Fanfic / The Gods Awaken

The Gods Awaken is a 2020 crossover fic between The Owl House and the Cthulhu Mythos. In this story, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is freed from his thousand years imprisonment and plans on acquiring the power he had lost prior to being imprisoned. During his time adjusting to the Boiling Isles, he makes a deal with Boscha who had become increasingly envious of Willow's growing popularity.

The fanfic provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • The Blights are not really the most perfect family on paper: while Alador did force Amity to end her friendship with Willow, it is apparent he was hard-pressed into doing it because of Odalia. Odalia herself emotionally and psychologically abuses Amity (whom she tries to mold into being like her) by dyeing her hair green or threatening to send her to the Conformatorium when Amity was refusing to disavow her friends. Aside from Amity, Odalia hardly takes her older children into consideration and has no qualms with draining her son of his magic.
  • Emperor Belos took in a young Camila when she inadvertently ended up in the demon realm and trained her by granting her some of his power. However, once she realized the nature of his plans for Earth, she turns against him and gravelly injures him. Since then, he developed an insatiable vengeance and nonchalantly decides to execute her once she was brought to him.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: The dimension that Luz and Amity journey through via drinking the apple blood is a 3-sided plane within a black void. There are endless rows of doors through which bizarre alien creatures with mind-numbing shapes traverse through.
• Ambition Is Evil: Odalia's defining characteristic; she fully believes in achieving her ambitions even if it meant living through her daughter Amity by dying her hair green, and forcing her to end her friendship with Willow.
• And I Must Scream: Belos reveals that the set of armor he was constructing is made from the souls of the witches that were executed via petrification and were melted down along with metal native to the Isles. The result is fully sapient weapons fully aware of their current states.
• Animalistic Abomination: Hooty is at first considered an average owl demon, but Hypnos makes it clear that Hooty is not just a security system: he is an ancient godlike Great Old One with free range who is immensely powerful. So much so, he could destroy the Boiling Isles if he truly wanted to but luckily is too scatterbrained to attempt it.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Nyarlathotep makes a deal with Principal Bump under the threat of unleashing Grometheus the Fear Bringer onto the Boiling Isles if Bump did not disclose where the original Necronomicon was on Earth.
• Awful Wedded Life: The Blight parents are not on proper speaking terms with each other. While they share the same bedroom, a white sheet separates them, and they both have individual beds.
• Arch-Enemy: Nodens, the Lord of the Abyss is this to Nyarlathotep for hunting down his creatures in the Dreamlands.
• Astral Projection: Hypnos, the Greek God of sleep, is able to separate his tangible body from his physical one. He demonstrates to Luz and the others in their meeting.
• Batman Gambit: Nyarlathotep anticipated that Luz would refuse his offer of ruling the Boiling Isles alongside him, but what she did not realize that by destroying the Necronomicon, that would return Nyarlathotep's powers regardless of her accepting the offer or not.
• Big Bad: Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, was the ruler of the Boiling Isles who was imprisoned in glass and stripped of most of his cosmic powers.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Nyarlathotep was the original ruler of the Isles who created Emperor Belos to serve as a Puppet King. Nyarlathotep then makes deals with Boscha and Odalia to have them serve him.
• Boring, but Practical: To lure Luz out, Nyarlathotep traps Eda, Lilith, and King in an impenetrable glass box and fills it with water to force Luz to hand over the Necronomicon.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When King and Luz accuse him of killing his mother, Nyarlathotep merely states that he did not have a memory box of all the individual screams he wrought.
• Butt-Monkey: Hooty is made to drink some of the frothy apple blood Eda kept around for forty years. Once he ingested it, he falls to his side and remains motionless for a duration of the fanfic.
• Character Death: The Bat Queen is killed by Nyarlathotep when she tried to defend her fellow palismans and the tree from him.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Nyarlathotep has Boscha and Odalia write their names in the Book of Azathoth by pricking their fingers.
• Creepy Souvenir: Nyarlathotep houses a pocket dimension where he kept different artifacts during the times he destroyed villages. One artifact in particular is the half of King's other horn.
• Deal with the Devil: Nyarlathotep enlists Boscha to his cause by giving her the opportunity to become even greater than Willow.
• Death of Personality: Belos seeks to kill Nyarlathotep out of fear that he would force him to merge back with him as since he was merely the soul of the Crawling Chaos given agency, remerging would mean he would cease to be. That is what happens to him when Nyarlathotep stabs him with a fake Shining Trapezodon.
• Disney Villain Death: The Owl Spy/Alador pushes Kikimora off the stairway and into a vault containing molten liquid.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Belos desires to destroy the Earth and subsequently all humanity because of some unspecified score he wanted to settle.
• Dragged Off to Hell: Once the staff Nyarlathotep bestowed to Odalia is destroyed, it is revealed that Edric's magic was feeding beings outside of space-time. As such, Odalia is dragged into the portal created by the gem's destruction and is doomed to be driven to madness.
• Dragon with an Agenda: While he would claim otherwise, Belos is secretly planning on killing his master Nyarlathotep when he returned to the Boiling Isles.
• The Dreaded: Hooty becomes this to the Emperor's soldiers after he soundly beat them when they were trying to capture Eda.
• Everyone Can See It: Nearly every character is aware that Amity is in love with Luz except Luz herself.
• Evil Mentor: Nyarlathotep becomes one for Boscha, promising her that he would make her more powerful in return for her services.
• Evil Plan: Nyarlathotep's end goal is retrieving the magical power he lost thousands of years ago. To this end, he manipulates Boscha into a deal so she could provide him with just enough magic to function whilst also banking on her leading him to Luz since she uses magic glyphs. When Boscha is temporarily put out of commission, Nyarlathotep then entices Odalia into servitude, entrusting her with finding the original Necronomicon on Earth. But in order to do that, he gives her a staff that can leech off magic from different sources. He then attacks Hexside to convince Principal Bump to give up the location of the Necronomicon on Earth under the threat of releasing Grom from its prison.
• Fantastic Racism: Odalia tries to force Amity to disassociate with Luz due to her being a human. While she notes that Luz can perform magic, she views it as an unnatural form that was a mockery to legitimate witches.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Nyarlathotep tends to speak in a mannerly tone of voice, but he is actually one of the more malicious entities of the pantheon.
  • When Cthulhu arrives on the Earth, he pretends to be benevolent to the armed forces, lulling one of the soldiers in with his tentacles and then killing them whilst reveling on the fear he was putting into the rest.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: When asked why she hated Willow, Boscha explains how she was like her once being a half-witch and a constant target of bullying, but she remade herself. Luz, however, points out to her that despite her bullying Willow for years, she never resorted to bullying weaker students. Luz goes as far to say that Boscha actually did not change, but puts up a tough girl front to hide her insecurity.
• Genius Loci: Ghroth, the Harbinger, is a planet-like Outer God with a singular eye; it exists outside space-time serving under the Court of Azathoth only leaving when it goes to planets to awaken the Great Old Ones on them. It does that to the Earth.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Nyarlathotep is revealed to be the one who originally gave the witches of the Boiling Isles their magic and that he was also responsible for Emperor Belos' rise to power.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: In chapter 10, Hypnos explains that in order to astral travel, they had to take a type of drug.
• Humanoid Abomination: Nyarlathotep takes a few humanlike forms including:
  • The Black Pharaoh which he uses to tempt Odalia into working for him.
  • Nikola Tesla in reference to the 1920 short story/poem bearing his name. He uses it when he arrives to Hexside to confront Principal Bump.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • More witch sacrifice, but the early denizens of the Boiling Isles were known to sacrifice their children to the dark god in return for bestowing them with his magic.
  • Odalia decides to take use Edric's magic in order to feed the staff that she was given by Nyarlathotep. She opts to have her daughter as the next sacrifice for the staff's hunger if Edric gets mortally wounded.
• Hypocrite: Boscha makes fun of Willow for being a half-witch despite the fact that her father was a jinn thus making her a half-witch as well.
• I Have Your Loved Ones: Nyarlathotep takes Eda, Lilith, and King hostage and threatens to drown them if Luz did not comply to his demands. Meanwhile, Emperor Belos himself captures Camila and desires to execute her for her past trangressions.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Nyarlathotep stabs Belos through the chest with the fake Shining Trapezohedron before assimilating him.
• Interspecies Romance: Amity's abomination ends up falling in love with a shoggoth.
• Irony: Boscha gets her leg broken when she tries to attack Willow much like how she hurt Amity's leg in the Grudgby episode.
• Kill All Humans: Belos explains to Eda and the others that part of the Day of Unity entails that all humans will be killed without discrimination.
• Lack of Empathy: When he learns about Kikimora's fate, Belos at most musters up enough to say it was a pity before leaving Camila's cell.
• Last of Their Kind: Owlbert becomes one of the last of the palismans once Nyarlathotep drains the tree that he was carved from and reduces it to ashes.
• Manipulative Bastard: Nyarlathotep uses Boscha's dislike of Willow and her friends to recruit her into working for him, and then plays on Odalia's pride of the Blight family name by promising that she would be revered by all of space-time.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Kikimora decides to kill Luz anyway even if she realized that Belos had more sinister plans for the Boiling Isles.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Unbeknownst to Luz, when she fought with Boscha and used the ice glyph, she inadvertently removed another seal that prevented Nyarlathotep from acquiring some of his old power.
  • Luz successfully destroys the Necronomicon before Nyarlathotep could acquire it, but that was exactly what he planned. He gets his full power back regardless of whether Luz accepted his offer of world conquest or not.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • According to Hypnos, Nyarlathotep had destroyed different universes before becoming trapped in the demon realm. He also assures Luz that he didn't want to take over the Earth - rather, he wanted to destroy it.
  • Nyarlathotep reveals his plan to be destroying the Boiling Isles and recreating it so that the new witches that rose up would have an inclination to serve him.
• Our Souls Are Different: According to Hypnos, the soul makes up the core of the mortal's body, but they also have separate wants and desires of their own. If abandoned from the body long enough, souls take up individual lives. This would be the nature of Emperor Belos.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Star vampires invade the Boiling Isles from one of the rips in space-time Nyarlathotep created and they drink the blood from some of the witches.
• Pet the Dog: Alador does often speak behind his wife's back by telling Amity that he is actually impressed with her refusal to follow her mother's demands.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Nyarlathotep talks Boscha out of harming any of the students at Hexside largely because it would interfere with his negotiating with Principal Bump. Instead, he orders her to create a magical glass around the school in reference to his initial punishment.
• Rat Men: Brown Jenkin appears as one of the denizens of the pocket dimension Nyarlathotep created. He steals the piece of horn from Luz and Amity and escapes to the Earth.
• The Reveal:
  • Emperor Belos is a part of Nyarlathotep that escaped imprisonment and burrowed into the ground to incubate itself for thousands of years until the Savage Ages.
  • The Day of Unity really refers to the return of the Crawling Chaos and the introduction of the Outer Gods into the Boiling Isles so they could feast on that realm. It also refers to Emperor Belos intending to have the Earth destroyed by his master.
  • Camila had ended up on the Boiling Isles when she was roughly around Luz's age and was taken in by Emperor Belos. He instilled some of his power into her so she could perform magic to get around the lack of a bile sac. This would be the reason as to why Luz would be able to read the glyphs. But when she learned about what the Day of Unity entailed, she turned on Belos and left him in a near death-like state. So, by technicality, Luz is "related" to Belos due to sharing his blood. Once she returned to Earth, Camila wrote the Good Witch Azura books as a loose autobiography of her endeavors.
  • Nyarlathotep killed King's mother years ago and cursed him into his current form. To add insult to injury, he broke off a piece of his horn and kept it as a memento in his pocket dimension.
  • Alador is the Owl Spy.
  • Hooty is actually a Great Old One that is powerful enough to bring an apocalypse onto the Boiling Isles but is neither good nor evil.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Nyarlathotep gives Principal Bump the option of either telling him the location of the Necronomicon lest he unleash Grometheus back on the school.
  • Nyarlathotep forces Luz to either hand over the Necronomicon, or Eda, Lilith, and King would be drowned in an inescapable cage.
  • To show Willow that he was being serious about the competition between her and Boscha, Nyarlathotep wipes out the arctic region at the Knee by reviving it, and threatens to continue resurrecting each of the Titan's body parts for her continued refusal. He singles out Hexside as the next target.
• Satanic Archetype: Much like in the Mythos, Nyarlathotep is depicted as a dealmaker who takes the form of a goat-like humanoid known as the Black Man from Lovecraft's short story The Dreams in the Witch House when making a deal with Boscha.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Thousands of years ago, the people of the Isles were able to overpower and trap Nyarlathotep and lock him away in a glass prison. At least until the thousand year punishment reached its deadline thus releasing him.
• Secretly Dying: It is revealed that Emperor Belos' physical health had declined so significantly, there is the likelihood that he could die at any point.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: When Amity meets Boscha back when they were younger, she discovers a toy that Boscha would stab with spikes whenever she wanted to relieve her stress.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Nyarlathotep accuses the people of the Isles of being this when thousands of years ago he was sealed away by them. He now seeks to destroy the Boiling Isles for this perceived slight.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Nyarlathotep had orchestrated a system of ritualistic sacrifice where the children of the Isles had to give up their children in return for Nyarlathotep's blessings lest he destroy villages if they opposed him.
    • He also cursed King when he was a baby and stole his horn just because.
  • Odalia uses the spear that Nyarlathotep bestowed to her to suck out most of Edric's magic. She then decides that Emira would be the next to sacrifice to the staff if Edric were to be completely drained of his magic.
    • On Earth, she takes a grandmother's grandchildren hostage and threatens to decapitate one of them lest Luz relinquished the ownership of the Necronomicon to her.
  • Kikimora tries to force Luz to fall into a vault of molten metal.