Eldritch Angel
At first, you couldn’t comprehend what you were looking at. It was a mass of tentacles—some squid-like and others far more alien—that much you could tell. They writhed around a central mass, keeping you from witnessing the truth that lay within. Not that you were sure your mind could handle it.
Already, you had a splitting migraine. This wasn’t some silly headache that could be handled with some Tylenol. No, this was like someone had taken an icepick and was driving it into your skull repeatedly. Blood pounded through your ears, the world growing more distant the longer you stared at your “date.”
A few moments later, with a pulse of something that you felt in your bones, the tendrils vanished. They were replaced by a sight that wasn’t as disturbing, but was still a visual mess of wings and feathers smashed together. Some of them uncurled in the proper way to look natural, but others curled up and backwards and around a single point of glowing light.
Staring at this form alleviated your headache in an instant, yet that felt like a lie. Viewing this body brought you the greatest bliss you’ve ever felt, yet that felt like a trap. Partaking of such beauty filled your body with the heaviest desire, and you found yourself unable to tear your gaze away.
Your mind knew otherwise, already wise to the tricks of this creature. It had already seen the truth, and so it did what any sane mind would do in this situation. It showed you hallucinations.
Flashes of reality poked through. Sometimes, a random server’s face would be replaced with a mass of wriggling tendrils. Other times, you’d stare down at your coffee cup and see tentacles squirming free like some shrunken leviathan. But your date remained unchanged.
You stared long and hard at her, trying your best to rationalize what your mind was trying to tell you, without splitting your mind in two. It didn’t work, and as she approached, you stammered out a greeting halfway between “Hi there” and a garbled mess of syllables that made no sense in the order they’d come out.
“Hi there,” she said, hovering beside your chosen table. “Are you ‘Eldritch-Lover-69’?”
You blinked once, twice, and finally, the illusion was broken. The feathers molted away in an instant, burning into cinders the moment they fell free of the tentacles. The light in her core faded as tendrils enveloped it, absorbing whatever brilliance tried to peek through. Her voice shifted from sweet and angelic to deep and monstrous.
“Are you okay?” she asked, one tendril resting on your hand.
You stared at it, then at her, then down at the app on your phone, which showed her profile picture. You couldn’t believe what you saw.
“No, I’m not okay.” You stood and grabbed your things, and with a slightly overexaggerated huff, said, “You lied to me about what you were.”
