From the Personal Diary of Joscelin Holloway
How utterly vexing that I have neglected to record the inception of this peculiar entanglement, a lapse that gnaws at me now as I sit amidst the whispering shadows of my apartment, the walls pulsing with the slow respiration of trapped eternities. It was only after that ghastly Christmas revelry—where the mortals plied me with their crude distillations and wrung confessions from my rum-addled tongue—that I realized I had never committed to these pages the moment Tobias P. Dobbs first trespassed into my awareness. The oversight is unforgivable, for that initial encounter now looms in my memory with a clarity that rivals the crystalline shrieks of the void-born. I shall rectify this at once, lest the recollection slip into the spaces between moments where even I might struggle to retrieve it.
It transpired in a coffee shop—an establishment so aggressively mundane that its very existence seemed a deliberate affront to the cosmic tapestry I navigate. I had sought respite there, a fleeting pause between recalibrating the dimensional anchors that keep this reality from unraveling like a poorly knit shawl. The sugar packets, those insignificant granules housed in paper shells, presented themselves as an idle diversion upon the chipped veneer of the table. With a flicker of curiosity, I began arranging them, my fingers tracing the sacred geometries that once summoned minor demons to dance at the edges of mortal perception. Three packets formed the base triangle, their edges aligned to channel energies older than the stars; two more intersected at angles that whispered of the Old Ones’ dominion, their placement a subtle violation of Euclidean law. The air thickened, light bending as the pattern neared completion, a faint hum of otherworldly resonance tingling at the edges of my senses—a trifling amusement, a momentary indulgence in chaos amid the banality of human bustle.
And then he appeared.
Tobias P. Dobbs—though I knew him not by name then—materialized beside my table with the abruptness of a temporal hiccup, his presence as unremarkable as the chipped mug he cradled in hands that bore no trace of cosmic stain. “That’s really cool,” he said, his voice a flat, human timbre devoid of the trembling awe that should have accompanied such a sight. “Are you an artist or something?” His eyes, a shade of brown so ordinary it bordered on offensive, regarded my work with guileless curiosity rather than the gibbering terror it deserved. He stood there, this mortal speck, utterly unperturbed as the sugar packets trembled on the cusp of summoning something squamous and unspeakable.
I paused, my fingers hovering above the final packet, its placement poised to tear a modest rift into the thirteenth dimension. “An artist?” I echoed, allowing a thread of eldritch resonance to weave through my voice, a harmonic that typically sent lesser beings scurrying for the comfort of ignorance. “This is no mere art. It is a configuration of power, a pattern that bends reality’s frail seams.”
He tilted his head—an angle so stubbornly human it mocked the flexibility of my own form—and smiled, a curve of lips that carried no hint of dread. “Oh, like those optical illusion things? My sister’s really into those—she’s got this book of drawings that look like they’re moving if you stare long enough. I’m Toby, by the way. Tobias Dobbs, but everyone just calls me Toby.” He extended a hand, as though the gesture were not an invitation to breach dimensional barriers but a simple pleasantry among mortals.
I regarded his outstretched hand, its lines and creases a map of mundane existence, unmarred by the fractal scars that mark those who’ve brushed the beyond. “Joscelin Holloway,” I replied, my name emerging with a subtle undertone that should have made the air taste of ash. I did not take his hand—my own remained poised above the sugar packets, fingers tracing the edges of a portal that pulsed with latent hunger. “This arrangement is not an illusion. It is a gateway, a summons to entities that dwell in spaces your kind cannot fathom.”
“Joscelin,” he repeated, testing the syllables with a warmth that made my non-euclidean appendages twitch in their hidden folds. “That’s a neat name—sounds old-fashioned, but in a good way. And a gateway, huh? That’s a cool way to think about it! It kind of looks like a star, you know? My niece would love this—she’s always drawing little constellations on everything.” He set his mug down on the table’s edge—a clumsy act that nudged one of my packets askew, disrupting the alignment by a fraction of a degree—and leaned closer, peering at the pattern as though it were a child’s craft rather than a harbinger of chaos.
“A star?” I intoned, my voice fracturing into frequencies that should have made his teeth ache. “This is no celestial trifle. The angles intersect to form a beacon, a call to beings whose very presence unravels the threads of your reality. One more adjustment—” I reached to reposition the displaced packet, my fingers brushing the air with a motion that bent light into impossible colors—“and you would witness the unmaking of this quaint little world.”
He blinked, those ordinary eyes reflecting not terror but a flicker of delight. “You’re really creative! I mean, the way you talk about it, it’s like a whole story. You should write books or something—people would eat that up. Though maybe not the unmaking part—sounds a bit messy.” He chuckled, a sound so devoid of malice it landed like a pebble in the vast ocean of my awareness. “Mind if I sit? I was just grabbing a coffee, but this is way more interesting than scrolling my phone.”
I stilled, my hand hovering as the sugar packets shivered, their potential teetering on the edge of manifestation. “Sit?” I echoed, incredulity seeping into my tone like ichor through cracked stone. “You would linger in the presence of that which could rend your soul from its moorings?”
“Sure,” he said, pulling out the chair opposite me with a scrape that grated against my multidimensional senses. “I mean, it’s just sugar packets, right? Unless they’re secretly magic or something.” He grinned, a flash of teeth so disarmingly normal it made the air around us ripple with my suppressed frustration. “You sound like you know a lot about this stuff—are you into math or physics or something?”
“Math,” I began, my voice carrying the weight of eons, “is but a feeble attempt to chart the unchartable. Physics crumbles before the truths I wield. This—” I gestured to the trembling pattern, now incomplete thanks to his careless nudge—“is a fragment of knowledge harvested from tomes bound in the flesh of forgotten gods. It is not a game, Tobias Dobbs.”
“Toby,” he corrected gently, sipping his coffee with an ease that defied the gravity of my words. “And wow, you’re really into this! It’s like you’ve got a whole universe in your head. I’m kind of jealous—I just organize paperclips at work and try not to spill coffee on myself.” He glanced at the packets again, then back at me. “So, what happens if you finish it? Does it, like, glow or something?”
I tilted my head, an angle that should have caused his mind to recoil, and fixed him with a stare that revealed glimpses of the void within my pupils. “If I complete it,” I said, each syllable laced with harmonics that made the table vibrate, “the air would split, and from the rift would emerge entities of claw and shadow, their forms a mockery of your flesh, their hunger a hymn to dissolution. Your world would weep, and you would know terror beyond comprehension.”
He nodded thoughtfully, as though I’d described a mildly interesting movie plot. “That sounds intense! Though I’d probably just think it was a really good special effect. They can do crazy stuff with projectors these days.” He reached for a sugar packet—not one of mine, thankfully, but from the holder nearby—and tore it open, dumping it into his coffee. “Want some coffee? I can grab you one. It’s not fancy, but it’s warm.”
I sat back, my fingers curling as the unformed rift dissipated, its energies scattering like ash on a breeze. “You offer me sustenance,” I said, my voice a low hum of disbelief, “while I stand at the precipice of your annihilation?”
“Well, yeah,” he shrugged, stirring his coffee with a plastic spoon that bent slightly under his grip. “You look like you could use a break. And hey, if the world’s ending, might as well have a coffee first, right?” His smile widened, a beacon of simplicity that pierced my cosmic disdain like a needle through silk.
My initial impression was one of incredulity. Here was a soul so thoroughly encased in the mundane that the very fabric of reality’s fragility seemed to elude him. Where others I have collected—the quivering wretch from my previous apartment building, for instance, or the countless scholars whose minds I shattered with a mere glimpse of the forbidden—recoiled in horror or dissolved into madness, Toby merely smiled, a curve of lips so disarmingly simple it did unspeakable things to the harmonics of my being. His hair, a tousled mess of unremarkable brown, caught the light in a way that suggested no hidden depths, no lurking shadows—just a man who likely owned socks organized by color and found joy in the trivial.
What struck me as different, nay, vexing, was his immunity to the cosmic dread that bends most souls to my will. The man from that ill-fated evening at “Buns,” whose flesh I sculpted into a beacon for the Creeping Chaos, had crumbled at the merest hint of my nature—his screams a symphony of despair as his anatomy unfolded into doorways for the beyond. Others, too, across centuries: priests who clawed their eyes out at my glyphs, philosophers who wept blood at my geometries—all succumbed, their essences harvested into my collection like moths to an eternal flame. Their terror was predictable, their fragility a currency I’ve traded in since Grandfather first bound me to this plane. But Toby? He saw art where there should have been apocalypse, beauty where there should have been ruin. His mind, a fortress of normalcy, repelled the eldritch as effortlessly as a stone deflects rain.
And yet, this very difference gnaws at me, a splinter in the vastness of my consciousness. Why should I be interested in adding him to my collection, as I did that trembling fool whose body now anchors a corner of my living room? It is not his fear I crave—for he offers none—but something far more insidious. He sees me, not as the horror I am, but as a curiosity, a puzzle, a thing to be cherished rather than reviled.
I could reshape him, of course. Pluck his soul from its mortal shell and weave it into my gallery of captured essences, his form rearranged into a lattice of impossible angles, his blood a conduit for entities that slumber in the trenches. Like the man whose flesh now pulses in my apartment, Toby could become a living sculpture, a testament to my dominion—a beacon whose every breath erodes reality’s frail seams. The thought is tempting, its elegance undeniable: his stubborn normalcy inverted into a monument of the extraordinary, his smile frozen in a rictus of cosmic revelation.
But therein lies the paradox that torments me. To collect him thus would be to destroy that which sets him apart—the very quality that draws me, against all reason, to his orbit. His simplicity, his capacity to render the incomprehensible comprehensible, is a rarity among the souls I’ve harvested. The others were broken by their own fragility, their essences yielding easily to my touch. Toby resists not through strength or arcane knowledge, but through an unshakable ordinariness that defies my mastery. To claim him would be to erase the enigma he presents: a mortal who makes me question the worth of my own cosmic grandeur.
As I rose to flee that coffee shop—abandoning the half-formed rift lest his presence somehow domesticate the demons it beckoned—my form flickered at the edges, a subtle unraveling of my human guise that should have sent the other patrons screaming. I turned toward the door, my steps bending space in ways that made the room’s geometry weep, when his voice pierced the veil of my retreat. “Hey, Joscelin, wait up a sec!” he called, undeterred by the shimmer of unreality trailing in my wake. I paused, one foot already half-submerged in a pocket dimension, and glanced back to find him jogging toward me, his mug abandoned on the table beside the scattered remnants of my pattern.
He stopped a pace away, hands shoved into the pockets of a jacket so mundane it pained me to behold. “I was thinking,” he began, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather rather than addressing a being poised to vanish into the void, “do you like Italian? There’s this great little place a couple blocks over—nothing fancy, just really good pasta. Want to grab dinner there sometime? Maybe tomorrow night?” His eyes met mine, oblivious to the galaxies swirling within them, and that infernal smile curved his lips again, a beacon of simplicity amid the chaos I’d nearly unleashed.
I opened my mouth to refuse—to inform him that I dined on the distilled essences of forgotten realms, not mortal fare—but what emerged instead was a single, treacherous word: “Yes.” It slipped from my lips without conscious command, a sound so unadorned by eldritch resonance that it startled me more than the rift I’d abandoned. Toby’s face brightened, as though I’d bestowed some trivial human boon rather than acquiesced to an act that defied my nature. “Awesome! How about seven? I can meet you here if that works.” I nodded mutely, my form snapping fully back into this plane as if tethered by his voice, and he waved cheerfully before retreating to his coffee, leaving me to stagger out into the daylight.
The shock of my automatic acceptance struck me as I crossed the threshold, the door’s chime a mocking echo of my lapse. Yes? Yes? I, who have declined invitations from elder gods with a flick of my wrist, who have turned away supplicants trembling before my glyphs, had agreed to dine with this paperclip-sorting mortal without a flicker of deliberation? My auxiliary SWITCH hearts stuttered, their rhythms clashing in seventeen dimensions as I replayed the moment. His offer—Italian, of all things, a cuisine I could unmake with a thought—had bypassed my defenses, slipping through the cracks of my cosmic awareness like a whisper from the void. Worse still, I felt no urge to retract it, no impulse to summon a temporal eddy and erase the exchange. Instead, a treacherous warmth coiled in my chest, a sensation I refused to name, though it bore an alarming resemblance to anticipation. How utterly horrifying that my tongue had betrayed me, aligning with his mundane proposal as though it were a pact older than time itself.
As I fled that coffee shop, I felt a sensation I scarcely recognized: intrigue, tinged with something perilously close to affection. He lingered in my mind, a mote of dust in the vast machinery of my awareness, and now, months hence, I find myself penning these words with hands that tremble not from eldritch power, but from the memory of his voice. Perhaps I desire his soul not to bind it, but to understand it—to unravel how such a creature can look upon the abyss and see only warmth.
The walls of my chamber pulse now, their rhythm quickened by my agitation, and the jellyfish in their tank weave patterns that spell out my disquiet in geometries older than this world. I am beginning to fear that Toby’s soul might be one I cannot collect—not because it eludes me, but because I dread what its absence might cost me. How utterly horrifying to contemplate that I, who have harvested galaxies’ worth of essence, might prefer him precisely where he stands: alive, mundane, and smiling at sugar packets as though they held no terror at all.