When he first rose from the seas to greet the fishermen on board in the darkest of nights, they screamed in such a horrible manner they almost blew his ears out.

"Don't be scared...wait, it's 'be not afraid'...," the tentacled monstrosity blurted out as he struggled mightily to read the words on his smudged cue cards, no doubt from the moisture. Did he manage to get his words out? He could not hear himself from the deafening screams of these humans.

One of the fishermen stopped his incessant shrieking to gawk, two hands firmly gripping his fishing spear, pointed in his direction. He raised a tentacle and pressed the spear downwards; he sensed a rude hostility and desired to push that down in favor of trying to speak their language. He had cribbed some words from a few of those flying eye-things who called themselves angels, hoping it could come in handy to resolve potential miscommunication.

"Stabbing fish with spears, it's so primitive and unrefined. I wish to impart to you better techniques." He slowly raised his hands and most of his tentacles (not all of them, after all, he still needed to keep a few tentacles in the water) in the air. Open, raised appendages is a sign of coming in peace, if he remembered correctly.

The fishermen seemed to understand. Teach us then, they said.

"And so that's all I did. I taught fishermen to fish better. Okay, I concede, I also handed out Amulets of Protection to a few favored followers. You have to believe me."

The monster slayer snorted his beer and brutally punched the creature clapped in chains before him. The creature spat out deep crimson blood onto the interrogation table and kept his steely gaze upon the slayer.

"Amulets of Protection my ass, you use those to brainwash people. You're a typical tentacled eldritch horror. I've seen and killed too many of your kind. I know what they call you, Eldritch Lord of the Black Seas. They say you drive humans insane with your incomprehensible cosmic revelations. They say you're evil and want to end our world and plunge it into the darkness."

"I merely seek to enlighten, for too long humans have lived on placid lands of ignorance in the midst of the black seas of infinity. You barely know what lies in the oceans and the seas of your own world. Surely, human's unfathomable curiosity could not be sated by what roams the lands alone, and will one day dive the depths of the waters to seek knowledge and power.

What you heard about me is nothing more than lies and slander. Innsmouth has grown from a village to a bustling city under my guidance." The creature opened his palms and tried to spread his shackled hands. It's a sign of peace, he told himself, the human should understand.

All he got was a hunting knife stabbed through the palm of his right hand.

"That's just rude," the creature said ruefully with a frown. "Who is the real monster here? The one who looks like a monster, or the one who behaves like a monster?"

"I'm not playing your mind games, eldritch horror. You are completely helpless and at my mercy chained with these magic nullifiers. When my crew is done dealing with your brainwashed followers, they will join me in tearing you apart. And I will enjoy hacking each and every one of those accursed tentacles of yours."

But little did they know, true divinity could not truly be destroyed, only shattered. But it still is a major pain in the ass to pull himself together when reduced to bloody gobs of messily hacked flesh.

He gritted his teeth. He wasn't going to cave in and start bawling in tears despite the agonizing pain. After years of receiving prayers from his followers, Elvari, Eldritch Lord of the Black Seas, silently prayed for the first time this dismemberment would suck a lot less than the first time he was shattered.

This was fun. Couldn't resist cribbing a bit of HP Lovecraft here.

Click here for the 1st prompt that inspired this series..

the 2nd entry, and sorta 3rd here

Been thinking if I should make my own subreddit and turn this into a legit short story series.

The crowd screamed and surged away from me. In their haste to flee, they trampled one another underfoot. Traffic ground to a halt as the surge of people broke and ran through the streets.

"Guys," I said, amplifying my voice until it shook the buildings. "Guys, chill the fuck out."

Nobody listened. I get it--when a ten-story being of the void pops into existence in the middle of town and your primate-brain is not used to that kind of thing, appearances matter. I decided to tone things down a bit. I scanned the terrified minds before me and found a pattern I thought they might prefer.

With a loud snapping noise, I became someone the adults seemed to find comforting, a humanoid with a large, frizzy mane of hair and a disarming smile.

"What the fuck," a woman nearby screamed. "Did it just turn into Bob Ross?"

"Everybody calm down," I begged. "I'm sorry if I scared you. We all get scared sometimes, and that's okay. It was just a happy little accident on my part. And after all, aren't we all just happy little accidents? You, somehow sentient monkeys descended from ambitious amoeba--me, the animated consciousness of the screaming void? We're all just doing the best we can."

Those nearest to me cautiously stopped their scrambling and stomping. A few started to drift toward me. Fires smoldered in overturned cars, and the groans of the wounded rang out over the sudden silence.

"Theeeere," I said, waving a paintbrush. "Why don't we just take these happy little mistakes and make them beautiful? Every mistake is just an opportunity, really." Broken bones knit back together. Fires snuffed themselves out. At least a dozen dead bodies rose as if from naptime.

The primates laughed uneasily, wailing mothers hugging their suddenly-alive children to their breasts. A little boy walked up to me. "What do you want?"

"I'm here to make things a little better for everyone," I said. It was true. These sentient lifeforms were the only ones I'd ever met that had been cursed with mortality. They were intelligent enough to ask why they were alive, but fragile enough to die! I couldn't imagine a worse fate. "I'm here to kill death a little bit, just make things kinder."

With another flick of my brush, I commanded the immortal spirits cluttering the atmosphere of this bizarre world back into their vessels. "Family is important, and I want you all to know I care about yours," I trilled. I would save these poor beings from the pain of loss they had felt for so many centuries.

I split the ground and pulled the sleeping ones upward to rejoin the living. Thousands of years' worth of dead men, women and children surged up through the cracks, shrieking as they came. Being reunited with one's soul can be a shock! I understood.

For some reason, the rest of the primates did not seem to. I gasped in horror as they started clubbing and shooting their ancestors.

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