I died quietly.
No prophecy.No tragedy.No last words worth remembering.
One moment I was a man in a small office cubicle, staring at a screen filled with numbers I barely understood… and the next, there was nothing.
No pain.No light.Just an absence.
And then—
Awareness.
Not the awareness of a body.
Not the awareness of breath.
But something vast.
Something… endless.
I opened my eyes.
Except they were not human eyes.
I did not cry. I did not gasp. I did not struggle for air.
Because I did not need air.
I existed.
And existence trembled around me.
Before me stretched the newborn cosmos — violent, molten, chaotic. Stars were still being born. Galaxies swirled like embryonic thoughts. Time itself felt… soft. Malleable. Young.
I understood it instantly.
Four billion years before the modern era.
Before mortals.
Before gods worshipped by men.
Before Earth had even cooled.
And I understood something else.
I was not mortal anymore.
I was an Elder God.
A child of the Demiurge — Demiurge.
And I knew my name.
Cthulhu.
Not merely the twisted dreamer whispered of in mortal horror stories. Not merely the cosmic entity referenced in the myths of Cthulhu.
No.
I was something… new.
The only one of my kind.
My parents abandoned me the moment I formed.
I do not resent them.
We are gods.
Attachment is a mortal instinct.
Creation is impulse. Continuation is optional.
I was born with a complete mind — not a child's, but something fully formed. And yet, that mind was no longer human.
My thoughts did not flow.
They expanded.
A single idea branched into thousands. A thousand conclusions calculated in the span of what mortals would call a heartbeat.
But heartbeats were meaningless now.
Time felt different.
A human would grow restless in silence. Would feel seconds crawl. Would sense hours dragging.
I did not.
I thought.
And perhaps days passed.
Perhaps centuries.
It made no difference.
Knowledge came naturally.
Instinctively.
I understood my nature the way a star understands how to burn.
I was an Earth God — unlike the original Cthulhu of myth. Bound to this forming planet, tied to its eventual biosphere. Its oceans. Its tectonic rage. Its eventual life.
But I was more than that.
I carried the archetypal horror of the Mythos — the mind-fracturing presence. The dream-corrupting influence. The dominion over abyssal depths.
I felt the echo of Azathoth within the architecture of my being — not as father, but as inherited principle. Chaos without center. Creation without intent.
And from the Marvel cosmology, I carried the Elder God lineage — reality-warping divinity, primordial sovereignty, the raw force that would one day precede beings like Chthon and other ancient horrors.
But I was not them.
I was singular.
I looked upon the forming Earth.
A molten sphere.
Violent. Incomplete.
Fragile.
And I understood something profound.
Four billion years.
Four billion years before the age of heroes.
Before Tony Stark would forge iron into legend.
Before Thor would walk Midgard.
Before the rise of mutants. Sorcerers. Celestials interfering in evolution.
I had time.
Endless time.
A mortal reborn with eternity.
A former office worker with the mind of a god.
I could shape continents.
Seed evolution.
Engineer myth before myth existed.
Or I could sleep beneath the oceans and allow history to unfold untouched.
My mind calculated possibilities faster than stars igniting.
Paths branched endlessly.
If I intervened too much, future heroes might never rise.
If I remained passive, others — like the Celestials — might claim dominion.
Power without strategy is waste.
And I refused to be waste again.
Not like my human life.
I extended my consciousness into the planet's forming crust.
Felt magma like blood.
Felt gravity like muscle.
Felt the planet's magnetic field like a faint heartbeat.
It was… beautiful.
And I smiled.
For the first time since my rebirth, I made a decision.
I would not be a sleeping god.
I would not be a forgotten terror.
I would cultivate.
I would prepare.
I would design the future from the shadows of prehistory.
Four billion years is not time to waste.
It is time to plan.
And I had always been ordinary.
But a god?
A god can learn.
A god can calculate.
A god can become inevitable.
And the universe would one day learn my name.
Cthulhu.
Not as madness.
Not as nightmare.
But as the architect of eternity.