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I've wanted to write this one for a while, and in a poll a while back, a number of you voted for some kind of interdimensional entity which lives in the mines of Starfall Springs, so here it is! As this is your monthly story reward, it will not be going up on Tumblr, so this one is all yours to enjoy! Let me know your thoughts in the comments or by dropping a click on the heart button if you liked it.

Contents: mention of vague nightmares, getting lost as a child in a mine, tentacles, shapeshifting creature, polyphonic voices, eyes, general eldritch weirdness... gender neutral reader, and some sexy times. Wordcount: 4006

Chunky preview:

The dreams still lingered. Despite moving away from Starfall Springs, despite years of therapy that had only half worked, you still had the dreams. They weren’t nightmares as such, but they were hardly fluffy bunnies, rainbows, and unicorns either.

Starting awake from yet another one, sweat sheening your forehead and chest, heartbeat hammering in your ears, you gasped for breath as the darkness retreated in your mind but not in your room. Outside, the noises of the un-sleeping city rumbled away, but inside all was quiet. Not so inside your own mind though. Tunnels, dripping water on algae-slick rock, breath clouding like ghosts in barely-lit tunnels, echoing shadows and scratching claws and rising panic. All manner of things lurked in the depths of the Starfall silver mines, and not all of them were as friendly as the teams of goblins and hobgoblins who worked the silver veins. One of those less friendly creatures had come looking for you.

That school trip to visit the main shaft of the mines, to see how silver was extracted through a mix of goblin technology and ancient magic, had ended with you separated from the group, lost, disorientated, wandering alone, somehow going deeper without realising it. Eyes in the dark; a breath on your shoulder; turning to find paralysing darkness on all sides and no way out: it had fuelled these dreams for years.

But that had not been the end of your experience.

The creature that had hunted you, toyed with you in the blackness of the cold tunnels, had been afraid of something too. Your friend, Ki’ik, had quoted Qui-Gon Jinn at you when you’d tried to tell her about it afterwards, saying something about bigger fish, but it hadn’t been much of a comfort. There, in the endless dark of the mines, lived something more terrifying and somehow more abstract than the unseen predator who had stalked you. All you could really remember was a slick tentacle turning you around, and another appendage, perhaps clawed, wrapping around your wrist with impossible delicacy, and tugging you back along the tunnel. Meek and limp with horror, you had obeyed. An eye had blinked at you in the gloom, the walls lit everywhere by the speckles of algae that barely threw off enough light to create the illusion of a starry sky. The only reason you’d even noticed the light to begin with was when the minuscule points had been blotted out in places by whatever it was that had appeared to guide you out.

“This… way,” a voice like boiling tar had whispered, appearing to come from inside your own skull. It had sounded thick and dark, and as though it tried to articulate a language too crude for its physical form. But still, it had tried.

From all sorts of impossible angles and places, the creature had led you through the tunnels until you heard voices calling. You’d turned, glimpsing a patch of glittering light high up near the barrel vaults of the rough-hewn tunnel that blinked and shimmered before disappearing completely, only to be replaced by a broiling mess of tentacles near the passageway’s floor. Your young mind had gone blank with the impossibility of it, and you’d passed out.

Waking a few days later in the small clinic at the edge of Starfall Springs, you’d tried to explain what you’d seen but you didn’t have the words. It was like your mind was trying to cup water and it was pouring through the gaps as quickly as you tried to hold onto it.

“Yeah, the Dark will do that,” Ki’ik’s older brother had said casually when you’d gone over to their house a month later. He, like most of the goblins who’d moved to the area, was a miner, and he just shrugged.

“The Dark?”

He gave another twitch of his bony shoulder and tucked into the dinner that his father had made for you all.

You’d looked from one face to the next, but it was their father who had chuckled and said, “The ‘Dark’ is what we affectionately name the entity which lives down in the deeper areas of the mine.” He nudged a bowl of vegetables your way and continued speaking. “We don’t know what it is or where it came from, and no one likes to linger long enough to find out, but anyone who’s ever got into trouble down there has been hauled out by it. Reports vary - here, have some more potato, please - but we know it has to be the same creature.”

“But… what is it?” you’d asked and he’d only insisted that no one knew, and that it was best forgotten. You were safe now, and that was that.

So, finding yourself back in Starfall Springs ten years later for Ki’ik’s wedding to some human that she’d fallen completely head over heels for, dredged up mixed memories to say the least. When she’d told you that it was happening at the mine itself, you’d grouched that that was hardly a romantic location, but when you’d driven up to the site through the seemingly endless pines, the forest floor carpeted with spongy moss, bright cyclamen poking their colourful heads through it, you’d had to admit that it was pretty.

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