BELOW: BIRTH 04 (Patreon)

First of the updates has arrived, babes. Enjoy my beloved lovelies, it gets worse from here.

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It’s funny how quickly you can get used to something. After starving for a few days and surviving in perpetual suffocation, dislocating my joints really doesn’t rate on the whole “oh fuck oh god why why why” level of pain it might usually. 

Is there a god?

Because if there is, then saying “oh god” really feels inappropriate. Partially for all the reasons you might expect, but more importantly because they made this place and put me in it. And if there isn’t, then what’s the point? Praying to a thing that isn’t there? A linguistic fetish left over from when I was alive?

Seriously, you can get used to anything with time. It’s almost horrible, except that without it I’d still be entirely focused on the fact that I have been suffocating for days.

But I’m used to it. So, mostly put back together facing the right direction, moving towards the snuffling snout at the end of the tunnel, I’m barely even here. I’m somewhere else, and it would be pleasant if not for my brain screaming panic signals at me constantly. 

I lived. I died. I’m here now. 

I might not remember my name, but I remember things. I don’t remember my address, but I remember that I had an address. I went to a school. I had a bedroom, and there was recognizable stuff in it. I’m not sure if the fact that I recognize things but can’t name them is a form of torture in and of itself, because it sure feels like torture. I could probably try to describe some of my toys, for example, but the details are fuzzy, and the longer I try to remember them, the fuzzier they get. 

I had parents.

Their faces are fuzzy. Their voices are fuzzy. Their shape is fuzzy. 

But they were married. They lived, and both of them died before me. I went to their funerals, and I cried there. The outline of things are there, letting me know at least some of who I was.

I traveled. I worked at a job for some time, and I went on long walks in the park, and I had a dog, then a cat, then a different dog and a second cat, then a bird, and then a fish for a few years at the end. 

I don’t know how I died. My memories just sort of fizzle out after a point, on a day where I remember waking up. I went and ate some breakfast, a cereal, with milk, and I don’t think I was lactose intolerant but maybe I was? Soy milk? 

I think I also had lunch, but I don’t remember what I ate. I remember a house, my house, the shape of it familiar, small and out of the way and with lots of shelves because I had so many books and knick knacks. I had paintings, and I made some of them, they weren’t just bought. 

I might be able to replicate them, at least mostly. If I ever find the materials. If I ever have hands that work right. If I ever have time and peace. And if I don’t look too closely at them in my mind, because the more I try to see them the blurrier everything gets. 

It’s like water, filled with cloudy patterns. Get too close, and my breath disturbs it, dissolves some of it, makes the water move enough to disrupt other parts. 

I was happy, I think. Happy enough. I had food, and I had friends, and I was the sort of person who liked watching the sun set and the moon rise. I did things I liked doing, and went to places that I found beautiful, and was lucky. I had family that loved me and who I loved back. I wore things that made me feel good about myself. I exercised enough to not hate my body most of the time. 

I was happy. 

And I was kind. 

I wasn’t a bad person. I don’t think I was. I adopted pets rather than shopping for them. I biked or walked and had an electric car. I tipped most of the time, when I could. I helped my friends. I gave to the homeless. Voted. Volunteered. Protested. Cooked for people when I could. I remember long phone calls with crying voices, helping them to breathe, to be calm. I remember long, slow nights, holding people close and feeling loving and loved.

The time it takes me to crawl to that vile crimson at the end of the tunnel is filled with analysis, full of thought, keeping me a bit above the suffering and deeper into a more existential kind of pain.

I lived a good life. I lived a life I don’t regret, that much I know, even if I don’t know the details. On the day I died, I was tired, but I had few regrets. I think I did my best. 

And I’m here.

142 SINs. One hundred and forty two. 

What counts? If I find them in my memory can I argue them with someone? Who kept track, and how? Were they biased? Are they biased? Was this system-thing real back in the world I was born in, or did it just make a big calculated guess when I showed up here?

I didn’t kill. I didn’t steal. I’m no rapist. I had my traumas, my fair share of hurtful comments, a few fights here and there, a few things I shouldn’t have done, but I have been suffocating for days and I can’t die.

Can I make up for them? Remove them somehow? My little evolution pushed me back down to 13, can I use that? If I get it to 0 but it takes an evolution, does that reset me or am I just… here?

The last stat on my sheet.

SALVATION: N/A

One’s ability to Exist

Can I upgrade that? Is there a way to gain stats without leveling up, if that’s what the evolution was? I don’t know. I don’t know.

If I stay here, trapped in this claustrophobic nightmare, and pray and pray and pray, will I leave my SINs behind? Will I gain a point in SALVATION?

For all I know, yes. For all I know, that’s exactly, precisely, entirely what I’m supposed to do. 

But that would mean staying here. In the dark. Barely able to move. Starving. Suffocating. 

And that’s too much to ask of me. Too much to ask of anyone. I wouldn’t ask it of the people I hated most in the world. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more than a quick shot to the back of the head for even the people I hate most. Punishment always felt so… pointless. It didn’t make me feel better when I did it as a child, why would it do so as an adult? 

Either someone can be changed, redeemed, helped, or they need to go away, and the worse they are, the more immediately and dramatically they should be made to go away.

There are people I would beat to death with a baseball bat that I wouldn’t ever wish this hell upon. 

Maybe the christians were right. Heaven and Hell exist, apparently. Kind of. Not exactly Dante’s Inferno so far, but not that far off. Maybe if I pray, god will be real and forgive me if I repent enough.

Then again, the bible did say something about “burning forever in a lake of fire”, as I recall. So maybe not even then.

I can’t breathe enough to laugh, but I’m trying to anyways as I drag myself forward. The snuffling thing’s massive lungs are strong enough now to start pulling me in as I crawl, giving me a little extra motion forward.

There is so much that I don’t know. So much that I literally have no tools, context, or ability to know or find out about. 

But there are things I do know. Truly and entirely. 

I am suffering. The thing causing some of that suffering can be made to stop. If I try, I might succeed. If I don’t, I will simply continue suffering forever and ever and ever or until it gets bored and I don’t know if it does.

Another snort, like thunder in the confines of the tunnel. I feel myself scrape my skin against the stone as the suction drags me forward, uncaring of the roughness of the terrain or my positioning.

I was a good person. Not a saint, maybe, but I was a good. Person.

And I still ended up here. And I’m still suffocating. 

I just want to breathe. I just want to stop being in so much pain. 

If I have to SIN for that… I’m here. Already here. Maybe here forever. 

I don’t want to melt into the stone until something eats me and I don’t die. 

I don’t want to stay trapped here until I suffocate forever and I don’t die.

I don’t want to get eaten and digested and I don’t die. 

Another snort-snuffle, like an explosion so close to me, violent enough to burst one of my eardrums in the vacuum it creates. 

It also puts me very nearly at the entrance of the tunnel. Very nearly close enough to touch the trunk. 

I could reach it. I could shove myself forward and open the mouth that goes down to my fucking sternum and start biting and gnawing and chewing. 

But I don’t know if that would hurt it. 

There are so many things I don’t know.

I wait.

And it inhales again, even more eagerly, perhaps sensing my scent in the little bit of air it lets in and then sucks back out.

I brace my hands, feeling my hands scrape raw, feeling myself get dragged in, feeling the vile heat of the crimson orifice in a world of perfect dark. 

And it inhales again–

I throw myself forward as hard as I can.

One thing I do know is that things that breathe don’t usually digest through their lungs. I know that the inside of things tends to be softer, easier to harm, than their outsides. I know that this thing is slow, and stupid, and I know that I cannot die from suffocation, which means even if there’s no air in the tube dragging me in I’ll still live long enough to start eating.

I tumble headfirst into the cavernous organ of the Shambling Hoarder, mouth wide open, and the moment my teeth impact against its hide I bite down hard.

BROKEN GULLET (COMMON)

Shattered pieces of what was a face, what was a throat, forcing one’s hunger to overwhelm and allowing them to shovel anything into the wound that causes it.

I’m not using teeth to bite. My face, my jaw, my sternum, are all ripped apart into jagged edges, and they convulse as I force muscles I barely understand to clench and compress and eat. I manage to get my face-hole around a chunk of slippery, bloody tissue inside the snout of whatever the fuck a Shambling Hoarder is and I chew into it, at first just digging through old gore, but by the second bite, I’ve hit tougher flesh deeper down. 

+15 SIN.

The tunnel moves, recoiling, gravity moving chaotically and trying to disrupt me. It goes to snort again, inhaling hard, and I let it rather than get destroyed by the pressurized air, laying flat to let it breathe. But I don’t stop biting. I don’t stop as I taste something vile, acidic, like battery acid mixed with syrup, falling into my throat and chest and mouth all at once because they’re all the same thing now. 

And I bite again. And again. 

+5 SIN. +5 SIN. +6 SIN.

Every piece I grab goes down my gullet, and my hunger breathes a sigh of relief before roaring back to full force. Whetted, my appetite screams in my head, overtaking even the pain of suffocation and telling me to eat eat eat.

Another inhale. The tunnel convulses, pressing down on me, hard enough that I feel some of my ribs creak and then crack, but I hold firm. I can’t swallow but I keep biting, keep shoving in more, and it goes somewhere because I always have room for more. 

Another inhale and this time I’m pulled in deeper, the claustrophobia of the tunnel nothing compared to the tightness in here, but I place my face flat to its surface and open and close and chew and swallow and when I can’t swallow I just choke on it and shove in more. 

I hate this thing more than I have ever hated anyone in the world. I want it to die so much, even more than I want to die, if only it’ll mean things stop hurting. 

And then I feel a new pressure. Rather than dragging me, rather than pulling bits of tissue violently out of my eardrums or making me feel like my eyes will pop out if I don’t hold my eyelids so tight, I feel a force compressing me like an accordion. My entire body, flattened and imprisoned by flesh on all sides, is pushed in and thus out and–

I hit stone with a thud and a crack, the back of my head joining in the screaming as I feel something come loose and rattle there. 

My limbs are limp. My torso feels like it’s imploded, rib-shards of all shape poking out of the skin in places. I broke a shoulder on my landing and a leg sometime while I was crawling.

Instinctively, I inhale. 

I can breathe. 

It hits me like heroin. Like how I imagine meth might hit. An absolute high, something like genuine euphoria crawling out of my brain at the sudden influx of air, no matter how much that air burns me from the inside. 

I can breathe.

THUMP.

A footstep. Massive. Larger than me, so large–

It’s turning to face me. 

Dozens of trunks. A thick, mucousy exterior, covered in filth, bits of bone and flesh, little bits of shaped stone that might have been some sort of weapon at some point. 

Five legs, like a starfish. Massive, like an elephant. Maybe larger. Large enough to inhale and drag me out of my hiding spot, to bring me close to its guts.

Beneath it, dripping more saliva and that too-bright blood that is the only color in this place, is a maw. Like a starfish, again. A massive, gaping hold where its stomach should be, drooling onto the world as it walks on those massive skin-flaps it calls legs.

It takes another step closer towards me.

THUMP.

I can’t move. A little SIN gained from my blind feast won’t stop it, won’t heal me, apparently.

My broken body shakes as I laugh, the sound gurgling disgustingly out of my WOUND. 

At least I can breathe.