Proxy

Today’s prompt: “Start a story with the line ‘Everyone whispered about _____, but no one had the courage to talk to her.’”

Everyone whispered about Shub-Niggurath, but no one had the courage to talk to her. Or the ability, really. Her Dark Young serve as her proxies. You want to talk to Shub-Niggurath, to pledge yourself to her, to worship her? You talk to them. Human peons don’t get to talk to the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. They get to talk to this kind of slimy, tentacly, tree-looking thing that smells like a corpse. And they’re real hard to get hold of, too. When someone wants to summon them, they have to look up the summoning ritual in the Book of Eibon, go to the woods at the darkest of the moon, and sacrifice a victim on a stone altar. It’s both barbaric and maddeningly inefficient in a day of instant communication. It’s like, they’re going to all this trouble – kidnapping you, tying you up and gagging you, marching you out to the woods, and slaughtering you – just to use you like some kind of human pager for one of Shub-Niggurath’s stinky, oozing lackeys.