"That's really rude, Roche," said the Kraken with a crooked smile, "I've never lead you astray boy, and here you are treatin' me like some servant."

  "No," I shook my head and spun the glass on the bar, watching the liquid, which was absolutely not whiskey, swirl inside, "no you ain't. But you did just threaten me. And who makes threats? Who but a messenger. People with real power just make it so," I smiled right back.

  Much as I had decided I was done with him, I held no ill will toward my Patron. Besides being a cryptic pain in the ass, and an offense to the sense, there weren't much I had to resent him for. The bastard had helped me. Had traded mana for power. The fact that his offerings were usually more than a little dangerous or disgusting, well, that was the game I had chosen to play.

  No though, it really was time to sit down at the big table, and I think that the Bastard knew it.

  The Kraken sighed and reached for a black, labelless bottle from the shelf behind him. In a smooth motion he swiped the usual glass of whiskey and set down an empty crystal tumbler.

  As he popped the cork on what looked like so much burned oil, the Kraken spoke, "Yeah, it is time. I was never going to be your Patron for long Roche. Not conserin' the Path you carved for yourself. I am a single fish in the sea and you done made plans to host the whole fuckin' ocean," the scent of sweet molasses, rotting fruit, and the tang of a warm see breeze billowed from the bottle as he poured two fingers worth.

  The liquid in the glass seemed to writhe and ripple, like kelp in a ghostly current of mana, or power or-

  "She ain't a goddess," said the Kraken, the wriggling tendrils of his beard mirroring the almost hypnotic motion of the liquor, "not to you anyway. Not to anythin' that draws or walks upon the land. She's somethin' older. Somethin' different."

  "Like you?" I asked, a little of the venom draining from my tone.

  He gave me a look and a shrug, "Maybe. Before the gods men, your Hearthmother, your Strix, your Saints and Heretics, before them there were many more. Things that swam between the stars, grew great in the endless tides of the darkness beyond this world. Things that could not die, but were not born, nor ever lived..."

  I took a breath, not a real one, there weren't no air or warmth or anything else in this place, not really. It was just the motion and memory of it that kept me steady, that the things my Patron spoke of feel a little less like madness.

  "So what," I muttered, "that's her? One of those," I scoffed, "Leviathans of the Abyss?"

  He didn't respond, he just took up the glass and held it beneath his nose.

  "No," he said passing it to me, "she's what ate all them other monsters. You want to deal with the real power boy? Well be my fuckin' guest-"

  His hand moved and in a blink the black, shimmering liquid was emptied into the space between us. Time distorted, not slowed, but... folded, as the spatter of a thrown drink expanded out. Each droplet became and arm, each of them reachin' out to consume the fabric of the dream, like spilled oil, like disease or rot.

  It stained and changed, and remade.

  I watched in quiet horror, frozen by the sight as the world became a vast and terrible ocean. I stood, no, I drifted, in a void of nothingness. The pressure of a thousand thousand oceans pushed down on all that I was. It was liked downing, being crushed, being strangled and a thousand other deaths, and yet I remained. More than that...

  I witnessed.

  Teeth like mountains. Countless eyes all as black as the Abyss that consumed us both. Arms as great and infinite as the horizon and more numerous than all the grains of sand of every beach I'd ever seen. And the voice…

  That music that had always been here, always been in my ear, in my heart, in my blood, I heard it now.

  Truly.

  Naked and terrible. Cold and so deep there was no end to it. No escape from the vast and eternal hunger that had birthed and consumed this universe, only birth a million screamin' more.

  My mind began to fray, my soul, if it had been real, would've burst apart, would've been torn and devoured and become another tiny piece of the Leviathan. Another eye in that cloak of watching terror, another grain of sand at the bottom of this fathomless expanse.

  And the jaws, the ones that were the only proof I existed at all, that I was still separate from the black, they began to open, and this new Dream, this Eternal Nightmare, began to rush into the cradle of her maw.

  I closed my eyes, I tried to scream, but it all sensation was simply lost. Every part of me simply wasn't real enough to matter before a God. An ephemeral flicker of spark, smothered by the waters of creation.

  And then, just as I felt myself pass beyond the teeth, just as I knew my fate to be consumed, not out of hunger or anger, or spite, but simple mechanical happenstance.

  Stolen story; please report.

  The jaws closed.

  And the song cut short.

  Black exploded into a kaleidoscope of color. My eyes shot open and I found myself, once again, sittin' on a stool, lookin' across a bar.

  But the Kraken was gone.

  In his place smiled something that my sense tried desperately to pretend was human. A woman, her skin black, not like a Southern from the Coastlands or even like a Heretic's Uruk, but the deep and unknowable black that I now knew was everything I did not see.. Her hair was a cascade of living eels, their tiny, white eyes blinking and staring as they writhed and swam about the bleached dead reefs of her lips and eyes.

  I could not breathe, could not move.

  All I could do was stare into her, and see myself reflected back.

  So small. So tiny in them oceans of her gaze.

  "Well," she said with a tut. Just like the Mother had back at the Chantry in my home town when she caught me drinkin' the offerin' wine, "aren't you a naughty thing. Aren't you just the most gluttonous, most reckless, most... Inspired morsel. Oh, it's been ages since I've tasted something like you. Eons since any fool so young, and so brave, and so," her voice dropped to a purr and her teeth, black and gleaming, flashed, "daring, rested upon my tongue."

  As she spoke images flashed through the illusion of the Dream. I couldn't help it. Couldn't myself from trying to see through.

  Flesh, red and wet with saliva and tears.

  The steady rhythm of a pulse rippling through the countless feelers that lined it. That grew like forests around the lure that was the woman before me.

  "Oh don't do that," the voice was a growl and the smell of rot and ruin filled the bar, "don't look, my sweet fool. It makes me hungry, and you are not for eating," she pressed a slender finger to her chin, her head titled and eyes distant, "well, not yet. Maybe. I haven't decided."

  I swallowed and felt a bead of sweat roll down the side of my face. I was pretty sure I'd have pissed myself if this were anymore real. Thankfully I was half certain reality still existed somewhere else. That the real Lorcan Roche sat before a fire, sleeping amongst survivors of a petty terror.

  Safe and sound, by compare.

  "W-wha..." I tried but it was hard to form words past the bone deep tremble that ran through every fiber of my spiritual being.

  "Wha, wha, what?" She mocked, "What? What is a mortal child doing, trying to bargain with things so far beyond his station? What is such a creature doing listening to such feeble pleas? What is a worm got to give the hungry fish?" A smile split her white lips, "What indeed, Lorcan Roche."

  She moved forward, a motion as smooth as the tide, as fast as a lightning strike. In an instant her face was close to mine. So close that her lips, her eels, brushed against my ear, caressed my cheeks and indly invaded my nose, ears and mouth.

  "Why," she whispered, the scent of something far worse than death on her hot breath, "you've nothing to give me, boy. Nothing I could ever want, or need, or desire. Yet, nothing is exactly what i have always wanted!" With that she grabbed me, her oil black skin as frigid as the depths I had just escaped, just as crushed as the weight of entirely too much being. And the moment she did, the true violation began.

  I tasted the mistakes of Gods and the sorrows of the damned. I smelled the rot of worlds and the birth of stars. I saw the end of a billion lives and the beginning of an infinite number more, all in the moment she forced her tongue into my gaping mouth.

  I screamed around the strangling tendril as it dove down into me, as it pierced and twisted and ripped at the fabric of what made me, me. I felt pass through it, felt it swim along the current she made between us.

  An egg. I knew it even though I couldn't have. A black pearl of potential and power planted in my guts, the same way a wasp fills a desert spider with it's young.

  And the woman, the monster, she pulled back.

  "There we are," she said, tearing a handkerchief from my own coat to primly wipe the corners of her mouth, "now, that was fun wasn't it, Lorcan? You just kissed a god, you dog!" She laughed, a sound like the waves breaking over the rocks outside my home town, like sound of mud sucking down a dying man in the swamps just beyond.

  "What." I ground out, every ounce of feeble will that still remained in me pressing hopelessly back against the weight that smothered my soul, "The. Fuck."

  She just smiled.

  "Well, now that's getting ahead of things, darling. Oh, come now, I jest. Don't give me that look. I know you mean what did I do. And more improtanly," she tittered throwing her head back, "what did it cost you."

  Her laughter, a terrible mockery of the sound, continued for a few moments more, then it was gone.

  "Nothing! Just as I said. I gave you nothing, and it cost nothing. A terrible, empty, aching nothing that will never go away. For endless ambition and the crushing will to achieve are your gifts, Lorcan Roche," she intoned, the words spoken, not as statement but as ritual, or pact, "I demand that you try and fill it anyway. Fill it with power, with justice and good violence. Fill it with all the love and loss and hatred you will ever find."

  Her eyes darkened, a storm rolling in over the bone colored sand.

  "I demand you rip open the throat of this putrid world that has forgotten my name. That it's fear of all that I called daughter and son, and all the monsters that came after. Fill that pit of hunger with blood and mana and terror and rage. Fill it and fill it, and when you finally crumble, when your pathetic flame has been snuffed, I will make seed from the ash that remains!"

  She slammed a fist on the counter. The bottle and glasses exploded into fragments and the whole of the bar cracked.

  "Do you understand, child?"

  No. No I fucking didn't.

  "Yes." I lied.

  She smiled and the darkness faded.

  "Good. Now go play cards with my Kraken, and don't fucking call on me again. Not until your done filling up that hole."

  The world twisted, reality and dream blurred.

  And this time, as I sat at the bar and stared at the black and gold smile of my Patron, I did not reach for the drink he offered. I did not trust myself to lift a hand, to do anything at all.

  Instead I kept my fuckin' mouth shut, and let him deal.

  "So," the Kraken said, his smile widening as he leaned in and looked me over, "let's get back to where we left off. You got mana, and I got the know how to make it work for you." He shuffled his deck of cards and as the first me the table I realized I liked him quite a bit more than his boss.