BELOW: BIRTH 02 (Patreon)

Yippeeee. Damn. This is actually shaping up kinda LitRPG shaped. I do not mind this. It's really nice getting to see, from a blank slate, how much I've improved as a writer and gotten new skills!

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The panic runs through me like cold knives. 

Something else can hear me. Something else is here, and my blood is the brightest thing possible in this monochrome world of only shades of black, and I am loud. Every breath brings the possibility of another cough, and each one is a desperate wrenching of air into my lungs to begin with. I don’t have the patience, the energy, or the physical functionality to be able to move swiftly or silently.

Which means I’m a sitting duck for whatever else I can hear shuffling. 

Easy rule of thumb is that if I can hear it, it can hear me.

Easier rule of thumb is that if I can’t stop it from hearing me, I need to be fast enough to make up for it. 

I drag in air. I force it into me, pulling it, even as it actively fights against me, leaving me in a constant state of suffocation. Once it’s in me, it aches in an all new way, sharp and prickly and full of acidic harshness.

I drag in another. And another. 

I feel my heart beats, like a fist bludgeoning the back of my ribs, strangling me with my own bloodflow. 

And then I force myself forward.

One hand. Then another. I follow the light of my blood, the light of the only color in a world of horrific darkness, where I can see only by what I can’t see. I flick my hand out, splattering more little droplets of red as far as I can as hard as I can, trying to build some kind of map. 

I’m exhausted already. It hurts so bad. I want to go back into the hole I crawled from. I want to lay still here, let the shuffling thing find me.

Instead, I force myself forward. One arm, then another, one breath, then another, my legs, shriveled and weak as they are, doing as much harm as good to help me on.

Behind me is the tunnel I fell out of. It reminds me of how a bee’s hive looks, the way those little baby larva get stuffed into the little cubbies until they’re done. Except I’m a broken thing, malformed, collapsed, and it’s no cubby, it’s a tunnel, going deep and far into the dark. But the thought offers me some possibility, because where there’s one tunnel, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be another.

In theory. Hopefully. The hope hurts. It hurts and it stings because it makes me feel something other than fear and spite as I drag myself, one agonizing breath after another, one horrific heartbeat after another, forward. 

Another snuffling sound. Like a pig, digging through the mud, making those wet squelching sounds. Like all the worst parts of how a hog breathes, coming closer. 

I don’t have the energy to look back. So I keep moving, inch by agonizing inch. 

One more breath. One more forceful lung of air. 

+1 SIN

There, bright and horrific in the back of my eyes. In my mind, brilliant against the ever-dark all across the world. 

I gained Sin. Somehow. By being alive? By the time it’s taken me to move forward? Or is it…

I breathe, fighting the strangulation, the oxygen deprivation, hating every moment of how the air feels in my lungs. I breathe, and keep moving forward, inch by fucking inch. 

And behind me, the snuffling, the snorting, the hungry, horrifying, hateful noise of something getting closer.

I throw my hand forward, splattering more droplets of color into the world. 

They outline craggy rocks. They highlight weird stalagmites, large and small, forcing me to turn and move in less than a perfectly straight line. They highlight how much empty space is around me, and if I had the energy or the strength to look behind myself I’d see how little distance there is between me and my starting point. 

They show the edge of a curve that doesn’t look like a stalagmite. 

They show a little gap in space. A hole in the–

A hole. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere to go.

The hope feels almost more violent than the pain. Shooting through me like lightning. 

Another inch forward. A splatter of crimson to paint my way forward, showing me the outline of a weird little orifice in the stone. 

Snuffling. Snarling, behind me. I can feel tremors in the ground now, rhythmic, like the footsteps of some lumbering horror. 

My breathing is getting louder, more desperate. I can taste blood in my mouth, coming up out of my throat, worn ragged by the violence of the very act of breathing. 

Minutes. It takes me minutes to move the few feet between where I am and where the dark is, where that tunnel goes. 

Thump, thump, thump.

One step after another. Heavy. Plodding. As they get closer, they get wetter, less solid, less like hooves or proper feet, more like dense blocks of fat slamming down with the weight of whatever this thing is. And the sounds. Snorting, constantly. It doesn’t breathe, it smells, it drags air into itself hungrily and desperately, and it keeps getting louder. I don’t know how large this fucking thing is but it’s big, or I’m small, and the sound of it, the sound of hunger echoing into its lungs, makes me think it will eat me in one bite. 

I don’t have enough air to whimper, but the more tired I get, the more I wheeze. I sound no less hideous than the snuffling thing coming after me, a sharp, whistling tune of desperation getting squeezed out of my lungs over and over. 

Occasionally, my heart beats. Proof that I am alive.

This Abyss, this place of darkness and blood and fear, punishes me for it. 

It hurts so fucking bad. 

I reach a hand into the dark of the tunnel. 

The sound of the thing is so loud. I swear I feel the stone creak, sinking under its weight, and I don’t know if I’m imagining it or not. When everything hurts so fucking much it’s hard to tell what I’m thinking at all. 

I drag myself forward.  

I hear it come around a corner behind me.

The sound of its hunting becomes so, so loud. Like it was muffled all along, and somehow, coming around some stone or other form of blockage, until the sound of it echoes louder than anything I’ve ever heard it feels like. Like standing right next to the speakers at a concert, but the only sound is wet and organic and filthy and hungry. 

It’s so close. Maybe only a few steps away. 

My other hand makes it into the tunnel, dragging me forward again. My head clears the lip of the tunnel entrance. 

Shudder-thump. Thud after thud, step after step. It’s so slow but I’m so much slower. 

I drag in air. 

My heart is forced to beat.

I breathe as hard as I can, forcing fuel into my body as much as I can.

+1 SIN

I’m past my waist now. I think I can feel its breath on my legs, coming up behind me. Ready to reach forward and bite. Ready to slurp me up whole like a truffle in the filth. 

I give everything I have, and I push. 

My legs shake from the effort. My breath feels barely capable of keeping me upright. But I make it. 

I collapse inside the dark, claustrophobic tightness of the tunnel, pressing in on me from all sides, crushing me. Like being swallowed, but by a throat of my choosing this time. Just as horrific, but my choice. 

And then I feel something wet touch my foot. 

I can barely see behind myself, barely even glimpse around the tightness of the tunnel, but the color makes it so very clear. 

It’s a snout. Wet and moist and bright fucking red, colored in. The darkness of shadow and of monochrome stone is nothing compared to the brilliance of the blood painting that snout. 

It inhales, wet and violent. 

And I slip towards it. 

I would scream, if only I had enough breath to do so. I would cry, if only I had time or fluid enough to spare. But it snuffles again, and the inhale is forceful enough to pull me another inch out of the tunnel. 

I grab tightly to the walls, press my feet against the stone, and force myself forward another inch. And another. I weep, without tears, through an airway that is worn ragged by the violence of keeping me alive.

It inhales, pulling me towards it, out of the tunnel. I inhale, tasting the stench of mucus and blood and death that emanates from this thing, and shove myself forward, up another inch. Back and forth, back and forth, scraping me raw against the claustrophobic confines of the increasingly painful tunnel. 

I just want it to stop. I just want it to stop. I hurt and I’m scared and it keeps getting worse.

I keep breathing anyway.

+1 SIN

I just want to die. It all hurts so bad that I just want to fucking die, because then I could be at peace for a goddamn moment rather than this forever tornado of suffering, where every breath is agony and every heartbeat a wound. 

Except I died already, didn’t I? Somehow, I died, and ended up here. Who’s to say where I’ll end up next?

I keep moving. Fear and spite are powerful like that, even in the absence of hope. 

But hope is still sharp and hateful in me, refusing to let me stop. Because every single inch further I go, I feel the suction of its breath pull a little less at me. Inch by inch, I escape deeper into the choking, strangling depths of the tunnel, away from the hungry thing that is so bright and so crimson and so bloody.

It keeps snuffling. Keeps trying to drink me in. And I keep crawling.

_________________________________________________________________

Eventually, it’s behind me. The tunnel isn’t that deep I don’t think, not overall, but it’s something like… I don’t know, twenty feet? Maybe? A few times the length of my body. The snuffling at the far end of it continues, and even now, I can feel the tiniest bit of friction when I rest as it drags me back and against the walls. But now, this far in, that friction is enough to only hurt rather than actually move me. 

In the meantime, as I advance, I’ve kept breathing, even in the claustrophobic confines of the space. 

SIN: 148

I want to laugh, but it just wouldn’t fit anything. Six more sin than when I started with, just from, as far as I can tell, breathing. Whenever I stop, whenever I’m too tired or when I got bored enough with the life or death struggle to do something different, I feel the effects of oxygen deprivation getting more and more intense, but never enough that I pass out. I don’t need to breathe, it’s just worse if I don’t, even though it’s terrible when I do. And without breathing, my heart doesn’t beat, and without that, I feel myself get weaker than I already am,

unable to even move. 

So. I could stop. If I just accept that it’ll keep hurting and getting worse, more and more, maybe forever, I could just lay here and stay still and do the next best thing to dying. 

Hurts to live. Hurts worse not to. I might not remember my name, but that, at least, feels familiar. 

+1 SIN

Hah. Almost to 150. Multiple of five and ten and two and probably some other whole number that I can’t quite think of right now. I wonder if I’ll get a prize.

My hand touches something that isn’t stone. 

Here, deep in the heart of this tiny little hole of horrific claustrophobia, there’s something else. Something warm. Something that sinks in a little when I try to put any weight on it.

 I try to say something, but I can’t quite speak. 

It’s skin. 

I try to say something, but I didn’t make myself breathe first, so it just comes out like a wheeze. 

It doesn’t move. 

I use what strength I have to give a little nudge, to shake the thing I’m feeling. It feels like an arm, maybe? Or a– no, it feels like a shoulder.

I force myself to keep breathing, even though the air is starting to feel thinner. It feels like I have to work harder, and I wonder if the snuffling thing at the front is blocking off my airflow, and that makes me afraid all over again. 

I shake the head of whatever or whoever I’ve found. 

Nothing. 

I drag my hand across it, the blood on my palm refusing to dry, coating the figure. 

It’s shaped like a person. Sort of. Not very much, but in the vaguest shapes. The head is lumpy and soft, the neck thick and over-flabby, the shoulder so thin that I can feel every piece of bone beneath it. And the bone, too, is soft, springy, more like cartilage than anything. 

It doesn’t stir. Even when I paint over its face, letting myself see the shape of its features, it doesn’t even blink. 

I pull in enough breath to let out something almost like a word. It doesn’t react. 

It’s warm. But it’s…

I don’t know if dead is the right word. But no one is home. 

And as the blood drips down its face, it touches the stone beneath it. 

The body seems almost melted into the rock. Half-fused, like it’s calcified. Without light, I can’t see the shape of it, can’t understand what’s happening properly, but it looks almost like wet clay, bleeding down into the pitch-black stone of pitch-black tunnel. 

I found someone. Someone that, for all I know, looks almost exactly like me. And… they’re not anyone. They don’t move. They don’t breathe. They don’t react in any way when I touch them, bleed on them, whimper at them to please, please do anything.

At the end of the tunnel, that hungry thing closes off the air, filling the cramped space with the stench of blood and rot.

Finally, I have time and misery enough to weep. 

My eyes aren’t the right shape, and my tears come out crimson.

_______________________________________________________________________

Time passes. More than minutes. Maybe more than hours. 

The body never moves. Never so much as flinches, even as I pinch it, trying to get a reaction.

The hungry thing that inhales its hunger with every breath keeps pulling at me. Keeps making the air in the tunnel lighter and lighter, harsher and harsher, until it’s almost pressurized. 

I don’t know how long it can keep this up. If I’m in hell, maybe this is one of its devils, dedicating itself to my suffering, now and forevermore. 

Maybe this is it. Maybe it’s all just tunnels and hungry things and suffering. Maybe it’ll eat me, and just like I can’t suffocate, I won’t ever fully digest, drowning in acid forever and ever. 

Fuck. 

Why does the thought of that make my stomach grumble?

I’m so weak. So starved. And the more time I have to lie here, struggling to breathe in ever-thinning air, the more other systems have time to rear themselves up.

I want to cry, but it hurts when I do, and it doesn’t seem worth it.

_________________________________________________________________

I’m used to breathing, now. It helps that the air is so thin, every inhale drawing in less agony than before, even as it also brings in less sustenance. 

I can’t sleep. 

I tried. More than once. Sometimes I even tried to give up, to lie without breath and without heartbeat, but I just… couldn’t. No matter how long I lasted, I always gave in and breathed again. 

But even past all that pain, and the constant struggle, I just… don’t think sleep is an option. No rest. No escape. It wouldn’t fit the tone of the place, would it? Wouldn’t be as much of a hell if you could leave just by laying your head down. Even when I put myself into an almost trance, managing to get my breathing almost subconscious, even in the midst of my complete and utter exhaustion, I can’t ever truly escape.

There is no sleep in hell, it would seem. 

So I lay in the tunnel. And I starve. And I suffocate. And I hear the echo of that hungry thing, trying in vain to drag me out. 

I wonder if I’ll become light enough, as I starve, that it will be able to move me again with its hungering breath. I wonder how long it would take for me to calcify in here. 

I wonder what world would be so cruel as to have a hell, and what hell would be so horrible as to make me starve alongside every other constant agony.

__________________________________________________________________

Days. At least days. Maybe longer. Does the snuggling thing every lose patience? Can it even think, or is it just a beast of hunger, trapped in its pursuit of me as I am trapped in this escape? Will it stay at the end of the tunnel, hungry, until something more appetizing draws its attention?

I don’t know. Will I ever know? Or is this forever? Is this claustrophobic horror I’m trapped in the end? Days, at least, and already I can barely stand it. 

I lived for years before I died. The details are foggy, but there were many, many years. How many more will I have in here?

____________________________________________________________________

I don’t know how long its been.

The blood doesn’t dry. It tastes of iron when I lap it up, trying to stop the screeching and clawing of my stomach. 

The air is so thin. I never got another notification for an increase in Sin, which only adds credence to the idea that the air in here is somehow full of additional suffering. A punishment for breathing in, and suffering alike when I refuse.

I can’t sleep.

I try to give up. Maybe three times, total. I stop breathing and just lie still.

But I can’t do it. I don’t know if it’s the pain of eternal suffocation, of eternal stillness clogging up my veins, or fear, or rage, or just… 

Maybe I just can’t. 

I’m so hungry.

_____________________________________________________________________

The flesh tastes stringy. Like ash in my mouth. Bright red and soft and salty and rich and watery and like ash in my mouth. 

I think it moved, once. While I rooted through the ribs, into the sweetmeats within. I can’t be sure. 

I don’t know if knowing if it did would have stopped me. 

I eat just enough to fill my stomach. Just enough to feel how starved I am. Just enough that I’m not bloated, so I don’t puke it back up. 

No idea if it works like that, but I decided not to test it. Starvation does terrible things, and it would be more terrible still to waste the meat.

Behind my eyes, crimson glows and fills my mind. 

+15 SIN

SIN: 151 (+13)

THRESHOLD OF DAMNATION REACHED

BLOOD IS POWER

POWER IS EXISTENCE

YOU SURVIVE

YOU CONSUME

SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES

WITNESS THE AVENUES OF SUFFERING AHEAD

In my mind, behind my sanity, I fall into something lightless and Abyssal, and feel its currents catching at things inside of me. I see the shape it offers. The paths it intends to force me to walk. 

I do not know if it is more or less cruel that it offers me options.