Tethered
Submitted by Unknown
When I was younger, my mother would always tell me fantastical stories before I went to sleep each night. One of my favourite stories was one that she called "The Girl and the Crow":
"A little girl was walking in a dark, damp cave, guided only by the dwindling light of her candle. She only had the sound of her soft breaths to keep her company. She did not know what exactly she was looking for, but as she ventured deeper and deeper into the cave, she soon found it.
Ahead of her was a door, installed in the very stone that made up the walls of the cave she was standing in.
Slowly, quietly, the little girl crept towards the door, turned the faded golden handle until she heard the click of the lock, and pushed the door open. She was met with a long corridor that she alikened to the kind you may find in an old-fashioned hotel. It had a worn carpet with a hexagonal pattern embroidered into its fabric. The space was dimly lit by the orderly light fixtures, which the little girl quickly realised were flames rather than light bulbs. In a few spots on the ceiling, water had seeped through the cracks and was now gently dripping onto the carpet.
At the end of the corridor was another door. While the previous door had been completely blank, this one had an emblem engraved into its surface inside a circle, which depicted a crow.
The little girl pushed open the next door, and was confronted by a large room with concrete walls. The girl estimated that the room was at least a hundred metres in width, length, and height. Contrasting the hallway she had just walked through, this room had a lack of decoration; all of the walls were completely bare and flat.
The room was almost pitch black aside from the light cast by the hallway's flames spilling through the open door.
However, on the back wall, the little girl could just about make out a giant dark shape, so large that it was pressed up against the ceiling. The little girl stared at the shape as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and the creature suddenly stirred, shifting with a sound reminiscent of the tearing of flesh. Then, just as quickly as it had come to life, the creature went still once more.
The little girl's eyes finally adjusted, and she could now clearly make out the creature's features.
Its head was humanoid in shape. It had dark brown hair that was so long that it draped over the creature's shoulders and reached the floor where it collected in giant coils. Its ears were long too, with lobes that reached its shoulders. However, this was where its similarities to a human ended, as the creature possessed a pair of long, sandy-brown, curly horns protruded from the top of its head. Its nose and mouth were grotesque, stretched and warped until they far more resembled a beak. And in the space where a human's eyes should have been, there was only empty flesh.
Despite the grotesque differences of its face, the rest of the creature's emaciated body was exactly like a human's, except for the yellow claws in the place of its nails on its fingers and toes. The creature was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the room, but even then, its immense height meant it had to lower its head to avoid being pressed up against the ceiling.
As the girl's eyes continued to adjust to the dim light, she soon realised that around the creature's wrists and ankles were bound in great iron cuffs, tethered by chains to the two walls on either side of the creature. Where the chains met the walls, they twisted around the iron hooks, forcing the creature to constantly have its arms stretched out to the sides due to how little slack the chains provided, and then looped back towards a pair of giant glass orbs by the creature's feet.
Inside one orb was swirling white mist, and inside the other was a charred skull.
The little girl simply stood there in silence for a moment, before the creature suddenly spoke in a deep, raspy voice:
'What is it that you want, child? To laugh at me? To torment me?' the creature asked. The little girl shook her head.
Then the creature said slowly, 'Do you desire the wish?' The little girl nodded her head.
'Do you know rules?' the creature inquired. The little girl shook her head.
'There are only three rules. You cannot wish for wealth. You cannot wish for life. And you cannot wish for freedom. The wish comes with a price: my life. Make a wish, and you will kill me. That is my curse.'"
My mother never told me what the little girl wished for; she would always end the story there. She called the creature by many names - "The Crow", "The Demon", "The Elder God" - but it was always exactly the same story, right down to the detail of the two orbs. If I ever asked what the orbs were, she would only tell me: "The creature is tethered to reality itself. The lifeline of the creature is the lifeline of reality."
Whenever my mother finished telling her story, I would always ask her if it was real, and she would tell me: "Every story is real somewhere. Maybe not in this reality, but somewhere."
Note from the A.C.E.
The universe has secrets.
The creature exists outside of reality.
The Elder God is the Lost Creator.