Page 16 of Dark Stars

They set to work exploring, but nearly an hour later, all they had turned up was a whole lot of nothing. Bobby huffed.

"This is frustrating. What could possibly hide themselves so fucking thoroughly?"

"Break the altar and see what happens?"

"Stand back,"

Bobby said as he turned his full attention to the altar.

It truly was beautiful, in a dark and twisting way, like fresh blood reflecting moonlight, or vultures sitting in a tree waiting patiently. Black as night, shot through with bands of silver and gold and faintly glowing white. No earthly marble, but drawn from a place no map would ever mark, no traveler would ever find.

He could feel the touch of every hand to ever rest on it, every prayer cast, every fallen tear, every drop of blood spilled.

So easy. It would be so very easy to take the worship, consume it, grow more powerful, seek out more and more and more. Grow in power like his relatives.

Leave behind all that he cared about, because it would no longer appeal to him, not like the might and power of the Endless Dark. No more books. No more tres leche and coffee and ice cream. No more teasing his best friends. No more mysteries to solve. No more Alejo, not the way they were now, and that hurt the most.

So he summoned his power, releasing much of his human form to do it, reaching out dark and twisting tendrils to wrap around the altar and squeezed. He screamed with the effort, a sound that reverberated across planes, fireflies flocking to him in support, filling the black clearing with more light than should be possible.

The crack was like a hundred thunderstorms compressed to a single sound, and the altar fell to the ground in two large pieces, smaller bits of rubble scattering around them.

Bobby shrank back down to his human form and fell to his knees, hands braced in the damp earth to keep him from face-planting entirely. His chest heaved with the effort to draw proper breaths, sweat glistening and dripping, limbs trembling with exhaustion.

And power. All the power that had remained in the altar flowed into him, like water rushing downhill. Lovely, delicious power. Clawing at the dirt, Bobby pushed himself to his feet. He could hear Alejo calling his name, the fear and worry in his voice, but he could only focus on this one thing right now. Lifting his hands, spread wide, palms up as though in supplication or offering, he intoned, "I, Ctheldush, gift this power, rightfully mine, to Cythlla, the Secret One, as a show of my love and loyalty."

The power drained from him slowly, and for a moment he could hear his mother's voice, a cry from the deep and dark, like a flickering light at the bottom of the ocean.

Then it was gone, and he was back to being simply Bobby—and fell forward, exhausted and weak, into Alejo's arms, out cold.

He stirred moments later, head on Alejo's lap, staring up at the black trees that surrounded the makeshift shrine someone had made on his behalf.

"Well, that was interesting."

Alejo gave a wobbly laugh.

"Interesting is one word for it, you stupid jerk. You could have warned me that breaking the altar would cause you to collapse dramatically."

"Didn't think it would be that bad."

Bobby slowly pushed himself upright, helped by Alejo. Thankfully, other than the barest bit of vertigo that quickly settled, he felt fine. Well, exhausted, but that was to be expected. He looked across the clearing at the broken altar, which was already beginning to turn gray. Within a few days, it would gray entirely and collapse into dust that would be scattered by the wind. Nothing would remain of the altar built in his name that the dark had kept hidden from him.

Pushing to his feet, Bobby stretched and yawned.

"Did anything happen while I was out?"

"This appeared in the rubble, and there was some music for a little while. Really faint, could barely hear it."

"Music?"

His hand dropped in the process of taking the small, black box Alejo had held out. Ice ran down his spine.

"What kind of music?"

"I— It was really faint, like I said. Thought I was imagining it—"

"What kind!"

Bobby said urgently.

"A flute, I think?"

Bobby was going to throw up.

"We need to go."

He didn't wait for Alejo's reply, simply wrapped arms around him and took them back to his house.

Where he stumbled over to the bed and dropped heavily, sick and cold and terrified.

Alejo sat next to him, still clutching the black box.

"What's wrong? I've never seen you look scared. Granted, I haven't known you long, but my impression is that you primordial types don't really know what fear is."

Laughing despite himself, Bobby said, "You're not wrong. It takes a lot to scare me."

"So what has?"

Alejo asked quietly.

"The Deep Dark,"

Bobby said, raking a hand through his hair.

"Be grateful you could barely hear it, that the strains of a flute were not clearer—and that there were no drums. 'The muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes'. The sounds of a place no mind can conceive, where Sleeping Chaos feeds on the dead ends of time and space."

He drew a deep breath and let it out on a shuddery sigh.

"My quadrice-great grandfather, Azathoth, Primordial Demiurge and Lord of All."

Alejo was silent a moment before saying, "That sounds ominous."

Bobby gave a cracked laugh.

"It's a lot more than ominous. They shouldn't be involved in any of this. It's like a blue whale playing with a marble. Why would they need the power that comes from my worshippers? It makes no sense."

Movement drew his attention, and he looked up to see Harold and Jones filling the doorway. Jones quirked a brow.

"You look like an ordinary human who saw a ghost."

"Is that how it feels? Huh. I don't like it."

Bobby quickly explained all that had transpired, and by the end of it, Harold and Jones looked as miserable as him.

"I need those files you showed me when this whole mess began,"

Bobby said.

"The one with the bad rune work especially."

"Take me to my house, I'll grab'em."

Bobby nodded, kissed Alejo, then rose and took Harold's arm.

They appeared in front of his house, and Bobby greeted the cats while he waited for Harold to grab the files.

Back at his home minutes later, he took the files and spread them out, frowning as he read them in a new light. It didn't take long, but he felt a million years older as he finished.

"I'm a fool. A careless, arrogant fool. It was right in front of me the whole fucking time."

"What?"

Alejo asked, holding out a cup of coffee that Bobby took gratefully.

He waved a hand at the files.

"Mysterious, laughably bad runes; above them sticks dangling; bodies buried in the middle of the circle. A woman and, more significantly, her cat go missing under strange circumstances. Animals sucked dry, as if by a thousand tiny mouths."

Jones frowned.

"But you'd know if there were dark workings in your territory."

"Not if that dark working was broken up into tiny, innocuous pieces. Like half the runes drawn in the ground, little more than gibberish, the other half drawn in the air, sticks hanging from trees, but from the right angle on the right plane, come together to form…"

He sketched quickly in the air, runes written in yellow-green light, stopping before he finished the circle.

"Part of a casting to siphon power, taken from one primordial and given to another. This is only part of the whole casting, though. You said you got them all, right? There should have been thirteen in total."

"Yeah, we found and destroyed thirteen all right. I bet if I mapped them they'd form a pattern. Never bothered to look at that, didn't matter as we thought the arcana was bogus nonsense. Shit."

Harold scrubbed his hands over his face.

"We're all fucking idiots."

"Goddammit,"

Jones said, sitting down heavily in one of the chairs.

"What does the cat have to do with all this? I know they're powerful in their own right, but in all my years, I never learned the finer points."

"Cats are…residuals. When you build a house—nailing, sawing, painting, whatever—there's sawdust, and paint splatters, bent nails that had to be discarded. Residuals. Most of them get cleaned up and thrown out, no sign remaining. But there's always a speck of dust, a tiny drop of paint… that's cats. They're the residuals of the building of the universe. The sawdust of dark stars, the paint splatters of birthed suns. They can see across planes when they are so inclined. Some are more powerful than others. The very oldest cats are older than me, and their children, while less powerful than those original, always have some measure of power. Easily exploitable power, to fuel secret workings."

"Someone killed a cat to fuel arcana?"

"Probably just drained its primordial essence, leaving it feeling as ordinary as people think it is. The cat won't care. It can get the power back if it feels like it. But that would be significant power to the spell. The drained animals were for blood to cast the lines to connect the various rune circles. And at their center, the altar I destroyed. Shit, shit, shit."

Alejo stared at them, eyes wide, and shook his head.

"What does all of this mean? Why is he siphoning your power? What will happen because of the altar being broken? I don't understand what's going on at all."

Bobby pulled Alejo down to sit on his lap and kissed him softly.

"I'm sorry, I'm not trying to leave you confused and all. Just overwhelmed and panicky. Imagine you learn that your neighbor has been stealing your electricity. Not a big deal, you can afford it, but the point is it’s yours and they didn't ask or anything. So you severed the connection, and now your neighbor doesn't have the electricity or internet or anything else he had because of the theft. Now imagine that neighbor is angry, violent, unpredictable, and thinks you're no more significant than a grain of sand is to a blue whale."

"A grain of sand worth stealing from,"

Alejo replied.

"So you've pissed off a relative who's a primordial psychopath slash serial killer, basically."

"Basically,"

Jones echoed.

"We need to find and destroy all the runes before something more comes through to discipline you and restore the siphon."

"I know where all thirteen in this area are,"

Harold said.

"They were already wiped, but I'll make damned certain of it."

"I'll go hunt down the thirteen around Marsh,"

Bobby said.

"Now that I know what to look for, it should be an easy matter. I don't think they'd have made more than two rings, it would start to draw serious attention at three or more."

Alejo gave him a look Bobby already recognized as Stubborn.

"I'm going with you."

"It won't be safe. They could send any number of creatures at me."

"You can whisk us away if it comes to that, but you should have support. What if you pass out again?"

"You left that part out,"

Harold said.

"Was breaking the altar that taxing?"

"The marble itself is thousands of times stronger than anything you'll find on this planet, or even in this galaxy. It was the power that made the breaking difficult, though. That altar has seen a great deal of offerings. I suspect it's not the first time it's been used this way, and that history of worship only made it stronger and stronger."

Bobby rubbed at his temples.

"I thought I was going to deal with a bunch of stupid cultists, not piss off the Deep Dark itself."

"Why would something like that want your power?"

Jones asked.

Alejo laughed.

"Because it's new and young and different. If they really are that old, that ancient, then nothing is new or different. They've seen everything a thousand-fold. Then along comes a great-great-great-great grandson who is half-human, half-primordial, who commands light. That's unusual, right? Dark stars, primordial dark, the Deep Dark…there's definitely a theme with your family. Except you."

"Except me,"

Bobby repeated softly.

"Something new, something strange, a power even the Daemon Sultan himself does not possess."

"Surely you can't be the first human halfling,"

Harold said.

Bobby shrugged.

"I am, though, so far as I know. Sure, my relatives will fuck their worshippers, but any spawn they birth they usually wind up eating or giving to others to consume in one way or another. You don't appreciate just how out of character it was of my mother to fall in love with my father and bear his child, let that child grow and become part of the family. I've always been the black sheep in my mother's family, but I didn't think I was so unique as to draw the attention of the Lord of All himself."

"I don't think it's all that different than crazy people who like, bathe in the blood of virgins to maintain their youth, that kind of thing. Young, fresh, unique power bound to light, the antithesis of all that your family is,"

Jones said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, I could see it. So we gotta stop the siphoning and appease your however many times great granddaddy."

He sighed.

"Easy as pie."

"I wish,"

Bobby said with a laugh, but he felt a bit better despite all that was now weighing on them. They had a plan, he had something he could do.

"I need to rejuvenate; breaking that altar really did take it out of me, and I gave all the power from it to my mother."

"Oh!"

Alejo said, squirming out of his lap and practically lunging for the counter.

"You never opened the box! It appeared between the broken pieces of the altar just after you passed out."

Bobby blinked at the box as Alejo placed it in his hands. It gleamed dully, like moonlight under a thick veil. It shielded whatever was inside, but he could feel a thrum of power.

Carved into the front of the box, not visible to ordinary eyes, was a sigil of a many-tentacled beast, each tentacle lined with barbs that were so venomous, a single drop could kill an entire city. "Mother…"

he said softly.

The box opened at the front from the bottom, flipped up and all the way back, the sides falling down too, leaving the contents fully bared. Said contents proved to be a single glass bottle, wide at the base with a thin neck, small enough to just fit into the palm of his hand.

Inside the bottle was a dark purple substance, faintly shimmering, with the tiniest specs of something suspended in the liquid. "Mother…"

he said again, softer than ever.

"Thank you."

"What is it?"

Alejo asked.

"Venom of the Secret Daughter,"

Harold said, voice trembling ever so faintly.

"One of the most sought-after components in arcana and alchemy in the world. People would literally destroy entire countries for just a third of what's in that bottle."

"Jeez,"

Alejo said.

"So it's a big fucking deal she gave you some?"

"My mother has the gift of prescience, like much of her kind, and while it's seldom enough to move her one way or another, she must have decided to help me in appreciation of my gifts—my power to her, and the Milk to Cthulhu."

"So she knew all of this was going to happen?"

Alejo asked.

"Not that simple."

Bobby tucked the bottle away in the pocket of his jacket.

"Prescience isn't seeing the future so much as seeing all, or at least most, possible futures."

"Prescience is being given a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, but you see all the choices all at once,"

Harold said.

"Would give me a fucking psychotic break, but for primordial beings, it's no different than admiring a landscape."

"So my mother saw a lot of this happening, yes, and when I made the choices of gifting, instead of whatever other choices I might have made, she rewarded me. I can only assume I'll need this poison at some point."

Between this and the gift from his grandfather, he had more power than ever, and he'd gained it by giving power away.

He rolled his shoulders and neck.

"Time to get to work I guess. Want to work clockwise or counterclockwise, my sweet?"

Alejo rolled his eyes while the other two chuckled.

"Counterclockwise,"

Alejo replied, "if it's so vitally important."

Bobby grinned.

"Back to Marsh we go. After this, hopefully we don't have to so much as look at the place for a long time."

"Stay out of trouble,"

Harold said.

"Or at least pretend to try."

"One of those,"

Bobby said, and then vanished him and Alejo away.