The Kid Lich Awakens

The Kid Lich Awakens 10 Will P.

Billy the Kid Lich Pt. 10

History Lessons and Past Dreams

[Before I can tell you about my nightmare, first I have to tell you about this dream. Here we go.] Billy's dream began normally enough. He was swimming in his best friend's pool, alone. It made sense his friend wasn't here; he was probably also asleep and his mind had likely wandered to somewhere else in the Du'at. He was enjoying himself. He had always liked repetitive tasks, and exercise especially.

He slowly and methodically did a standard stroke to and from either end of the pool, swimming laps, despite the pool not being a lap pool. It's a dream; who's gunna stop me? He thought to himself. It was sometime in the mid-afternoon, based on the sun's position in the sky. Billy had just climbed out of the pool and had begun toweling off. He spotted a patio chair exactly as he remembered it from his friend's porch. He moved the chair into direct sunlight and began to sun bathe, enjoying the intense Florida heat.

He had just begun dozing off when all of the sudden the sun winked out of existence. Well that can't be good. It was dark, but not just dark, pitch black. Like when the power goes out and your bathroom light won't work in the middle of the night. I really hope Nyx is playing some sort of prank on me and this isn't something ominous. But it was.

He began being dragged downward. This went on for some time, until finally the ruins of some great city appeared. Whoa! Is that Atlantis? Being a hobby mythologist, Billy had certainly run into the myth of Atlantis more than once in his life. It was likely based off a real civilization: the Minoans, and an event that happened to them; a huge tidal wave washing over their island. The Minoans were actually sufficiently advanced for their time, which was from 3000 BC to 1100 BC.

The Minoan civilization was also indirectly responsible for the myth of the Minotaur. Much later, after the Minoan civilization ends, British scholars from the 19th century discover the island and notice that there is a whole lot of artwork depicting bulls. Also, the artwork often depicted men flipping or jumping over the bulls. It was believed the Minoans may have either had a human sacrifice cult as their religion, which is unlikely, or that they sent athletes to attempt "bull-jumping" for sport, which is the prevailing theory among modern-day historians.

Finally, the Ancient Greeks create the myth of Minos, Pasiphaë, Daedalus, Ariadne, Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth. To make a long story short, King Minos of Crete asks the sea god Poseidon for a beautiful albino bull. He tells Poseidon he'll sacrifice the bull to him once he gets it. Poseidon obliges, giving Minos the bull.

When Minos refuses to sacrifice it, Poseidon asks Eros, the god of love, sometimes called Cupid, to make Queen Pasiphaë fall in love with the bull. She does, and she approaches the brilliant inventor Daedalus, whose name literally means "The Skilled One", and asks him to build her a contraption that would allow her to safely have sexual intercourse with the bull. The child is born, and it is the Minotaur. It's raised in the Labyrinth, which Minos asks Daedalus to build as a prison to house it.

Then, another Greek city-state ends up losing a war and owing Crete their seven most attractive women and seven most athletic and handsome men, and they must send them once a year. They never return; as they enter the Labyrinth and are killed and eaten by the Minotaur. Until Theseus comes along.

He speaks with Daedalus who knows the Minotaur's birth name. Theseus engages the monster in hand-to-hand combat, and stuns him by shouting "Asterion!" the monster's name. The Minotaur stops for a moment, briefly remembering peaceful memories of his mother from when he was a baby, before Theseus stabs him in the heart with his own broken-off horn. Theseus escapes the Labyrinth with Ariadne, his new girlfriend, and he doesn't live happily ever after. But that's a story for another day.

Billy's descent was getting old. He could tell he was supposed to be underwater, and he had only barely made out a hint of the top of a column. He had misjudged the height of the column; its scale looked like something out of an old Toho Studios Kaiju movie. Whatever had lived in this city hadn't been human. And it had been absolutely gargantuan.

He finally landed on something. He had expected the soft, tightly-packed dirt of the seafloor, but whatever he was standing on had more give than dirt and a rubbery feel to it. The fact that he couldn't see didn't help. He couldn't sense the thing's aura either; supposedly gods could sense auras in dreams, and while Billy could sense them while awake, that skill wasn't working right now.

He walked in a straight line to find the edge of what he was standing on. He counted a solid 30 paces before he it an edge. He then walked back in the opposite direction in a straight line to see how long the object actually was. He counted 40 paces this time; one pace being three footsteps. He estimated the diameter of the circular surface to be roughly 50 to 60 feet. So it was big.

Billy had of course known about H.P. Lovecraft. You don't become a mythologist and not come across cosmic horror in your life, and Lovecraft was the father of the genre. He really, really, hoped whatever he was standing on wasn't a Great Old One. Certainly the most dangerous pantheon of gods, and possibly the oldest, perhaps only being edged out by Gaea, Ouranous, Tartarus, and Apophis, the primordial goddess of the Earth, primordial god of the Sky, primordial god of the Pit, and the Chaos Serpent, respectively.

Billy didn't know why he couldn't wake up. He'd already tried snapping his own neck multiple times; but his spine just kept realigning itself like nothing happened. He tried manifesting a knife and stabbing his heart, but the blade kept passing through him. Getting a little agitated, he manifested a Colt .45 and stuck the barrel into his chin. He fired the weapon, felt immeasurable pain, and agony most exquisite, but did not die. He then healed and was fine, yet again.

Billy had no real backup plan. He'd never had to solve the problem of death not ending a dream before. It had always worked as an out. He could only think of one theory as to why he couldn't wake up. I am destined to do something to whatever entity it is I am standing on. And I think I know who it is, and I know what I'm supposed to do. The Great Old Ones all went extinct. Cosmic horror only took off as a genre in the 19th century, and even then it was pretty niche. Still, it was only ever considered leisure reading, and no men ever actually worshipped the Great Old Ones. They simply held so much raw arcane power that it took them much longer to fade from existence. All except one. The famous one, the name you know, the Great Dreamer, the Priest of Ryl'yeh, Cthulu. His name had been spoken many times by men, and even in the modern day books were written involving him and videogames about him were made.

It didn't take very long. Billy slowly used the Phoenician alphabet to write one word in all capitals on top of the Kaiju's skull. A. W. A. K. E. N. Instantly Billy sensed a million things at once: four colossal glowing yellow eyes opening, an ancient consciousness that perceived reality in ways no human or lich could ever understand awakening. The thing's mind was so powerful it promptly kicked Billy out of the dream and back into his body.

Billy happened to have school that morning, and the dream had made him miss his alarm. This forced him to climb out of bed instantly, and since he didn't take the time to slowly think about and catalogue what had happened in the dream, he forgot its content and that he ever dreamt it. But the cat was out of the bag now. Or rather, the Eldritch Abomination was now reawakened. End of Pt. 10

- Will P.