Short-Term Eternity

                It didn’t occur to me to wonder where I was. Yet, I can describe its strange beauty. The stars in the sky that depicted unfamiliar constellations, the tree line in the distance that whispered promises of esoteric knowledge and not least of the marvels were the luminescent objects hovering silently above. The great watchers I called them, because they watched. I say again, it was not my setting that was relevant, nor my purpose… but my choices that mattered.

                I walked and the ground beneath my feet crunched with each step as if the green grass I walked on were dead. I passed pools of dark water. The sight of them triggered a thirst of which I had yet been unaware. It was intense. The thirst spoke to me as a vampire’s thirst for blood. All my craving focused into a single unwavering desire for a mouthful of water. I stooped next to the closest pond and began to drink. The pang of the cool liquid in my stomach was magical. I hadn’t realized how tired I’d become. The forest was still a daunting distance from where I sat and I considered sleeping there under the open sky and the gaze of the watchers.

                And I may have, had it not been for the sudden unbearable pain that saturated every fiber in my being. My stomach clenched and I heaved as warm salty liquid projected from my mouth. Blood. Soon, there was nothing left and I remained on all fours choking on the flesh of my own throat. I could barely breathe. My eyes bulged, and yet they would not stay still. I looked at the moon as it laughed, and at the grass that was not grass. The water beside me came to life with the writhing tentacles of some Lovecraftian horror. It rose from the unimaginable depths of what I had thought to be a pond, and the lights in the sky vanished. I couldn’t tell if the watchers fled, or were simply concealed by the gargantuan monstrosity.

                I swallowed hard, and stood to run. It was perhaps two or three steps before I fell again. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the thing. Its stare utterly engulfed me. It had numerous large black eyes and they drank in every bit of light from their surroundings like astronomical black holes. Tentacles fell from its body in asymmetrical patterns, and wings it should not have had spread wide from its back. I cannot explain how I knew, but it seemed to want to convey some sort of message. I only wanted to escape. To live.

Immortality.

Like a flash of light, the word hit my mind with the force of an epiphany. Only the origin of the thought was alien.

You drank.

Yes. The water. It was poison. I was dying.

Change.

Change from living to dead. I slithered away from the old priest as fast as I could. My legs felt like rubber. I could move them but they offered little strength. Glancing up at the forest in the distance, I felt utterly sad. I would never know the secrets it had to offer. My arms gave out, and when I looked down at my hands I discovered the feeling of true terror. My fingers we gone. My arms were growing long and thin. My legs were already almost fully transformed.

I collapsed. Unconscious. Black. Rest. Relief.

When I woke in the hospital, my family was there. I was told I’d suffered a seizure and was in a coma for four days.

I lived happily for months. I suffered no nightmares and no more seizures.

It happened on the seventh month after my release from the hospital. I was at the bank just making a withdrawal from my savings account for groceries when a man in a black mask walked in and shot three patrons to show he wasn’t “Fucking around”… I remember the first gunshot. I remember there were only three if us in the lobby. I remember dying.

And I had made my choice. I drank the water because I believed the thirst. I chose to forget my goal for temporary comfort. I chose the poison, I chose my eternity. Immortal. Changed. Forever the spawn of great Cthulhu, forced to wait dreaming at R’lyeh. Ia! Ia! 

-Selador of Wordcraft