Anniversary Email 49

Happy 11 year anniversary, <NAME>. That is an impressive milestone. Be sure to celebrate it. Enjoy yourself and escape, if only momentarily, the terrible knowledge that you are being hunted. Hunted by a creature so awful it cannot be named, lest in so doing I call its wrath down upon myself. A leviathan of smoke and shadow and flame. Tentacles. So many tentacles. Grasping. Tearing. Rending. It is unstoppable, and it hungers. Hungers for human flesh. For our spirit. The essence of our being.

It could be I gave it your name. In a moment of weakness. As I stood in a circle of salt, having summoned this titan from the depths of whatever ethereal plane of torment it calls home, holding the crumbling grimoire in my quaking hands. I felt suddenly small. Inconsequential. My protections laughably inadequate. It roared inside my brain, demanding a name. The sheer strain of the assault on my mind caused my vision to darken and blood to leak from my nose. I fell to my knees and spoke the first name I thought of. Your anniversary was so close. It was right there in my mind’s eye. My insides roiled and twisted. I loosed my tongue before I scarce knew what was happening.

It laughed, if you can call the primal, deep rumbling that came from such a thing laughter. My eyes burned from the stench of brimstone and the impossible heat the thing radiated. The candles I had so carefully arranged were naught save puddles as their wicks guttered and blew out. I stared into the swirling mass of chaos that comprised its mass, my sanity straining under the effort. Before it left it oozed one single tentacle over the line of salt I had artfully placed, tapping it thrice, as if to say, “Foolish boy. You cannot contain me. You have no knowledge of what you have unleashed. You are a child playing at a deadly game.”

It shattered the very earth as it fled, thrashing. I gasped for air and slowly rose to my feet, weeping. In the distance, terrible screaming, as though the sleepy little town I had chosen as the site of my studies had become Armageddon itself. The ancient tome was naught save a pile of ash, whether burned up by the gaze of the monster or simply crumbled to dust from the strain of the ages, I cannot say. The world no longer makes sense. I know in time it will return to finish what  I started. You will be the herald. After it has completed its dark task with you, warping and corrupting your flesh, I will know my time is nigh. Without the book, I have no means of stopping it.