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Part 1
Ah I got the diary working again, finally!
I was afraid I had wrecked it for good after I fought Ry’loteth, whose name I can now mention since he is now a puddle of goo that is frozen inside a polar ice cap.
Unfortunately something far worse occured as a result of our battle, and for this, you need to know more about the fate of my universe.
I lived on Unaris Prime, the capital of a sprawling Galactic Empire of humans that had been dominating the universe for over 6000 years. I had a wife and…. two children. I was a struggling writer, and had no success until my first exploration.
It was late at night and I had just scrapped the manuscript I had been working on for 4 months. I was ready to give up and go work in a factory when something reached out.
It spoke to me, promising me great power and riches if I let it in. I was desperate and in a bad mindset, and so, I let it in.
It was the worst mistake of my life.
I was full of strength for one instant, and then it was gone, but it left me a chunk of its power.
I was inspired and I began writing bestseller after bestseller, gaining inspiration from the things I saw in the Far, until the day the deal came back to haunt me.
I was on a picnic with my family when a horrific wail shook the ground and the sky went dark. When I looked up, our star was obsidian black, and covered in planet sized teeth.
I had grabbed my family and was about to teleport out when a single reality breaking shriek liquified my brain and I fainted.
I woke up floating in the void of space, my planet obliterated from existence. The star was moving away at a blinding speed, but just before it was out of sight, it turned around, and whispered in my mind.
“Your fault”
My universe was empty before the day was out. They destroyed everything. Billions of them poured into reality and their screeches reduced my universe to nothing but void.
I escaped into the Far, and built my cottage and a grave site for my family in a field of golden flowers.
But the Dead Stars did not leave me alone.
Their nest is right on the boundaries of the endless lava lake that surrounds my cottage, and relaxation is almost impossible due to their endless screaming.
They have learned not to try and attack me directly since the last few times they tried….. well let’s just say there a few corpses lying at the bottom of the lake.
With all that said, I can return to the problem at hand. During my fight with Ry’loteth, when we were punching each other in the middle of a star, a faint screeching began.
Ry’loteth started panicking, and started to fly out of the star with his 400 wings, but before he got too far, a wail emerged from the once yellow star as it turned coal black, and its sides ripped open to form thousands and thousands of tentacles as a single red eye appeared on the top of its form. The tentacles wrapped around me, and another wail turned Ry’loteth to goo.
And then I was pulled into the core.
The core of a Dead Star is sheer malice and pure hatred, a single fragment of consciousness forcing it to function.
But now I understand.
They are creatures that never wished to be born, nor do they wish to survive, but something forces them to continue on with existence.
That something is their parent and creator, the Dread Monarch of the Dead Stars, which is quite an extravagant title but who am I to judge.
It has a name of course, but I have no intention of speaking it, for obvious reasons.
So there I was trapped in the core of a dead star, unable to move or even think, when the Dead Star began to speak
“CRY” “KILL” “HELP” “OPEN” “BROTHERS”
As it kept repeating these words, it began to whistle in a high pitch. The tentacles writhed and it screamed as it broke apart into pieces and then millions of its kind began to pour out from the chunks it left behind.
I gathered my strength and analysed the universe I was in. I couldn’t kill that many of them fast enough, but I could deprive them of resources. The universe was sparsely populated, and I began teleporting all the matter in one half of the universe to the other. The Dead Stars began to scream together, trying to disturb my concentration, but they failed, and they began to slow down and become quieter as starvation kicked in. Soon the void was full of corpses.
I moved all the matter back, and just when I was preparing to leave, the same being that had spoken to me the day I doomed my universe, called out.
And then I was standing in The Graveyard Of Stars, before the Monarch Of The Dead Stars.
It had no fixed size, it was boundless. Every inch of its surface was covered in eyes or mouths, and it’s speech was paradoxical, booming and screeching at the same time.
“JOIN US……. STRENGTH IN NUMBERS……. CHILDREN……….. RETURN WILL BE”
It was a mockery of human speech and worst of all, images were dancing through the fog around me, of my home universe.
“END EXISTENCE WITH US…… COMPLETE YOU WILL BEEEEEEEE”
I stepped backwards, and began teleporting when all of its infinite eyes turned on me and it’s mouths unleashed hell.
It was an endless barrage of screeches, screams and yells that shook the graveyard. Its children joined in to form a chorus of pure agony. I was ripped apart and reformed over and over, my brain was mush and my consciousness was dissipating when it stopped.
I was lying on the floor in a puddle when she stepped forward. The Girl In Scarlet was standing in front of me. She waved her hands and then we were sitting in my cottage.
I was blinking back my confusion while she was closing the portal to make sure none of them followed us.
“What trouble did you get involved in now Fedora?”
I made tea and we sat down.
“Dead Stars” I replied.
“What did you do to piss off the big guy?”
“I think I it got offended because I beat up Ry’loteth in one of it’s would-be kids” I answered
“Such an overprotective bastard” She said with a chuckle, “ Well it was nice saving your ass, see ya later”
And then she was gone.
I should probably explain what she is.
The Girl in Scarlet looks like an 11 year old, but she’s probably older than half the universes. She’s the result of a ritual gone wrong, where instead of her being sacrificed to an old god, the old god got sacrificed to her, which resulted in the death of the cult that was trying to sacrifice her in the first place.
So now she’s essentially a god, who is pretty relaxed for a god, and she in fact has a quite a nice candy cane house that she lives in. I mean she is technically 11.
So that’s all the time I have for today, I’m going to nap for a few seconds to recover, and I will see you all next time.
Good Bye!