The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar

In the depths of a dark forest, far from anywhere a human foot had ever trodden, where the light of the moon
cast eerie shadows upon the strange and twisted foliage, a minuscule egg – one not laid by any creature - sat
nestled upon a leaf. And on a Sunday morn, when the sun's warmth did rise, with a deafening POP! that shook the
earth for miles around, the egg split open and a tiny and ravenous creature emerged.

The creature pulsed and writhed upon the leaf, its body elongated and segmented, each section sprouting several
squirming appendages. Its many legs wriggled in sickeningly gelatinous spasms, as if they were not quite attached
to its body. The creature’s eyes were unblinking, an abyssal black so deep and empty that they seemed a
blasphemy against the natural order of the universe. And yet, from those unfathomable depths…something…
stared out with a sinister intelligence. From its mouth protruded a mass of wriggling, sinuous tendrils, constantly
moving and probing the air for prey. Despite its tiny size and grotesque appearance, there was an undeniable aura
of ancient power emanating from the creature, as if it were a coalescence of primordial forces, a harbinger of
some unspeakable doom.

Had any mortal eyes been present to witness the birth of this tiny malevolent creature, the very sight of it would
have filled the observer with a sense of crippling dread, as if they were gazing upon an unescapable nightmare
made flesh, a hallucination clawing at the veil between imagination and reality.

The creature’s beady eyes darted about, surveying its surroundings, as it began its quest for sustenance.

On Monday, it consumed an apple several times the size of its own body, yet its hunger grew. On Tuesday, two
pears did it consume and still its hunger persisted. On Wednesday, three plums met their end within its
horrendous maw, yet its hunger grew ever more terrible and urgent. On Thursday, four strawberries succumbed
to its rapacious appetite, though they lessened its insatiable craving not one jot. On Friday, five oranges were
devoured, but still the hunger persisted as if some eldritch force drove the creature to consume.

On Saturday, it feasted upon a smorgasbord of confections, its mandibles working furiously to ingest each morsel
in turn. Feasting as if driven to consume the entire universe leaving only oblivion in its wake, as if it intended to
devour even light and hope themselves, the creature gorged itself upon a piece of chocolate cake, an ice-cream
cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese, a slice of salami, a lollipop, a piece of cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a
slice of watermelon.

That night, the creature's gluttony brought upon it a ghastly stomach ache, a torment the likes of which no human
could have endured even a single second without being struck profoundly and irrevocably insane.

The next day, as the Sabbath sun once again graced the sky, the creature consumed a single crisp, newly-grown
green leaf; a thing of beauty in its simplicity and its symbolism of life and hope as part of the inevitable cycle of
renewal and decay, and the fleeting transient nature of anything mere mortals might comprehend.

The creature’s pain abated but the transformation had begun.

No longer was it a small, feeble creature. It had grown into a vast bloated and corpulent monstrosity, its flesh
pulsating with an otherworldly energy barely contained by the sickly flesh or indeed by the thin walls of what we
choose to call reality.

The creature spun itself a cocoon in which to rest, its form contorting and shifting as it entered a state of
metamorphosis, dissolving and reshaping itself, becoming something terrifyingly other.

For an unknown time it remained inside, writhing and twisting in unspeakable ways. Its chrysalis was a thing of a
madman’s fever dreams, a wriggling, pulsating mass that seemed to writhe with a life of its own. Until, finally,
something clawed and chewed a hole in the nightmarish prison and wriggled out, transfigured, its new form
terrible and wondrous strange.

Its wings iridescent, shimmering with a putrescent, unearthly glow. Its eyes - multifaceted and set upon the
grotesque thing like corrupt jewels upon a diseased crown – are agleam with an intelligence far beyond human
comprehension and utterly inhuman; each aspect of each eye seeming like a dark window to a different hell. Its
many legs squirm and undulate more like chitinous tentacles, and its bulbous body is covered in bristling hairs and
writhing, grasping cilia. Its face is a thing of nightmares, with a multitude of wriggling antennae and mandibles
that clack with a sound like bones grinding against one another.

The creature flits about, its movements graceful yet deeply unsettling, a being of unbearable beauty and horror.
The forest whispers with a dread that is both palpable and inexplicable, for in that creature's transformation,
something has shifted within the fabric of reality itself. Something has been awakened, something ancient and
terrible, and it was now free to roam the world in its new form.