[Archived Short Story] Eldritch Society And How They Deal With Creation

Within the timeless space beyond creation, where all of everything could fit an infinite number of times, there was a new order. Well, “new” is a little bit of a misnomer, what with the whole “timeless space” thing. Can’t even really say “at the moment” and mean anything. Good thing those who exist in that non-space are more than capable of handling this sort of thing.

Anyway, there was something new, which in this case means that it has existed since the beginning of existence, but it came into being at a point that those in creation would place after other things. In this case, it was a new form of society. Not that this means the “older” forms of society stopped existing. Rather, the entities in the space have simply chosen, were convinced, or got forced into joining and thus, since the beginning of everything for this moment, they followed it. Yet at the same time, for all of existence, they had been doing something else.

A bit annoying to try and figure out, so some clever creation based sapient managed to boil it down before they fully lost their “sanity” and could no longer exist within creation without spreading Eldritch corruption. Anyway, let’s pretend the length and breadth of existence was a record and time was a song recorded on it. Within creation, the present is where the record player’s needle currently is.

When the song ends, creation is still there, just nothing is happening. Then at some point, someone will move the needle and the creation picks up wherever it is placed. Did the first time the song get played not happen? No, it still was a thing, but from the perspective of creation itself, it didn’t. Oh, and when talking about creation, this isn’t referring to the multiverse.

Rather, the multiverse is a single play through of the record. Creation is that record and every other record, all of which can be “currently” playing or not. Outside of creation is everything else, including the needle, which despite pointing to the “present time” within creation, is actually a separate thing from it. Also, the records aren’t some sort of platonic ideal that stays unchanged. Rather, as the song gets played over and over, the record will begin to get worn out.

Within creation, this is represented by the fact that Eldritch entities will have an easier time inserting themselves. Oh, and time travel into the past tends to accelerate the wearing down as that represents the needle being moved to a previous point in the song and that section ends up being played again. Not that a single record being worn out and destroyed matters all that much for those Eldritch beings from outside of creation. After all, if the record you have of your favorite song breaks, you can just get a new one.

And of course, the fact that while records playing songs is a nice little metaphor, outside of creation is still timeless and thus while all of this is happening, the very concept of “happening” is overly tied to time. Those entities can not only move the needle on a record to anywhere they want. They can also “go back” to when they first got the record and experience playing it for the first time all over again.

This change to having a society is basically all the entities from all of everything and nothing going “back” to when it “began” and following the rules of this society. However, this doesn’t invalidate the infinite number of times they had previously done stuff like this. There are even some reluctant entities that decided to sit this “play through” out instead of being forced into it. Well, they’re still being forced into it, but they are in a sense only half paying attention to it?

So yeah, let’s just limit ourselves to creation for the moment since that is where saying “something happened” has meaning. Anyway, the particular record we are dealing with was in the middle of being played when the new Eldritch society formed and so the entity listening to it grabbed the record from when they were listening to it and had it continue playing from when they left off. No, that isn’t really how it happened, but remember, we’re now limiting ourselves to spaces with time as a concept. So, I’m going to use time-based words and you’ll have to excuse the inaccuracies.

Anyway, the record was an older one and had a few errors slip in. One was that two outsiders with similar names, at least within creation, ended up getting their names flipped. A bit of a problem when those two didn’t like each other at the moment. Now, what would have normally happened was the offended Eldritch that received the mistaken call would shatter the record. Except there was a society outside of creation at the moment and part of being in a society is not breaking other people’s stuff.

This was quite interesting for them because it meant actually having to handle the situation within creation itself. The idea of Eldritch beings going against each other within creation is a well-known thing. That’s all fun and games for them, like a strategy game or 4X. This? This is an actual disagreement from outside creation being brought into it.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the people that caused this problem. They were, of course a cult. Beings from outside creation generally only get cults because they aren’t able to properly connect their worshippers together like local deities can. The idea of distance being a problem, both in space and time, is a little hard for them to care enough to deal with.

Anyway, the cult was actually a relatively big one and they managed to get their hands on a True Artifact Tome. This was actually a problem because such things have the True ways to call Eldritch creatures instead of just their intermediaries. So when they got the name wrong? Well, it was the actual being turning their attention to them instead of some flunky who wouldn’t want to report such a thing upwards.

Oh, and since we are talking about getting the names wrong, let’s put those two names into text, well, not the actual names. I can’t trust you not to use them. Instead, we’ll use more mortal sounding names. Anyway, the names were [Joe] and [Jo]. Yes, I’m going to call an Eldritch being from beyond space and time, [Joe]. I would call them Joe, but referring to them when you do know enough about them, even with a false name, forces you to imbue some of their essence into it.

So this cult, they were worshiping [Jo] and wanted to call them in to wipe out a nearby kingdom. Simple stuff, they wanted land of their own, but didn’t have the actual power to take more. [Jo] would have been happy to do this with some nasty caveats and a lot of sacrifices. On the other hand, [Joe] feels that [Jo] is a little too loose with such things. [Joe] felt that beings like them should be more hands off when it comes to those limited to a single record of creation.

So suffice it to say, when a cult interrupted [Joe] with exactly the kind of request that they were against? Hahaha, the being who had been playing the record likely would have taken multiple play throughs to reconstruct the record if they wanted to try. [Jo] would have found it hilarious as they saw such an action as the height of hypocrisy. After all, [Joe] constantly harps on not messing with those in creation, only to destroy so much more than [Jo] would have ever affected.

Instead, the new Eldritch society needed to figure out what the hell to do in this situation. Cults are annoying, but once they succeed in summoning something from outside creation, they’re impossible. Such a thing warps their body, mind, and soul. There is no coming back if they actually worshiped something from outside. Everyone else just has a near certain chance of being warped in such a way, instead of a 100% thing.

Oh, and the worst part is that it becomes a lot easier for them to summon beings, both those from outside and their intermediaries. That meant even if [Joe] stripped the cult’s ability to summon them and took the True Artifact Tome, that wouldn’t stop the cult and those affected by their summoning from calling in others. Oh, and those others that got affected? Remember, the cult was calling in [Jo] to wipe out a kingdom. So yeah, that entire kingdom got a dose of Eldritch nonsense.

That meant the society was going to have to deal with the mess since they had already decided not to go the “rock falls, everybody dies” route. This honestly made [Joe] even angrier, but as another smugly put it, “A good compromise leaves everyone angry”. And what a compromise this was.

At first, another suggested a targeted wipe. Except, of course, that wouldn’t really work out. After all, directly using their power within creation would simply result in more of the locals getting corrupted. There was a reason most summoning methods require one to be in far-off corners of the world. Worse, if they were going to do anything, it has to be one of them directly or the corrupted locals would instinctively call someone in, defeating the purpose of trying to use an intermediary.

That meant taking responsibility. A rather novel concept for them. Though the fact it also meant forcing multiple of their kind to think in a linear, creation-based fashion was a little distasteful. Good thing they paused the record when they realized making a decision was going to take a while. An odd thing to say for beings used to being able to do an infinite number of things between each moment of creation.

Their decision? Quarantine and control. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes such events can result in a cascade failure of creation. Normally, beings within one record can’t jump to another, but once you introduce Eldritch corruption, nothing is sure. In fact, while it was a long time ago, even for the timeless beings outside of creation, there was once a cascade so bad that all of creation had to be wiped and rebuilt. This wasn’t going to be that bad, but everyone remembers how without creation, things were bad.

So the first step they took was moving the metaphysical location of the tainted record. While not a guaranteed method of preventing early spread, having the close-by records all containing laws of reality directly and not so directly counter to the tainted record would help sterilize any attempts at spreading. Kind of hard for a human to survive to preach the “good word” of their Eldritch overlords if in the new creation they end up in, the bonds within water molecules are actually explosively unstable.

On top of that, they also went to quarantine the corrupted world, except they were too late for that. It had been a highly magical society and so once an entire kingdom was corrupted, the Eldritch infestation was able to spread to the entire world within days and then past the world within weeks. The beings from outside creation that were trying to handle things just weren’t used to how time keeps moving without their input. Now, some of you might point out the fact they paused the record. Yes, they did, but then they used that same creation as the base for their creation based thinking and unless time is moving, you don’t get to do that. So every time they had to think things over? Time was moving.

Anyway, the Eldritch infection was still being limited to a single universe within that record and thankfully, beings capable of moving between universes tended to be resistant to second hand corruption. So the beings from outside could only shrug and take control. Whether it was one kingdom, world, or universe, it didn’t particularly matter to them. All larger areas meant was that they had to use more avatars to control the situation.

Of course, for any creation based being, such a statement would be folly for most. While externally limited, a universe can be internally infinite, meaning they would need an infinite number of avatars to cover the area. Except, the beings from outside of creation are a couple magnitudes of infinite above such a thing. After all, outside creation can hold an infinite number of creation. And within creation, there can be an infinite number of records, within which there can be an infinite number of any specific record. Then finally, within that record, there can be an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of universes, which finally leads to the comparatively much smaller infinite amount of space any one universe might contain.

So, a bunch of the Eldritch who decided they should try having a society sent their avatars down into that universe to control things. This. Well, this was not a “good” thing for the inhabitants of that universe. See, while the various beings cared about what happened to that record, they didn’t actually care about any individual soul within it.

Though admittedly, they also respected the potential of a soul more than a human would respect a bacteria, despite the distance between them and the soul is multiple infinite magnitudes greater. This is because each soul has the potential to rise up and touch up on, and in rare cases, match their power. In fact, [Jo] is actually a being that at some point in the distant past, had been a mortal soul. Except in rising beyond creation, such connections fall away and every instance of their soul is, was, and will be wiped from all the records.

Some might think this meant there were an infinite number of the Eldritch beings beyond space and time. There aren’t. Such ascensions are so rare as to be non-existent, if not for beings like [Jo] and myself to prove otherwise. After all, a majority of outsiders are actually native and have been a thing since before creation happened. Though such a period is a little loose on the details, as even within a timeless space, not having something to measure against makes things like record keeping and memories worse.

Now back to those infinite avatars. They weren’t there to kill people, so people survived. Except each avatar had different ideas of how this was meant to work. Small facets of the plan spread out across time and space of this one universe.

Some avatars turned their area into what the locals would call a “hellscape”. Others simply forced all the souls in the area to worship them. Worst though, were the ones that decided they could play around a little. I won’t describe what they did. There simply aren’t words in your language for it and since you have a soul, attempts at describing it would simply twist that soul and I don’t want to ruin all that work they did in quarantining the infection. That would be rude.

So, why am I telling you this at all? Simple! I want to. Don’t you ever question why beings like us allow souls like you to record down stuff about us in the first place? Like, sure, a True Artifact Tome is outside of our control, they pop up like mushrooms after a rain. But that doesn’t account for all the first-hand accounts, strange magical texts, and so on that mad prophets are always writing. For beings like us, to even record hints at our presence requires our approval!

So yeah, we let them record how to call on us, even when we don’t have the ability to resist the call. Not that a soul has the ability to force us to do anything. Rather, those strange rituals are simply methods to forcefully intersect creation with a part of us. Besides, resisting wouldn’t be fun! I’d laugh about making puppets dance, except you are so far below puppets to us. Like the bacteria on a puppet, we make the records dance and you are none the wiser. Even me telling you this can’t possibly get you close to understanding the enormity of it! Though if you figure out my name and ritual, maybe I’ll reveal a bit more?

Yes, I am tempting you and most won’t go for it, but that’s half the fun! Some of you can’t resist a challenge and others will want to try and destroy me. Either way, you’re all just an infinitely small distraction from what truly matters and I’m more than willing to indulge myself in such frivolities.