Sometimes it just doesn't pay to get up in the morning.

The first indication that His time of restless sleep had come to an end arrived in the form of starlight. Infinitely slender beams of the stellar luminescence penetrated even the miles of murky ocean under which He had lain for endless eons. The shimmering warmth of the rays nurtured His burgeoning wakefulness, a transgalactic prompting that the stars had once again aligned.

His renewing power came in surges, causing an involuntary twitching in His already writhing tendrils and a jerking of His limbs.

"Free at last!" He bellowed out in incomprehensible tones unto the liquid murk of a thousand fathoms. His moment of vengeance having finally arrived, every inch of His grotesquely titanic bulk surged with a newfound buoyancy.

Without further hesitation, He commanded a rift of molten rock to form in the subterranean floor, a teratological bulge that began the elevation of R'lyeh, His monumental throne of eternal power.

As the ancient metropolis rose up from the depths, Cthulhu relished the planet-wide annihilation with which He would herald His renewed reign. He would rid the tiny world of every parasitic form of life from man to microbe.

The crown of His head broke the surface of the Pacific, then continued to rise upward like a behemoth towering over its domain. Excitedly, He surveyed His long-lost kingdom.

Instantly, the Great One grasped the situation before Him. All exuberance quickly fled in the wake of His coming rage and overwhelming disappointment.

The cosmic realignment had come too late; He had slept too long! Naught but inert wasteland, devoid of any form of life, met His furious gaze. Only sprawling, devastated continents stretched out gray and corpse-like before Him, capped with an atmospheric blanket of pollution and toxic filth, while the ocean from which He had just emerged was nothing more than a cesspool lapping at His feet.

Consoling Himself, Cthulhu called out to an ironically absent audience, "Pathetic little humans, you needed no outside horror such as I to destroy your earth -- you already had yourselves!" His cosmic laughter rang out hideously as it circled the otherwise silent, lifeless globe.

Created: August 11, 1997; Updated: August 9, 2004