Chapter Text
The young man trudges through the howling desert, filthy matted hair whipping around his face and in his eyes. He has traveled for months in search of the Portal. Feeling the last dregs of strength drain from his legs, he stumbles to his knees. The sand shifts underneath his weight with a shiver.
One more dune, and then maybe he’ll let himself die, succumb to the shrieking sandstorm determinedly blocking his quest. As he crawls, he allows a single tear to fall. No more- he’s dehydrated already- but it’s just so hard to believe that his life’s work ends here. All he wanted was to be a warlock. He had worked so hard to get where he was, to finally meet the old gods and beg of them the favor of eternal servitude. To find that it was all for nought was almost too much to bear. He opened his mouth to speak for the last time.
“Goodbye, fair worl- oh FUCK, what the hellll…..” What would have doubtless been a wonderful and heartwarming speech was cut short by the sand simply falling out from underneath him and hurling him into a temporal void that led to the rest of the universe.
He opens his eyes, deciding after a few minutes that squeezing them shut to avoid seeing whatever he’s just fallen into is probably not very Brave and Heroic. A weird sort of incomprehensibility blinks into view. It’s like the night sky twisted around itself and twice as large as it normally is. He is not breathing, yet the thought of air does not occur to him.
The longer he looks, the more it seems to shape itself into a room that looks strikingly familiar. A nursery. The walls are lined with the fabric of spacetime, sure, and the crib is beating rhythmically like a heartbeat (and is also twenty five times his height), but it’s a nursery. He turns around slowly, surveying the space. It has no floor, and he is not moving his legs. He blinks, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
He is face to ?face? with a Thing.
His brain immediately revolts. Miniature banners of protest hang themselves on the inside of his skull, and the microscopic guillotines are brought forth by some of the more radical neurons in his head. There is absolutely no way something like that exists. It goes against everything the world was and would be. His vision fades in and out, and an excruciating full-body pain wracks his spine-
No, no, no! Remember your training, he tells himself. He straightens up. Focus on the eye. Focus on the eye it presents to you. The eye that it presents is roughly four stories tall, and it has a tiny solar system merrily spinning about in the iris.
“Er. Hello,” he tries, fighting back nausea. “My name is… uh, shit. I think it’s Narzak. I’m finding it rather difficult to remember.” Narzak trails off, pleased to see that his training is working. He can see his brain reconstructing reality in real time. Infinitely branching tentacles are shrinking back, a horrendously whorled torso is now less of a spacetime swirl and more of a solid entity, and the number of eyes is down to a manageable number.
It gives no reply. Narzak decides that there is only one thing to do at this point.
“Right. I’m assuming that you’re an extraplanar entity. Probably infinitely powerful and incomprehensibly old. Heh. I’m gonna do the spell, and if you want to be bonded to me you just reach out and touch me to complete the ritual, okay? Please don’t kill me, I promise I’m qualified to be doing this. I’ll- I’ll just stop talking. Cazxth Thxrupix Verxxzix Xzoiuqalz Tghx, ” he rattles off hurriedly.
No reaction whatsoever. Just as he is about to sigh resignedly and try another pocket dimension to see if there were any more receptive eldritch entities, the Thing reaches out with an unspeakable appendage that maybe could have been mistaken for an arm at a distance of three miles with pickle juice in one’s eyes and pokes him as gently as a creature the size of a large building can poke.
He flies back by at least two hundred meters and is reasonably sure that had his body been in the world he was used to his ribs would have broken twice over. As it was, he merely got a bit of a fright and a lifelong pact with the first creature he found after falling through the Portal. Whether that was a good idea was another matter entirely.
He gasps. “I’m a warlock! I’m a- I’m a warlock! I’m bonded!” For the first time since arriving, the creature speaks to him. Since it’s apparently an asshole who doesn’t like soundwaves, it opts to speak directly into his mind instead.
“Haa. Czttttxh. Czz-czz. Tha-tha. Goo goo ga ga.”
“What the fuck?” Narzak asks. It only blinks at him. Well, phases in and out of existence rapidly.
“Did you seriously just make a pact with my baby?” This voice is new, and also telepathic. Great, another asshole who doesn’t use soundwaves like everyone else. It’s deep and rumbly. He turns around, and this time he really does faint.
When he comes to, he is faced with a fifty mile high wall of disapproval and its eldritch child. His brain redoes the aforementioned revolution again, albeit a bit more half-heartedly.
“Oh, one second. Cthulhu! Go play with your brother, let me talk to the speck without you hanging off my XXzythilvxghzz. Here.” The creature shrinks itself down rapidly, and soon it turns into the shape of a ten foot tall woman with white hair and clouded eyes. Still incredibly intimidating, but far less brain-melting. The hulking mass of tentacles named Cthulhu promptly vanishes.
“Oh, thank you so much,” he says earnestly.
“Call me Nug if you want to. Look, that child is barely three million years old. What possessed you to make a pact with it? It’s not ready for that sort of commitment, it can barely feed on planets by itself yet! You’re lucky I’m in a good mood this century, if you had shown up just a bit ago and pulled this I would have vaporized you.”
“I’m so sorry! I didn’t know it was a kid!” he replies, nearly in tears. Sure, he knew in advance that the chance of being immediately murdered was incredibly high, but it’s another thing entirely hearing it from an old god with infinite power.
“Alright, look, don’t get your weird earth tears all in the rug, it messes with the temporality. Something about the salt. Tell you what. I’ve been wanting a date night for ages. You can make it up to me by babysitting my kid for a bit, yeah?”
He blinks.
“It’ll just be a couple centuries, don’t sweat it.”
He opens his mouth, and then closes it again.
“Even gods have emotional needs! It’s the least you can do, really. It’s a good baby, really it is. It only needs to feed every so often, and the rest of the time it’ll either be sleeping under the Pacific or playing. It doesn’t tantrum that often, so hopefully everything will go smoothly in that respect. If it does get fussy, you should probably lead it a good distance away from your home planet, just in case. Of course all the usual terms of a warlock pact apply. You know, you feed off our power and we mostly ignore you. I guess that’s it. I’m headed off to the next galaxy over. I’ll be back in two and a half centuries. Bye now!” Nug vanishes with a pop.
Narzak stands there for an indeterminable amount of time with his mouth hanging open.
“Well shit.”