Dear Diary #4
But so many things now were different to how they had been.
Perhaps this could be, too.
It mouthed the words. Something grated from its throat—a croak, a groan, but not a voice.
It tried again.
Sand filled its mouth until it choked, still wordless.
Exhaustion shook its limbs. It had answered no prayers, but it was as spent as though it had blessed the world.
Finally, shaking and bitter, it stretched its arms up above its head.
“Lol,” it said, a whisper inside its own head.
It didn’t help it feel any better.
The exhaustion lingered. Too long. The god lay huddled on its altar, watching the darkness, watching the unmoving light of Riley’s words.
At last more appeared. It followed them with its eyes, listless.
Dear Diary, how many weird hooded cultists can you murder before it becomes like, you have a problem?
Dear Diary, how many creepy underground monsters can actually exist without it starting to get kinda ridiculous?
Dear Diary, how many explosives are too many for an underground temple complex full of acid-breathing snakes?
Nevermind that last one, figured it out.
Dear Diary, what’s a ‘five days of death’? The others all seem to think I should know already but surprise, I do not.
Also hello, sorry. I should let you say hello before I launch in.
The walls closest to the god were full of words now, all around the circle of its altar. Riley’s messages flocked close down, as though wanting to be read—but with no more space near to the god, her next words appeared higher up.
Another thing that had never happened before. The walls had blazed before, but they had never filled up. The sacrifices always washed the prayers away.
It rose slowly, shedding exhaustion like old blood, and climbed up the light to find a scrap of darkness to write on. Its wings were strangely jointed, with claws at the elbows and not-hands. The obsidian wall cracked as the god pierced claw-holds in it.
It forgot the chains until the manacles clanked tight against the bones of its ankles.
It slipped, the sound of claws against glass a shriek its throat could never manage.
Light splintered, its priest’s prayers, Riley’s words splintered as it scrambled to create new claw-holds, but then it was secure.
It clung to a patch of untouched darkness, higher on the walls of its pit than it had ever dreamed of reaching.
HELLO.
You’re there! Yay! I was worried I scared you off lol.
I do the same in person as when I’m writing if it helps at all.
Just talking constantly and never shutting up long enough for anyone to tell me what the five days of death are.
The ~~FIIIIVE~~. What five days. What will happen.
Why death. I mean obviously we are all death all of the time here or at least mostly death most of the time, so what makes these five days different?
I AM SORRY. I DO NOT KNOW.
Being around other people who know what is going on is nice, though, even if I’m chronically unable to give them a chance to actually tell me what’s going on. Speaking of. What’s going on, Diary? What’s happening in there?
IN WHERE?
Wherever you are.
A warning curled its claw beneath the god’s ribs. I AM NOT ANYWHERE. I AM YOUR DIARY, it wrote.
But you said you’re not a book, right?
A strange sound filled the grotto, like the whisper of dried leaves.
Found it! Pages ago, but you definitely said you aren’t a book. and like, you’re writing to me and I’M not a book. I’m just writing in it. So I figure you’re writing from somewhere else as well, right?
Diary?
Are you still there?
No prayers, for itself or anyone else. Riley was out there somewhere, but she wouldn’t be out there forever.
The god had been in the grotto forever. It would be here forever. That was how it was meant to be.
But forever felt much shorter than it had before.
It had learned not to fear its priest’s prayers so well that it had forgotten that there were other things in the world for it to fear. But her words were there for it to read and reread, the same way she had reread its admission that it was not a book.
It had no acid-breathing snakes for company. It had never known whether there were others like it.
But if it wanted to live—and for the first time since long before its aeons-long sleep, it did want to live—it needed to be gone from this place before Riley and her new not-friends found another underground monster to kill.
The manacles were still tight, even so many years after the priests who forged them were surely dead.
More sand poured onto the altar, uselessly unmagical, as it worked the golden chains over flesh and bone.
It would still be able to use its four fore-limbs to climb, at least; to crawl, as well, once it was out of the pit.
It must get out.
Are you still there?
Are you ok?
It fell five times without reaching the top. Each fall broke the wall more. It could no longer read the first messages Riley had sent.
But her words flocked higher and higher, as though following it up to the mouth of its grotto.
And it still hungered for them, for its priest, even if she was coming to kill it.
Btw I know what the five days are now. This fake eclipse all the cultists are on about? It isn’t caused by the sun. it’s caused by all the monsters in the world rising as one and eating the sun.
Which isn’t technically an eclipse but like, I guess the people who came up with it originally didn’t know that. Back in the dark ages or whatever
I know what we have to do though.
Kill all the monsters first.
Six attempts. Seven.
Failure after failure.
Its altar was littered with broken shards of the priests’ wall, now. The only visible words were the ones that scrawled themselves far above the god’s head. It crawled over them each time it tried to escape.
freaking me out a bit to be honest
are you okay? You haven’t written back in so long.
I’m worried about you
I hate this
The god hesitated. Its wings were jammed into claw-holds it now knew better than it knew the landscape of its own body; it was so close, but…
DID YOU KILL THEM ALL? it wrote, half-hoping.
Getting there. Soon.
AND YOU MUST KILL THEM?
That’s what everyone says. And honestly it’s not hard. They’re all monsters.
The god gritted needle-sharp teeth as another hope that was already long-dead inside crumbled to pieces in its chest.
The mouth of the god’s grotto had been dark for so long, it thought there would be something to claw through at the top—a roof, a lid.
But there was nothing but a gaping absence.
The space beyond was all dark, and within that darkness was a wideness and a height and an emptiness that made it lurk beneath the rim even as its muscles quaked with exhaustion.
This was it.
It could leave.
Be free.
But still, it hesitated. Riley had kept writing to it the whole time. It had stopped reading, and the longing to go back down into the grotto and devour her words with its eyes made it weak. Here there was nothing but emptiness and darkness; below, there was only the wait for death.
And light.
And her.
It remembered the screams, when the priests brought payment for their prayers. It remembered when the screaming stopped.
I hate this, Riley had written. There was no prayer in those words, but there was, at the same time.
Still…
It crawled over the edge, into darkness. But when it was out, when it was safe and the obsidian cracked and crumbled below, it reached down and stole a shard of black glass.
Room for one message. If the magic held, once it escaped this place.
Diary? Are you there?
Please say something.
Riley chewed on the end of the pen. She’d stopped herself from doing that at first. It was kind of gross.
Like, she still didn’t know what the pen was made of.
But she’d given up on that months ago. It wasn’t like she would chew on her ancient tome’s ancient magic stylus when the others were watching, but other times, a little nibble helped centre her.
She was uncentered as fuck right now, though, and it wasn’t helping.
“Ow,” she yelped as she bit down on the inside of her cheek instead of the tomely stylus. Great, now she was bleeding from the mouth. Onto the magic book! Fuck! Good job, loser. Big world-saver vibes there.
Because that was what they were doing, wasn’t it?
That was what everyone said they were doing here.
She waited, but there was still no response. And something had happened to the earlier pages. The ink had gone cracked and strange, as though the words from her strange ghostie friend were written on broken glass, not… whatever not-paper creepiness the pages were made of.
Please, she wrote again.
We’re running out of time.
I want you to be safe and I’m beginning to think—
The god stood. Its hindlegs should have hurt, it thought, after the manacles, after all the falls, but perhaps its body had forgotten how to feel pain. It was sure that would come in useful, whatever the world beyond the darkness held for it.
It walked forwards, almost steadily, until it found a wall, and from the wall it explored the shape of the place.
A cavernous room, its stone walls carved with images or sigils it could neither see nor comprehend.
There was no light, still. How had the long-ago priests conjured the gaping light at the maw of its grotto that had always preceded their prayers?
It clutched the shard of obsidian glass. It had not yet tried to write its final message to its new and final priest. Like her, that first time her words had spilled over the walls of its prison, it would wait to write until it was somewhere safe.
Far above, stone grated against stone.
And there was light.
And in the light, a figure.
The god stilled. The light grew—a sliver, a crescent moon, half and gibbous, a full and hideously gleaming circle of gleaming gold that streamed down a flight of stone steps and ended at the mouth of the pit.