THE LIGHTHOUSE
Disclaimer:
I do not own digimon and I am not making money off this fanfic. I do
not own/make money off of any companies/music/shows/etc I mention
(such as Dragon Ball Z, the theme songs, Dasani water,
Batman/Superman, et cetera). The definition of "mimicry" came
from Merriam Webster Online. No infringement intended. Feedback
is wanted and highly encouraged.
Author's
Notes are almost always at the end of each chapter.
Thank you.
Story
Themes:
"Head Like A Hole" by Nine Inch Nails and "Never Too Late" by
Three Days Grace.
The Lighthouse: Love For A Fool
"The
most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not
meant that we should voyage far."
—The
Call of Cthulhu
by HP Lovecraft
Prologue's
Epilogue Part I
...Endless
Brethren...
When the jackal teleported to Depths of Nowhere, blood skittered across his skin like worm-strewn streams. His chest pounded upward and downward in extreme sharpness, breath heaving from his ungodly lungs as he half-collapsed on the tiled floor beneath him. His red glowing eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, lighting that wasn't quite as gray as the Dark Ocean's, but colorful despite the spread of shadows casting brown-streaked starlight across his blood-speckled skin.
His head drooped, chin pressing against the top of his chest before his eyes widened.
He could feel another presence within the Depths of Nowhere; three other presences. He could feel the jagged presence of one of the figures, an aura that spiked outward like earthy stalagmites. Another flowed, pushed, pulled, swishing and sploshing in jetsam and flotsam – a presence that coiled over him and drowned his own presence in its thick wet fury. The last presence he felt was mammoth, as if it loomed over him, a trembling mountain moving sluggishly in his direction. However, the mountainous presence was still quiet, serene, unmoving.
Every time the jackal visited the Depths of Nowhere, he felt that gargantuan presence no matter where he went or what he did. It was a murderous aura, one that weighed heavily on his chest, on his shoulders, on his head, one that felt like somebody's boot was smashing against his ears over and over and over again. Even so, because the Depths of Nowhere was the oceanic mountain's domain, there was nothing the jackal could do to get away from the murderous intent within the presence's inner-turmoil.
"Back so soon?" echoed an exquisitely harsh voice. The jackal peered up from the blood puddle he'd created, his stare landing on the wide-hipped digimon standing at the wooden doorframe. Woodwork wasn't hard to find in such a big, empty palace. It surrounded each window, each doorway, each arch, each scrap of furniture fabric. Polychrome from blaring reds to fuzzy yellows spread across the carpet, the couches, the walls, splashing technicolors into an otherwise dull room. However, it wasn't the beauty of the palace that caught the jackal's attention, but the female digimon standing delicately at the hatchway, one of her shoulders leaning lightly on the frame, her long arms folded over her chest, her pinched waist gleaming in the silver moonlight as her neck craned to view him stumbling to a stand. Her nose wrinkled. "You're so weak, 'Overlord of Darkness'."
She let out a snarling chuckle, one that rumbled from the inside of her chest as she ruthlessly mocked him. But that was alright. He'd show her, her and the other Endless Ones, because he was a splendid overlord. He was powerful and someday, yes, someday he would rule over every shadow, every nook and cranny that exposed darkness from underneath the underneath. He'd conquer every hearth in a merciless battle for the soul. Someday, that would be the Overlord's fate.
For now, however, he only stood from his position on the ground. He forced himself to stop panting in front of his superior, his eyes falling half-lidded as the shadows around him grew brighter for a mere few seconds. His skin glinted lightly against his eyes, just enough to relieve any sort of threat in his presence. If the Leporidae digimon sensed any sort of fear, anger, or hostility in his presence, he knew she wouldn't hesitate to blow his brains out.
Even one-on-one with the Goddess of Moons would do no good but to reassure his short life would be, well, short.
"Did you get our message across?" she asked, her voice primly sharp.
"Why, of course," he replied. The deep gashes in his skin hovered over his body's darkness before seeping into a scab, then becoming nothing but invisible blackness. The womon watched him with quiet endeavor, saying nothing at all as her fellow Endless One stepped toward a nearby cornerdesk, which harbored a stainless silver platter with a bottle of red Pinot Noir wine, four half-hourglass-shaped wine glasses, and several white folded napkins which laid across its gleaming surface. Ignoring the wine and glasses (at least, for now), he picked up one of the napkins and delicately unfolded it before dabbing it on an unhealed wound in his arm. He stained the white into a dark mahogany red, teeth briefly clenched before his voice continued, "He's still sleeping in the Dark Ocean's depths. I can feel it, can feel him. Have you and the 'king'—" his voice grew wry, "—recovered the Necronomicon?"
"Of course." Even from his distance, in which half her body was veiled by villainous shadow, the jackal could see her white-fanged grin which spread across her face in a jack-o-latern fashion. "It's just as creepy as Peach thought it'd be. I can't wait to use it. I've been waiting so long to meet a Great Old One, and it's been an eternity since he and I've spoken..."
"I hear he has the Creeping Chaos on his side," the jackal noted.
"I hear he's hated by the Unspeakable One," the Moon Goddess replied. Her smile loosened, body briefly relaxed before her gaze flittered to a nearby window. Her eyes glazed with uncertain distance, hands clenching and unclenching into tightly-knit fists. "Peach is worried about him. He's worried a lot nowadays."
"He doesn't like it when you call him Peach," the Overlord grumbled.
The womon threw her head back in a hoot, shoulders shaking with rupturing laughter as the Overlord cringed. She was swift to snap her head back to the front within a millisecond, eyes wide and bulging to the point where he could hardly see a pupil in them. The acidic blue-gray of her eyes shifted into their silver stone tone, body as swift as her eyes as she pulled herself forward into the Overlord's bubble and clenched her fingertips tightly down on either sides of his neck, pinching anti-skin until he winced.
He wanted to say something. To do something. But he could feel her aura; he could feel the very emotion that defined her radiating off her skin and pouring over him like a ravaging waterfall in summer. The underwater pressure cracked into his skin and scattershot into his eyes, peeling back his lids as her fingernails dug into shadow until she could feel the skin beneath.
"I'll call him what I want to call him," she said, leaning forward just enough to whisper into the Overlord's canine ear. "Just like I call you weak, worthless, and witless, I call him Peach, because he is my peach, and if you dare take that away from me, I'll take away your life."
"Not as long as I have your Other Half," he growled.
Instantly, her hands wrenched away from his shoulders as she realized what he'd said. Her Other Half. Hers. He knew it was her absolute soft spot, a soft spot he fully intended to play with. Though the Soul Sucker was the weakest of his brethren, he was also one of the most clever. They did not know all the tricks he had up his sleeves, nor the doublecrossing soul-stealers he had hidden in his regime. They weren't the only ones who knew how to utilize their tools – the Overlord knew, too.
She drew back her twitching fingers. They hovered for a few seconds, as if trying to decide to launch forward again or stay back, before they rested at either of her sides. She peeled back her lips into a stark grin, gray bags forming beneath her eyes as she hollowly snickered.
"You won't have my Other Half forever..." she cooed. "And when I have Him, I will take Him, and you will be nothing, Soul Sucker."
"As long as I live," the Overlord told her, "he lives, too."
.---.
R'lyeh was once a glorious city seeped in rich lore, sending millions of humans, non-humans, and digital creatures buckling to their knees. Its oddly-angular buildings and Cyclopean monolith tips spiked outward, jutting into a ruthless, oozing air that seemed tainted by murky green miasma. The city itself was built on bizarre, foreign architecture, accompanied by material so utterly unearthly it could only be called alien. At one time, R'lyeh was built on a foundation of slaughter, gleeful chaos, and the ways of murder – sacrifices were neither good nor evil, sin was a frail attempt at defining something undefinable, and disarray was a jumble of human emotion and digital physicality.
And, at the center of this havoc (havoc that strung outward, beyond R'lyeh's blackish-green obelisks and its cadaverous jungle), there was a cephalopod monster bloodthirsty in nature but graceful in gesture. Its body was made of breathless-blue tentacles, dead and decaying as they stretched like moist leathery parcels of false flesh. Wrinkles tottered inmost of the creature's face, forming twitching feelers and expanding tendrils of thick, octopus-like whiskers. Chained around the great monster's neck was a beaded rosary, off-white in color and malevolent in aura as it connected with the golden ringlet shackled around the beast's fore-leg.
Of course, the Wrathful Demon – who stood at the remnants of the sunken city – had never really seen the rubbery fleshwrinkles of the great monster. He'd heard rumors of the blood-red hieroglyphs that engraved Its evil body, of the black deadlights in Its curved-inward eyes, of the seaweed-redolent wings that spread treacherously as gray light splayed through their rotted-red membrane. The Wrathful Demon had seen pictures, statues, bas-relieves, undying cults of the great monster's horrifying, mind-numbing, spine-chilling appearance, and even so, the Wrathful Demon also knew that the things he heard were grossly beyond titular for the mammoth terror that lied both dreaming and dreamless behind the gateway of the broken R'lyeh city.
The great monster lied waiting within a cluster of poison-exuding citadels, all gaunt with black, haggard harpoons that shot out like scraggly claws, reaching for the unreachable. As the Wrathful Demon approached one citadel's wide russet-colored gateways, an old brassy knob shot forward and nearly ripped into his gut. He clasped it tightly, clawtips clinking against its echoing coldness.
In that moment, the Dark Ocean shuddered.
To the Wrathful Demon, he could feel the tidal waves resonating with humming, elastic energy, shriveled and damp with writhing gruffness.
Goosebump-teasing tingles traveled up his spine.
His red cloak fluttered beneath his feet as a quiet gale tugged at his body.
And, with a quiet unfearing grunt, the Wrathful Demon spoke words of apocalyptic fury – words he'd only read from the fleshy, blood-scrawled text of the immemorial Necronomicon – and yanked the gateway open with a simple, enduring pull. His muscles twinged, giving him a moment to stare into the endless black depths beyond.
A rotted stench then viciously assaulted his nostrils, as if he'd ripped open the door of a googolplex tombs. He heaved, grimacing furiously as he reached up a hand to clamp around his face as the eradicating odor assailed his eyes, stinging them until tears formed. It burned his rubbery flesh, tearing at his bloodstained fangs, touching his tongue with an indescribably disgusting taste. The only way the Wrathful Demon could describe the smell was beyond death – not even a corpse would dare peel such stench.
Yggdrasil at the Zenith Gate! the Wrathful Demon innerly cursed, eyes widening for a mere few seconds before he lurched backward and stared into the malignant yellow glow of something in the tomb's near-distance, a pair of spherical hovering orbs that he couldn't quite define. Once his initial reaction had calmed, he peered deeper into the darkness, discovering that the orbs were not, in fact, orbs, but a pair of eyes, staring into the thick of the Wrathful Demon's blackening veil.
Immediately, he wrenched himself away, hiding his face beneath his cloak's darkness as he watched something within the darkness shift.
The Something – like a trembling mountain – gave one titanic movement, causing the earth beneath its hind feet to crush and shake as several trees outside tumbled downward. The Wrathful Demon continued to stare into Doom, into the eyes of the great creature he'd sought for so long.
The Something – the great monster – had been right in front of him all this time, yet he hadn't known.
"You've awakened," the Wrathful Demon said, his voice rugged. It rippled unrealistically in the Dark Ocean's depths, sterling and whirling in all of its mighty magnitude. Though his voice was but a single string of words, they carried with them the weight of a hundred war songs, drumming to a heralding beat. The heralds spun death, peril, and pain in one verse, and the End of All in the last.
The trembling mountain stirred from Its resting place, a pair of sickening dead-blue tentacles reaching beyond the darkness to caress the ground at the Wrathful Demon's feet. Though the great monster could not see the demon's face, the demon grinned, knowing that soon, within six months, the stars would align, and the two great lords would rise from the abyssal deep into the zenith light. Together, with the Moon Goddess and the Soul Sucker, they four would descend humanity into their nightmarish nadir, where they all would sit and rot like the plague they always were.
