The Hunger Of The Cathwary Rhombus

20251021

Written for Bradley Ramsey's "First Indulgence" event.

While initially working in a museum was exciting, after forty years the exhibits faded into a sea of glass boxes. Blindness by familiarity.
It actually took Rodney a minute to realise what was bothering him. He gazed around the Prehistoric Sculpture room, his brow knitting as his eyes hunted for the Wrongness which halted his rounds.
Then it clicked - one box was empty.
Not unknown. But Rodney would’ve been informed if an exhibit was removed for any reason. And when he stepped over to investigate there was no polite printed card explaining the absence to visitors.
There was only the standard plaque - “Cathwary Rhombus”.
Hm. That felt familiar. Not in a “read it a hundred times” way, more… had it been highlighted on a school trip?
Rodney pulled up the work chat to alert the team, then the artefacts database.
Aha. “Prehistoric religious artefact”.
Blah blah Bronze Age blah blah… actually a ‘rhombicuboctahedron’ blah blah… found sealed inside a rock cairn at the bottom of Cathwary Lake, surrounded by eight warriors buried upright with spears in hand facing the cairn… inscription could be translated as “prison” or “fortress”… scholars couldn’t agree on what the god was of but most thought either feasting… or destruction.
Rodney looked between the empty display case and his phone. A dull dread gnawed at his neck, shivers rattling his vertebrae in a wordless scream of warning.
He was no scholar. Didn’t even have a history O Level. There was nothing underpinning this certainty. But… he was nevertheless certain that you wouldn’t take a fortune of metal, forge it into that kind of complex shape, then hide it in a stone box at the bottom of the deepest lake you could find just to act as a house for a jolly feasting god.
That would’ve taken an entire community years, right?
His radio crackled to life and Gabrielle announced “I’ve contacted the police, they’ll send someone to check the scene. I’ll scan security footage in the meantime. Rod, check all the windows. See if you can find the entry point.”
“Righto boss.” Rodney turned back to his rounds. But now each step sent waves of goosebumps up his back.
He was so preoccupied telling himself not to be silly, it wasn’t until his footsteps echoed he realised he’d gone down the stairs, into the basement. He shook his head and turned around - and faltered.
Had he heard something? His senses strained yet found nothing. It was more like… a memory. A susurration felt in his blood, not ears.
He slowly turned back. Hefting the reassuring sturdy weight of his steel torch.
About halfway down the basement he definitely heard a sound. A delicate rasp of metal on metal. Someone was filing something.
His feet jolted into a run. As his breath deepened he realised it wasn’t just his nerves acting up - the air down here was arid, not damp like usual. It’s as if something was sucking at his lungs. His face. His eyes.
The pull led him - dragged him - to a side room. He flung the door open and charged in, torch gripped tight, and skidded to a halt with a shocked “Christopher?”
“Rod! You scared me half to death!”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Rodney demanded, his gaze fixed on the slim file in the other man’s hand. “Put that down. Now.”
“Alright, calm down, I know this looks bad…”
“Put. It. Down.”
“It’s alright! I can patch it up good as new-”
“I SAID PUT IT DOWN!” Rodney lurched forward, his fist rising, and Christopher threw up his hands with a yelp.
“Wh-what’s gotten into you??”
“I’m asking that!” Rodney snarled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing??”
“Just taking one of the faces off.” Christopher said soothingly.
Did he not feel the, the slurping sensation from that hairline crack?
Rodney had always scoffed at grumbles about someone being ‘not from around here’ when they’d moved in from fifty miles away as a child. But his nerves were screaming to close the gap, seal it up, drown the damn thing all over again…
Yet Christopher wasn’t just unbothered, he was bubbly. “Dad told me yields have trended down since the fishery opened, and I decided to look into it. Didn’t make sense populations would plummet like that, after thriving for hundreds of years.”
“Because we didn’t fish the lake.”
“Of course people did.” Christopher scoffed.
They didn’t. Since he was tiny Rodney had known that…
Who’d told him?
Was it grandma, while teaching him to fish? His parents, once he got old enough to wander on his own?
Perhaps the warning came from deep in his bones.
Cathwary Lake eats people.
You fished waterways near the lake, because fish seemed drawn there. But never the lake itself. It was a drowning hotspot.
The rhombus was trying to breathe. No - it was trying to hold against the pulsing, sucking, grasping force which could taste the world through that crack.
“…blathering on about ‘global warming’ and ‘population shock’, and meanwhile I solved the problem with my history degree!” Christopher beamed and tapped the struggling prison, making Rodney flinch. “We dethroned a provider god!”
“That’s not-”
“Ugh. Of course you ‘men of science’ wouldn’t get it.”
“That’s not - get away from that thing!”
“I’ve made a replica, I’ll just open up the original and take the ‘focus’ holding the god and move it to its new home and-”
“No!” Rodney dove for the rhombus. Christopher yanked it away.
Was it bumped? Or was that simply the moment the bronze couldn’t take anymore?
The crack imploded, metal deforming into twisted lips, with a sensation like someone gulping down air after spending almost too long underwater.
Bronze folded in. The air folded in. Concrete folded in. The entire vent system screamed as fans were whirled by air rushing past and down and into that gaping maw. Rodney felt the world fold and crumple and vanish into darkness and then, thankfully, he died.

Prompt was “You’re a security guard at a museum, and one of your main posts is an ancient artefact said to be the prison of an ancient god. On a routine night, you pass the exhibit, only to realise it’s empty and the artefact is gone…”