>>5560490>>5559843You take some time to consider your options over the next few weeks, allowing the Novice to return to her human experimentation and the heretic to do… Whatever it is that the strange and twisted outcast gets up to in his private sanctuary. Periodically, you check in on the progress of your (unconsummated) true love’s ‘good work’ upon this ‘Elaine’ human, hopeful that she might either serve as a vessel or the raw materials to construct one…
But… No. No, she is a passive and weak thing—a common human, without any magical aptitude, athleticism, refined breeding or even a strong sense of self. She cowers in her cage, almost comatose on some visits with horror, while other times she is pleading. As weeks turn into a month, two months, she is less a human than a beast—truly, an ape, barely speaking and clad in ragged remnants of her vestments, gnawing on what scraps the Novice feeds her, patched and bandaged roughly where she has experienced extraction or addition of material in accordance with your beloved’s alchemical ambitions. She cannot bear your seed, let alone the vital energies of a Dark God. She would perish, and take this wonder-child with her.
But what of a SUPERIOR human?
You instruct the others not to trouble you for a time, while you sequester yourself away. In your private quarters, you set a fresh candle of human tallow to burning. You set a piece of eggshell and a preserved mammalian umbilical cord of unknown providence into a brazier-bowl, which you set above the candle, and you speak the by-now familiar incantation to invoke those Below and Beyond:
“Oh Lords and Ladies of Eternity and Infinity, oh Lords of the Endless Black, oh Ladies of the Deep Flame. It is I, your prince! It is I, your servant! Your first among sons and daughters beseeches you, and I offer up this great tribute, in hopes you will hear me, and guide me, and make me a part of your Grand Design.”
You wait for some time, but gradually the walls seem to shift outward in some uncanny way, the space widening and the ceiling peeling away to reveal a super-reality. The floor falls away, and eyes unseen peer in at you from below, and beyond—from outside conventional reality, and a darkness greater than mere lack-of-light.
