The God In The Gutter
I was four years old the first time I saw the God in the Gutter. The memory didn’t form until my mother mentioned that one summer I started shrieking while on a walk. When prompted I pointed to a storm drain and said I didn’t like the man peeking out. This freaked her out understandably but when she went to take a look there was no one there. Beyond the storm grate was a space far too small to fit a person. She thought it must have been a conjuration of an overactive child’s mind, giving shape to the blurry darkness. But after she told me of this experience, what I know to be a false memory formed in my mind. I envisioned this strange being made of darkness, taking the rudimentary form of a human but the eyes gave it away. These crimson pits, iridescent and hateful, cleaving through shadow to gaze upon the world. If you’d ask me how I knew what I saw was real I wouldn’t know how to answer. Memories after all are these fickle little malleable things that warp with time, never a fully accurate representation. If I said I was guided by a dream you’d think me insane. All I know is that there’s an indentation left in my being that’s so defined that these events cannot be anything else but real. From then on I consciously avoided that sewer in my walks to and from school until the eve of my 12th birthday. I decided to confront what I thought was a childish fear. Dad had told me that I was about to transition to a young man and that I’d need to act like it, something I took to heart. It rained the day I followed a stream running down the street gutter, eyes focused on the detritus it carried until I was face to face with the sewer grating that had caused a tinge of anxiety whenever I caught sight of it. Peering into it I saw nothing but the flow of rainwater and any fear I once had started to peter out. I blinked, looked away, wondered if the strange mixture of emotions I was feeling was the first taste of existential disappointment, and flicked my gaze back to the storm drain. I froze, a half-formed gasp caught in my throat and I let out a long wheeze at the sight. What had once been a regular, unassuming street gutter now was a black chasm. I tried commanding my body to move, will my mind out of its fear-induced stupor but the endless void I was staring into consumed all of my facilities. “Hello,” it said. And the spell was broken, within a heartbeat, my body slackened and tensed. This time I was ready to flee. “Don’t run, please. You might not remember me, but I remember you.” It continued, whispering in a voice so frail it elicited a sense of pity. Against my better judgment, I looked back down at the gutter and followed the serene flow until that pit met my gaze. I peered into nothing. Curiosity had taken hold of me. This thing that had been an ever-present but subtle fear, now stood before me and the need for answers rose above all. “You’ve seen me?” I asked “Oh I’ve seen plenty from here, I can gaze out onto the world and a few other places but not for long. Can’t afford to get too distracted. But I’ve seen you and your parents, I’ve seen your neighbors, I’ve seen the years come and go, and you’ve grown older and stronger with them.” “I have?” “Oh yes, you’ve changed, things are always changing. It’s the way of the world. Even down here, things have changed and will change, long after I’m gone.” A slight grimace spread across my face. “What could possibly be changing down there? I can’t see anything.” “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Down here there’s an entire world no one but me knows.” “What’s it like?” “Would you like to see? I could show you,” it said, voicing pitching in excitement. A knot formed in my stomach, this thing had almost shed the malicious veneer I had painted over it all these years, but now its invitation dyed it once more with a shade of danger much more intense than I could have ever imagined. And yet curiosity gnawed at my being, dissolving mental failsafes. With each passing moment, the answer to its invitation grew louder within me. “I can’t be gone for long…” I tried one final excuse. “Time runs differently down here. You’ll find almost no time passing during your visit.” “Well, then I guess it couldn’t hurt.” “Excellent, all you need to do is come closer.” Slowly I lowered myself towards the grating, peering deeper into the drain, seeing nothing but the static murk of pitch black. “Closer, come face to face with grate,” It said. I hesitated for a moment, weighing my options. I figured that if anything tried reaching through I’d be fast enough to get up and run. And even if it did catch me, I was in broad daylight, and a neighbor’s house was directly in front of me should anything go awry. So I got down on all floors, wincing as rain soaked into the knees of my jeans, and peered as closely into the darkness as I physically could. Panic shot through me as the sensation of falling came over me, I tried to stand but it felt as if I was disconnected from my body, and I was only a head plummeting into the void. Like those dreams of falling and falling into an abyss, a sea of nothing. And then there was light. I had never seen a supernova, no human alive had ever seen one in the midst of its desolation. The intensity of the final flicker of a star’s life, all we have is the aftermath of its death throes. But here in this place, I saw it, saw what I could only describe as the birth of a universe. Darkness and then a spark, a connection made, synapses firing, conception, creation, brilliance. And in the fading afterglow, as the cosmic dust settles, all that exists and can exist takes form. “What… was that?” I asked. From somewhere still shrouded in dark, the Gutter God answered, voice now stronger than ever before, but exhaustion still pervaded every syllable. “Your consciousness gives shape to all that exists down here. Though I created it, a new version of it is created within your mind to see. Don’t worry. The broad shape and form of this world is the same to you as it is to me, you just perceive some of the creations… relatively.” “I don’t understand what is this?” I looked around, still disembodied but somehow able to move, seemingly without limitation. It was a vision of space, but much more vibrant and whimsical. A cosmos of various celestial bodies scattered about. There was a massive bubblegum-colored gas cloud whose expanse must have been a hundred thousand light-years across. It was dwarfed by a strange neighboring planet. It had rings like Saturn but these rings encapsulated the entirety of the sphere. Spaced out radially in a clock-like formation, giving the impression that the world was imprisoned by a cage made of planetary rings. Elsewhere there was what seemed like a solar system composed entirely of cubes. Cube planets with cube moons, all orbiting a cuboid star, the light shining off of it was strange, contorted in ways my mind couldn’t begin to unravel. I cast my look away and saw a tear in a portion of space itself, a claw mark raked across a spattering of galaxy clusters and quasars. Within this wound lay a void, darker than black, and I couldn’t help but have my gaze drawn into it. I strained my vision, wondering if the shifting masses within were real or conjured by my mind. As I approached the certainty that something stirred within, the Gutter God’s voice spoke once more, booming and yet frail. “No, not there, never there.” I shifted around and saw nothing but the strange cosmic realm he had drawn me into. An unease still lingered, at what could elicit such fear from a God. “Where are you?” “I’m too weak to manifest a form now, and cannot interact with anything here, I’m just as powerless as you, and am condemned to mere observations of my creation.” “So you made all this?” “Of course. When I crawled into that dark recess, I had nothing but time, so I made something… something to pass the time, or maybe something to ease the pain. But enough of me, here look.” The world in the gutter shifted as we shot through it at such dizzying speeds that stars became streaks of light. And then there was stillness as I now gazed upon a planetoid floating in empty space, a third of it was consumed by the trunk of a tree that reached far into the atmosphere. My perspective shifted once more and I saw my field of vision closing in on the strange planet, crossing through a thick layer of violet and blue clouds into the landscape below. From a bird’s eye view, I gazed upon a gathering of strange chubby creatures within a sea of fuzzy pink grass. These beings seemed to be stubby-limbed bone-white puffballs. There was no distinction between the torso and head, just a rounded mass with black beady eyes. A horizontal mouth lined with rounded triangular teeth split its face in half. In between their eyes, a horn sprouted, with the gnarled, curled patterning seen in popular depictions of unicorns. The creatures reminded me of a child’s interpretation of what a fictional animal might look like, but they stood there. Vocalizing and puttering about, physical and real. At least by the metrics that governed this place. “These are my first attempts at creating life. I didn’t do a good job. All sorts of structural maladies plague them. They strip the bark from the tree but it provides them no sustenance, eventually, they’ll strip it to its core and it’ll collapse taking the whole planet with it and all these creatures will fall into the void of space. Since I didn’t imbue them with the concept of death they’ll be left to drift endlessly until the end of time itself.” I felt something then more existential than I had ever known. A God abandoning his creations, not out of spite, or anger, but despair. Anguish at his own failures. “Why can’t he just fix them? Or make the tree grow faster than they can eat it?” Before I could voice my thoughts he spoke. “There’s more to see, let’s not ponder on my first creations. I was nascent then, we must move ever forward.” The planet and its strange inhabitants fell away from us, shrinking to a distant speck and then to nothing as we moved through this bizarre world. The cosmos darkened to a starless inky murk, unbroken for several minutes until a blinding beam of deep violet light cleaved through the shadowed veil. Tracing it to its source settled my gaze upon a vantablack sphere. A quasar. A thin magenta outline was the only thing that defined it against the stark black. Staring at the massive celestial body an image forced itself to the surface of my consciousness. It flashed over the quasar, superimposed for a moment, and was gone. A massive orb of flesh, covered with countless gnashing mouths lined with massive serrated dagger-like teeth. Occasionally a tongue could be seen drooping out of one of the mouths, hungry and drooling. Chains extending from somewhere beyond sight converged onto the beast, hooking deep into its flesh, anchoring it in place. An echo of its ravenous groan lingered as its visage faded back into the quasar. The God sensed my fear of the beast and assured me that the quasar was not our destination. Instead, we were drawn to its edge, and there, hidden by the cosmic body, was a small planet. We plummeted through its atmosphere, gazing upon great scars gouging the landscape. A smattering of orange-red specks within these crevices glimmered like embers or stars. When we finally came to rest it was within a great ravine. A murky sky swirled above, lit only by dim violet light, but here an inferno raged and threw light and shadows across the many rock faces. I watched as a procession of curious creatures circled the fire in a graceful, rapturous dance. In the flickering light their angularity hid much of their detail, save for the many spindly limbs. It was only until one cast itself into the fire that I made out its full form in the second before it was engulfed. Crystalline serpentine beings conjoined into a branch-like mass, its “flesh” was obsidian, made of countless glossy black shards. A shrill cry arose from the being. I didn’t know if it was agony or the sound of its blood boiling and venting like steam. The others danced with increased fervor as they let out tinny ear-splitting vocalizations, an alien song. The being emerged from the flames, reborn anew. Now it was jagged shards of iridescence sculpted into the rudimentary form of a human. Opalescent light cast out on the ground before it, a living prism. Its hands rose to the purple sky with a cry. Its voice now is like that of a thousand shattering panes of glass, or a rain of diamonds. Something like a cheer resounded out through the chasm and the dance continued. “I named them Cyrranids. It means nothing to my knowledge, it simply sounded right.” He flew us to another ravine, one where the fire was but a smoldering wreckage. Light gleamed off countless fragments of dull dark crystals scattered about. They hummed, trembled, and inched ever closer towards the dying flame. “They start as crystal shards that vibrate at the same frequency and use that to locate and move towards each other. Then they merge and form long chains. This is their juvenile state, these crystalline ouroboros then seek each other out to join together in their next stage of life. When the time is right and the embers spark into an inferno they feed themselves to the flame and fully mature.” In an instant we were back at the pyre, watching the Cyrranids revel in their ritual. “They have culture,” I said. “In a sense, they can also grow and change…” “But?” “They cannot create and lack sentience. It is more like a process, but one that is inefficient, they have no purpose but to exist. I can hardly call them life. I wanted to make something beautiful. Something greater than I. The sin of my first creation plagued me so when I saw the fruit of my failure here, I tried giving them mercy.” “That’s why you made the devouring beast.” “Yes, but that too is flawed, it cannot scour them from existence, and neither can I.” Something like anxiety came over me, deepening as the sky grew brighter with intense violet light. Looking up I saw the silhouette of the great devouring moon spread out across the horizon. A flash of white lightning split the sky and revealed a sky full of flesh and teeth. A great maw parted and revealed a chasm of gluttony, gaping and throaty. Immediately the creature’s dance ceased but they did not flee. I understood then that the process had been interrupted but they did not recognize what halted it, nor did they have the instinct to survive. “The beast!” I cried. “We must go. This is not something to dwell on,” the God said. “If the beast does not consume them what does it do to them?” The earth shook with the beast’s roar and the wind whipped into a vortex pulling dust towards the sky. Looking up I saw the beast’s gullet within a gaping mouth and sucking in all below it. The dust cyclone crossed over the great inferno and sparked into a tower of raging flame, bridging the gap between heaven and earth and feeding the chained beast. The Cyrranids stood still as they could until the force of the vortex sent them spiraling into the tempest and launched up the ladder of flames and into the belly of the beast. I screamed at the God to do something but he pulled us away and into the atmosphere once more, past the veiled planet, and that unholy quasar and back to space. I was solemn for several moments before the God spoke once more. “The beast can only grind the Cyrranids back to their nascent form and spit them back out as a crystal rain, the cycle continues endlessly. I thought once to extinguish the fires that forge them into their adult forms. But that would leave them scattered and aimless. This way at least they have an endless menial cycle of existence.” “Death and rebirth,” I said. A concept I had barely grasped this year. “Let us move on,” he said and the world darkened to near pitch before a cyan tint swirled through and an ocean stood before us. Light reflected and refracted until gold shimmered on the tide and in the distance, swaddled in radiance, land. In an instant, it was before us and a sea of emerald leaves and ruby landscapes eclipsed the blue. We moved through the air, at mach speeds, watching the landscape transition to a desert waste made of pale violet sand, then a murky green lake the size of a continent, and then cycle back to the lush greens and reds that started it all. I was about to ask the point of it all until I saw the mountains in the distance shift and clarify into something else; towers, temples, unnatural edifices formed with intent and sentiment. My previous apprehension was shattered by curiosity. “You made these?” “No, I made their makers.” “Makers?” “My greatest creation, and my greatest failure.” How could it be both, I wondered but didn’t voice. The city was upon us now. A Babylon that had never fallen, never been shattered by the wrath of God. Towers, segmented and cuboid rose to greet us on high. And as we descended beneath their shadow I saw the architectural genius of their design. Patterns and masonry interwoven with support beams and arches. Perfect functionality but not at the sacrifice of beauty. Devotion was evident in every single detail of the structures here, represented as rays of light shining down on a cold and dark world. The colors had faded now but a phantom of their previous splendor flashed in my mind and I knew at once the adoration and desperation of their construction. “They worshiped you,” I said. “Naturally, observe.” We were on the streets now. Smooth stone pathways that at one point must have been polished to brilliance were now dull and worn. Holes pockmarked the ground-level buildings and in the passing moments, they emerged. Ribbons made of something between flesh and fabric, long and flat swirls coalesced around a spherical base. The beings were orange-red with pinkish hues, and along the underside of their appendages ran a dark crimson line that split and formed a diamond pattern only to rejoin into a seam flowing to the red-tipped ends. Something like fingers, a dozen, adorned each tendril. The sphere that these limbs connected to had a triangular alignment of three beady eyes just above the center of its mass and in the direct center a larger eye, pale grey and pupilled. Tens of dozens moved about on their appendages, something between a walk and a slither. Their gait was languid and graceful, and none noticed our presence. “They do not see us. They do not see me. Though I am everywhere and my essence is distilled into every facet of this reality, they do not notice. Once, they knew this, once they communed with me in any way they could. It is the reason these structures exist. But that was long ago and now only a few send their words my way. So I faded from their lives, and I am only an intangible now.” The God said with a leaking sorrow. “It’ll appear here now. The abyssal gate. As I’ve told you before, do not look into the threshold beyond this reality, but observe what emerges carefully,” He continued. And so I watched the sky darken as a shadow passed over the firmament of this world. The beings stopped in their tracks and though their forms were alien, the emotion that stilled them was not. Fear. A keening rose from somewhere, a wildly pitching fragmented whistle, and the mad scramble began. The beings panicked and rushed towards their dens. Some staggered and stumbled and some were trampled or tripped. Black dots began to stain a space above a plaza and the screams rose to a crescendo. The space burst open, like the puncturing of an amniotic sac. Tears in reality raked by some unforeseen hand operating in the beyond. I could only avert my gaze. I looked downward, at the space directly beneath. The first wave brought something feral and quadrupedal. Its form was blurred and vaguely amorphous as if a living ink stain in perpetual motion. The first casualty was an unfortunate creature that had fallen in a nearby alleyway. The thing from the abyss was upon it in the blink of an eye, folding the space between them away in an instant, no it devoured what existed between it and its prey. I reeled in panic watching the strider being torn asunder by the abyssal hound. A rain of black-green blood peppered the ground and its scent was sweet and sickly. Why would a creature that could scrape away space itself stop to maul one lone strider? And then it dawned on me, sadism. I stepped back, ready to run when it spoke again. “They cannot see you. They cannot harm you.” “What-“ “Just watch, this is important.” A dozen more abyssal hounds emerged from the tear and in an instant, the city had been gouged out into near nothing. The monolithic towers were torn asunder and fell in heaps of rubble before me and I instinctively tried to flinch away. But with no physical body and no eyes, I was forced to watch as an entire section of earth blinked out of existence, and within the craters, the striders screamed and tried to scramble to safety. A sound, high, shrill, and piercing, rose. The unmistakable shriek of a child. A cove of infant striders scattered and squealed but the hounds were upon them. One was caught between the maws of two abyssal dogs who pulled at it in opposite directions until it ruptured with a roar of agony and its blood flooded the earth. “Enough,” I said “Not yet,” was the reply, and with it an ascent, raised to the sky so we could witness the carnage on a larger scale. “It is not over yet, bear witness to absolution.” From my vantage, I saw the expanse of the ravaged city, though its center lay in ruins the rest of it expanded out laterally for what seemed like an eternity. But the further we rose the perimeter of its end neared and the tear into the abyss shrunk until it was a mere pinprick of black. One moment there and the next splitting open and vomiting black veins across the horizon. Like bolts of lightning or a window shattering it spread across land and sky. Latching onto buildings and the air itself until I was looking at a black web all originating from the abyssal tear. In a heartbeat, all that existed within the sphere of black veins collapsed. Matter was torn apart, sundered, and disintegrated into nothing. Space shrank towards the nexus and time itself ceased to have meaning. All unraveled and reformed into a point so infinitesimal it could hardly be said to exist until that too ceased to be. In the wake of the desolation nothing was left except for a continent-sized creator and quickly fading black vapor. “Wha-“ I started to ask. “I called them the priori, I wanted them to be my legacy, it took 7 iterations before I was satisfied.” “And before them? How many living things did you create?” “Hundreds? Thousands? Too innumerable for me to recall.” I reeled, how many had been abandoned to the cold cosmos, or worse. “I don’t understand this, or them, or why you would abandon them.” A long moment passed before he spoke once more and when he did it was with a blossoming of a new location, the desolate crater fading and a fertile crescent of strange plants and valleys like scars took its place. From the strata, curious shapes arose. “I wanted them to be functional, perfect, graceful. I wanted them to be better than me. So I made their biology as efficient as I could conceptualize, I had an intimate knowledge of biology once. But I failed to account for one harsh truth, a creator can not make something that transcends himself, instead, he must transcend through his creation.” The forms collapsed to dust, then faded to nothing. “What was that?” I asked “A desperate grasp at a new genesis, but I am old and tired.” “You can’t create anymore?” “I can create fragments of things. But It’s been ages since I’ve seen anything through to completion. Once it was so easy to dream up an entire world from nothing, spend eons on the details, and bring it into existence. I loved to dream once, wander in the endless possibilities. Now I can only dream a figment of a whole form, the drive and ability seem to have fled from me a long time ago. Totality evades me.” “Then… this place is dying.” “No. it’s stagnant. A world of relics. When the time comes it will be my crypt. What happens to my creations I cannot say, likely they’ll fade with me. But with you maybe… For now, it lives in a state of limbo” “Why did you bring me here?” “So someone can bear witness to all that I am. There’s one more thing I must show you. Come.” The planet we stood on gradually faded away in a translucent haze until we were adrift in space once more. Again we rocketed through the cosmos, a quiet tension trailing close behind. The marvelous wonder of his cosmos now shaded with the revelation of the underlying rot of his indifference. That and his unwillingness to be active in its maintenance. A lump formed in my chest as we crossed the expanse of a familiar pink cloud. I averted my gaze the second we came to a halt once I realized where the Gutter God had brought us. The Rift I had been warned to never let my gaze wander towards. “I’m sorry, I thought I could bury this sin. But if you are to be the observer you must see all I have made. Even this. Stay close, the horrors you will witness will be unrelenting.” He said. The rift was before us now, drawing us into its murky swirling depths. Panic rose as we crossed its threshold but with nowhere or way to run, I could only endure. Dark mist was all I saw at first. It was thick and shimmering, shifting as we progressed through it. The miasma only parted when we reached the first marker of our journey through the abyss. An island floating in the void, inhabited by a single dead tree. Flesh was stretched across its trunk, human flesh. Faces pocked every inch of its surface, stitched together in a horrid amalgam of agony. Their mouths wrenched open in an eternal scream, their eyes long gouged out leaving black pits that too shrieked their suffering. The Gutter God knew what my reaction was before I could give it voice and he spoke. “Not yet, this is only the beginning. Steel yourself, it will only get worse from here on out.” We moved past the tree, its abrupt silence causing a deep unease to creep over me. “Why did it stop screaming?” The floor transitioned from the tar-black pitch of the abyss to an angry fleshy beige. If I had the physicality to scream I would have, if I could run, if I could cry, if only I could close my eyes… The stitched faces now stretched out like a rug of skin, an ocean of pain. It was a pattern, repeating infinitely. The depths of their mouths and eyes felt darker than anything I had ever experienced, descending endlessly as they drank light itself. But the horror was just beginning, I realized this as they twitched alive and their maws gaped even louder with the deafening roar of a billion cries. The mass of flesh vibrated and shifted with chaos, it was like a surging crowd in hell and instantly I knew what this place was. Before I could ask why the God forced us through, passing through the pandemonium for what seemed like hours. It never got better, I never acclimated to the screaming sea, and my only grounding force was the momentary shock that would set it at irregular intervals. The scene was broken by another escalation in the profane. So far the carpet of flesh had only been confined to the floor of this place. But now archways and architecture piled high on top of itself. Intricate pillars supported bridges and walkways, castles and towers rising high into the blood-hued sky and all of it was made of screaming, thrashing, human-faced flesh. Passing through an overpass I saw misery was woven into every facet, every angle, every corner. No salvation, no mercy, no hope. Still, there was more to see, weaving through structures of biblical proportions the dread only deepened until I broke. “Stop, please. Why are you showing me this? How could you-” “No, not yet. We must see this through. You must bear witness to the apex. We’re almost there.” I wanted to argue back with some reason to turn around, to rebel, or just lash out in anger. But the will to resist dissipated the moment it was born, replaced with morbid, horrid curiosity. Solemnly I accepted my fate as we left behind the city of screams and entered a massive spherical chamber. The faces were now laid in a grid pattern and a new detail was added to the design. A spire rose from every intersection of the pattern and thinned to a sharp point. The room expanded outward, growing to gargantuan proportions and I saw the true purpose of this place. Atop the spires they writhed. Lifeforms of all shapes and sizes squirmed against their impalement. I saw what looked like an infant cyclops with antlers grasp at the air and shriek. Hundreds of Priori flailed their ribbon-like appendages and were about to let loose their keening. Bleeding blue spheres hummed and vibrated the torture they endured. Countless others, too varied to recall with accurate detail all were here in this hell. I hadn’t seen it at first, maybe it was hidden by the sensory overload of this hell. Maybe it didn’t manifest until now, but the chained pyre burned with hateful incandescence. A miniature sun levitated at the center, grouting white-hot flames. Chains attached and melded to its corona and held it in place, they themselves anchored to the flesh of the floor by hooks, digging painfully and drawing blood. From the screaming gaping mouths surrounding the star strange beings flooded out. They were ghast-like, flowing ragged forms without features, like billowing, torn sheets. They flowed towards the sun and fed themselves to the flame, letting it grow in intensity. All while the damned of this world charred but did not die in its unyielding heat. Hell. This was the greatest of hells. I needed to look away, I needed to escape this place, return to my world. If I could shed tears then I would have been bawling my eyes out at the sheer immensity of this cruelty. And it was not over. A pinprick of black manifested at the center of the star. It grew to a black ink stain consuming a third of the star’s surface, spreading out radially. Lines of white split the surface of the black stain and I realized what it was, an egg. It shattered with an uproarious fury and the things within spilled out in a mass of dark shapes. They quickly oriented themselves, let out a snarling howl at the base of the star, showing their devotion, and sprinted out of the chamber. I had witnessed the birth of the abyssal hounds and knew they’d go out and hunt for new flesh to add drag to this hell, they did not truly consume the reality beyond this realm. They abducted it. Hell was made of the discarded refuse of a God. A stirring began within the room, the impaled crying out all at once and letting their tone shift towards a hysterical pleading. Those who had arms to raise flung them to the open air, grasping at something they could not see but knew was there. “They sense us?” I asked. “They sense me. This is the first time I’ve been here in eons, and they reach out for me.” “Why don’t you answer? Why do you condemn them to this hell?” “It is as you’ve surmised. This is hell, or more precisely, I call this Tehom. And this process is the scouring. It is my attempt to wipe away what I’ve made, to clean myself of my mistakes. But what has been dreamt cannot be undreamed. There is no respite for them for they cannot be unmade. Once I walked among them, but when my creation grew beyond manageable scale much of it was left forgotten and so they forgot me in return. That could be forgiven, I was to blame. But then the ones that resented my touch grew and declared the world for themselves, claiming that I could not exist. Should not exist. I cannot even manifest a physical form myself, I cannot save them. And they cannot save themselves, this is the vision of the world they wanted. I merely used my meager power left to deliver them that vision. Now we can only look and despair. ” “So you made this Hell, and you tell me you can’t do anything to save them?” “It grew out of the wound that was delivered upon me by them. Festering like an infection it spread out, defiling this space and asserting itself as an autonomous domain onto itself. A nightmare manifesting from my resentment towards my creations. The only part I had a hand in actively making is this room, this process, these hounds, they are called Pleroma. Instilled with my will and the totality of my remaining power they seek to devour the whole of creation. Now I know it’s a fruitless effort, even here, creation persists.” “I don’t understand how you could dream of something so evil.” “Because I wanted to give them perspective. For when all I had made had been bested and conquered by them they fell into indulgence and lost the perceptive that fueled their wills. So then they grew petty and vindictive and turned what should have been an epoch of peace into another valley of tragedy in the timeline of their existence. So I gave them horrors, endless horrors so that they might stand in solidarity once more. They did, for an infinitesimal period before they fell back into their vices, the arrogance from the previous era now a core element of their being, and all they knew was how to splinter themselves into smaller and smaller groups bound by flimsy ideals. They knew nothing but contempt for those who fell outside their spheres of influence. This was the culmination of the Priori’s existence. I cannot blame them entirely, however, for they were born from me and what I knew. I cursed them with free will. This is the creator’s greatest folly. The only thing I’ve made that is greater than myself is this dream of hell.” “Transcendence,” I said, almost whispering. “Tehom and the Pleroma were the only things transcending my limitations. Birthing out and growing beyond my control, I could only guide the vision of their form and purpose. That they were born from despair is the only shame I hold for them, but now, I think something has changed, because of you.” “What are you?” “I was just a man like you once. I didn’t have much time to live, I was being ravaged by a malady that decays the very sense of self we hold dear. I felt everything slipping away from me and my grasp was growing weaker by the day. So I slinked away to this isolated recess and wrapped myself in shadow, wishing to fade painlessly into nothing. Then I dreamt this endless dream and bore my first creations. Dreams are strange things, time warps around itself, slowing and sometimes running parallel to itself. But it still flows ever forward, nothing can stop that. Here unfathomable eons have passed but in your waking world, a few years at most. Come I must show you one last thing, my final creation.” The scouring star dimmed and darkened, its surface once more staining with that inky dark that preceded the birth of a new horror. But this time the egg grew beyond the boundaries of the star itself, expanding out towards the edges of the room. The damned creations quieted for the first time this began as they too watched Genesis. Larger and larger it grew until it consumed the very room itself and plunged us into the true darkness of the void. An eon passed before a pinprick of light stood against the dark and in an instant, light. A supernova exploded and blinded us, radiant waves flowing out from this divine coalescence, overshadowing Tehom itself. Vision returned as the brilliance dimmed and revealed a new realm. A crater left in the whole of the God in the Gutter’s creation. A sun rose here, brilliant but obscured by shadows, staining the world in the dying pink light of an eternal sunset. A shallow ocean like a mirror reflected the brilliance of the sky above. Geometric structures made of solidified light were scattered about, casting prismatic shadows. It was without life, for now. Without asking the God knew my curiosities and answered. “Elysium. A place where they can dream. And hopefully, with time, a place where they might create worlds of their own. This is the last creation I can bestow upon them. Even the damned can dream of heaven. The paths they walk now are their own, where it takes them is their choice alone.” “Your final creation?” I asked. “Yes, I can dream no more. My end approaches, and with it the end of this very dream itself. When I am gone for a while longer the final vestiges of my being will anchor this place to existence. But that too will fade. So I cast it all to darkness, leaving all I have created to fend for itself within the maws of solitude. But I hope that from time to time, you can dream my dream and give all inhabitants a bit of your light, a moment of respite, something to cling to. Within you, I saw wonder and awe once more and I’ve come to realize that a creation does not belong to its maker alone. It is those who gaze upon our great work that allows it to grow beyond itself, new angles and paths born from a new observer. With time they too might let it color their dreams and the great work lives in the fragments of those dreams.” “A creator can only transcend through their work. You are a God in my eyes, great and terrible. Brilliant and monstrous. You’re more than just a dying old man, you are a totality of an existence. Thank you, for sharing this dream of yours with me.” “So you see now, young one? My dream dies with you. I cannot set things right, but I can give them a chance, for someone else to come along and dream something greater than I could have ever imagined. Maybe that was my purpose all along. Goodbye, young dreamer. I’m glad you bore witness to my creation.” I was spat back out to empty space, left adrift in this cosmos, no longer able to feel the presence of the God in the Gutter. But in my mind, I saw the silhouette of a feeble, hunched man. Years of suffering left him atrophied and exhausted. Rest was all he deserved now, and I wished it would be granted to him. I let an unseen current guide me away from the abyssal tear. It looked smaller now. As if the claws that had raked it open had been retroactively imbued with restraint or fading resentment. It didn’t matter now. Unease faded as I drifted through now familiar astral bodies and nebulous clouds. Whimsical, beautiful things I had taken for granted at first, things beyond imaging. I longed to cling to them but knew that was impossible. So I swore I’d never forget the cuboid planets, the brilliant glassy stars, the curious creatures reaching out to a fading creator. When I washed ashore and woke from this vision I found myself back at the sewer gate, still peering in. I lunged a hand into its depths, calling out “Hey!” but my hand met no one and nothing answered back. I trudged home that day, confused but certain I had seen something beyond this world. But as the years crawled by, that image dimmed and faded like neglected polaroids. The thought crept in that it was nothing but a fantastical but ultimately fabricated, child’s dream. That was until a few days ago when I dreamt of it again. It has faded in the last decade and a half, and the Tehom has grown to a gaping maw, eating away at the world of the Gutter God. But I also saw Elysium, inhabited by ruins. Ancient, fading but awing in their complexity and vision. A garden path made of solidified gold light weaved through temples imbued with the same reverence the Pirori once held for their maker. At the base of a monolithic altar, a half dozen of these ancient beings worshiped. This place still had dreamers. So I share this with you, in hopes that you too might dream this dream so that it might never die out. Credit: Santiago Del Mar Linktree Reddit Please note the author of this Creepypasta does NOT give permission for it to be used for any recordings or podcasts Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.