Chapter four
In the dark, Shub Niggurath waited.
The Dark was comely, like a womb asleep and fruitful. And it was full of Shub Niggurath. There was no space to move, yet there were endless rooms and wandering paths to explore, random ways wrought by the dying of the previous universe in brilliant hues of blood and vibrant shades of vomit. Even now, those colors marked themselves in deep shapes of despair. Trumpeting forever into the wilderness stretching behind the Old One's memories of flesh. It had owned flesh once, had walked in the sun and the stars and the sweet dust of worlds as master, joying with its brethren in the saccharin of chaos.
Life had been a heady draught of nonsense… and Death, it was merely the replenishment of shallow pain forgotten by recycled flesh. Both were a cycle, a lesson in futility. As a god, Shub Niggurath had retained no care for these things, and with his brothers and his sisters he had ravaged and raged across Time, across Space, over and under and through and between like eels among the shoals. Together, they had looked upon the Tapestry of Creation and laughed as they snipped the strings they had no uses for… And why not? Good and Evil were dead. They had not caused it. They were not responsible. They had merely lapped up the remains and digested, and known Godhood.
Now, this dark and this hole was his world. But he had given birth to many children, here in the Pit, and now their weight was pushing against that so thin membrane which prevented their freedom. This time, the physical representation of the Brane was on a piece of mossy detritus called France, atop the cliffs where an old monastery reached with crumbling fingers to the God that abandoned it so long ago. Was that little speck of dust still called Earth? Was the monastery still called Nematon? That once, his followers had come there, asking for him. Of course he had not heard. He had been dreaming.
The Veil of his prison had begun to dilate in his slumber, wounded by the grandness of war on a scale unfathomed by men or beasts since the days when Good and Evil were still kicking around the place.
Suddenly he moved; in the midst of contemplation his enormity shivering, straining.
Being of pure consciousness, he feels only the merest phantom pang of sensation, a thick plop. He watches transfixed as his tentacled get pour unto the tear in the Veil, growing it, ripping through the thin curtain toward the physical with their newly formed essence as they crowd each other mindlessly, hungering for any form of matter as they Fall and take form, that they might Feed. And from his cocoon of self-awareness, Shub Niggurath smiles down at them, wishing them strength, and prepares to bring forth another wave of his children, his Vessels, more of himself and his essence and influence, through the Veil.
Soon, the hole will be large enough for him to squeeze through. Afterward he will consume the Earth and all of his young, to grow strong again. Perhaps he will grow strong enough to raise his brethren from their sleep. Or drink the sun in toast of their remains as he consumes the dusty memory of their molecules.
And what then, with such hunger so ravenous? Consume the entire system of Sol, then travel outward, where he would dine on every star, every system, every nebula and singularity, and revel in the carnage.
Ah, but for Xebulba, revisited.