Oathbreaker ch. 9.16 - A Scream Across Eternity (Patreon)

Part 2: The Abyss

Falling.

I fell.

Howling wind scorching.

Terrible cold, a cold like warmth itself had never been.

Heat like a star’s lance.

Sound.

Light.

Silence.

Dark.

Air.

Void.

Ripping.

Burning.

Burning, burning, burning—

I burned.

I hurt.

I felt nothing, awful nothing, and everything, I—

I—

Who was I?

What?

What is I, am I

Am. I am

Nothing, no one, not

Can’t

Cannot stop falling what

What am I where is this why is this when will it end will it end I am

A scream.

I am a worm wriggling in mud.

There are others. Billions.

Not all are like me. Many — most — are weak and confused. They wriggle and writhe together in a senseless, endless mass.

They have voices. They whisper. They beg, question, gibber nonsense.

It is heavy. The weight of an ocean is on me, pressing down, always down.

All noise. I am not like them.

I am hungry. I eat.

They sense that I am different and try to avoid me, but there are too many and they are trapped by eachother. They plead for me to stop, but the ones who plead loudest are the ones I hunt.

Slithering through the writhing mud, I bite and strangle and chew.

I am a worm.

No, I am a centipede.

My legs are sharp and my fangs are strong.

I eat.

I crawl.

I see nothing, know nothing but an endless cavern of writhing worms and their insensate voices.

There are others like me, hunting through the mass, and I devour them as well. The ones who are stronger than me I avoid, but soon I am stronger and they feel my fangs as well.

I take wounds. This is when I learn that I am not a centipede. A bug does not understand hate.

I hate. I eat. I grow stronger still and hunt the ones who hurt me, and devour them.

There is no time. There is nothing but hunger and a desire to escape this purgatorial wriggling. I sense there is a way out, but I must chew towards it.

So I eat.

I am a serpent. My tongue is my harbinger, flicking out to scent my path as I digest my last meal with slow purpose. The worms hardly satisfy anymore, and now I exclusively seek the other predators. Some were like the confused ones once, but had begun to eat and change. The ones like me have done this before, been here before, but the gap between the two will diminish in time, and then become meaningless.

I feel that I am close to the top. The press of helpless bodies feels less heavy. Or have I just grown strong enough to not feel it anymore?

I eat. I simmer in voiceless ire. I am here for a reason.

Why? What did I do to deserve this?

It is too loud. I cannot hear my own thoughts. Do I have thoughts? Or am I just a fragment of this infinity of writhing?

I seek answers in the others. Their voices are all around me, my whole universe.

WHERE AM I WHAT IS THIS SOMEONE PLEASE HELP CAN ANYONE HEAR ME SOMEONE PLEASE—

IT HURTS HURTS MAKE IT STOP OH GODS THE NOISE STOP STOP STOP—

DAMN BASTARD YOU’LL PAY FOR THIS THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH—

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK—

MOMMA? MOMMA?!

Just noise. I keep eating.

I have been here before.

I will be here again.

I was born of this.

“Got it!”

“Iron Pits, it’s strong!”

“Keep hold, keep hold…”

“It’s on me, it’s on me!”

I came thrashing out of the water and struck at the first movement I sensed, whipping forward and wrapping myself about its limbs. There were hooks in my flesh, but I ripped free of them with a series of spastic movements. All round are shouts and drumming feet on a solid surface.

Disorientation. I had not known anything solid in—

How did I know it?

Thinking came as a background to action. The thing in my grip was strong and solid, more so than any of my recent meals.

Not strong enough. I squeezed and broke it, heard noise all around me as it struggled in my grip. Something had changed. Something was different. The space around me felt too open, devoid of the endless press of wriggling bodies I’d felt for… How long? For forever.

But it was dark. So dark.

I opened my eyes — grew them even as I remembered the need — and saw that I was on the deck of a ship. The sky boiled with bloody lightning, spitting acrid black rain on my scaled hide. The others on the deck were hunched and crimson-eyed, powerful forms with skin like burnt rock and barbed weapons, harpoons and hooks on long ropes. They were closing in, trying to get me off the one I’d latched onto.

Too many, and those weapons they carried — those would hurt. They would poison me and make me weak. I did not need to feel their bite to know it held venom.

If I went back into the water, I could escape, but I did not want to go back. That would be worse than the touch of those weapons. The one I’d grabbed was shouting in rage, its fanged maw open wide to reveal the black pit of its throat.

A dark place to hide. I lunged for that, and went in. The thing’s anger turned to horror and it tried to scream, but I was already inside and blocking its air. I burrowed into the hollow spaces inside the creature. It bucked and spasmed. I heard muffled shouts from outside my new den, and realized the others were going to cut this one to pieces to get to me.

I wriggled in more firmly and made the still living body move as I wished it to, using the weapon in its hand to cut one of the others down. The thing had four limbs — two arms and two legs — and somehow that felt right to me. Even as I made my puppet dance, I began to change. The thing I wore died.

We were struck, hard. We fell. Impact against the deck of the ship — how did I know what a ship was? — sent a jolt through my body, but I was undergoing a new and complex change and was too disoriented to react. More shouts, curses that split the air in tune with the lightning. A blade mercilessly sliced apart the one that had, moments ago, fished me from the endless writhing chaos that had been my whole world. Hooks and clawed hands found me and dragged me out. This time they held metal poles, and when they pressed them to my flesh it was like a thousand burning needles through my veins.

I knew that sensation too, and the name for it. Cold iron.

They tossed me, stunned and dumb with confusion and pain, onto a deck slick with blood. I was no longer a writhing, lashing thing of scales and sinew, but more like the creature I’d penetrated. Smaller than it, my new limbs thin and weak, gray and androgynous body curled into a trembling ball as dark voices bubbled through the air all around. The one I’d killed — my parent, in a way, for I’d used it to birth myself into this new shape — lay nearby, now an empty, smoking husk.

Above the ship, the sky splintered with lightning. The mutters of the crew died as another presence moved through them, taloned feet marking the soaked deck as that larger form approached me where I lay on the deck, helpless and shivering.

“What do we have here?” The voice that carried down to me was like the thunder — deep, rolling, and portending destruction. Its owner knelt on digitigrade legs, and great wings curled in to shelter me from the rain.

One of the others answered. “Looks like a fresh spawn, Almoner. We pulled it out of the Dross.”

“It’s rancorous,” one of the others added. “Look at what it did to Maruud.”

The tip of a clawed finger touched my shoulder. “It has already taken a defined shape.”

An uneasy shifting from the others. “Your orders, Almoner?”

The voice above me was almost tender. “We will take it with us. Place it with the others.”

It was not a ship, exactly, but a barge. Its name was the Tithe of Pelops, and it was made of the bones of the dead.

The vessel was crewed by devils, and I soon learned its purpose. With their hooks and nets of cold iron, those dread fishermen sifted through the muck of a churning sea of black sludge and blood. When their poles disturbed something in the water, they would drag it out and subdue it much as they’d done to me, then throw it into one of the iron cages stacked atop the barge’s frame.

For a long span of time — there was no night or day to mark its passage — the crew kept me in a cage with the others. They were mad things, my fellow prisoners, gibbering and seething against their bonds. Some howled and fought against their prisons without rest, while others spoke unending nonsense to themselves or just brooded in dark silence. Alongside the ever-present storm in the sickly skies, the guttural voices of the crew, and the omnipresent whispering from the waters, the noise was ceaseless and impossible to escape.

I could see no shores but the distant impressions of broken mountains, visible only in the brief flashes of lightning in the endless darkness. The storm was the only source of light, the irregular light that flashed across the faraway sky providing glimpses of a fanged horizon.

The Tithe of Pelops was a mostly flat platform churning through the rank waters. The cages dominated much of its surface. A raised section toward the front held the bridge. It was a veritable castle, tiered and towered, and creatures with long pikes and harpoons stood guard on its turrets. Not all on the vessel were fiends and gibbering things. There were dead mortals too, mostly naked spirits with bodies fashioned of the same pale material as the Tithe. The cages also held mortal souls, who wept and cringed in terrified confusion from the monstrous sights around them.

One, a womanly shape I thought, though it could be hard to tell in their present state, saw me from an adjacent cage. Seeing my silence and more diminutive form, she must have thought me a kindred spirit and tried to whisper to me through the cacophony.

“Do you know where this is?” She pleaded with me in a tinny, echoing voice that sounded very far away. “Do you know what’s happening? I think there’s been a mistake. I… I shouldn’t be here!”

Spirit was flesh in this place, and the ghost seemed a figure made of wax and tallow, real as me. When I didn’t reply, her words became more desperate. “Please! This is a mistake! I just need… I just need to talk to…”

She couldn’t remember who she needed to talk to. After a moment’s pause she said, “We’ll get out of this. I know we will. I always manage, somehow. He should have listened to me. If he had just listened, I wouldn’t have had to…”

I turned my head to look at her. When she saw my face, she started screaming and didn’t stop. When she realized that she didn’t need to take a breath to keep screaming, it only grew louder, her jaw stretching impossibly wide and her eyes turning to hollow pits.

“It’s always the same,” a melodic voice said. “They unravel. Bit by bit sometimes, but usually in long leaps.”

I turned to see the one who’d ordered me placed in a cage after I was fished out of the Dross. The Almoner, the crew called him. He was a tall, proud creature, muscular, with flesh that seemed fashioned of violet and sable shadows beneath black robes embroidered with violet gems. Though he walked upright like a man, his body was lionish and oddly proportioned, with bulging shoulders and long arms tipped in inky claws. His face also held something of the shape of an animal, almost human but stretched and sloped to give it a feline cast, with a flat nose and large, luminous eyes like beacons in a foggy sea.

I found myself admiring the result. It had a feral handsomeness to it. Even as I thought it, and envied it, my own features began to melt and morph to take a similar shape, a gray face that had been like a featureless manikin stretching into something half beast and half human, with pointed ears and slanted eyes.

The lordly fiend cast an appreciative gaze down at me. “You are not like most of these other mad spawn we’ve fished out of the Dross. This is not the first time you’ve done this, is it?”

I lifted my hands and felt at my face. My fingers took on a more defined shape even as I remembered the proper feel. My new features were as much that confused woman as the Almoner. Like a child intaking new sensations, I tweaked and added to my still-changing form constantly.

But some things were still beyond me. Though I heard his words, and understood what they were, I did not know their meaning. I tried to mimic them, but my ill-formed mouth could only mumble nonsensically.

The Almoner let out a disappointed sigh. “I am certain you will return to yourself quickly, child. Perhaps you will even do so before we reach our destination. Tell me, do you remember your name?”

That word struck a chord. Name. My name. Someone had said my name and called me. Someone had said it and hurt me. That word was pain.

When I curled into a fetal ball and refused to respond, the Almoner left. All around me, the damned wailed against a tortured sky.