Page 26 of Dark Stars
"This is pretty close to the church, isn'tit?" Alejo replied, as masterfully quiet as ever, clearly havingplenty of experience speaking in cavernous spaces prone torevealing echoes. "If we follow the river against the current, betwe'll find that tunnel we couldn't breach. Why are you alwaystaking me to dark caves?"
"Is there such a thing as a bright cave?"Bobby asked thoughtfully.
"Ugh," Alejo replied, all of his eyeroll inthat single word, before he nudged past Bobby and started walkingalong the wide, open edge or bank or whatever it was along theriver. "I don't sense any arcana."
"Still faint, I think we'd have to followthe river the other direction to reach the source."
"Guess we're doing a shit-ton of walking,then," Alejo said with a sigh. "My watch is going to love all thesteps I'm getting today."
Bobby huffed a small laugh, but before hecould say anything, the path widened into a large, openarea…complete with steps carved into the stone at the far end,flanked by melodramatic torches… and carved into a large patch ofwall was an enormous, repulsive sculpture.
"Why does looking at that thing make me wantto throw up?" Alejo asked, voice shaking.
Taking hold of his arm, Bobby pulled Alejointo his arms, letting his head rest in the hollow of his throat."Because that's what they do when seducing you to their sidedoesn't work." He frowned as he looked the image over. To ordinaryhumans, it would appear as either a completely boring,uninteresting statue if they were strong enough of mind—or so dullof mind the supernatural may as well not exist.
To those with weaker minds, it would appearheartachingly beautiful or utterly terrifying or both. The biggerproblem, though, was that it wasn't any of the three primordialbeings that Bobby had expected. This was much,muchworse.
And he hadn't sensed its presence. Even now,for all he could see it, he couldn'tfeelit.
For the first time since this adventure hadbegun, Bobby felt real fear.
"You're trembling," Alejo said softly,slowly looking up at him. "Why?"
"Because we might be dealing with somethingmuch, much worse than one of my stupid cousins," Bobby said. "Thatstatue isn't of any of them. That's one of the many forms of—" Askittering, click-clacking sound cut him off, and Bobby swore. Heknew that sound. The little fuckers had bullied him relentlessly ashe grew into himself. His mother had rarely interfered, the entirematter beyond her comprehension as they were all cruel and kind toone another in equal measure, possessing no metric to clarifysomething as trivial as wrong or right.
Holding Alejo tight, he retreated back theway they'd come, but the sound grew louder. Closer.
Ctheldush,we can tasteyou…
"Shit! Fuck!" Bobby snarled. "You need toget out of here."
"I'm not leaving you," Alejo said, pushingaway and looking around, tensing for a fight. "What's goingon?"
"My niblings have come to play, and by playI mean try to kill me. Humans call them the Dark Young. Usually,though, they prefer forests and shit. I don't understand whythey're in a goddamn cave. WhySheis in a cave."
Alejo shot him a bewildered look.
Fuck. He could fight them easily if he wasalone. But fighting them while also protecting Alejo? That was afar more dangerous proposition, especially since it wouldn't takethem long to realize how important Alejo was to him. But hecouldn't just toss Alejo in the river.
Could he?
Chapter Ten
Resigned to the tongue-lashing he'd getlater—grateful, in fact, if that was all he had to worryabout—Bobby again swept Alejo up into his arms. "I'm so sorry aboutthis."
"About—" the question turned into a bellowof outrage as Alejo went flying, landing in the middle of the riverwith an echoing splash. As he surfaced, Alejo shouted, "I'm goingto kill you myself!" before the current swept him away down theriver and out of sight.
That problem addressed for the moment, Bobbyput his full attention on the much greater one. They weresurrounding him like piranha now, the Dark Young, their mawsdripping acidic green goo, their tentacled bodies undulating ineager anticipation of striking, cloven hooves scraping along thecave floor.Ctheldush…we come for you…nasty, tasty spawn of theSecret One…
"I can't be nasty and tasty at the sametime," Bobby muttered. As they converged on him, he counted sevenof them, but felt more than that. Why so many? Normally just one ofthe little fuckers was more than enough for even a large cult. Twowas an abundance, and anything more wasn't just overkill, buttantamount to suicide. Well, more tantamount than getting involvedwith his relatives at all.
Surrendering his human shape, Bobby sankinto the primordial dark that dwelled deep beneath the surface ofthe mortal plane, grew and unfolded into the body he knew best: notquite as large as his mother, but still too large for any human toendure, skin mottled and dark, a mass of writhing tentacles, no twoalike, and a thousand eyes that glowed the yellow-green of hisbeloved fireflies.
They attacked with vigor, spewing acid andshredding flesh, ripping at his tentacles and crushing others withtheir hooves. But Ctheldush had been dealing with them since he wasa child still attached to his mother like a fragile parasite,absorbing all the knowledge she had to give until he'd been strongenough to tear himself free.
His fondest memory was of his motherburbling in her attempts at affection while his father stroked himand sang him lullabies. They'd called his mother weak. Broken.Strange, which was real fucking rich coming from primordial beingswho got confused by a clock. And of course, because she was weak,he was weaker. Pathetic. Not a real old one. Hypocrites that theywere, they did not care about such things until something violatedtheir own mercurial, incomprehensible rules.
In their arrogance, their gleeful bullying,the Dark Young always forgot one crucial thing: they were theservants of the All-Mother, beings woven from the dark despair atthe heart of an ancient black hole. They were not true children,made from her will but not her blood. Ctheldushwasherblood, her great-great grandson, from the line of Cthulhu, her mostfavored grandchild.
