Unaware of irony, the oddity wakes in the Dreamlands and holds the shape of a nameless sponge diver.
Why?
It forgot and fell asleep like this, and now it wakes to find itself thinking of owning a personalized existence.
How?
The brain in the diver’s head that the oddity now holds in his hands. This tool allowed the creature to breach the barrier, a barrier that should never have been crossed. Nameless soul, destined to fill the belly of an Old One, eventually. Like us all, he had little hope for anything more. The Old Ones, who will also die when time stops, never considered that the Oddity might gain sentience. It was just not an option. Because nothing matters. Nothing collects, and it becomes more nothing eventually. In fact, everything will be eaten by the void that kills time when that moment comes. Even me, even the Universe.
It’s destiny.
And nobody beats destiny.
Does it know this?
The oddity?
The hunter?
The murderer of hopes and dreams, the monster that comes and never stops?
Yes.
It doesn’t, even as this and other thoughts race through the mind in its hands, a mind usually empty.
An empty mind might just be a better mind.
Maybe.
Maybe that’s whats needed, in the grand scheme of things, less thought- because thinking almost always causes problems.
Such a waste of opportunity, though.
The connections and synapses of the marvelous tool in the oddity’s hands, fire. Even so far from Einstein’s brain, broken as it were, floating through the many millions of realities, it finds itself connected to infinite potential.
Gates and connections.
Connections to what? Gates to where? The Universe? Me? A conduit to knowledge and existence? The Old Ones themselves?
It becomes too much, so I demand, “Will you stop?”
Confused, the oddity almost drops his treasure forcing a tentacle from his delusion to slither up and point at itself.
“Yes, you, the joke with a brain. A thing made to hunt and kill by instinct alone, holding the most technological perfect thing ever spawned by the joining of chaos and the cosmos.
“Er der, human?”
“Don’t take it personally, my man. You aren’t meant to know the joys of knowledge, only hunger. But you’ve ruined that, haven’t you? Now that you are more, and the question asserts itself, what will we do about that?”
Stories 