Dear Diary
She stopped writing. It wasn’t that the world around her seemed to be holding its breath as she scratched the strange pen across the even stranger page.
More like the world had stopped breathing altogether, like, hours ago.
The basement those robed fucks had thrown her into was dim, airless and hot.
The only noise was the scratch of pen on paper and the electric crackle of the single bare lightbulb overhead.
The eerie murmur of her captives’ conversation had long since faded into nothing. Back before her throat hurt from screaming.
But not before she’d heard enough to know their plans for her.
Plans that made her skin chill and her heart throb in her throat. Plans that made no sense. Plans that couldn’t be real, except none of this could be real, but it was, so that left her—where?
In a dark airless basement. She glanced around, as though any of it might have changed since she was locked in here.
Single flickering lightbulb hanging from a wire that looked like it was just waiting to break.
Concrete floor. Steel shelves bolted to three walls, stuffed with disintegrating cardboard filing boxes, some with strange fluids oozing from them.
Steel cage bolted to the fourth wall. Steel cage she was locked inside, mouth-breathing so that she didn’t have to find out if those strange fluids had a smell.
The only exit was through the ceiling. A trapdoor with a fold-down ladder. A trapdoor with no handle on this side even if she had any way out of the cage, so change that from ‘only exit’ to ‘no exit’.
It didn’t seem real. Even with how her head and hands hurt, and her knees where they’d dragged her over the concrete, and the rawness in her throat from screaming, it didn’t seem like any of this could really be happening.
Maybe that was why, when her first couple hours of screaming and banging on the bars had only resulted in this old book falling off a shelf and onto her already-aching skull, she’d clung onto it instead of hurling it at the trapdoor.
Because the book was the most unreal thing of everything so far.
And if it was real—and it certainly felt real, with the damp soft leather of its cover that seemed to want her fingers to plunge into it, and the pages that felt sometimes like bone and sometimes like skin, and always left a crumbling sheen on her fingertips—if it was real, then all the rest of this ridiculous fucking day must have been real, too.
She sniffed wetly, then hated that she’d sniffed, then glared down at the book through watering eyes.
Well. Frankly, if the fuckers who’d thrown her down here didn’t want her to vandalize their shit, they should have tidied it away better, shouldn’t they?
The book had a pen—a crabbed, claw-like stylus.
The ink that seeped from it when she dragged it over the paper was a dull grey that was somehow more unnerving than, for example, blood red.
Maybe that was why she’d used her swoopiest handwriting and written what in any other circumstances would be the most unserious nonsense.
In these circumstances? It was the truth.
Dear Diary, she wrote. I asked my boyfriend if he’d like to try pegging, and he handed me over to a cult to be sacrificed to an ancient god?!!
Somewhere far away, light pierced a darkness that had lain untouched so long the creature hidden within it had almost lost its fear of it.
In these depths—in the worshipful pit, in the god’s sacred place of rest—light only meant one thing.
Dread pooled in limbs that had forgotten they were limbs, unilluminated in the dark; it spiralled through lungs that breathed, now, for the first time in millennia, and breathed with ribs tightening around them.
The god had thought it was forgotten, for so long that it had forgotten itself.
Now it remembered.
Chains clanked in the gloom, the stained wrought gold reflecting the moonfire words that blazed from the obsidian wall. The priests’ wall, where the god’s keepers made their wishes and intentions known.
The god rose slowly, the light hurting eyes that it did, after all, still have, in painful multitudes, and stared with a desolate acceptance up at the prayer.
And blinked.
The script was unfamiliar. The words—the words were not in any language the god knew, but by virtue of the priests’ magic, it understood them.
Dear Diary
What was Diary? Who was Diary? Was this a new name its priests had constructed for it—they, who had always wrapped their blood-soaked prayers in far more gilded terms?
And—
It read on, and its confusion grew.
What was pegging?
Seriously. SERIOUSLY. That was all it took? It’s not like I haven’t done things for him, you know? But I’m not even allowed to ASK??? It’s our six-month anniversary and he’s celebrating by handing me over to a pack of weirdos in creepy robes???
In as much as the god was able to make any expression, on a face that had not moved for centuries, it frowned.
This was… not the sort of message its priests usually communicated.
Whatever. I don’t even know why I’m writing all this down.
Probably because it’s that or scream--oh wait, I already screamed a ton and look how it got me nowhere.
Might as well mess with their shit if they’re going to kill me anyway, right?
Sorry about using your ancient tome as a diary, assholes, but it’s not like you left me anything else to do down here.
Hey, if magic is real, maybe I can use this to summon a demon or something to help me. Hello? Demons? Need your help right here, please. Or maybe a friendly ghost? There a friendly ghost in this creepy book who’d like to come out and help me escape this bullshit?
The god lifted its arm. It extended one cramped, skeletal finger.
Stupid. I know it’s stupid. Look, everything I write just disappears anyway. It’s not going to make any difference. Can’t even deface a creepy artefact. God, I—
It pressed one finger to the blazing letters. It didn’t hurt; the strange new priest’s words didn’t feel like anything except cold, hard obsidian glass.
And yet it had spent so many hundreds of years cringing from the words that piled up around it on this unscalable wall, as though they were what hurt it.
The god let its finger drop, and its claw scraped across the black glass, leaving searing smoke-filled red in its wake.
The moonfire words stopped, halfway through a word the god had been too distracted to read, and then—
Where did that come from?
Another pause. Then, not a word, but an arrow and a circle, to where the god’s finger still hovered in front of the mark it had made—the mark that disappeared as quickly as it appeared, sinking into the glassy black.
Am I seeing things? What did that?
The god stared.
There must have been a time when it scraped at the priests’ words, to remove them, to make them not real—but it could not remember.
It reached up again, and wrote in the same language the priest used:
I DID.
It wrote carefully, the words crabbed and awkward.
holy shit there is a ghost in this book. save me ghost.
THERE ARE NO GHOSTS, the god wrote, and wondered how true that was. It was not a ghost—that was true. Even with everything the priests used to do—there had never been any ghosts, down here.
Perhaps the ghosts had stayed up where there was light.
oh god ok
you’re real though?
This, the god could answer. YES, it wrote.
can you help me?
The god peered up through the shadows. The moonfire letters blazed up, up to where the other light always appeared, the blinding white mouth—but it was not there now. There was only darkness above.
WHAT ARE YOU ASKING FOR? it asked, wondering if its uncertainty bled through into the words.
I don’t know. A way out? A magic spell? All of this not to have happened?
Except if it hadn’t happened I guess I’d still be with him and he’d still be the same guy who sold me out to these weird cult freaks and I wouldn’t know it, so I would be going on like normal and then any day I might say something or he gets bored and then this all happens again so
The words stopped with a suddenness that made the god stop breathing.
I hear something
The god stilled, as though it could hear it, too. But its altar was silent.
A sudden thought, more horrifying than the light, crept beneath its skin.
ESCAPE, it wrote, inscribing the text so deeply its claw cracked on the obsidian wall, wishing its own words had the same power as the prayers the priests had forced on it long ago. FREE YOURSELF. DO NOT LET THEM TAKE YOU TO—
To where? It didn’t know. It didn’t know what the blinding white mouth of light looked like from the other side; it didn’t know what happened to the people the priests brought to it. All it ever heard of them were their screams.
All it ever saw, or felt, was their blood, a red flood that washed away the glowing prayers and wove power from the shadows of the god’s form.
DO NOT LET THEM TAKE YOU, it wrote again, and again.
Its words vanished, blue fire sinking into the impenetrable black.
There was no reply.
The god retreated into the centre of the round space that was all it knew, its sacred altar, its tomb, and waited. There was no reply. But there was no light, either.
No screaming.
No blood.
The god’s new priest was silent. Also—a first—the god’s new priest was captive, somewhere.
And yet not, perhaps, captive here.
It should have been relieved. It had been so long since the god’s priests called upon its power. It thought itself forgotten, and to be forgotten was a gift, after all the bloody years of worship.
But now it had been found again.
The god reached out again until it could press one finger, all, and then a whole hand over the word god.
This priest wrote like no priest had ever before.
But whoever they were, whatever the world out there was like now, they must be a priest. The priests were the only ones who ever prayed to the god, even if this prayer, too, was nothing like it was used to.