I am dreaming.

I know this is the state I walk within because I do not wear the garb the humans insist upon. I wear shreds of sanity sewn with hearts blood to cover the more tender parts of my form. Though even those “tender” parts need to fear little. Except the soul-blistering cold that pervades the entire realm in which I walk.

Icy cavern walls reflect a dark rainbow of colors around me, hues I did not know the names for but took into myself as I remained in their presence. I strode across a bridge of diaphanous ice, my feet numbing with every step, chill creeping up my limbs. Then I came to the platform at the end of the bridge.

No, not a platform.

An alter. To the one that slept beyond the bridge’s end, shrouded in mist. It cleared enough to reveal a face with eyes that were taller than my entire body.

I sank to my knees, the chill creaping faster through me until it seemed to pervade all of me. In that chill was a form of armor against the horrible wonder before me. My voice was a shivering whisper as I spoke one word.

“Father.”

The bridge shuddered as the being before me partly opened one eye. The vast pupil was a horizontal bar of galactic darkness in a well of lurid orange before it disappeared behind the skin the color of frozen algae. A wing shifted on the leviathan to cover the face and shroud it from the lights that flickered in sconces on the cavern walls.

The alter before me shimmered and a being appeared there, an echo of the goliath before me but on par with human size.

“Greetings, my daughter,” it said in a voice that richoched through my brain, making me wince. It saw this and the next words were quieter, if such a thing could be. Perhaps I cannot explain it properly because humans have no words for such things. “My apologies, I should have realized that you hear me as Cthylla’ia does.”

“Thank you, ancient one,” I said, eyes on the icy bridge. “Are you- are you really my father?”

“How would I know you as mine otherwise,” it-no, Cthulhu said as he walked to me. A clawed paw gently lifted up my chin until I gazed into those Jack-O-Lantern eyes. “Your sister has told me of you. I wondered when you would grace the halls I slumber in.”

“Can’t say it was a planned visit,” I said, rising to my feet and keeping his gaze with mine. “But I am glad to finally meet the other half of my genetic line that’s upon this planet.”

“I am not from this rock,” he reminded me with the cool logic one older than a human’s sense of time itself. “I am from a world many stars away. But I find your womb-bearer’s species interesting and though cold, my respite site is as peaceful as any other. That poor fool Lovecraft could not withstand seeing the whole of me. Even you would not be able to; though this portion does not seem to do you harm.”

“This isn’t all of you, Cosmic Daddio of mine?”

He snorted with a laughter like glaciers crashing into ships and gestured to the massive being sleeping behind him. “Oh now, daughter mine, you know it cannot be. Most of me slumbers still, waiting for the world to warm enough to wake me. It happens faster than I planned but again, your womb-bearers species is a marvel of self-destruction. And ‘Cosmic Daddio?’ Is that some new slang?”

Me and my stupid mouth. “Not exactly… you’re from the cosmos and the ‘Daddio’ part was just me being me.”

“Smart ass,” he said, the tendrils around his face raising as if to smile. I hoped it was smile. “You older sister merely calls me ‘Father’ though I do not mind you using that.”

“Do you know where she is,” I asked before I could help myself. “Is she safe?”

“Cthylla’ia brings me much joy,” he said, voice tolling like a bell within my skull. “The next one created failed and then there is you. She loves you, you know. As much as she is able.”

He didn’t say she was safe and in the manner of dreams, I couldn’t make myself care. Instead I answered the statement he had made. “I love her, too. She has ever been kind to me.”

“But not to the humans that harmed her,” he said, voice challenging.

“Those that would harm your daughters give up the rights to be free from harm,” I said harshly, mind focusing on my recent loss. Helix’ loss still tore through me.

“I have seen your loss written across your heart,” he said and laid a clawed hand upon my shoulder. The nearest tendril wrapped around it briefly before releasing. “What will you do about it?”

“I am going to make them wish they’d never been cooked up in the lab,” I said, teeth bared. I looked away and then back to my father defiantly. “I will shred their souls from their walking corpses and wring every scream I can from them.”

“Ah, you are indeed my child,” he said with an amused tone. “I went to war against my brother for… reasons. It’s not important why. Remember, daughter, if you need my powers, merely call for them and I will lend you aide.”

“I’m not sure your kind of aid would leave me sane afterward.”

“Sanity is relative,” he said, placing a kiss on my forehead. I fought down the shudder, barely, as his tendril covered face touched mine. “Now, back to the waking world, call me if you need me.”

Three days later:

“By the power of Greyskull!”

Veronica snorted in laughter as I held my hands to the heavens, calling lightning from the cloudy mid-afternoon sky. It was the reaction I’d hoped for and her mirth gave me greater strength. The lightning above me began to arc around itself, forming a lightning filled symbol above me. The skies were painted with my challenge. My partner beside me slipped ear plugs in when I elbowed her. She shouldn’t hear what was to come. Hell, I didn’t want to hear what was to come.

We were standing on a tiny island on the Pacific side of Baja, far enough out to sea to be unnoticed by the mainland. Hopefully far enough out to avoid civilian casualties from weather or waves. A spotted hound dog raced around my legs, yapping excitedly as he watched the celestial dance. I let the symbol go with a thundering crash from the heavens as it flared to twice the size and vanished leaving an afterburn of its shapes on my eyes.

We didn’t have to wait long for an answer. A high-speed boat crashed over the gentle waves, a wave rising behind it then the boat cut sharply to stern. We all grabbed onto the tether lines we’d sunk deep into the rock further up the beach in preparation for such an event. The wave crashed in over us and back out between one heartbeat and the next. My arms strained to hold their grip, two tendrils adding their strength to my grip and another two grabbing on to Veronica to make sure she kept hers. The dog’s tether had a grip he could sink teeth into, and his own body was strongly grounded so he barely moved at all with the force of the water.

The twins to emerged from the surf, hand in hand and as planned, Peter ran up to them in his hound dog form. No normal dog would have ran to greet them, probably peed and ran for the hills.

How to describe the walking horror of the two of them in mere words? They were alike in many ways, from their bronze skin with high cheekbones that harkened to their mother’s Mexicano heritage. Their delicate hands ending in claws like our father’s, their forms lean in a way that is all genetics. From there though, the differences emerged. #44A had no hair, the top her head covered with tiny tendrils that hung to her waist, giving her a Medusa-like appearance as they hung loose. Her eyes were the unseeing white of a dwarf star, blind to the mortal world. She moved in the space around her gingerly if her sister was not within reach. I had seen her move through the deep pools back at the research center with greater confidence, using clicks to aid her, seeing as a dolphin would use their echolocation in murky water. Her twin, #44B was a vision of madness on a small scale. Ebony hair hung to her trim waist but unlike her sister, her eyes were black pits with fiery depths set above what could only be described as a maw. Thin tendrils, each coated with suckers, hung from those high cheekbones, covering the cephalopodic opening of her jaw. I’d seen her with her tendrils tied up once and it reminded me of the extendable, circular ocellus of an octopus, very much like our father’s.

#44B, easy to distinguish because of that horrid maw, landed a kick that sent the poor hound soaring into the surf with a yelp. Veronica was on my right, a couple paces higher on the beach with spear gun held ready, gasped in fury. The movement shook the speargun she held, making the seemingly delicate line of silver coiled at my feet twitch. I held fast to the end in my hand and I pitched my voice to carry over the yelping of the dog.

“You’d kick a dog? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I think #44B snarled at us, but with the writing mass of tendrils around her lower face, it was rather difficult to tell. Her sister answered. “It is a lesser life form, what does it matter?”

I snarled back at them. “Do you really think you’re so much above the other lives around us?”

“Without a doubt, we are,” #44A said, her ghostly blind eyes flashing. Water seethed around her feet, tiny waves crashing into their knees as they stepped further onto the beach, leaving the dog in the surf behind them. “This mutt is unwanted in the world we live in and in the world we shall create after we destroy you.”

“Wrong answer,” came a growling voice from behind them as the moon crested the horizon, a soft pink in the sunlit sky. “You are some stuck-up bitches, you know that? I didn’t believe #42 when she told me how bad you are but damn, I do now. Cousins, you aren’t worth the air you breath. Kicking dogs, gods, you two deserve what’s coming to you.”

I added my voice to Peter’s growls. “Let us cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war then.”

As I spoke, lightning gathered around my balled fists, licking the air around me in greedy strokes. The crashing of thunder in my palms covered the initial howls of the shifting being behind them. In a burst of scarlet light, Peter shifted into his most primordial of forms. The beast that stood behind the twins now was a massive creature, vaguely wolf shaped but far larger. My head would only come to the thing’s shoulder and the twins were inches shorter than I was. A coat the black of a newborn galaxy sucked in the light around it, the darkness tinging the air and sea at its feet as it towered behind my younger sisters.

His voice was a thing of nightmares brought to flesh, growling and darkly amused. “So, you value my canine cousins so little? Ah, silly children, that is the wrong answer.”

#44B let out an undignified yelp at the sight of him before seizing her sister’s hand and dragging her further up the beach toward Veronica and me. I could see bewilderment at what she faced in the muscles around her eyes. Dragging her blind sister to safer ground, #44B was unable to avoid the jaws that tore through her calf. #44A screamed with her sister as she felt the pain through their twin bond, the tendrils of her hair lashing at the galaxy wolf. #44B’s howl of pained fury joined her sister’s and that madness inducing shriek drove the beast away. He leapt over Veronica and I with an easy grace, snarling behind me now.

Veronica, ear plugs working just fine, took aim with the spear gun cradled in her arms and #44A joined her sister in experiencing true pain for perhaps the first time in her life. A tethered spear bolt slammed into and through her shoulder, tearing muscle and rending tendons with its barbed tip. The sound escalated into throat-tearing agony as I grabbed the tether line attached to the bolt buried in the blind one’s shoulder. We’d found I could do a new trick when on land and I summoned up the power that was my birth right. The power of my father’s blood that sang a song of fury inside me.