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All That Lies Between Gods & Mice

part 2

In the mortal plane, on a distant world, in the remnants of a desecrated forest, a mouse awoke, writhing from with unfamiliar thoughts and twitching within a body that was not quite his own. His fur was drenched in his own sweat and a thick, viscous, non-Newtonian liquid that pulsated and tightened around each of his limbs as he squirmed; it was as if they were chains that came to life only when he struggled to move. His eyes scanned his surroundings frantically, wincing at the faint light of the twilight hour as if were as bright as the sun at its zenith. His brain was overwhelmed by the simplest sensory processes, unable to integrate the information that flooded each of his senses. His heart was beating at twice its sinus rhythm and every action potential was shattering the absolute threshold, plunging him into complete and total dysregulation as he lay helpless in the aftermath of the madness beyond the veil.

Then a familiar, wordless voice spoke and his convulsions ceased. For an eternity condensed into a single moment, the mouse was frozen, every particle of their being paused until the voice spoke again in words that could not be heard. Yet, his mind had understood what it was saying, it compelled him to “look up," so he turned his gaze toward the stars. Above him were two moons, both shining brilliantly. One was emitting a beautiful, pale blue light and the other was emitting a similar hue but with a tinge of green. He kept his gaze fixated on them as it took his mind a moment to realize there should only be one moon in the sky. As soon as the trapped mouse became aware of that, three slits of gold light appeared in each of the bright celestial spheres and a piercing, gilded gaze peered down at him.

The mouse could FEEL the gaze as an immense downward pressure, pinning him to the earth below, a gravity that dragged every follicle of fur downward. He tried to get on his feet and scamper away, but the liquid around him resumed its iron grip the moment he tried to flee. He looked again to the sky and the moons were as they were before, and terror strung at his heartstrings as he could still feel the gaze upon him. Slowly, he turned his head to look behind him.

There now stood a bizarre and formless figure, an impossibly large, looming, contorting shape of purple shadow and dim blue light manifesting behind him. Like a seed of pulsating blight; ethereal tendrils protruded from the shapeless mass and flowed like water in streams that defied gravity as they spiraled outward from its core. The shifting shape continued to flow over the felled, rotting, and disintegrating tree trunks as its root-like appendages spread and claimed the land for itself.

The mouse centered their gaze—no, was unable to focus anywhere else, as they bore witness to the manifestation of the horror before them. Their presence was at once overwhelming and incomprehensible. Their form, such as it was, twisted and slithered over itself, perpetually diverging and enveloping within. It appeared as if they were covered in dark pearlescent scales that flowed like water, masking an unfathomable depth lurking beneath the dark violet and shimmering blueish black of their surface.

The figure lifted an amorphous appendage as it contorted into a shape resembling a claw, holding it high above the mouse, fingers slowly formed split apart at the end of the tentacle like limb that loomed above. The newly made digits moved with fine precision in the air as a shadow deeper than the blackest part of the night sky appeared below and crept over the mouse, swallowing him in the shade of its grasp.

“There. You may speak now." The voice echoed and reverberated throughout the air around him as if there were a meticulous acoustic array surrounding the air, rattling the mouse to their core as the waves of those words collapsed on him from all directions at once.

“S-Spea—k… speak words… to communicate a thought verbally… language… words… conversing… I can speak?" The mouse lifted its head, dumbfounded by their newfound comprehension of the world. The preceding experience outside of reality was as fleeting as a dream and they had no grasp of what had truly happened in the time between “before" and “now." A moment ago, he had clear and distinct memories of being nothing more than a simple animal and yet here he sat with what felt like an endless library of knowledge suddenly inside his mind. His thoughts raced as they pondered all of the words they could now string together, concepts they now knew but had never learned, their psyche fractured as it tried to comprehend the full weight of all that had come to pass and how they were no longer the same individual. They had a much larger body with entirely different anatomy; this new being was empirically not their former self, and this new being had no idea who or what they were.

The mouse's musings were cut short by a soundless wave of emotion that washed over them like cold water emanating from the being that towered over him. It had the abrupt tone of a cruel laugh as well as the measured control of a gentle touch. The the monster spoke again, “Breathe, rodent."

The mouse sat up straight, corrected their posture, and began breathing in through their snout and out through their muzzle in a measured rhythm as if they had practiced the art of proper breathing their entire life.

“Do you know where you are right now?" The looming beast asked with a playful tone.

“I… I do not. Somehow, I know that it's not where I'm from— SQUEAAAH!" The mouse cried out in horror and anguish as their hands rushed to their chest and muzzle. He fell forward, eyes wide and overflowing with tears, his body fell back into complete dysregulation once more, but this time it was breaking under the burden of clarity and revelation. They lost control of all bodily functions, trembling in a puddle of their own sweat and urine as the weight of what had happened surfaced in their mind.

“ Cease!"

The mouse was once more moved to obey the voice, calmed to a perfectly composed demeanor at their command. It wasn't until he had fully corrected his posture that he realized he did not know if he had been choosing to obey or if his body had moved all its own. The concept of muscle memory was roused in his mind as the best explanation of this reflexive action, a rather simple and common feat in nature… and yet this logical conclusion only unsettled the mind of the mouse even more… for he knew this knowledge was all novel, and he was learning it for the first time as he remembered it from a life unlived. As peculiar as it all was, he also felt as if he had been this way since birth and couldn't understand why everything felt so strange.

The small creature lifted his head and spoke with a crack in his voice that had the pitch of a squeak. After a moment more to compose himself, he tried to speak once again. “I-I know that the world I am from is now-w—" The mouse averted his gaze and quivered, the command to calmness broke under the weight of his sorrow, but something compelled him to continue, “That world is now bathed in the darkness that washed over it aft-ter you… d-d-devoured its star."

The confounding figure condensed itself to a more solid form and adjusted its position so that the trembling creature below could witness the process of it completing its corporeal manifestation. Slowly, the entity above formed a face that could express itself through normal conventions and bared impossibly white fangs in a grin of malevolent delight. Their visage was difficult to categorize, but appeared feminine in ways the mouse could not quite put into words. Their face was comprised of three pairs of eyes as well as a seventh eye in the middle of her forehead; she had two mouths, laying parallel in the ordinary place; and her body seemed at once covered in scales as well as fur but was difficult to discern as the surface of her body contoured, contorted, converged, and diverged in and around itself in a manner that was beyond Euclidean geometry. After crossing over as fully into the physical realm in a form reality could bear, she opened her second mouth again and spoke with words that carried through the air and stimulated the mechanisms of the ear rather than penetrating straight through the skull into the mind within the brain of the rodent beneath her.

“It is as you say." The figure shook with a chuckle before narrowing its piercing gaze. “And do you know my name, little mouse?"

Synapses fired within the new mind of the reborn mouse, the surprisingly high pitch blip of two blackholes combining into one, the symphony of a supernova rippling throughout space, a handful of sounds that resembled pronounceable phonemes followed by many more which did not, punctuated by a deafening silence flooded their mind in an abstract cacophony that drew his paws to his head to steady the splitting headache resulting from the experience of trying to recall the name that he knew, though he had never heard and could not hope to pronounce.

The figure smiled, “Good. And you know what I am?"

“You… are unknowable… but to… to them… to… our world… you are—were an eldritch deity. A deal maker. In texts referred to simply as 'V'yahl-renh' which was pieced together from fragments of the more comprehensible components of your name as best the scholars of their age could decipher into their tongue. You would bargain for their souls, for you are 'the shadow that devours the light that cast it.'"

“Just so, little mouse." The Elder God known as V'yahl-renh began what felt like a hearty laugh, the sound warming the blood of the mouse before it quickly soured, feeling as though the mouse's heart was being grasped tightly within their chest. “And…" the figure paused as the guttural reverence of a growl shook every particle it touched and contorted the very light itself through a spectrum of color foreign to this realm. “Do you remember anything from before I devoured the sun of your world?"

The mouse averted their gaze, and put a hand to their forehead as they wracked their mind for memories of the self they were before. Images revealed themselves, not as lived experiences but as a series of stills from a film. “I… was hungry… starving. I was starving and cold? I think I was cold; my hair was standing on end and I was trembling with no signs of danger around me. I was crawling through a cave, over gaps between rocks and cracks within walls, following the scent of ash until I found a line of sconces in a chamber filled with etched walls and piles and piles of tomes and parchment. Humans were engaged in some activity I couldn't comprehend at the time. And then I slowly descended from the top of the wall, down over the piles of books, and scurried across the stone floor until I found my way under a large door… I was running. I was running from the… laboratory… What were they doing... They had not fed me in two days…"

The mouse trailed off and looked off into the distance, pulling at the thread that seemed to end at the maze. He had seen something, heard something… a word he didn't know at the time and could not recall now as his mind could not hold the fragmented notions he once had… but the humans had said a word he had come to fear. It did not sound like a word now but instead rang in his head like a lyric to a song. The shape of the word felt like it was on his tongue but all he could remember was the fear. The earth shook beneath the mouse as the Elder God growled. “You DARE waste my time as I stand here, experiencing the temporal flow of your wretched realm?! SPEAK!!!"

Tears welled up in the mouse's eyes and his nose leaked with light mucous as his limbic system shattered at the tone of the command, his mouth was able to steady and continue speaking as the muscles that made up his muzzle seemed to be the only ones that seemed unaffected or explicitly not affected by the power that had fully subdued the rest of his body.

“I finished the maze, and they reached in and lifted not with a gentle cupping of their hand around my body but roughly yanks me up by my tail. I was ready though, and I curled up on myself, then I grabbed the tip of my tail and I bit down again and again until I had chewed through my own flesh and I fell to the floor. I ran out before he had even noticed I had dropped… then wandered through the corridors until found that chamber and slipped under that immense stone door... And once I was there, I picked up on this… scent… and I was sooo hungry… And I had this scent of… something…"

The figure chuckled amiably, but then spoke with bemused derision “Something?"

The mouse blinked as the revelation hit him and his eyes widened. “I… I ate you?!" The Eldritch Deity slammed an appendage down on the ground and the mouse winced, but no words or further actions followed. The mouse scanned the figure for any hint of their mood or what they wanted from them. “I'm… I'm sorry, I had no idea… and I was so hungry…" the mouse finally whimpered.

The figure let out a cruel laugh, but this time he reached out again with her arm and curled a finger upward as a shadow appeared on the mouse's chest, running up along his neck and lifting his chin. With increasing fury and indignity rising from within deep within her grand, boundless form, she spoke with such malice that the mouse could feel the words cut straight to the nerves beneath his skin. “It was… a humiliating sacrilege. An infinite entity, a GOD to feeble mankind, to be eaten by the lowliest of creatures… I had lay there for centuries, bound in physical form, a veritable corpse, forced to experience time linearly with my consciousness trapped in a lifeless husk of my former grandeur which now served as my tomb… and then what I had been reduced to… the temple of my remains… to become mere meat for a pathetic LITTLE—"

V'yahl-renh stopped. For a moment, her endlessly shifting form stood still. And then the surface of her scaled slowly resumed its ceaseless rhythm of convergence and divergence, flowing into, under, over, and throughout itself as she composed herself and spoke once more; this time her voice brandished a tone so measured it unsettled the mouse even more than when the Eldritch Terror's anger could be fully felt beneath his skin.

“Oh, I was livid. The fury that burned within me could paint the entire cosmos with a constellation of wrath… But…" V'yahl-renh paused as she examined the helpless creature they were addressing. A genuine smile crossed her wicked lips, gazing upon their body, an expression of unmistakable awe and admiration, a sigh of relief, and a moment of peace resonated within the beast of destruction as they appreciated their liberation, basking in magnificence regained. In this form, the ancient being stood over three stories tall even as she was hunched over on the coils of her own immense body, shimmering with a beauty no earthly texture could mimic. V'yahl-renh enjoyed this trance for what felt like an eon to the mouse, though she returned her attention below after only a few minutes.

“Once you had… partaken… your flesh gave my soul fresh life. From within you, the shadows of my tendrils coated every vein and spread through your entire body, the piece of me you had taken for your own sustenance began to devour you from within… and—"

“Then you dragged me… I was pulled."

“ YOU INTERRUPT?!" V'yahl-renh shouted with such force that the clouds in the sky burst and a torrent of rain crashed down in a solid pane of water, knocking the mouse to the ground as it shattered over his head. He nearly lost consciousness as the force winded him, but the shadow of V'yahl-renh's claw crept beneath him and forced him upright once more, splitting his skin and drawing blood as it dragged from his loins to his chin.

“Go on then, speak, rodent."

Stammering, the mouse opened their mouth once more at her command. “I w-was p-p-pulled, dragged… deep down, in the sifting flesh of your corpse… I fought so hard with everything I had, my paws desperately seeking purchase for stability… but I was helpless. And then I—" The mouse trailed off. “Then I was here?"

The figure smiled “Not quite. But I would not expect your mind to be able to retain much of what transpired in the realm between."

The mouse sat speechlessly as he pondered the flood of his former memories and the weight of the cataclysm that he had catalyzed. “I… destroyed the world?!"

The figure lifted the distal corporeal form of its tail and slammed it down with force enough to split the earth asunder, forcing the mouse to scurry to safer ground. “I DESTROYED THE WORLD. I devoured its LIGHT and left it as a MONUMENT to the hubris and AUDACITY of that wretched species… but not before taking my time to track down and devour every last descendant of those who had dared to BIND me— ME!!!" Another genuine smile crossed the lips of V'yahl-renh and all seven of their eyes closed as they recalled that moment of brutal, carnal delight. “I've had blood of the willing… but blood of my enemies? No mortal had ever managed a feat that could even interest me, let alone earn my ire… That was a… novel experience for me. And theirs was the sweeeeeeeetest nectar I thought I'd ever taste… until." The figure looked down at the mouse before him, fangs dripping.

The mouse gulped and feebly tried to retreat, but the figure uncoiled itself and surrounded the entire clearing, casually eliminating any fleeting hope of escape.

“I'm sorry, V'yahl-renh… your magnificence—I didn't know!"

“I do not harbor… much resentment. After all, I was able to use your body and soul to shatter my bonds. You were useful even if you were… unpleasant."

“I—I'm happy I was able to help."

“Are you?" The Elder God seemed amused and intrigued as she examined the mouse beneath her. “Is that all you can remember, rodent? Do not deny me. Confess. What else transpired before you came to me?"

The mouse opened their mouth as if to obey, but no words were formed, their lips remained open for a moment but closed without uttering a sound.

V'yahl-renh's eyes narrowed, she appeared to ponder something briefly, then relaxed her gaze. “Then what else are you?"

The mouse once more opened and closed their mouth without a word.

“Then why is your blood so… intoxicating? Is that the word for this sensation?"

The mouse's jaw dropped, not from a command to speak, but from shock. He knew he was in peril from the beginning, that he was certainly in his final hours, but this was the moment he knew he was done for, and the thought of entering the maw of the beast resurfaced from his dream as the conclusion to that premonition drew closer.

V'yahl-renh's expression turned serious and pensive. “You have piqued my curiosity. Is it because your newfound form and knowledge is a boon from my magnificence—No, there's more to it than the taste of forbidden knowledge. Is it the flavor of my own power that stirs within you now? But… I have feasted on the god-touched before… and my own at that…" The face of the horror wrinkled further in contemplation as it attempted to sift through the allure of the simple prey before her.

“Is it because your psyche somehow managed to grow within me? Is it how the weight of the eschaton crushes your soul? Or is it that your former self had not the capacity to fully appreciate what you were setting in motion and your soul remains innocent while bathed in the blood of your entire world? What is this that I can smell on your soul?" The great figure opened its first mouth for the first time and a large tongue lapped and licked at the air as its shadow swallowed the mouse below in a sheet of darkness. “What… is that DILECTABLE flavor…" V'yahl-renh continued to speak from her second mouth as she licked the shadow of the mouse's soul with the tongue from her first maw. “ANSWER ME!"

“I don't understand." The mouse feebly squeaked as his brain was flooded with an array of neurotransmitters, eliciting fear and excitement, dread and desire, sorrow and joy, the apex of all impulses pumped into his heart as he gazed up at the face of a God.

V'yahl-renh retracted her tongue and tilted her head as she pondered. “I think I have an idea now… but how could that be?" she contorted her face into the shape of genuine confusion as the thoughts that moved within her seemed to truly perplex her. “It's... So much stronger than blood of the willing… sweeter even than blood of my enemies is… could this be blood of the… eager?" A cruel smile broke across her face and she lowered herself so her massive maw was only inches away from the mouse. The breath that emanated from the nostrils of the immense beast was colder than ice, sending shivers through the fur of the mortal creature before her. The devourer of stars looked intently at the tiny mouse and recognized the tender pink flesh between his legs as a sign of arousal in mammals. “It… it is. You hunger, no, you lust for OBLIVION? To be devoured by me is no simple experience. Proud men have asked for riches and power beyond measure only to rue their lust for the material in the endless agony that their soul ultimately suffers within me. For all time— beyond time. And have you not had a glimpse of the abyss? You may have seen only a fragment, but you were within me as I was within you. You saw the truth of the end. Knowing all this… you still desire—no, yearn for it?"

The mouse put their paws together and wrung them frantically as he kept his gaze on the ground, but the shadows he averted his eyes to split open, and a gold light that matched the color of V'yahl-renh's seventh eye stared back from within. The mouse tried to find somewhere else to settle his eyes, somewhere he was not met with that piercing gaze, but the seventh eye of V'yahl-renh opened in every corner of the broken woods around him. Finally, the mouse closed his eyes and cradled his head in his paws… but the eyes of V'yahl-renh opened even within his tightly clasped lids. The mouse opened his eyes immediately, shaking and trembling.

“Why do you shy away when your desire lies right in front of you, little mouse?" For the first time, V'yahl-renh's voice was playful and seemed almost kind.

“I—I don't want to die!" The mouse squeaked. They had no idea why the thought of being devoured by such a monstrosity could stir any of these feelings within him, but now that it had been said out loud, he couldn't deny it… Yet the instinct to cling to life was still strong; the last thread of his soul was sturdy. He was not willing to give in.

“Oh?" V'yahl-renh chuckled in an almost flirtatious tone as if testing the resolve of the creature that was denying their own desire.

“Think of it not as an end, for you will be part of eternity."

The god's soft tone did not sway the mouse. “No."

“Is that so?" V'yahl-renh lowered her physical claw until it was just above the mouse's head. “You will perish regardless, of course." Her warm smile turned into an insidious grin.

“And you will not taste the blood of the eager—not fully!" The mouse stood up, although his limbs were shaking, he found the strength to move. The liquid bonds that once held him fell off feebly into the puddle of rain that had diluted them. “You can't properly savor the taste of my soul, which no doubt exceeds what you can sense on it now. Like the allure of a freshly cooked meal, you can only bask in my aroma without my permission to go further." The mouse managed to smirk. Their lip quivered, however, though while his courage was as flimsy as paper his words were as solid as stone.

V'yahl-renh's lips teetered between a scowl and a smile, with all of her fangs on display. “Unfortunately. As such, normally I broker a deal with an individual seeking to barter their soul away for something. But in this case, the devouring of your soul is the favor your heart desires... So, you need only accept your own depravity within and surrender… Why resist me?"

“That doesn't exactly seem fair." The mouse protested with a cavalier shrug.

“So, you should benefit twice from our arrangement?" The God gave a hearty laugh “My, my, are you greedy..."

The mouse shrugged once more, finding a bizarre sense of confidence and smugness in the insanity of this moment. “And why should I just simply consent then? It's only fair that you pay for your meal, no? Surely your savior deserves a favor before he is savored."

Entertained, V'yahl-renh motioned with her hand. “Go on then, make your request."

“I want to truly enjoy it. In exchange for my soul, I want the unfathomable agony that awaits within to feel instead like an ecstasy beyond imagination. I want any and all pain to become pleasure in my mind."

The Elder God's face froze, both of her jaws lay slack, her seven eyes widened, and what could almost be perceived as a giggle bellowed from within her chest. “That… may, in fact, be the most brilliant deal any being has ever sought to make with me. You willingly descend into hell on the condition that it be made paradise? The audacity. The creativity… You've managed the impossible again… You, little mouse, have impressed me twice. To think… such a pitiful, pathetic, and depraved creature could alter the course of the cosmos and then strike such a favorable bargain with a being far superior to them... Very well. As it was spoken, so it shall be. Do you consent to the terms of this contract?"

V'yahl-renh opened her first mouth again and extended her tongue, at the end it held a swirling orb of green and violet light so dense it seemed physical as it flowed beneath a current of shadows that surged like water. The Ancient Deity held this sphere at the tip of her tongue as she lowered it down. The mouse reached out to touch it, and his mind was flooded with an abstract energy permeating through his nerves into his mind where it unraveled into the concise and fully formed concept from which all words are attempted to derive from before they become speech. The exact terms of their agreement were conveyed to his mind like a work of art in perfect clarity.

“I accept these terms, V'yahl-renh. My soul for your favor. Spoken, now and forever unbroken, my word become bound, my soul become yours." The mouse spoke the required words as if he had rehearsed them daily, standing resolute, and excited.

The swirling orb expanded into ethereal light until it enveloped even V'yahl-renh herself before rapidly and violently imploding back into itself and vanishing from reality, sending a shockwave so strong it knocked the mouse to the ground even though not a single blade of grass had swayed from the force. He looked up now at the Eldritch Being before him with fear, hunger, anticipation, lust, and shame burning all at once within his blood, excitement dripping from the flesh of his member as his eyes waited for the maw of the beast to open.

V'yahl-renh took a moment to herself before she parted the teeth of her first mouth again. With a devious grin, she licked her lips, raised her maw to the sky, and snapped it shut in the air with a deafening clash of colliding teeth as the shadow of her fangs tore through the very soul of the mouse below.

CLACK!

As soon as V'yahl-renh clasped shut her maw, the mouse convulsed and screamed a blood-curdling shriek and violently convulsed and tossed, writhing from within. Their bones felt as though they had all snapped in half and his veins as if they had exploded. He arched his back so sharply he nearly snapped his own spine, but at the same time, the muscles of his abdomen were shocked into contracting so tightly he was brought into the opposite extreme before his spinal cord could splinter; he lay stuck, trembling and writhing in the fetal position. His pupils fluctuated between complete dilation and constriction as his mouth quivered and twisted between being pulled toward agony and bliss. Giddy giggles escaped him in unsteady breaths as he foamed at the mouth with blood seeping out in his drool from where he had bit his tongue and his cheeks as his head slammed into the ground again and again. His mind was split between reality and the realms beyond as his soul experienced sensations his brain could not process. His eyes glazed over as he saw stars burst and burn, worlds swirl with warmth and life then fall into desolate and barren darkness. He saw creation and destruction as he was dragged along the veil between heaven and hell as his whole being lay caught in the shadow of the fangs of V'yahl-renh.

An epoch passed in this fashion within the mind of the mouse, though was returned to the exact instant of their descent into madness after the Elder God released her fangs. The mouse collapsed onto his back, breathing heavily, unable to lift his head or process even a modicum of volition as he lay completely drained in every sense of the word. As his gaze met V'yahl-renh, he could not manage to form words or even thoughts in the wake of what he had just endured.

V'yahl-renh laughed heartily as she smiled almost fondly at the mouse below. “I have held up every end of our bargain, and I can tell by the perverse juices you've added to that puddle around you that you're satisfied with our… arrangement. But you wonder why I didn't devour your soul?" The Elder God paused for a moment to allow the mouse to think and then bellowed a cruel laugh from deep within as she stared into the eyes of her prey. “Oh, no. No, no, no… heh… It's nothing so… what's the word? Romantic? I find it amusing that you think you could mean something to me. You are merely a meal… But your taste is, what was the word again? Yes— intoxicating … and I'm not quite ready for this to be over just yet. And I'm curious if you'll taste even sweeter with time to marinate, pine, and yearn for it even more now that you have had a taste of what you've bargained for."

V'yahl-renh reached out with her hand and physically touched the mouse for the first time since they re-entered reality. She steadied the mouse's mind, not just into the moment but into his new self. The mouse now felt grounded and rebuilt. Like they had been made whole, fully settled into their mind as if they had existed in unbroken consciousness in this form since birth, as if they had not just been created in the chaos of the void a short eternity ago. He felt whole even though his soul had just been shattered and scattered across the cosmos. He was somehow, impossibly, at peace.

“I'll see you again, and again. I will take only a nibble each time until I eventually devour the entirety of your delectable little soul. But it will be a slow, meticulous undertaking. I will take you piece by piece until there is nothing left. My delicious little morsel, my exotic little delicacy… my…" The elder god paused for a moment and peered into the mouse to choose her final words with the utmost precision to leave the desired effect on her new plaything “My… precious little snack."

As soon as she spoke that final word, V'yahl-renh vanished from reality with a crack of thunder that sundered the sky, causing light to erupt and crash back into itself in the opening and parting of the realm between. The mouse lay there speechless for a moment until the ground, the trees, the sky, and every aspect of reality around him returned exactly as it was before V'yahl-renh had manifested. He reached up to gently touch his face with one paw and roughly clawed into his chest with enough force to draw fresh blood from his wounds with the other. He arched his back as the sharp pain sent a delightful quiver through his body that made his fur stand on end.

He looked up at the moon, wondering if V'yahl-renh was still looking at him. He began to giggle, then cackle and finally exploded in blissful, maniacal laughter he could not control; he tried in vain to fight against this immeasurable joy as he struggled to capture a breath. It wasn't until he had nearly suffocated that he finally managed to fight past the laughter and draw air back into his lungs. His breathing continued to quiver with giggles of delight as he caught his breath. Once he finally recentered himself, all he could do was mutter the Cosmic Horror's last words back to himself.

“squ… sne… scur… Snaa.. Snack… Snack… Snack. SNACK!"