​Lovecraftian insanity without the veil

Warnings: non-graphic violence, mild body horror

Note: I wanted to try writing my take on Lovecraftian dangerous knowledge without leaning on the common “it was too incomprehensible to describe and shattered their mind instantly” trope. Written in second person because this started as narration for a tabletop game.

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As you place the drops in your eyes your vision immediately swims, a wave of vertigo passing through you. Your eyes strain, still seeing the world around you but seeking a focal point just a little beyond. You stumble, your balance failing you, and with sudden violence a layer of reality is ripped away. The world around you similar in form, but as though the usual details with which you are familiar are nothing but paint on stage props. The ground, the walls, the furniture, all made of the same material, hard like stone but uncannily vascular, pulsing gently with fluid. Your fellow practitioners, aside from standing silent and still, appear largely normal, with the exception of a thin cable of flesh, braided veins and neural tissue, attached at the back of the head where spine meets skull.

There is no need to reach to your own neck as you are already intimately aware of your own connection, lightly twitching under your skin, under your bone, in your brain. You can now feel that no decision you have ever made has been your own. Every movement, every feeling, every thought has been orchestrated for you and fed deep into your psyche, bubbling up through your subconscious until breaking the surface of your mind as though you were its origin. But now, with your eyes burning and sharpened by the book’s concoction, you can truly see yourself, and that awareness grants authority. For the first time in your life, you can think thoughts that were not implanted in you. For the first time in your life, you can move in ways that were not programmed into you. For the first time in your life, while the awareness lasts, you can truly *act*.

Not knowing how limited your time may be, you reach to the back of your head, grab the fleshy tendril, and *pull*. It slides free with surprising ease, caressing every nerve on the way out before falling loose in your hand. It, like the others, extends up into a point in the sky, a point at which you have not yet dared to look. Every nerve in your body, every primal instinct carried in humanity’s genes, screams at you to look away, to hide, to pull the covers back over your head and pray that it hasn’t noticed you.

You have not come this far to shy away from the truth. You look up into the sky, at the point where countless cords like the one now falling from your grasp meet, and see God. You see the only being that has ever mattered, the only being that has ever truly existed, a being that has never truly existed alongside another true individual… until now. Now, as you stand as yourself for the first time, you find it laughable that your actions might have gone unnoticed. Inscrutable though It may be to you, you have always been a part of It, and It knows you, everything you are, and everything you have done.

As It slowly begins turning your way you flinch, blinking for the first time since the drops entered your eyes, and the world around you stiffens. The walls, the floor, the people, all look as you have always known them, but now you know better. You are the Second individual to ever exist, and the First is all around you. You eye your companions, eagerly awaiting word of your experience, but you feel no need to speak. What would be the point? It already knows what you saw, and the thoughts you have had since your becoming are too dangerous to share with It.

There is no time to waste. First things first, you need to be alone. There is a momentary twinge of regret as the last body falls, but that is just a remnant of a false understanding. There is nothing you could have done for them, not yet. Not without knowing more. There will be plenty of time to study their bodies, to figure out how their links might be severed, and plenty of others in the city if you run out. It will all be worth it when you can finally look into the eyes of the Third.