Curse of the Cosmic Ones

Curse of the Cosmic Ones skin description

Hey guys, here's my submission for the Lovecraft contest! I tried some new things with shading and even pulled a scarf out of my proverbial hat. I had a lot of trouble finding the right colours to match, being green brown and blue, there's not a lot to work with. Hope you like it! Description DescriptionPoor Bathazar here happens to be mostly cthulhunoid now. He's protecting what's left of his humanity with a strange talisman that wards away Cthulhu's spread. His life sucks. Super-Epic-Ultra-Long-Backstory-Thingy * * * Everyone ran to their houses. Blinds went down, curtains closed, doors locked. Only the curious children were naive enough to peer through the cracks in the doors. After 5 minutes, a silhouette appeared on the horizon. It had a strange outline, as though you could tell it was moving, and of a person, but it did not hold the same shape as a regular human. Even at that distance, however, it's single yellow eye pierced the souls of those who had not fainted already. For those who locked themselves in the closet, you could hear a solitary footstep, followed by a sound that was not supposed to occur on land. Clunk.. swish.. Clunk.. swish.. * * * Balthazar was a simple man. Everything he did rang the bell of normalcy. He was a scribe. Every day he would go to the heart of town, buy papers from his favourite shop, and return home, where he would copy ancient texts in his study. Day in and out, he sat at his writing table, with a text of some sort or other, be it scroll or book at his side, and he would write away. One day, however, he found a very odd scroll. He could not make heads nor tails of it's origin. It's script was not of Arabic origin, nor Chinese, nor any nation or empire he could think of, but he was still able to understand it. It was a primal feeling, as if he wasn't using his mind to translate this, but it was programmed into humanity's genetic code, as if he were meant to read this. The words didn't make sense, they read in a way that doesn't work in normal human language, but nevertheless, he understood it. He knew from the scroll that he needed to do something. It described a ritual to bring back "the Ancient One", should no one be able to open the doors of his sanctuary at the right time, whatever that meant. He was to spill blood on the scroll on a blood moon. In the back of his mind, this felt kinda sketchy and more than just ominous, but his instincts, his being, followed the words of the scroll. Coincidentally, the blood moon would occur in 5 nights, so he had not long to wait. When the moment came, he went to the top of Glastonbury Tor, scroll and knife in hand. He performed the ritual, chanting "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." He had no idea why he was doing this, his mind resisted even as he commited this dastardly, awful ritual. He was just a scribe. He didn't ask for this. His wish was to die at his desk, with the entire works of Sun Tzu translated into five other languages. As his blood hit the scroll, a bolt of lightning struck him and the scroll. He was surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke. When he came to, h heard another voice inside. It wasn't one of his voices, though, this voice would kill him if he heard it while he was still human. Still human? He reached for his face, but his hand was covered in oozing green tentacles. Wait, his hand was the tentacles? He reeled and horror, and ran down the hill, or tried. He made one step, but his other leg just fell away, as if not a whole lot was able to support him. He then realized that that too was made of tentacles. Great. This was it. His life would be a nightmare for the next several thousand years, possessed by a demon. Just great.