the creatures, I recognized from my previous fights. Read their names as I looked over the images.

There was Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Wood with a Thousand Young, a mass of tentacles, slime, gnashing mouths and goat legs. Then there was Yog-Sothoth, The Lurker at the Threshold, The Key and the Gate, The Beyond One, Opener of the Way, The All-in-One and the One-in-All; he knows the gate, he is the gate, he is the key and guardian of the gate, all of time is within Yog-Sothoth.…

Continued on past the murals. So many other names and beings. Ghatanotha, Thoth, Tsathoggua, Yig, Hastur… as I read more, I felt the throbbing pain in my head, growing by the moment. In a prominent position over the altar was a mural that looked as if it had been painted out of pure madness. It was impossible to discern any meaningful detail from the beast it depicted; looked almost as if someone had tried drawing a 12 dimensional being on a 2D surface using only primitive paints. Its name was Azathoth, the Daemon Satan, the Nuclear Chaos, the Blind Idiot God beyond angled space who dreamed the universe into existence…. He rests on his throne at the center of Chaos, where the whistles of his pipes echo throughout his black halls, and when he wakes his dream shall end and all our worlds will come crashing down.

But there was one other mural, directly beneath Azathoth. Unlike the others, it wasn’t perfectly preserved. Looked like something had deliberately tried to destroy any trace of its existence, tearing into the black stone wall and leaving deep gashes where its image had been. Its name had been struck out, leaving only a few symbols. “Nyar-” was all I could read; the rest was gone.

My headache spiked, and I almost collapsed under the pain. Something was screaming inside me, screaming to be let out, and… and….

I wasn’t alone in the temple. Looked back, and saw these… things… approaching me. They were formless, black and green gelatinous beasts, slithering across the floor toward me, acidic smile dripping off their sides. The pain in my head was growing worse by the moment, until-

“Kneel.” The word came out of my mouth, but it wasn’t my voice that said it. The beasts hesitated, and then slouched into the best bow jello monsters can do. The stone floor beneath me rose, and shaped itself into a throne. I sat down in the throne, and opened my mouth to speak again….

The headache was gone. The moment it left, the throne crumbled from underneath me, back into rocks. The beasts seemed to hesitate, then started charging again. Tried shooting them, but they absorbed the bullets without harm. Warped out of their path, and threw a grenade. The explosion caused them to splatter all over the floors and walls, but they reformed in seconds. Time to flee.

Ran for the door, and warped back to more present times. That was really, really weird. And not entirely all that productive. But the whispers, at least, are quieter now.

I-330