“You…promised.” The words were pitiful.

Matt knew the man’s role had ended; his purpose had been served. He had spoken the words and broken the final seal, so that nothing could come between the new celestial convergence and the rise of the beast. His work was done.

“You – fucking – promised.” Drummond ground his teeth. “I risked my life a thousand times. I gave you everything.” He stamped his foot like a child.

“Not quite everything, Charles.” The Father reached out, fingers growing once again into long tendrils to wrap around Drummond’s neck and torso. It was then that the Father started to grow, taking the struggling man with it.

The little girls by the cliff screamed and turned away, sprinting madly back along the dark beach.

It lifted higher and higher, increasing in size, so that the shawl it wore shredded and burst from its expanding frame. With the Father’s form revealed, they could see that it hadn’t been standing on the sand at all, but was instead actually growing out of it.

“I could have told them, I could have told them.” Drummond’s words were faint now as the thing lifted higher, pulling free more of itself that was buried beneath the sand. The huge pipe of flesh trailed into the water.

Matt’s mouth hung open as he saw Drummond beating at the cords encircling him for only a few seconds more before he was simply pulled inside the pulsating mass, his yells of protest turning to a pitiful scream at the last.

The Father tilted forward, its huge face looking back down at them.

“You think I am simply the servant of the great Old One? You think I can be hurt?” The voice bubbled and frothed in its anger.

“Good Christ,” Abrams said backing away. “The Father is not a servant of the Cthulhu: it’s a goddamn part of it.”

Adira grabbed Matt’s arm, backing him up.

“The vanity of the gods.” Matt was already out of breath. “They never thought we could read it. Never believed we were ever significant enough to be a threat. But there is something in here –there must be.” He looked up. “Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab, before he lost his life, took great pains to inscribe a warning, and perhaps his weapon or fortification against this growing horror. He hid it away, for us, for the next time that the beast attempted to rise. He must have.”

Matt flipped page after page as the column of flesh that had been the Father moved out over the dark water. Whether the being was like an appendage of the great beast rising toward the surface, or some sort of intelligent symbiote that Cthulhu had picked up in its eternal slumber, they couldn’t tell.

“This thing is not immortal. We have already proved it can be hurt.” Adira fired a full magazine into the dark flesh, but it absorbed the compacted salt bullets with little effect.

“Ach, we need a cannon,” she said, ejecting and then jamming in another magazine. “Time to go home, I think.”