Hear, Θe, Soŋ, Of, Θe, Fleshs, & *+
You regain consciousness slowly, blinking at the dim red light surrounding you. The air is full of dust. Red light seeps from the walls with no obvious source. The red intrudes into your forebrain like a glowing hot poker pulled directly from a fire. The augmentation in your eye scales down into lowlight mode, bringing your surroundings into starker relief. The walls are rough granite. Maybe? The ceiling – which is low and also roughhewn stone – is barely illuminated by the red light pouring from alcoves along the passageway you find yourself in. You cough. It is hard to breathe in here. The air is stale and chalky. The temperature is cool. You are almost certainly underground.
You sit up, pushing yourself up by your elbows. The tunnel trails off into the distance until it curves out of sight. There is no one near you. No Karcist mutated into a spider-like centaur creature. No fellow agents. Nor their remains. You have no idea how long you’ve been unconscious.
"Command?" you ask out loud, causing a frantic coughing fit. "Command, do you read me?"
Silence is your only response. You prop yourself up against the wall, try to understand what has happened. The last thing you remem–
Goddamnit. Cain ripped apart by those Sarkic monstrosities. Taylor taken out the same way. Fuck, his blood is still all over you. Mixed with the grit of stone dust in the air. Cain was a pain in the ass, but Taylor was alright. He had a good sense of humor. Now he’s spread out like a stain on that marble floor – if the manor is still standing that is. Wait. How did you get here?
Everything hurts. Your lungs are filled with rock dust. Your arms and legs. Your head from whatever fall you take through the floor of the manor. Your ego. What was that fucking plan? Infiltrate a cult gathering and put a hit on a monster. You’ll have back up, they said. Sure. Where? The next county over? You thought when you came in from the military that the Foundation would be different. But there’s even less respect for the grunt here. Cain and Taylor died to accomplish the mission – you’re just sure there were better ways to get this mission done.
You look around at your surroundings. The darkly colored stone walls are covered in a creeping organic material rising along the walls from the floor. The material seems like kudzu but made of scabs and flesh and teeth.
You stand finally, dusting yourself off and checking for injury. Other than soreness, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you. You’ve even still got your pistol, a semi-automatic with a dozen rounds left.
You reach out and touch the kudzu, feeling the rough surface with slight give. It is hard and yet spongey with a moist texture. A wave of revulsion travels down from the base of your skull to your stomach, leaving a sour pressure in its wake. What is this place?
The light from the alcoves comes in through cracks in the walls. So maybe not fully underground?
Alright. Time to find out where you are, so you walk down the tunnel. You pass a dozen alcoves until around the corner you spy craggy, uneven stairs cut from the stone, leading up into brighter light.
A courtyard. Better stonework here, giving off less cave energy and more paleolithic civilization. The courtyard even has stone plates for flooring. Symbols carved into the faces of the plates have been worn down by the elements. You stumble on a loose stone tile, causing another coughing fit. The air no longer smells of stone dust. But the air all around you is still choked with dust. Red dust. Like pollen.
“Does anybody read me?” You’re trying the radio again. “This is Agent Kennedy requesting evac, from wherever the fuck I am. On top of the complete blank on my location, I’ve got no food or water. Any help you can give me would be appreciated.”
Nothing. What did you expect? That there’d be better signal up above ground and out of the cave. Which is reasonable. But still not true, apparently. The muddy red dust motes float on the air like spores from a crushed mushroom. You can’t help but breathe some of it in. It tastes like cinnamon and blood. The sour pressure in your stomach intensifies for a second. Please don’t be sick. You don’t need to vomit in this place.
You cough again, this time producing red mucus into the palm of your hand. You’re dizzy and exhausted. Alright, enough of this. You go back down the stairs and lay down on the stones in one of the alcoves. Over the next twelve hours you rest fitfully, waking from nightmares and then try to reestablish contact with Command. You try on four separate occasions, each time walking up the stairs to the courtyard. In all that time the light never dims. Pressing into your eyes like a burning brand.
You know it’s day two because of the augment in your eye. It’s still counting the seconds for the mission timer at the corner of your vision. But otherwise, nothing has changed outside. You check every few hours. You had hoped something would make sense. That the sun would go down. Is it even the sun? Just suffused reddish light over reddish stones and scabby vines of teeth and viscera. The dust is worse now than when you first went topside, but you’re going stir crazy. No radio contact with Command for over eighteen hours and you need to find something to eat and more importantly something to drink.
So here you stand at the end of the courtyard again, staring out into the dust/pollen/blood storm. It blocks out anything more than a few hundred meters away. But unless you think this will end by wishing it, you know you need to get a sense of where you are.
“Working under the assumption that nothing I transmit is being received by command. But for posterity’s sake, I am leaving my shelter to locate food and water.”
If they can’t hear you, how can they come find you? Would they even try? Can’t be that concerned with your survival or they would have sent you in with more firepower. How were three agents supposed to get out of that manor alive? You know the answer, you just don’t like it. Your getting out was at best a secondary goal. Mission accomplished. They’ll be remembered as heroes. Fuck all the way off.
You tear at the hem of your evening gown and tie it over your face like a mask. You cross the courtyard and into the space beyond. It’s a structure of similar materials, similarly covered in meat kudzu crawling along the floor and up the walls. There’s another stairwell here, going steeply up. You climb for nearly five minutes until you’re on a bare rooftop overlooking the surrounding area. Through the swirling blood pollen you can see nearly a dozen fat, black ziggurats in the distance. You stand on the top of what must have been a ritual space or temple complex, but it has seen better days.
Huge portions of the roof have caved in and whatever idolatry which used to decorate this place is gone now. You hold your high heels in one hand and your gun in the other. You take off the heels after only a few steps up the stairwell. As ridiculous as the dress is, the shoes are worse. Now that there’s no cultist elite to impress and mingle with, you don’t need them. They sail through the spores and into the blank red desert between your temple and another nearby. It’s slightly easier to see long distances now that you’re higher up, but the motes in the air are distracting. Not least because they coat the inside of your mouth and nose, even with the mask.
Off in the distance, between the ziggurats, you can see long black organic looking tendrils reaching for the sky. Sinewy fingers of thorny material shooting straight up and swaying in the wind. It’s impossible to say what diameter they are. But their height is nauseating. Something that thin reaching straight up and moving in the wind like reeds, it makes the back of your skull hurt. You decide to stop looking at them.
The ziggurats shimmer in a heat haze that you don’t feel. They refuse to solidify in your vision. Like they’re only partially rooted to the sand, and half of the buildings are built into another world entirely. The shifting spores make looking at anything in the distance hard, but this isn’t that. This is your brain refusing to accept the ziggurats as being in the same space you are standing in. Looking at them directly is like staring down from an incredible height. The vision swims in front of you, their black stones vibrating just slightly out of sync with everything else.
Much nearer, a building draws your attention. It is a windowless tower nearly four stories in height and topped with a dome. It leans heavily in your direction which is what made you notice it. In fact, you can’t figure out how it’s still upright with the lean so dramatic. It’s got to be an almost 45-degree angle from the reddish sands. But there’s holes broken into the side of the tower and with that lean, you think maybe you could get inside.
You climb down the stairs, cross the courtyard in a different direction and walk out onto the sand in bare feet. It is lukewarm and spongy between your toes. Not like sand at all. You approach the leaning tower and look up to the nearest hole; clearly something very heavy hit the stones and ruptured the structure. They make you think of catapults for some reason. You climb along the rough stones making the wall and tuck yourself into the opening, landing badly and rolling down into a room filled with urns.
The interior walls are covered in the same organic material you saw in the chamber you woke in. The material is hardened, resembling the crust of a scab. In places the material has cracked open with blood and bile leaking out. Amongst the pools of coagulated organic liquids are hundreds of containers, earthenware and wicker baskets. You start sifting through them, looking for unbroken containers. Most of them are empty or busted open. But you need to find something, so you keep looking. After an hour, you have found a total of three amphorae that are sealed and still filled. One contains honey, the other two contain some sort of wine.
As you crack open one of the wine containers, knowing full well you should be looking for water, you hear a deep voice coming from somewhere inside the room. It speaks no language you have ever heard before.
“Hello? Say again?”
The voice responds but you still can’t make out the words. The voice sounds like granite wrapped in velvet grinding together. It makes your head hurt. Listening to it is like trying to focus on those ziggurats. It is here and it isn’t here. You are shaken. Here is a threat. Here is danger. You pick up one of the broken urns and brandish it as a weapon around the ruins of the storehouse.
“I can’t understand you. Who’s there?”
The voice does not repeat itself. Not for the first time you wonder if this is some last gasp of a dying brain. If you’re actually lying under tons of collapsed concrete and remnants of the manor as it fell on top of you. Is your brain bleeding as you mumble to yourself in a tumble-down ruin? Pragmatism wins you over in the end, thinking on the off chance you’re not dead that you had better act as if this place matters.
You decide it’s time to go, climbing down to the ground while struggling to keep the three amphorae protected against your body. You slink your way back towards the original ruined temple. It’s not comfortable but it is the only familiar ground you know. The coughing hits you halfway across the short empty space between structures. You almost drop the amphorae. You drink some more wine. It burns but has a pleasant aftertaste of nutmeg and cardamom. Maybe it’s made from some rice. But you’ve never been a wine expert. It’s just a relief to find something to drink. The climb and the coughing and the scare have wiped you out. You retreat back to your cool stone cave, prop yourself against a wall, and slide down to the floor.
It takes a while for sleep to come, but when it does another thought rips away the drowsy comfort of unconsciousness. If you’re not dead, maybe that bitch from the manor isn’t either. Maybe she’s here too. And if not her, someone else. You slide your pistol out and lay it next to you, within reaching distance. This is not a place where you want to be vulnerable.
Far too much time passes without you doing much other than drinking the wine and sleeping. You haven’t found anything to eat but honey and nothing to drink but ancient wine. You can’t just sit here forever. Nothing to be gained by drinking yourself stupid and waiting for something to eat you. You aren’t a teenager sitting in the dark wondering about your place in the high school hierarchy, you’re a fully-fledged Foundation agent and in an alien world. You have a job to do, not least of which is finding a way out of this fucking place. So. Get. Off. Your. Ass.
The spores/dust storm have not lessened, and the light is still the equivalent of mid-morning. You try to transmit again.
“Everything I see is being recorded. If I get out of here… yeah. Maybe. Maybe we can get something out of this. Cain never made it out of the basement. And Taylor… Jesus fucking Christ.”
You sigh and rub at your temples. You’ve had a dull headache behind your eyes for hours now. The ghost of a hangover maybe.
“The target POI is apparently not here. Maybe I managed to neutralize her. Hit her right in the forehead before the room collapsed. Hope I killed the bitch.”
You start walking into the dust storm, holding one of the amphorae in your hands. You should throw it away really. More booze won’t help anything. But you don’t. You don’t really care if it’s bad form to be drunk on a mission. You don’t really care if you’re just making your dehydration worse. Wait… is that a myth? Does drinking wine make you more thirsty? Not that you’re even feeling it yet. Too tired and sore and fucking terrified to feel thirsty.
You adjust the impromptu dust mask of your dress material to fit snugger against your face.
“I don't know what to make of this place. The air tastes like blood. It burns. Look at what it’s done to my skin.”
You hold out your left arm, showing the lesions running up and down your forearm to the recording augmentation. In the light, the lesions glisten slightly like they’re open to the air. It doesn’t hurt but does make the skin on your arm feel tight and uncomfortable with any flexing. Each of the small wounds is purple and the surrounding flesh is tinted red with irritation.
You wonder if leprosy is part of Sarkic magic. What do they call that? Something to do with meat. Of course it is. Always flesh this and flesh that. If you never had to read about another horror construct or eldritch cult, your life would be so much better. Is this a flesh eating bacteria? You don’t know how that works. You’ve always imagined your skin dissolving like a fizzy pellet you drop into water and drink to fight off nausea. What you wouldn’t give for a fucking ibuprofen. The headache throbs behind your eyes for emphasis.
“I found some food, so maybe I can find some medical supplies as well. I know honey has some antibiotic properties, or I think it does. I smeared some of it on the lesions. No idea what I'm doing. I drank one urn full of wine? I guess it was wine. It tasted a bit coppery and reminiscent of cardamom but also vaguely boozy. Sorry if that’s unprofessional. I’ve been here at least two days, maybe more. But I’m not thirsty. I should be dehydrated, especially only drinking wine. I don–”
You’re interrupted by a screeching, echoing howl reverberating behind you. You turn quickly and look back towards the tower and ruined temple complex. Your augmented vision searches for contacts, a source of the unnatural sound. But you find nothing and after a few moments to steady your breathing, you continue out into the dust. Bodiless voices talking to you in arcane languages. Shrieking beasts out in a dust storm impossible to locate. Stepped black pyramids that shiver in a heat haze despite the cool air, shimmering like a mirage even from up close. Flesh tendrils reaching up and up and up. And you’re covered in little weeping wounds making your arm look like it had been chewed on by a thousand chittering insects in the night.
When you were in training, they outlined what to do if you were in an extradimensional space and none of that makes sense to you now. No one ever prepared you for the dreamlike quality of being faced with dozens of unreal but real things everywhere you looked.
Not for the first time you wish someone would just tell you where the fuck you were. Is this Hell? Is it a hallucination? If it is, you wish it would end.
Wandering past the ziggurats – while trying not to stare at them as they vibrate in and out of reality – and through the small forest of tendrils (which reach up at least eighty or ninety meters in the air) takes most of the day. You stop for rest in the shadow of a stepped pyramid, sleep poorly and then continue on. When your chronometer says you’ve been here for at least a hundred hours, you find yourself approaching a new structure. As you have been periodically doing, you try to transmit again. Keep some sort of record. It’s not talking to yourself if you’re making a record.
“I haven't seen anyone… well. It’s lifeless, but not? The ground is alive, the walls are alive. The place is crawling with flesh. The growth is everywhere, crawling up any surface that will hold its weight. And there’s these spores in the air, so it’s not as if this place is barren of life. But I haven’t seen a single person or animal in all this time. No bird song. No bugs. Just spongey sand, blood red dust, and scabrous kudzu everywhere.”
You are wandering along reddish sand dotted with the occasional organic structure twisting in corkscrew shapes from the sand. You turn to the structure you just saw – a large building roughly thirty meters in height, which is made up of hundreds of strands of that same scabby growth. The strands burst from the sand without obvious foundation. Sphincter-like openings dot side of the building facing you.
You feel like the openings in the flesh are just like those that showed up in the manor at the end. Is that like a common aspect of Sarkic magic? Why couldn’t you study something before a mission just once?
“I’m hearing things. Whispers in a language I don't understand. Fuck, I guess I have seen some people. And look at the growth, tell me you can’t see faces in there.”
As you approach the building, the vines twist into shape mimicking a face, contorted with agony. A pair of hands reach out towards you, frantically trying to find purchase. Then they are gone, almost as quickly as they appeared. You wonder for the thousandth time whether what you’re seeing can be trusted.
“By the time I get any closer, they're gone. If someone is in that stuff, they want out. Or they want me in. Either way, a good reason not to get too close.”
The wind howls and you look up at the spore-dominated sky.
“And this dust or whatever. It moves… unnaturally. Can you see it? It hurts just to look at it. Sorta floats on the air and moves differently than the wind. Maybe I’ve lost my shit.”
The voice returns, grinding dust between molars of stone and making sounds you’ve never associated with language before. You sigh. It isn’t upsetting anymore. Or better to say it isn’t as upsetting anymore. Spooky voices lose a lot of the fear quotient when they just say random shit for days on end and never really get around to threatening you. If this was a scary movie, they’d have said something full of dark portent by now. But so far, it’s just gibberish.
“I wonder if you’re picking that up or it’s just in my head.”
The voice responds. More nonsense. It has to be talking to you. There’s no one else here. Then again, you still can’t figure out where it’s coming from. What if it’s not talking to you at all? What if the only active thing you’ve discovered here doesn’t acknowledge your existence at all? You never realized how social a person you were. Nearly a week without interacting with a single person in a meaningful way. You would give anything to have an actual conversation.
“I wouldn’t even mind hallucinating the voice, if I could fucking understand it.”
A wind picks up and the spores gather around your face, clouding your vision. You wave your hands in front of your face as if the spores were a crowd of bees circling. But the spores don’t even notice your attempts to bat them away. They float around your arms and force their way into your ears, nose, eyes, and throat.
You gasp. You choke. You cough wetly for several minutes. The fit winds you and you bend over spitting red mucus into the sand. You try to catch your breath and only stand erect when the coughing has subsided.
There. Much better.
“What in the– ? I understood that.”
Good.
“Who are you? No, fuck that. Where are you? What did you just do to me?”
The only response is the shifting sand and the sound of the wind. You scream. You scream until your throat is ruddy with blood and spores. Cinnamon and copper in your mouth. You hyperventilate. You cough. And cough. And cough.
You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and you see the lesions on your left arm have deepened to crimson. The lesions are less puckered but the skin around them has a rough texture that wasn’t there before. Your right arm is also slightly discolored now.
“Terrific.”
You move on from the building made up of corroded flesh and hair and teeth, and head out into the dust. What good is this mask even doing? Did the spores react to the voice? Are they doing this to you? Why? What have you ever done to deserve this? Fuck command. Fuck the Foundation. And fuck all Sarkics who ever lived.
What does time mean? The sun has set, you’re sure of it. The red light has dimmed here. It must have at some point. The digital counter keeps going up in your vision. You wonder what would happen if you ripped it out of your head.
Oh look another run down building made from red stones and covered in fleshy growths. If they didn’t have such varied shapes and dimensions, you wouldn’t be sure if you were looking at the same building day after day. Just walking in circles. Every landmark here you’ve seen is in one of several architectural styles and you don’t know what any of them mean. And still you trudge forward.
Wandering to this yet another dilapidated ruin, you find a room containing a primitive stove, a man-sized cauldron, and several earthenware containers. You find another jar of honey – oh thank fucking god – but the rest of the food stuff is rotten, disintegrated, or consumed by the ropey tendrils of the organic growths crawling over every surface.
You climb to the second floor, encountering a large room evidently designed for communal living. Against one of the walls in the living area, you see several wicker cabinets. You open them, finding a robe of material that feels like wool.
You tear the ruined evening dress off your body and wrap the crimson robe around your skin. At the bottom of the cabinet, you find a belt made of some sort of leather with a simple clasp. You cinch the belt at your waist on top of the robe. You consider resting but other than new clothes, you’ve found nothing of use. Now you’re wearing the clothes of someone a thousand years dead. You should feel horrible about that or at least uncomfortable. But the robes are still soft, and they only smell slightly of must. You’re dressed like a bloody monk in some dark brotherhood but hey, this place has offered so little comfort, why not take solace in what you can find?
So, you continue up the stairs.
On the third floor you find what must have been a library crammed to bursting with shelves overladen with tomes and scrolls.
At the end of the room a table sits pushed up against one wall and there’s someone at that table, seated in a chair, holding an unfurled scroll. You approach slowly with pistol raised. As you get closer, you realize the figure is wearing a full suit of ancient-looking bronze armor, posed as if reading. There’s something strange about the armor. You aren’t an expert, but every image you’ve seen of someone wearing bronze armor was limited to chest pieces and some guards on the forearms and legs. This is like a suit of plate. But was that even a thing during the Bronze Age? The visor is up, and you look into the cavernous space of the armor. The suit is sitting in the pose of a contemplative scholar but there’s no one home. The facemask is damaged, the metal flanging outwards like whatever ripped up the metal came from within the suit. Whatever happened, it was a violent escape. You imagine a tendrilled horror bursting from the face of some respectable knight, ripping through teeth and jaw and nasal cavity until pressing up against the bronze and tearing that like paper too.
On the table is a bronze sword laid out in front of the armor, presumably belonging to the owner. You run your finger along the edge lightly, gasp lightly, and pull your finger into your mouth.
“Dammit, still sharp.” You pause as you consider the sword. “Actually…”
You grasp the hilt of the blade but notice a thin trail of organic material connecting the sword to the armor and to a mass of that scabby kudzu on the floor climbing up the legs of the table. Your eyes trace a line from the armor to the pile of growth.
“Oh fuck.”
You jerk your hand away still holding the hilt of the sword, snapping the trail free from the larger mass. You hastily wipe down the hilt with the hem of your robes and back away from the armor.
What the fuck happened to them? Was whatever burst out of the armor the person who used to wear it and that’s what is left of them in the corner? You look around at the walls of the building at the hundreds of meters of ropey flesh tendrils that climb up every surface like the roots of a tree bursting up and over a retaining wall in a garden. Are these all people? Or worse? Were they all grown from this one man and he just endlessly replicated his ligaments, teeth, blood, bile and fleshy bits as they grew out of him? Maybe all these tendrils are the people who used to live here. Maybe they got what was coming to them. Maybe they shouldn’t have been Sarkic fleshcrafting maniacs. You feel hot and flushed staring at them all, you need to get out of here.
You rush down the stairs until you’re free of the suddenly claustrophobic building. Your breathing is elevated, your hands are sweaty. That was too much. If this was a hallucination would there be so much you couldn’t understand? There’s no dream logic here, just stories from the long dead that you can’t read.
You slide the sword into the belt at your waist and walk out into the spores. Better to be out here than in there.
Is there any building still standing here?
You crouch next to yet another ruined building, this one long and open like a small warehouse. This building is constructed of muddy red bricks but still covered in that endless fleshy vine. The purple-black of the growth starkly contrasts with reddish bricks. The growth squirms as you lean in to see better. Through a window a group of humanoid figures are gathered in a circle with their arms held high, surrounding a symbol that has been carved into the floor. They appear to be chanting but their voices are muffled by distance and the wind.
You concentrate, focusing past the constant distraction of the chest pain and headache brought on by the coughing. The augmentation in your eye enhances, showing the ritualists in greater detail. They are dressed in finely tailored upper-class attire from a multitude of eras. There are tattered frock coats and half crumpled tophats; whalebone corsets and dirty robe de style; rotten furs and three button suit jackets with matching power ties. Nothing makes sense about it, but in this red nightmare it’s the least of your concern.
Their faces on the other hand make you nauseous. The faces are chimeric, displaying octopus tentacles, bull’s horns, eyes that look like insects, and other non-human features. None of the ritualists look the same as any other, combining a variety of non-human features. They are hard to look at. Gazing upon the symbol on the floor proves even harder. No matter how your eye focuses, you can’t quite trace the lines of the sigil. You can see it all at once in a blurry manner or focus on individual parts. But you can’t make it resolve in your mind.
Every aspect of the ritual is wrong to you. Not morally wrong exactly – although you do not hesitate to judge them and their disgusting religion – but off, out of sync with reality. If this even is reality.
Their ritual continues for an hour, culminating in a fissure appearing in the earth in front of them. A bulbous cocoon of flesh emerges from the ground, around which the worshippers circle and touch their hands to its pulsating surface. Then their hands plunge into the pink, wet tissue with a sound like fifty plungers in fifty toilets being worked up and down.
A large, vaguely human entity is pulled from the crevasse and cocoon by the “people.” The new arrival is curled up in a fetal position on the floor and covered in blood and other fluids. The almost pitiable creature reminds you of a newborn baby. But muscular and covered in scales. The entity trembles for several minutes and then begins to rise to its full height at nearly three meters tall. You duck down as their gaze passes your direction.
“Oh fuck oh fuck.”
You inch yourself up so your eyes barely clear the base of the window. The ritualists raise their arms in unison and call out a single nonsense word. A flash of light erupts from the center of their ring and they disappear as starbursts leave you semi-blind. The augmentation starts acting strange, showing you several layered images of the room. You feel dizzy and smell burning rubber on the air, then fall and start seizing. You are completely aware for every second of the vibration, starting at the base of your skull and working down your spine, out along your limbs. It hurts more than you have ever felt. Worse than when you were shot that time. Worse than breaking your leg in junior high.
The smell of your vomit is impossible to ignore.
You’ve never had a seizure before. As you lie on your back you feel your grip on the situation slide out of your consciousness. The eddies of spore in the air circle around you. You find yourself sinking into the sand, through blood and bones and dead insects until you’re floating in a murky darkness. A piercing red light shines on you. You have the sense of being watched from a great distance. You hear the song of the blood. The song that all flesh makes. The melody of growth and adaptation. The verses knit together like sinew healing around bone and reattaching to muscle. Like individual cells of cancer searching for a home in your mother’s breast. Like the life of a million insects growing, fucking, eating, dying and repeating over millions of years.
Then just as suddenly you are lying on the ground where you fell. The aura fading and leaving behind a throbbing pain throughout your body. As the pain pulses through your muscles, you slowly regain your wits. You still see double of the room and you switch off the augmentation, causing the vision in that eye to dull.
What the fuck just happened?
You drink the rest of the wine.
Oh, holy shit. Is that water? Maybe a lake? You walk across the reddish sands for hours to reach what you really hope isn’t a mirage. It’s not that warm here, in fact it’s fairly cool. But you’ve been walking for days without water. You should be dead. You need that water.
You probably are dead.
You pick up the pace. As you get closer, the cloud of spores clears just enough to see it clearly and… fuck. That’s not water.
The body of liquid spread out for hundreds of meters in front of you is yellow and viscous. It’s a lake of snot. Or stomach acid.
“Come on! Can I not even have one fucking thing go my way?”
Bubbles emerge from the shallows, the gas wafting in your direction. You press down on the cloth over your face and try to hold back the gag. You try to think back to the last time you vomited. It’s not an activity that you relish – not that you imagine anyone enjoys it. But you have a particular anxiety about it. You watch what you eat. You never drink as much as others do. You stay hydrated and always wash your hands before eating anything. You aren’t that worried about germs, but you are absolutely sure that if you never vomited again then your life would be just about perfect. And here, in this horrible squelch of a world, you’ve had to be sick so many times. How many different ways can one place strain your thin grasp on reality? Everything here is disgusting.
While you’re trying not to vomit you look along the shore and see movement. Low flat bodies moving through the shallows with six legs, each at least three meters in length. They resemble crocodiles you’ve seen in zoos, but their skin is gray, black manes of hair run the crest of their spines and the heads are skeletal. And the eyes. Jesus Christ, the eyes.
“They look human.”
They were.
You jump nearly out of your skin. The voice has been quiet for days. It has done this time and again, without warning. You have a hard time judging when the voice will speak up. So, you’re never really ready for it.
Best not to approach, sister.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” you whisper. Sister. What the fuck is that about?
You think maybe the voice – on top of being a spooky thing that is haunting you – is also way too familiar. But you can’t pretend it hasn’t helped you a dozen times by now. And the last thing you want to do is get eaten by Sarkic crocodiles to prove the voice wrong.
You back up a few meters from the edge of the lake and start circling the shore, moving away from the creatures and heading towards yet another nearby ruin. The building is a single story and within the first room you find dried herbs, a table with several mortar and pestles, and over in the corner another wicker cabinet. You open the doors as quietly as you can and find roll upon roll of rough bandages.
“Oh thank god.”
You slip out of your robes and begin wrapping your arms and legs with the bandages. The discoloration has spread out in patchy patterns across your whole body, and the lesions have spread up both arms. Your left arm is covered in scaley bits of dried skin, the entire length of the arm is red and black with barely any of your original flesh tone visible. Wrapping the bandages over the lesions lets you breathe a bit easier, even though you have no way to clean the wounds or the material. It hurts to have the ancient cotton tightly pressing against the lesions and yet you feel relieved. So many open weeping wounds to this blighted air and the spores has been making you anxious. Well, more anxious.
You move through the room and explore the ruin. Beyond the room you’ve decided is an apothecary, there’s a short passage and then a large open chamber. Against the walls are a variety of statues. Human and animal and abstract, each of the statues is defaced and intentionally damaged. Not a single face or inscription is whole, clearly having been scratched out or struck with weapons. Ruined tapestries are piled on the floor behind some of the statues; you try to lift one up to examine but it falls apart in your hands.
At the end one side of the room is an altar made of stone, stained brown with several ritual-looking daggers of obsidian. Behind the altar is a fountain that is dry now but had clearly been in use at some point. The water feature seems to be the focus of the area with the altar inscribed with etchings of the fountain. What did it signify? Life? Death? Bounty? The wall behind is gilded and inset with precious stones. It too has been damaged you see, with the walls of the pool crushed in places. Even if water still flowed it would escape out onto the floor. Above the fountain is a stele inscribed with sigils you don’t recognize but they make you feel disoriented.
What was this place like when it was in use? There must have been a bustling crowd here to worship at the various altars. This place must have been the center of activity for the community. And now it’s destroyed. Devastated not just by time but intention, someone took tools to these statues. Someone scraped clean most of the iconography on the walls and altars.
“Not saying I disagree, but whoever did this was not a fan of religion.”
Do not worship those above you. Ascend to heaven and consume the Gods.
“Charming.”
You move towards the other side of the large chamber in the direction of an open door leading to a courtyard when one of the hairy crocodiles shuffles in through the portal. It opens its mouth and emits a high-pitched wail. The teeth within the mouth are glassy black and resemble the obsidian knives.
Oh fuck. You were so sure you avoided their attention.
You quickly turn and slip behind one of the larger statues – nearly three meters in height – and crouch behind it, sneaking glances between the legs. The lizard slowly enters the room and walks the circumference exactly as you originally moved around the interior of the building. After a few minutes it approaches the statue you are hiding behind. Your breath is hard in your throat, your fingers gripping the pommel of the sword so hard your knuckles are white. You draw your sword and hold it high above your head as the snout begins to round the corner of the statue’s base. You slam the blade across the bony snout just as it opens its mouth to wail again.
The six-legged skull-faced lizard screams in a very human manner, echoed by more high-pitched wailing from outside the temple. The reptilian creature hurriedly retreats, but you leap from behind the statue and plunge the point of the sword into the skull of the creature, impaling it to the stone floor beneath.
The bastard struggles for a few seconds and then falls dead, black ichor leaking from the wound and out its mouth. When you go to pull on the blade, you find it firmly rooted to the stone.
“What the fuck?”
You have to really lean on the blade, pulling with all your weight to free it. You stare at your hands. You push the body, moving it half a meter on the floor – finding it easy to push it aside. There’s a puncture in the stone from the tip of the blade, covered in the ichor. The gash in the floor is clean as if scored by power tools.
“These things must weigh four hundred pounds. And this is slate, I shouldn’t have been able to do more than scratch it.”
You rub at the divot in the stone, clearing away the black liquid. It is a perfect fit for the tip of the blade. You shudder. This shouldn’t be possible. You kick at the monster’s corpse, crushing its skull like paper beneath your bare foot.
Every time you think you’ve got a handle on this nightmare something new pops up. As you undergo what you can no longer ignore is some sort of transformation, you can’t help but wonder what your colleagues will say. What are the chances they have some treatment for you back home? What are the chances they lock you up in a cell and prod you with scalpels to see how you tick?
That train of thought is interrupted with more harsh keening from outside, followed by rushing shuffling sounds of horrible crocodile monstrosity footsteps and quickly you run through the back door and out into the dust storm. There has to be somewhere nearby you can fortify and get away from the things. Someplace quiet where you can think and take a breath without disgusting surprise.
This stuff grows on anything.
Now, in another part of the temple complex you fought the crocodile in, you’ve made yourself a refuge. Blockading the entrances with statuary and ruined stonework from the walls has given you a sense of security. Moving the rubble was easy. Pieces of stone that must weigh hundreds of pounds, but other than the difficulty in leverage and holding chunks of stone being awkward, it proves quite easy. You have marveled at the increased strength and resilience of skin, despite the weeping lesions covering so much of your upper body now. You wonder if there is a word for what is happening to you, but you decide not to try and focus on another tangential thought with no answers at hand. The voice has not been forthcoming. You are sure it is not a figment of your imagination now. You are also sure it is a stingy bitch and you would like to throttle it.
You’ve scavenged throughout the building, finding more urns of honey and wine. Nothing else is edible. And yet, after a few days have passed there’s nothing left again.
Desperation settles in and inspires you to take one of the obsidian daggers to the meat kudzu. Maybe it's edible?
“It used to be people.”
You might not feel hungry, but you need to eat. That’s how being human works. You eat or you die. What good is a world of flesh magic if there’s nothing to eat here? What did those cultists eat? Why is it so fucking hard to find water here? Why aren’t you thirsty?
You bring the knife down on the kudzu and saw away at the flesh with the blade. The scabs break down like scabs always do – oozing and softening with the blood and pus. But under the scabs, there is little flesh. Just bone and cartilage and human teeth. Actual human fucking teeth. How does this grow? What does it feed on? Is it like a plant sucking nutrients from the soil? But then this soil is mostly blood and dead sand.
What fleshy bits you’re able to pull off you try to choke down.
Within minutes your temperature rises, you feel weak and you’re vomiting. You’re vomiting. Again. The only thing this place is good for is vomiting.
Fever builds and you need to rest. Hours pass in a haze. You hear the wailing of the crocodiles outside, sounding so human that you wonder if you couldn’t eat them? But their blood is literally black. No. You can’t do that. You won’t do that. This experiment has been utterly useless and only made you staggeringly ill.
Through the shivers and draped in an old ratty blanket you found, you make a small fire in the brazier that you’ve dragged near your bedding. Scraps of paper and wicker baskets taken from the temple interior burn decently but don’t last very long. It isn’t very cold but the fire makes you feel better. Your fever has gone down, but you feel ridiculously weak. The cough has reduced noticeably lately. Maybe you’re adapting?
You decide to make a new record for anyone who might be listening.
“Pretty sure no one is receiving this, but for posterity, I am relatively healthy apart from significant reaction to trying to eat the kudzu. There is almost no food here, but I don’t even know why I even tried eating that shit. I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry for weeks. Makes no sense. I haven’t eaten anything but honey for days, and only a small amount. Once the wine ran out, I haven’t found any other potable liquid to drink. It’s like I don’t need it anymore. Like something is sustaining me withou–”
The wind blows harder outside and the spores drift into the temple in an agitated manner. Floating in a circular pattern through the heat of the small fire before flowing out again.
“And all this time I’ve been breathing this stuff in, which has to be what’s causing this rash. God knows what else it might be doing to me…”
You stand up suddenly and approach the open window. The keening of the crocodilian entities can be heard in the distance, somewhere outside the building – hopefully on the far side. You take a deep breath, actually seeing particles fly into your mouth and nose. You don’t cough this time.
Something must be sustaining you. Something is changing you. Something is making you feel ill and yet stronger than you’ve ever been in your life. Something is making you a new person under the shell of the Margot Kennedy you used to be.
“No fucking way.”
You rest for a few more hours, having fitful sleep on the cold stone floor of the temple. You wake with a shout, then clamp your hand over your mouth. Panic gripping your throat and chest in a vise. Those things are still outside, they never go far. But the dreams, they’ve gotten so real. So vivid. You decide it’s time to memorialize them for the record. Maybe they’ll mean something to someone. And maybe it will feel good to talk about them instead of trying to ignore whatever messages this place is injecting into your brain.
“I haven’t mentioned it before, because I thought it was just stress at my situation. But I have been having the most vivid and impossibly strange dreams since I came here. It started out as night terrors – dread, physical pressure on my abdomen, and hard to move. But then there was pain, confusion… In the dream I mean, not just in my body. I’m sure I was asleep. Aching sense of need, the way dreams communicate ideas without anyone telling you.
I think it belongs to someone else, the dream, because I am a shepherd, tending to my flock. I try to protect them. There are predators but I can't save them all from these threats - I'm just not strong enough. I have to find a way. I gave them medicine - it made them stronger, but… but something is wrong. They're sick. So am I. Sick but strong. So strong… I feed them my blood instead. I drink it too.
We keep drinking this cure. We can't stop. We need it now. We're so hungry for it. We don’t ever stop, not ever. It doesn’t stave off the sickness but it makes us stronger than we were. I can’t save them all, but I can teach them to save themselves. To shape themselves into something even stronger. Fed on the blood from my chest, suckling them like babies.
I don’t think they’re sheep. I think they’re people.
Of a sort.”
You’re quiet for a few moments. Thoughts racing through your mind that you don’t want to say out loud. If you say these things out loud, does that make them less or more real. For the first time in your life, you wish you had a therapist here. Someone who could analyze the dreams. What you wouldn’t do for a good, old-fashioned nightmare like teeth falling out of your mouth.
You sigh.
“Command, you ever hear anything so nuts? You people have heard it all, I’m sure. What do the experts think?”
You’re hit with a coughing fit again, the worst one in nearly a day. As you recover, you notice blood in the palm of your hand… and a tooth.
“Oh god. Oh god.”
You move a finger through your mouth, start to curse, and then feel something completely alien.
“Command, I seem to have lost a tooth, a perfectly healthy tooth. It isn’t broken, it just fell out of my mouth. And there’s a new one growing in, I think. Sharper. Like a shark’s.”
You cover your eyes and crouch next to the smoldering fire, placing your head between your knees. Your breathing is shallow and rapid. You know it’s coming.
You hold it for a few seconds and then the first sob escapes your lips. Then the deluge begins. If you had your wits about you, maybe you’d wonder at the timing of losing a tooth right when you think about those sort of dreams. But you don’t have a firm grasp on any of this. You have just discovered a tooth from another organism in your mouth growing out of your gums.
“Can someone please come find me? I could really use some help.”
Maybe I could help, if you want.
You sob.
“Okay.”
“What do you mean?”
This land… this soil you lay upon is not some strange realm.
“You’re saying that this is Earth?”
Where else would you be?
“We don’t have hairy crocodiles on Earth. Or creeping vines made out of scabs and human teeth. Or dust that’s alive and turns you into a freak. Or… I hope we don’t.”
Nevertheless.
“So, what are these ruins? I’ve never seen a city like this, and everything is old. People don’t carry around bronze swords anymore.”
We never carried weapons.
“Pacifist?”
They were… unnecessary.
“Just fists and feet huh? Like Jackie Chan.”
…
“Don’t worry about it. But tell me about this city. The dust storm. All of it.”
It is not a short story.
“I have nowhere else to be.”
You wake up in the ruined temple with a shout, like you have done so frequently lately. You look around your space, making sure the barricades are still up. You’ve healed nicely but you haven’t found the energy to start wandering again. You search the ceiling for any sign of the voice, even though you know you won’t see them.
“You here?”
The only answer you receive is silence. You think back to the dreams and wonder if they might serve some expert back home to understand what is happening to you. So you begin to transmit again.
“More dreams. Always with the dreams. Every time I close my eyes, it’s this absurd shit.
Dreams that aren’t mine. Memories that aren’t mine? An old man, his skin was dark, but his face was white with the ashes. Somehow, I knew the ashes were his ancestors, which he kept in a great urn by his bed. His nails were long, having never known a day of physical labor. This would have usually made me dismiss a person, but I admired him. I stood at his side. I was so small and his shadow seemed to stretch on and on in the flickering torchlight. We were in a library of sorts.
He held open a scroll. The parchment… I think it was human skin. I could see a mole on it. He was blind, but no… he actually had no eyes, just flesh where the sockets would be. Even so, he read it all from memory. It was a duty. The symbols were unfamiliar to me but like they were just out of grasp. I knew if I tried hard enough, studied long enough, I would be able to parse them.
Oh my god. He was teaching me how to read.
And in a flash, I saw his future. I saw his lifeless body, skewered among the refuse of the city. There were hundreds of men and women, holding long metal tubes sharpened on one end. Carrion birds darkened the sky. He knew that was coming too. And despite that, he still chose to teach me. Me. Some nothing orphan with nothing to her name.
I don’t even know who he was.”
You need to move. You need to leave the temple. Nothing has happened in days, withdrawing into yourself and falling into a depressed mood. You can’t stay here. If you’re going to get home, you’ll have to save yourself. So, it is time to go. Although, something has changed – you will no longer search for food or concern yourself with water. This world wants you to live.
You don’t know why but the resistance to the fact is gone. You no longer feel the need to cough or feel nauseous at the strange transformation on your skin. Resting was good. You have perspective now maybe. So you feel like exploring again. Even as you feel the changes burning through you. Feel it worming through your flesh, ripping apart your cells and building up anew. It feels like an itch inside you but it no longer feels like you’re going to die. Not in any traditional sense.
You’re up on the roof of the temple, scouting the surrounding area. Night has finally fallen, as it does periodically here. You don’t remember if you’ve mentioned the strange day/night cycle for the recording. You don’t care. There’s nothing less important than making a record of your time here. Maybe this was all meant to be. Maybe it doesn’t matter in any way not connected to your experience of it.
You focus on a fire in the distance and magnify your augmented vision to investigate. A crowd of humanoid entities gather around a bonfire. The fire appears to be the product of a gaseous vent rather than an artificial creation. They have constructed a series of pyramids over the gas vent, letting the fire silhouette the shapes of the structure. It is too dark to see what the materials are, but the structures do not burn. Although you can only see the individuals in silhouette, they wear tattered robes and carry primitive weapons, such as spears and clubs, which they hold up in the air.
“Are they human? Were they ever human?”
You see movement around the bonfire and soon several hundred figures come into focus, dancing and shaking their fists at the fire. They strip out of their robes and only wear simple loincloths. The spores that normally dominate the sky suddenly break, revealing an enormous eye hovering over the burning effigy, high in the air. The eye is looking directly at you, you’re sure.
The blood in your veins freezes. You feel a pressure on the back of your skull. Livid fear rips through you. Whatever this is, it is larger than you can imagine. The eye must be nearly a kilometer in diameter. You can see nothing of the rest of the entity. You are fantastically grateful you cannot.
“What is that?”
You collapse on the roof tiles, flattening your profile. The eye burns a bright red, with endless stars shining within the dark of the pupil. You can’t look away, it pins you there with its gaze. As if merely bearing its notice weighs you down with heightened gravity. It blinks, then focuses down on the revelry.
You follow its gaze down to the things dancing around the fire. As one they look up to the eye and then turn in your direction.
“No no no no no no no no no no!”
You get your sword, make sure you still have the gun, and climb down the outer walls of the temple, fleeing in the opposite direction of the humanoids. You look back after an hour of running - the eye remains and is still staring at you. You will not look in its direction again for hours.
You keep moving for hours, steadily in the same direction. The crowd of humanoid worshippers continued to hound you for the first hour before most broke off and headed back in the direction they came from. Unfortunately, there are four that will not give up the hunt. Glancing over your shoulder, they lope after you on all four limbs. High above, the red glow from the eye continues to illuminate a cloud cover of the spores but you can’t see the actual eye anymore. These things aren’t giving up and you need somewhere to fight back. Ahead, a large boarded-up hall rises from the sand. It's several hundred meters long but most of the roof has caved in. You burst through the rotten wood and find several hundred ruined pews made of bone and cartilage.
You push together some of the ruined pews into a semi-circle to give you some barrier between yourself and the open door to the hall. You pull your firearm and check the ammunition: only seven rounds left.
“I’m really screwed here.”
They are lost. Their minds shattered. Such was a time they were of the people.
“Lost or not, they’re following too close. Most of them have fallen back but there’s four of the bastards who just won’t give up. Whatever they want with me, it’s not something I’m going to like.”
You are most likely correct, sister.
“Well, while you’re speaking to me, what were they doing back there?”
Seeking to appease those things that rule here. I do not know them, but I know them. Servants of The Great Winnower, faceless manifestations of primordial chaos. They seek to breach into the world but were restrained in this place.
“Anyone ever tell you how cryptic you are?”
They approach.
The four individuals enter the space in the gloom – what light enters the ruined structure similar to early morning in baseline but tinted red. What you wouldn’t give for some sunlight.
Now that you’re not running, you can finally scan their appearance. They’re vaguely humanoid but with varied mutations: horns on the face, skin covered in red scales, spinous growths emerging from the feet and hands and elbows creating elongated bone spears piercing their skin. All four are completely naked. They spread out and begin advancing toward your position.
You rise, firing the pistol four times. Two shots hit the lead thing in the chest, knocking it down. The next two shots find the head and throat of the next entity to the left. The remaining two rush your redoubt. The first leaps over the barrier; you fire wildly and miss with the last of your rounds. You pitch the gun at one entity’s head, hitting it like a rock. It stumbles, bleeding profusely and falls to its knees. The last entity reaches for you and you punch it in the chest, knocking it backwards with such force that it hits the barricade and slumps. You draw the sword.
The entity hit with the pistol begins struggling to its feet as the slumped figure pulls itself up using the barricade as support. The two approach slowly; you give ground slowly while brandishing the sword.
The entity with the head wound rushes and you swipe the sword across the its body at a diagonal slice, catching it in its lower torso and tearing through to its clavicle. Nearly sliced in two, its entrails and copious blood splashing to the dusty ground, the entity falls and lies twitching. The last entity turns and looks at its companion, then to the two who have been hit by gunfire, then looks back toward you.
The entity has lost most of its face to a mass of writhing tentacles which reach down into its upper torso, splashing blood and mucus as they thrash in its flesh. The sound of tearing skin and meat is constant and like a sponge being torn apart. The creature screams from a mouth hidden somewhere beneath the tentacles. It warbles and sounds wet like the vocal cords are drowning in blood and whatever else is ejected from the tentacles.
“If you want to do this, come on. Otherwise fuck off.”
The entity looks down at its compatriot again and starts slowly backing away. When it gets to the barricade it hops over and looks back at you, spitting mucus and blood from the tentacles in your direction. Then the entity turns and runs from the building, bipedal at first but descending into a quadrupedal loping run after a few meters. It does not look back.
“Yeah, fuck you too.”
You wipe the blade on your robe and sit on a nearby pew still mostly upright. You hold up your left hand in the early morning light. The skin is livid with red welts and scabs, the latter seemingly joining up with tougher sections of skin like a lattice of interlocking scales.
“All fists and feet.”
You look around at the empty hall.
“Hey pal, you there?”
Only silence in response.
“Come on. I’m sorry I killed them, but not like they gave me much choice. Anyway, they were fucking monsters.”
I found them beautiful.
“Beautiful?”
Denying the limitations of the human form is the highest goal of all who resist the Gods.
You are overwhelmed by a swirling of the spores. They swim in front of you and cloud your eyes. And then you are somewhere else. You are in the cosmos. You float in the void, overlooking the curve of the Earth. From out in the dark, you hear a howling. Like ten thousand voices keening all at once. You see tendrils of vivid scarlet burst from a noxious cloud handing in the ether. The tendrils reach for the Earth. They plunge through you. You are consumed. Torn into countless molecules of blood and flesh. The tendrils grasp the Earth and pull it towards a waiting mouth ringed with teeth ten million kilometers tall. You can hear the song again. The song of the flesh. As the chorus rises, you see the tendrils lose their purchase on your world. The melody grows in volume until you can’t think and there is a bright flash. For a moment you can see the silhouette of a man in robes holding up his hands. Then it's gone and you are back in the empty meeting halls and surrounded by ruined pews.
Never be satisfied with the body forced upon you by the strictures of the universe. Humanity need not be so limited.
Time has ceased to mean much. You move or rest and then move again. You can see how much time has passed in this place by looking at the mission timer and doing some math, but you really couldn’t care less. You move south, or at least what you assume is south based on the light.
You eventually find yourself in a completely new environment – black and gray, lacking the red coloration that encompasses so much of this place.
An aroma tickles your nose, and you gag.
“Oh god, what is that?”
You can’t hold it. Your throat is on fire, and you bend over to vomit. The ground is soft and wet, like a mudflat. It smells like all the rotten garbage in New York laying out in the sun. As you stumble forward you are increasingly ensnared by the rotting tissue, sinking deeper as you struggle to free yourself. The liquefying gray matter begins to bubble and is followed by a guttural noise as the ground ruptures beneath your feet, revealing a darkened hollow formed by decay. Your vision goes dark as you slide through the foul material, tasting some as you submerge as the material is forced down your nose. You hit a hard floor with your face, slightly cushioned by the rot. You vomit again and lose consciousness.
Somewhere around six hours have passed after losing consciousness. Your augment scales down to lowlight showing a hallway of an intelligently conceived structure – organic in design, similar to a hive. The hallway and doors all resemble the ventricles inside a body. Like sphincters and tubes to connect the various mechanisms of an organism. The material is a white-yellow coloration and has a smooth, hard surface clearly organic in nature, but appears inert rather than a living tissue.
“Hello?”
There is no response. You start moving into the passages where you find evidence of habitation, including books and scrolls of abnormally large size. You unfurl one of the scrolls and look through it.
“Sarkic symbols, I think?”
You have seen some of the old language in the files, but this looks slightly different. Unfortunately, you didn’t learn how to read it, so you can’t get much from it. You slide the scroll back onto the shelf. A place of study? Of research? Or was this worship? You don’t know the first thing about these people. You think to ask your guide but then an icy grip slides down your spine. It is looking for you again.
A chorus of flesh rises from the ossified halls. The flesh of the passageway pulses, alive again as if they had always been. There, in the distance you see a red light like the eye. It searches through the labyrinth of passageways like a spotlight. As the light finds you, the walls pulse in rhythm to the melody of the chorus. The song reaches a crescendo. The light dims. You sigh contented in the bosom of something larger than you that wants you to live. Something that makes you feel like you belong. The walls turn back to their frozen state, losing the pulsing beat of life as the chorus fades again. You find that you can almost hear the words.
You continue to investigate the structure, wandering under high ceilings and furnishings that have been long abandoned. Winding hallways and numerous chambers extended out in many directions, and you find it nearly endless. After a few hours you’ve clearly walked kilometers without an obvious exit. There are libraries, kitchens, meeting rooms, living areas and even simplistic restrooms with pits in the floor. Endless hundreds could have lived in this space. But you can find no one. Not even remains.
Sometime later you sit on a large bench in a circular chamber, surrounded by several dozen bone altars with skin stretched along the top like a drum. In the stretched skin, blood pools in slight depressions. The blood is wet despite the many years this place has obviously lain dormant given the dust covering everything here.
“Been wandering for hours. Command if you hear this then you can watch the footage. Some of the rooms seem notable, but many are just dormitories, I think. This structure must’ve housed thousands. And a completely different culture than whoever built most of the ruins. Or at least I assume so, based on the unique architecture and building techniques. I guess these materials could be similar to the growths I’ve seen all over the place, but hard to tell without some eggheads doing tests. It doesn’t look the same.”
You look around at the drum altars.
“Felt like as good a time as any to tell you something I think might be important: I’m having more dreams.”
You laugh tiredly. Despite the sustenance this place has given you, you are bone weary. You would give almost anything for something to drink. Something to eat. You sigh and continue with your report to no one.
“I don’t know why this is important, but I was never much of a dreamer before and these feel a little too real. I am in a series of passages in a palace, a throne room, a library, and a council chamber. Surrounded by women in robes of finery discussing something in an animated way. They carry obsidian blades on ornamental belts.
I see a high priestess whom even emperors have served.
I see the sacrificial spires from which blood always flows.
I feel the gods and hear their ceaseless whispering.
I see a slave who would spark rebellion, who would drink from the ichor of a dying deity.
I remember a tormented scholar redeemed; a broken warrior unbound; a tyrant-turned lover; a servant reborn through revenge, knife always in the hand.”
You laugh again.
“I know how I sound but bear with me. The cultists we hunt are wrong, but I don’t just mean morally. I mean I think they’re doing this all wrong. Hidden beneath their interpretations, their rituals and sacrifices, their yearning for power, somewhere among the oldest of their myths, is something true.”
You touch some of the blood pooled on a nearby altar and bring your fingers to your lips, tasting it.
“We can learn from this place. From these people, whoever they were. I can learn from them.”
Seven days vanish behind you in a haze. The voice teaches you. You read the scrolls. You touch the blood and commune with it. You dream. But eventually you need to breathe free air, even air tainted by the spore.
You emerge into the red sunlight, the drifting masses of the spores floating on silent wind. The flows react to your presence, drawing closer. You take a deep breath. Absorbing them into your lungs, your blood, your breath.
“Much better. Spent too long down there.”
You turn and look back into the tunnel from which you emerged, showing the organic labyrinth you fell into almost a week ago. You are surrounded by the black and gray organic substances rotting in the red sunlight. The smell no longer bothers you.
“I wonder what happened to them. They were making it work, enough for a large group living together. No indication of struggles or civil strife or whatever. But they just up and left. Meals still on tables, scrolls laid out on desks ready to be studied.”
You stop and listen to the whispers.
“Became what?”
“More than they were?”
“Alright, fine. But who were they?”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Deathless? That sounds ominous.”
“No, yeah I get it. Carry a big stick. But that means they had enemies right? You had enemies. These were your people, I’m guessing.”
“Now that’s a word I remember from the files. Machine freaks. Big on the ye olde clock work and cogs…”
You hold the bronze sword out in front of you. Your hands are visible in the light, the skin has uniformly changed color to a deep crimson mottled with lighter patches and resembling the scales of a snake, glistening with oils. The changes no longer bother you.
“Ah I get it, that’s why the sword and the armor.”
“It doesn’t bother you I kept this, does it?”
“Good, I’m glad. After everything you’ve done for me, I’d hate to offend you.”
You start walking again and then stop. Something has definitely changed. The whisper is freer with you. More willing to share information. Whatever was holding it back before is gone now. But also, the method of delivery has changed. You think you know why, but you ask anyway.
“Hey, why’d you start talking like this? I could hear you before but now I hear you.”
“Well, that’s a bit paranoid. No one is ever going to come for me, so no one is ever going to see these recordings.”
“It’s alright. I’ve made my peace with it.”
You walk through the ruins of an ancient city. Black pyramids and ruined skyscrapers are visible in the distance, along with swaying tentacles hundreds of meters in height towering over even the buildings.
“This feels so familiar. Which is ridiculous, we don’t have black pyramids and tentacles reaching up to the sky at home.”
As you pass along streets paved with cobblestones made of organic materials resembling keratin and obsidian, you see individuals in small groups. Emaciated humanoids are there in the hundreds; some sit, some stand, but all are motionless. You can hear the chorus of flesh on the wind but it isn’t strong here. These are not the people of the flesh. They do not commune with the blood. The song sings of emancipation. It sings of rising up. It sings of revolution. You look at the nearest entity. You can almost see the notes of the song traveling past its head, flowing around but never into its ears. They cannot hear the song. The spores avoid the entity.
You approach the entity. It has sun-worn, tanned skin marked by a number of tattoos. It wears golden bangles and necklaces but is otherwise nude save for the tattered yellow silk that covers its head and shoulders. The entity looks as if it were human once but has undergone significant mutation like those who attacked you days ago. Around the horns jutting from its brow, the skin is puckered and festering. Overall, the entity looks dehydrated and starved.
“Are you alive?”
It says nothing. You prod it with the hilt of your sword, similarly failing to elicit a response. The entity’s skin tears like aged paper but bleeds only slightly. You slide the sword back into your belt and hold your hands out, palms toward the entity. It does not react. You never wanted to hurt it. But you don’t find much regret in any discomfort. This was one who chained the flesh down and made it serve their purpose. These entities cannot hear the song.
You wonder at that. Were they once of the people? Or were these enemies caught in whatever catastrophe ripped this place from reality and into this pocket of existence? Whatever happened here happened long ago, and somehow these people were preserved too. Although not in very good condition. So, if they don’t hear the song, if they don’t partake in the crafting of flesh, how are they still alive? More importantly, if they were the enemies of the Sarkites who lived here, why were they not being massacred by those you’ve run into before?
The whisper speaks again for the first time since reaching this place.
“I was just wondering that. Who were they if not yours?”
“Really? They were still around by then? I thought they had died off?”
“Ah right, that book of theirs changes history. You mentioned that before. So, after the rebellion, why were so many still here? I mean, I’ve been assuming this was your home before whatever disaster happened.”
“Huh. Would have figured you for the unforgiving type. Letting them live here after you took over, I admire that. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever piss you off.”
You continue down the street and look up at the nearest large structure, probably nearly fifty meters tall. The building is made from stone shot through with organic material, with the scabby kudzu merging into the stone walls.
“What did you say this place was called?”
“Never heard of it. Ade-om? Is that right?”
“Adytum. Well, I was close.”
“What happened here?”
You listen as the whispers say more words in a row than they have ever since you first spoke. It is full of regret. It does not want you to fear it. Hesitant and quietly, the whispers continue to describe the doom that came to this place. The doom that that they wrought with their own choices. You don’t want rush them, so you let it all tumble out. When they are finished, you feel sorrier for the voice than you have for anyone else in your life. But also, you can’t help but judge them for what they’ve told you.
“I… I don't… But why did you do that?”
“I don’t like that at all. Sound too close to ‘ends justify the means.’”
“You know what? Let’s talk about something else. You mentioned your family. Tell me about them.”
“Disciples? Like Jesus?”
“No, if you don’t know who he is, I don’t see a need to explain. Okay, so they were your students. How many of them?”
“Four? That’s it?”
“Oh right, okay. There were more later. That makes sense. What were their names?”
They speak to you of the librarian, and the lover, the spy and the warrior general. You wonder if you’ll ever meet any of them. If this one is still alive – even in a disembodied way – maybe they are too. You can set aside your anger at their actions for now, you have all the time in the world. Where else do you have to be?
“Do you miss them?”
“Awww, that’s very sweet of you. The feeling is mutual.”
You haven’t stopped for days. This city goes on seemingly forever. Endless multistory buildings, many of them crushed under unseen and unimaginable forces. The spores flow in and out of the buildings. Strands of organic tissue stretched between the structures like a spider web of gossamer fats and ligaments. The strands sway in the wind in time with the chorus. As they move, they toll like tuning forks played in rhythm with the verses. You feel your vision cloud when the tone becomes too loud, but you never lose your footing. The song does not wish for your pain. It wants you to continue. It only serves to fulfill the desire within your cells. To see you grow and become something more.
The emaciated humanoids seem to congregate around the edges of the city, and you haven’t seen them for a while.
There in front of you is a large structure without clear entrance. Many meters tall and the lowest opening is nearly two stories above the keratin cobbles. Along the bottom floor several of the walls have collapsed. You look in and see an open floor plan with no stairs ascending. There are open portals between floors. Either the things who used this building could float or something is missing. You don’t know how this could have been used by people.
“This can’t be a single city, there's completely different architecture from one section to the next, and they’re smooshed into each other. Whole worlds and different histories must’ve led to these buildings. I mean, what even lived here, for example?”
You listen to the wind and the whispers.
“The graveyard of reality? That’s a phrase you don’t hear everday.”
“If this is the end…”
You smile and turn towards the horizon, down the ruined street beyond the structure and back in the direction she entered the city from. Somewhere out there the eye and its devotees search for you.
“Right. It’s still here. Not the end then. Just a stuttering, half-aborted fetus of a conflict, dragging itself along.”
You bark a harsh laugh.
“Never been accused of being a poet. Skipped creative writing in the whole combat training regimen.”
You continue to wander the ruins and approach the edge of a cliff. Over the side, you can see a landscape of tormented faces and malformed fetuses the size of mountains. They line the inside of a canyon nearly a kilometer in diameter and several hundred meters in depth. You sit down, dangling your legs over the edge, and stare at the colossal aberrations for hours. The faces within the cliff sing aloud, their voices carrying on the wind. They sing of all they have lost. And all they might lose in the days to come. They sing of blood and ageless beings and the war that never ends. But mostly, they sing of eating the gods. The voices sing without words. Just meaning. Meaning and blood. For the first time you join the chorus, letting your voice rise to the melody.
You are sitting against a low wall just a few meters from the canyon’s edge. You say nothing. The voices stopped hours ago. You touch your face, then the ground. You rise to your feet and walk along the precipice for several dozen meters. You sway awkwardly, barely maintaining your balance.
You are not awake. You have never been more aware. You stop and kneel, hands pressed against red earth. You dig your hands into the soil and blood. You tremble noticeably. You fail to notice. Your body shakes violently as the surface of the ground is torn up into a gash perfectly perpendicular to the cliff’s edge. The opening rips into the cliff walls. Blood and gastric acid sprays against your face, and into your hair and robes.
You crawl forward into the fissure and through a mucus membrane until you emerge into a downward-angled tunnel. You crawl for hours and hours until your hands and knees are bloody. You stop and lay your face against the slick material of the tunnel. It pulses beneath your cheek. You sleep.
You startle awake and look around you. You do not recognize your surroundings. You are in a long tunnel made of soft organic tissue like an esophagus or intestine. Your breathing rises as you feel the panic rushing to your throat through your chest.
“Where? What?”
“Into the bowels? But how?”
“How long?”
“Your voice! Yes, I hear you so much clearer now. It’s less a hearing and more a feeling.”
“I see through your eyes too, yes. That’s what the dreams are, right? These are memories. Your memories. You were human once…”
“Yes. Show me.”
You hold out your hand. The fingers burst into a number of writhing tentacles, each finger splitting into three or four tendrils of stark red and black flesh. They curl into a knot of tissue, and sway to a melody you can almost hear. Then they return to their original shape.
Panic slips through your lungs, into your limbs and rising to the top of your head. You tremble despite your best efforts. You don’t want the voice to know how much this bothers you. Even as you are awestruck by the beauty of it.
“Oh my god. Am I Sarkic?”
“Sorry! I didn’t know. Seriously. I apologize. What word do yo–“
“Nälkän. Got it. Won’t happen again.”
“But, then… does this mean I’m one of you? You’ve chosen me?”
“Oh. I’m not special at all, then.”
“Wait, does that mean we’re all Sark– Nälkän?”
“Yes, I’m human! What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, I appreciate that, thank you. Okay, what did you mean by “we’re all human?” You consider yourself human?”
“Okay, you did, that’s fair. But what I mean is, what does being human have to do with being Sa– Nälkän?”
“What?!? No, that can’t be. There’re heritages and communities. Genetic markers. The whole thing. I don’t have a connection to–”
“God. I had no idea. Inheritance, huh? From who?”
The voice speaks of the thing in the cosmos. Of the death of everything. You don’t know what to make of it. At first it seems to you they’re not really answering your question. And then you realize that they are. And maybe nothing will ever be the same again for you.
“Oh.”
You are silent for several minutes. These are things you wish you could unlearn.
“That’s really fucking upsetting. No offense.”
You descend and then ascend through the tunnel. There were no branches. Just a single path along those wet surfaces at least a kilometer in length. You no longer feel uncomfortable with the mucus or blood between your toes. You almost forget what shoes felt like.
But now you find yourself at an exit, weakly shining red light flowing in from the open air. You crawl out of the tunnel and turn around, stretching your back and calves. In the distance, you can see the canyon, but you are on the opposite side from the ruined cityscape you walked through.
You extend your hands towards the mouth of the tunnel and both hands split into writhing masses of tentacles again. The tentacles pulse in time to a rhythm you can hear in the air, in the earth, in the spores. The chorus is all around you. You feel the song flowing through you into the flesh of the ground in front of you. It hurts, but in a transcendent way. You are part of this place. Of these people. Maybe that’s not the bad thing you originally thought it was. The tunnel closes and the organic material at your feet seals without any evidence of an orifice. You smile as you feel your fingers flow back into their original shapes, giddy with the power you have developed.
“Life and death at our fingers.”
You stop and listen as you so often do in these moments. So many things to learn. The whisper does not admonish you exactly, but there is a sense of criticism to its words this time.
“Not death then, life. It’s just that the word is meaning a lot more to me since I came here. Since I met you.”
“Seeing as you’re feeling talkative again, I have more questions.”
You sit in a meditative pose within an open amphitheater formed entirely of bone, cartilage, and flesh. You can feel the cosmos on the other side of the air. The tendrils reaching through space are just out of reach. The chorus rises and the tendrils are pushed away again. Far away and yet closer than is comfortable, the eye looks for your presence. You have no way of knowing where it is, but you are sure it is not here. The notes on the air shiver with your attention, as if yearning for an audience after millennia of silence in response to their voices.
The spores are swirling around you until you hold out your open palms and the spores freeze in place, ignoring any gravity.
“This stuff is the only reason I'm still alive, isn’t it?”
“Oh, then I owe you for that.”
“I appreciate that. I feel very much the same.”
“But there’s an elephant in the room.”
You laugh.
“It’s just a saying. It means…”
“Yeah, like that. So, anyway, I think there’s something we should talk about. Pretty sure I know who you were.”
“An echo? What do you mean?”
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry.”
You are quiet for a few moments. You wonder what it must be like to retain the thoughts and memories of another being that has long since left you behind. You wonder how the whisper can stand it. Somewhere out there, there’s another version of this voice. One who has ascended. But this is a shell of their former power. Relegated to this place, reminded daily of the failures of their power. The catastrophe of their rule. The degradation of their people. They have you. And you have them.
“What? No. I don't hate you. You’re the only person I know in the world. Besides, we’ve done things just as bad for our own reasons. You had good intentions, and you never realized how close they were. Or what the consequences could be. I can’t imagine what it was like to make that choice. But I know that there’s no way you could have predicted all this.”
You look around at the ruins of the city, thinking of all those lost and mutated people you’ve seen. The dilapidated buildings. The souls transformed into beasts swimming in a yellow pool of bile. Of the constant presence of the eye and those that worship things like it. It’s too much to even consider being weighed down with all that. You want the whisper to understand.
“No, look. I’m serious. I can’t judge. It’s too big for me. You spent so long trying to protect them and found out the real danger wasn’t the people here. Although…”
“Okay, fine! It’s just that you’re so concerned with the people, but do you know what’s happened since this all went down? Sure, some of them. But not all. More importantly, the assholes have found your bag of tricks.”
“Uh… ok, let me explain it like this. There are rich powerful people who have slaves or roughly the same level of control over people. Yes, people still do that. As a rule, there are always assholes. And some of those assholes, they’re practicing your stuff back in the real world. I don’t know how, I’m not a history teacher. But it’s a who’s who of shitty villains with the power to summon eldritch horrors and transform into fleshcrafting horrors.”
“The stuff they do with it is monstrous. I guess the people back home have a hard time differentiating between those assholes and the everyday Nälkä. I didn’t even know there was a difference before I came here. And it took a metaphysical slap in the face for me to realize. Things have moved on since you did what you did, pal. Lot has happened.”
“No, no. I’m not saying it’s your fault. You did what you thought you had to. And things changed. That’s what happens, it’s just that usually we aren’t around to see the consequences. But…this conflict all started so long ago and look at what it caused. I’ve been walking through the consequences for weeks, and the children back home are really making a mess of the house in the meantime. Idiots back there use the tools you left around like firecrackers thrown into a house soaked in kerosene.”
You think back to the manor and those people in their party dress, casually chatting about atrocities. They would not hesitate to see this place as a new world to drain of resources. You cannot stand the idea of them gaining more control over the powers they clearly never earned. Those are not the people. Those are not the Halkost. They’re tourists, torturing people and reality for thrills. And to increase their power over other people. The whisper needs to understand. They aren’t responsible for those assholes in the manor. But they aren’t free of blame either.
“Is this what you wanted? Do you want this to go on forever?”
“Then… how do we end it?”
You listen for a few minutes. You listen to their fears. Their trepidations about what might come next. Of what new consequences might come from taking further actions. You understand, sometimes it is easier to hide your head in the sand. But they’ve done that long enough.
“You aren’t the person who did this, not really. They made their choice and left you here, a memory of the person they were. Yes, the fallout was bad, I can look around in any direction and see that. But doing nothing is no longer acceptable. Unless you want the spoiled princes of our world to inherit your gifts and bring the whole of reality down with their blind grasps for more power, you need to do something. We need to do something.”
They speak and make a request. You hesitate and then turn off the recording on the augmentation in your eye.
You turn the recording back on. You are perched upon a high structure, looking down at a small village community of individuals. Each of the entities are mutated in similar ways to the humanoids that previously attacked you. The village structures are constructed with the organic growths shaped like reed huts, seemingly grown into housing and community spaces.
These people can hear the song. They grow within the fingers of the spore cloud. They tend crops of living flesh, bone and sinew. They develop within the verses of the song, they grow within the voices and add their own to the rising melody. These are of the people. It makes you glad to know that not all who were trapped here succumbed to the worship of eldritch horrors in their fear.
“Relax, I want this recorded.”
“I know what I’m doing. You were telling me about the enemy. The Archons. Keep going.”
“You’re sure all four are locked out?”
“What do you mean, ‘most’?”
“Oh Jesus. But if one of them is back home, isn’t that the end of the world?”
“Well, if you’re sure it's asleep…”
“I’m confused though, aren’t they here?”
“The thing in the sky? Oh fuck. That thing isn’t asleep. What’s to stop it from coming through?”
“Are you sure? I got here, didn’t I?”
“I told you about that, I’m positive. At the Manor, owned by one of the cultists. The rich assholes I was telling you about. They opened some sort of portal. Looked like sucking chest wounds. I fell into one and that’s how I got here.”
“There are? That means there’s an exchange between this place and home.”
“Well, then I think the Neos were trying to tap into something over here. And if they are still here as you say, that makes sense.”
“Maybe I should go back? Someone needs to stop the Neos. And the Foundation won’t know anything about this. We can’t allow them to contact that thing in the cosmos – all it’s waiting for is an invitation.”
You stand, turn away from the window you were looking down on the village from, and start descending a dilapidated staircase. What would happen if you went back? Would the Foundation listen to you? Would it matter? If you could stop the Neo-Sarkites from reaching this place, wouldn’t that justify further oppression of the people who happen to share a tradition with them? No. Not anymore. That sort of logic feels hollow to you now after the time you have spent here and the death you’ve seen. Something much bigger than the Foundation is at work and they don’t know the first thing about it. The Foundation isn’t equipped to understand what is at stake. You no longer trust them anyway.
Standing at the entrance of the building, you look out towards the village again. The fingers on your left hand grip the pommel of the sword tightly.
“You sure about this?”
“Of course I do, I’ve listened to you every step of the way. I know it took me a while to get on message but I’m with you here. It’s just…”
“Okay. Hope you’re right.”
You begin walking toward the village. As some of the entities notice your approach, you raise a hand in greeting. You reach up and turn the recording off again.
You haven’t turned on the augmentation’s recording device for more than a week according to the chronometer. But this is important. You can’t let it go without giving the Foundation something. They can do some good, even if they are woefully ignorant. Even if your benefactor wants you to forget them, you can’t. You might not trust them but you know they can have an impact.
When the recording begins, you stand above a hole in the ground. Although located in an artificial stone structure, the hole resembles a deep, infected wound – similar to those you saw during the destruction of the manor.
“If you listen to this, I think they’re trying to help me. I followed their path and found myself at a new fork in the road. This hole could represent a way home. One like it brought me here, after all. But I find the idea of returning to be noxious. I've changed so much. This place is inside of me, and I find that I like it. If I came back, I would be caged, dissected… I understand protocol and wouldn’t hold it against any of you… Probably.”
“I don’t trust you anymore, maybe I never did. But I don’t trust myself either. If I came back, I couldn’t stop myself from bringing you down for everything you’ve done. What I’ve done for you. In the name of preserving the status quo.”
“But the information I have… I think it could help? Not help you get a better control on these people, who are very much my people. Our people. No, I think it would help you understand how outmatched we are. How irrelevant to this conflict. Even the Cogwork aren’t relevant. They were only ever a hurdle. A distraction. The war is still going strong, and it doesn’t even involve us. We just bury the bodies, so no one freaks out about the weird things that make up our world.”
“And if what they’ve told me is right, we’re all the same. Humanity is Nälkän, there’s no appreciable difference. Anyone can learn how to do what they do. And what they do has a purpose, a grand purpose. One intended to protect our world. We have more in common with these communities than we do with other Groups of Interest.”
“So, I leave you now, with a final report. Take what you can from these records. Keep an eye on those Neo-Sarkites; if they get their hands on this place, the world is over. No exaggeration. We all die if they find their way here.”
“The Nälkän people are not your enemy. They are also opposed to everything the Neos are doing. Someone in the Foundation needs to realize this and start working with them. Because you don’t understand the first thing these people are capable of.”
You place your fingers near the augmented eye, splitting the first and second fingers into thin tendrils that encircle the eye. You don’t scream, that’s something. And then the augmented eye is pulled from your socket and sits in the palm of your hand; you turn the eye towards your face, and you see through two perspectives for the moment – your one eye socket is a mass of red and black, bleeding freely. The other eye is yellow, and you begin pulling at the bloodstained bandages that have wrapped your body for weeks, revealing the unusual growths which have formed all over your body. You hear the rising chorus again, and the empty eye socket begins to fill with a gray orb. Then slowly the eye forms and it is yellow like your other remaining eye. You smile into the camera.
“There’s something you need to accept. Everyone you’ve ever met. Ever loved. Ever hated even. Every single person and thing that breathes. In every twist of DNA, in the memory of life as it crawled from the muck into the air and took its first breath. All of it comes from the same thing. An endless unknowable god that’s just outside in the dark, waiting for us to open the door and welcome it in. Already your death is waiting for you. And it is inside you. It is you. Is me. The only force that has shown any effect are the people we have been oppressing since we discovered them because they have something in common with some rich assholes. Wake up.”
“Take this. See what I've seen. Write it all down and lock it away. Maybe you’ll learn from it. Learn like I have. It’s the only chance you have.”
“Maybe one day we'll meet again beneath these rose-colored skies.”
“If we do, I’ll be ready.”
You set the eye on the ground near the edge of the hole, then turn and walk slowly into the shifting spores. You see the bandages fluttering in the wind. You see your retreating form. Then the vision goes dark in the eye as it begins sliding back into the orifice. You keep walking.
EXITING ONTOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE SHIFT
Afterword: Several organic apertures have been discovered within the crater where Croÿ Manor originally stood. Based on the above record a proposal for unmanned exploration of SCP-001 is under consideration by the O5 Council.
We, Will, See, You, Again+
;under, Red, Rose, Skies,
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