Dear Diary #5
Once, the glossy obsidian would have caught the light, creating the perfect shining horror that haunted the god’s days. Now, it died in splintered shards.
Except on the piece clutched in the god’s claws.
It could not move. It could not breathe. The figure in the light moved, and the light seemed to move with it, seeking out new things to break upon, but still the god could not force its body to move.
The figure. Human—an outline so like and unlike its own, familiar and strange, and could it be—
It raised one hand and made a quick gesture. More figures followed it through the circle of light.
Four. Six. No, seven. The god thought its senses had abandoned it, the light so bright it flooded out its hearing, but then it realised they were working in deliberate silence.
They crept into the shadows, and at last it found it could creep, too, echoing their movements in reverse.
They approached the pit, venturing forwards in watchful bursts; it skulked around the edges.
The humans held light in their hands, a magic that sent shafts of sunlight through the darkest corners of the cavern. Each time they scythed towards them, the god flinched, drawing cold and darkness from the shadows around it and wreathing them around its body in a way it had not known it could do.
And they did not see it.
The spears of light pierced its eyes, blinding it, but each time they moved on, as though it was invisible.
And yet it knew it was not. The priests had seen it, long ago. The sacrifices, before their blood poured down the walls of the pit—some of them had seen it.
But these invaders could not.
What magic was this? With no prayers, and no blood?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that if it reached the glowing circle, perhaps it could escape.
The humans scoured the shadows with their lights. The moonlight glow from the pit flickered as the beams passed over the god, again and again, and was the only thing in the cavern that stayed hidden.
The intruders formed a circle around the pit, their long, spear-like weapons pointed at it.
One of them crept closer, to peer down into the moonfire-lit depths, then backed away and held up one hand. The leader, the god thought, and in its head that translated as Head Priest.
“Clear!” the Head Priest called, the word carrying easily through the cavern. “No further descent. This is it. Allbright?”
“No surprises yet. Sacrificial altar. Pit. Everything we were expecting.”
“Except the target.”
“The records are clear. The creature was bound at the bottom of the temple, and there’s no suggestion it—”
“No suggestion like in Mexico or no suggestion like in that fucking volcano?” someone muttered in an undertone that somehow everyone heard. The Head Priest smirked.
Allbright stuttered, “That was—”
The Head Priest gestured sharply, and the others fell quiet. “Follow protocol,” he commanded.
“No can do. Barbie’s got a headache, so we can’t put her on a barbecue stick and hold her out over the pit.”
The god didn’t see who said that, but several of the intruders laughed, and a terrible suspicion curled in its stomach.
It crept, slowly and unseen, towards the steep and narrow staircase down which the humans had climbed into the cavern.
The conversation continued behind it, a tide of confidence and strength.
None of this was new to any of them—the cavern, the strange temple, the eldritch glow from the pit and the promise of a strange creature within.
The god’s world was more familiar to these intruders than it was to the god itself.
It could not stop itself from looking back as they catalogued its prison.
There was a strange stone plinth at one edge of the pit’s opening, which it had not seen but which they dismissed with casual familiarity.
The plinth was covered with strange, dark stains; again, no mysteries there for the intruders.
The god crept upwards, wishing it did not know what those stains were.
Then:
“Looks like we weren’t the first here.”
“Course we’re not the first. Hard to have a treasure map to a place if no one’s been there before.”
“It’s hardly a treasure map. These records are—”
“Well, whoever made it, they took something from here. Look. Something’s been levered off the altar here.”
The god froze. Someone else had ventured down here, since the priests stopped worshipping it? Something had been removed from this place?
How had it slept through that?
It craned its head to see what they were seeing, and—
“I saw something!”
“Wait—” the Head Priest shouted.
Noise shattered through the cavern. A crack like thunder, over and over, and a roar as stonework exploded. The god curled itself small as smoke and dust filled the air.
The men by the bloodstained altar were covering their faces and shouting.
Some of the light still seeping from the pit flickered and went out.
“What the hell was that, Carver?”
“I saw something!”
“Oh, yeah, and did you hit something?”
“If it didn’t know we were here before, it does now.”
“If it’s even still in there—”
“Just throw a fucking grenade down that hole and—”
“It’s not down there.”
The others fell silent at their leader’s announcement. The god, already halfway up the staircase to freedom, froze.
Escape was so close, but if they realised it was already free…
It had a strange feeling that the magic that had kept it hidden in shadows before would not survive the light of day outside the cavern.
“The fuck do you mean? It’s already dead?”
“No body.”
The god counted quickly. Two intruders at the mouth of the pit.
Three others spread around the cavern, their lights marking their locations.
It could not see over the top of the staircase to the other side of the room but the flicker of light over there gave away the sixth and seventh intruders’ locations, even through the haze of blood-tasting dust.
It was climbing with one hand and the claws of its wings. That left one hand free to clutch the obsidian shard. Its last chance to send a message to Riley once it was free of this place.
Or a weapon. A glass knife.
It climbed higher, flat against the stone steps, as dry and twisted as the carvings it clambered over. The light was just ahead. Shadows fell away to either side, a precipice as high as the pit had been deep.
And the silhouette of another figure appeared in the doorway.
The god stilled.
One human, between it and freedom. Smaller and slighter than the others.
The god changed its grip on the shard, again and again. It crept to the very edge of the door. Still in the shadows.
“It’s all broken to shit,” someone said, back near the pit. “But look—is that writing?”
“We know the creature’s worshippers inscribed—”
“No, you fuck, look, it’s in English—”
The slight figure’s head snapped around.
She was still silhouetted against the sunlight. Her face was in shadows, her head wreathed in hair that glowed the same golden shade as the god’s broken chains.
It would have to move fast, to break past her.
She peered past the god, not seeing it, and muttered something sharp and frustrated beneath her breath. She was clutching something to her chest, in front of where—when it attacked her, it would have to—
Dread calcified in its throat, stoppering its breath. The obsidian was sharp enough to cut the god’s withered flesh. It would cut human flesh. She would bleed. She would scream, and when the screaming stopped…
Its eyes were adjusting to the blazing sunlight, now.
It saw the wide bright eyes, the bitten lips, the anxious flicker of her gaze from her comrades investigating the pit to the bulky, rectangular object in her arms. She adjusted her grip on it and the god tightened its grip on the shard.
She opened it and something fluttered with a sound like dried leaves.
It had to move. It had to do this. It had to be free, so that its priest wouldn’t kill it, so that it could send its one last message.
She pulled a strange claw from the leaves, and scratched it against them.
Moonfire blossomed across the shard the god held in its cramped hand as it swept the knife in an arc towards her neck.
And she saw it.
Her bitten lips dropped open. Her wide eyes grew wider still. She saw the god. Saw the glass weapon, angled towards her throat.
And the god saw its last priest, an inch from dying by its hand.
It changed the direction of its attack, too late.
The sickly blue light of its priest’s writing sliced over her face as though the makeshift weapon was already leaping to cut her, and even as it changed direction to slam the blade into the wall beside her, the black glass shattered in an explosion of razor shards.
The smell of blood, once so familiar and now sickeningly strange, filled the air.
Riley swore and covered her face. Red peeked out between her fingers. The god reached for her and saw its own hand in the light for the first time.
Where she was bright, it was shadow. Where she was full of life, it was desiccated, brittle, breaking. The shattered glass had struck it too, and it did not even bleed.
Her eyes were wide, the whites showing all around, an eclipse of horror. The god staggered back and her other hand, the one not holding her bloodied face, reached for something. A weapon?
Dust filled the god’s throat. It tried to speak—It’s me, you know me, I didn’t mean to hurt you—but it could only make a gasping noise. It raised both hands—tipped with claws, the bones showing through, monstrous things—and hissed a plea that even its own ears heard as a threat.
This was the truth. This was everything it had been avoiding, as it turned its eyes away from Riley’s messages, as it tried to escape before she found it.
Its connection with Riley had been the one good thing of its existence, but it was such a small part of its existence. Whatever it had learned of itself in their stolen messages to one another was nothing compared to what it had been for so many hundreds of years before her.
Monster. Creature. A thing of blood and death, a god that was nothing without the hot blood of those its priests shepherded to their ends in its grotto.
Maybe it was good that this was how it would end, at the hand of someone who had already survived the fate its priests had handed out to so many innocents.
She would kill it, and she would hate killing it but would do it because killing it was the right thing to do.
And then she would write to it and nothing would ever write back.
Its priest was smart.
She would figure it out.
Was that worse? To let her kill it, knowing she would later discover what she had killed?
It tried again. The blue light—if she saw her own writing, would she understand?
It scrambled to pick up the shattered blade but even as it picked up the remnants, they crumbled.
Riley wielded the same explosive spear that the intruder below had used to destroy so much of the cavern below.
It held nothing in its hands, and she held death.
But she didn’t strike.
“Oh god,” she gasped. “It’s you.”
The god’s last priest reached out to it.
Her fingers wrapped around flesh no living thing had ever touched.
She squeezed the god’s bony claws so fervently and so gently it was as though she was holding another person’s hands, and not a monster’s.
Riley smiled, and the sunlight wasn’t behind her anymore, it was in her eyes and the blood that sang in her veins.
“I’ve been hoping so hard I would find you. Come with me. Let’s get out of here.”
Riley tugged the god towards her. It couldn’t move.
“Please,” she begged, as though it was choosing to be paralysed, as though she truly wanted it to come with her even now she had seen what it was.
Its throat moved. Its voice was like the dry air of a tomb. “Why?”
“You wanted me to find better friends, didn’t you?” She let go of its hands and yes, that was right, because a person like her shouldn’t touch a creature like it—but then she cupped its face between her palms.
She smiled tentatively, a sun that did not trust the cold earth below would welcome its warmth. “Well, here I am. Found you.”
Life flowed from her touch into the god’s withered body. A heart beat in its chest, without need for a sacrifice, or blood, or death. The power that had made men trap it beneath the earth so many centuries ago flowed through its veins.
So this is what I was, the god thought, wondering, placing its own hands over hers, worshipful in the face of the first true warmth ever offered to it.
A voice roared from far below, “That’s her fucking handwriting—”
“Time to go?” Riley suggested. “I have an idea of where we can go—somewhere safe, at least for now—and I want to go there with you.”
She searched the god’s eyes. All of them, without fear, or disgust.
“I don’t have to stay there with you,” she reassured it in strangely tight tones.
“I understand if you don’t want me to. Everything I’ve done…
but I want to be with you. Ghostie. Diary.
Of all the shit that’s happened to me, all the magic I’ve found out about, everything I’ve discovered about myself, you’re the only part of it I want to keep. ”
She put her palms to its dry cheeks, and kissed it.
Any sort of touch was new to the god. But this?
Wonder unfurled within it, a magic greater than any blood or pain could conjure.
Please stay with me, it wanted to write, but the obsidian shard was shattered on the floor. It only had the voice of its own hands—long-fingered, clawed hands, but it could be gentle, too.
Riley smiled against its teeth. “Let’s go?”
The god nodded. It took her hands. Shouts followed them, more explosions, but still, its priest did not let go. They ran together through the long passageway to a world more terrifyingly vast than the god could ever have guessed.
For so long it had only known that it was a captured god. That its power flowed only when drenched in blood.
To discover it was something else was the greatest miracle of all.
Riley said she knew of a safe place. A place that was safe even for now was more than the god had ever known.
And they would be there together.
The god opened its wings, and with its final priest and first love in its arms, it flew to freedom.
Dating's tough when you're an eldritch abomination. For more queer monster romance, check out my Monster Girlfriend series, starting with How to Get a Date (When You're a Terrifying Monster):