CHUDs in Church

They weren't much on looks - or brains, for that matter - but Dagon was growing to love them.

The creature had discovered them in the tunnels as it patrolled the fringes of its subterranean domain: a large, grotesquely inbred colony of shivering albinos, nominally human but hopelessly degraded by years spent living underground, eating rats and algae, and perhaps the odd adventurous Youtuber (if the occasional GoPro in their bone piles was any indication), without light or language. Were they not interminably pregnant, the females would be all but indistinguishable from the males, so translucent and emaciated were their crooked bodies. Dagon's first impulse had been to simply devour them - a curiosity, but little more than a special meal. Indeed, it had consumed many of them before noticing the first crude idols.

Out of feces and splinters of bone, the subterranean dwellers had created what were undeniably attempts at some sort of graven image. At first, Dagon assumed it was random superstition or abstract gibberish, but over time the likeness improved until Dagon recognized a definite attempt to render a specific entity - Dagon itself.

The sub-humans began to grow quiet as Dagon approached, and sometimes seemed to sense the predator's presence even when it used the gifts of the blood to cloak itself from sight. Dagon began to toy with them, favoring some, punishing others, and slowly but surely, they began to respond. Feral though they were, they repeated the same sounds when they saw or suspected that Dagon was present. The little effigies became more elaborate, more numerous, and were often encircled by strange offerings. In response to this, Dagon began to bring the creatures food.

One night, the "tribe" offered Dagon one of its own - an unusually healthy child, as plump as is possible for a feral albino. Dagon appeared before them in its most terrible aspect, making itself huge and extending its fangs, and consumed the shrieking offering before the babbling horde. It taught them to say its name - "Dagon" - and they mastered it quickly, associating it immediately with their "god". Who could resist indulging their ego under such circumstances?

To date, the arrangement has proved most amusing to Dagon itself, and relatively beneficial to the sewer tribe. Dagon feeds them, they feed Dagon, and Dagon bathes in their adulation, even allowing some of them to eat the parasites that crawl under its skin - marking those so favored with a verminous infestation of their very own.

Their prayers may be gibberish and madness, but Dagon grants their wishes as best it can.