Yes, it’s cosmic horror again. I am just about to finish my first three short stories, and one is, I think, one of the more obvious processing of alcoholism.

As I said, I use Cosmic Horror as a vehicle to tap into subconscious processes of my addiction, and in the case of the upcoming short story I am dealing with here today it is mostly about emotional aspects and compulsions related to alcohol and the according choices or the lack thereof.

I think it is appropriate to borrow from the Cthulhu mythos even without specifically mentioning this one specific entity by name: Nyarlathotep. It is the one entity that is explicitly interacting with the human race to induce insanity and psychological decay. Nyarlathotep is not represented in a form that he will be recognized, but I think it could be quite obvious to the reader that it is Nyarlathotep. The importance here is that the protagonist faces choices by temptation that he identifies of not being his own, although no-one ever forced him to these decisions.

The other entity is Lovecraftian in its appearance, I think, and is meant to be the growing representation of the destructive aspects and powers of addiction, hunting down and confronting the protagonist with his choices and his passive role in his own life. This entity has interestingly grown while writing this short story based on a one-shot Journaling Solo RPG, generated with the help of AI and the randomness of a D6 for each scene. This entity is labeled by the protagonist as “The Beast with a Million Eyes”, while the eyes represent remorse, guilt, fear, anger, accusation, all of it at once.

The interesting thing about this kind of writing is that writing happens all by itself. I only need a prompt and the rest is just my subconscious, my fantasy and my fingers working.

As soon as I have this story finished, I will load it up on a separate homepage. I will have artwork ready by then, for the remainder of the time until then, here is an AI representation of what my mind came up with prompt wise:

Until then: Keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.