BELOW: BIRTH 05 (Patreon)

I'm not sure exactly what the schedule is going to be for BELOW, at least until I have enough of the backlog I'm aching for to keep things steady. Once the first 20 are up on here, the first 1 will go up on RR, but how long that 20 will take, I dunno! Hopefully by the 15th, which obviously requires quite a few chapters going up... not that I hate that... hmm.

Anyways! I'm going on a trip tomorrow over the weekend, so I'll give y'all some extra goodies this friday (again, tomorrow) and we'll go from there! Byeee! See you tomorrow for RfR and BELOW, and see you tonight for the next chapter of VISCERAE!

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THUMP.

Another step closer. I can move. I should be able to move. The pain doesn’t fucking matter, right? It won’t kill me. It can’t kill me. As far as I’ve experienced, it can’t even knock me unconscious, I just stay awake and keep suffering and–

I can move.

Except not that much. Not entirely. Not really. Even if it won’t truly kill or ruin me, I still have muscle fibers that need to be in the right position for them to move, joints and bones that need to be connected in a specific order to be of any fucking use. So I’ve got one arm and a leg, except the leg is fucked because my ribcage is like a fucking broken accordion and it can’t hold any weight. There’s nothing to fucking anchor to.

I flop my one working arm to the side, grab the black stone of the black cave where everything is pitch fucking black except my blood, and drag. 

THUMP.

Part of me wants to climb towards it. Go back to trying to tear this thing apart and kill it before it kills me or eats me or whatever the fuck. Can I make it back off? Can I hurt it enough that it’ll leave? 

I certainly can’t escape it. But I try anyways. 

If I can’t die, then I can keep going, right? Do I need my broken legs? My shattered pelvis? My broken ribs? 

If I tear my useless limbs off of me, I could go faster. Maybe. Can I do it? Do I even have the strength?

I stop crawling. Stop dragging myself along. It won’t fucking help. 

I turn the fingers of my big, malformed, four-limbed hand up, aiming whatever claws or nails or whatever I have towards my opposite shoulder.

I stab.

It breaks the skin, if only just. It cuts into muscle, ever so barely. Not enough.not nearly enough.

Fuck me, if shit would stop hurting for like, five and a half minutes, that’d be fucking awesome. 

I stab again. I yank my hand out, feeling a broken finger pushing things out of shape, misaligning my fucked up attempt, and I jab it back in anyways. 

I can feel my muscles tearing, even as my fingers break. I feel myself dig into the severed socket where my arm used to work, and feel things moving as I spasm and dig in deeper and start to pull. 

THUMP.

I laugh, because it’s easier than screaming and because it’s funny. 

No way this’ll work. No way at all. I’m not physically strong enough to tear my own arm off, no more than I could rip an uncut steak in half with one hand. In theory, with the right angle, using my weight properly, maybe I could tear this useless meat off, but fuck it if lying here on the ground, shattered, is the way to do it. 

So I’m laughing. Breathlessly, but I inhale anyways, forcing the burning, stinging air down into my lungs enough to laugh.

THUMP.

It’s already across the chamber, nearly above me. That snuffling, starfish-legged freak extends one of its snouts down to me, not snorting this time. This time, it presses down onto my barely-intact spine, and the simple heft of it, the pure fucking weight, is enough to make me wheeze all the air out of my lungs again. 

And then it keeps pressing down. 

My shattered ribs put up not one fucking bit of a fight, and I feel myself flatten like a fucking pancake. I feel my organs come into contact with shards of bone and the cold rock beneath. 

It’s so funny. I’m like a balloon. A wet balloon full of pain and organs and squishy bits getting quickly shot the fuck out of me more and more. 

I think I’m trying to laugh, but none of my pieces work that way anymore. 

And then it exhales, the sound like a thunderous snort, like a spasm of sound that breaks me a little further- but also stops the squeezing, because, a moment after, it retracts, recoiling from me. 

No. Not me. Recoiling from something else. 

My ears are ringing and full of blood and maybe burst, but I think some of the ringing is coming from outside my body. 

Not ringing. Shrieking. A high pitched, keening cry of something that doesn’t stop. It’s matched by a huffing and snorting from the Shambling Hoarder, coming out faster and pitched differently. Pain? Panic?

I want to look, but I can’t even roll over. Too broken for that. Too malfunctional for that. I can barely even turn my head.

But I can still do it. And I do, and the one eye that didn’t burst can see just a bit over what’s left over my shoulder. 

There’s something on the Shambling Hoarder, something fast. Something that has long, slashing limbs, sharp-edged, flashes of black-on-black and painted red where the claws have dug crimson out of the beast. Something out of the corner of my eye, whose screams would make my organs shake if any of them were still put together, and who is apparently having a rather significant effect on the big beast. 

It stumbles, its too-heavy body barely able to move as it tilts and leans around the thing atop it, tearing into it like a dog into a pile of mushed beef. Its snouts come up to slam against the thing, but it’s fast, sharp, too quick to be caught so easily. 

I want to laugh. Apparently, the big freak made too much noise. Got something meaner to come after it. What a fucking joke this all is. What a fucking laugh. 

It’s suffering all the goddamn way down, isn’t it? Being the smallest fish doesn’t mean the big fish isn’t someone else’s fucking meal. 

The struggle keeps tearing things apart. The room, previously almost impossible to see, the literal single color of everything making it all blend in together horrifically, becomes visible due to paint. Like someone slapped balloons full of blood against every possible wall in a childish little game, except I can smell the iron of it all, feel the room getting hotter from the fluids being spilled. 

It’s funny. 

I can’t do anything more than laugh. I make wet little bubbles in the pool of blood coming out of me and of the battle, and try as hard as I can to fall unconscious.

I don’t succeed.

__________________________________________________________________

The blood tastes delicious, after so long without eating. It tastes delicious because it’s not the watery, still, too-human thing I had to eat in that tunnel. There’s enough blood on the floor that I’m suffocating again, this time because I’m drowning. Not in much- it’s just a few inches of blood, but when you don’t have more than a neck to lift yourself up with, there’s not much room to go. 

I get breaths of air now and again, but the massive, gaping maw I have in place of a mouth or throat is mostly filled with red. I gulp it down, and it goes wherever the fuck it goes, because it can’t be just my stomach. That, I think, burst open a while back. Or maybe it is going to my stomach, but whatever this system-thing is, it doesn’t care if a thing stays in my stomach, so long as it gets eaten. 

+40 SIN.

Not much, all things told, but apparently, the first bite counts most. The first intentional taste of another’s living flesh counts for that original +15, while the rest… 

Well, I don’t know how the rest gets calculated. But additional bites, additional wet, ragged gulps, give me less. 

But even if they’re only giving me 1 SIN at a time, or even a percentile of one, not sure if that’s a thing, there’s enough that I can eat a lot. 

So I keep gulping, and then slowly, ever so slowly, the level of blood falls. Slowly, ever so slowly, the sounds of crunching, chewing, gorging, coming from the other side of the chamber, get a little louder, now that there’s less to muffle the sound with. 

The body of the Shambling Hoarder shifts, occasionally twitching, moaning, or trying to fight back. But whatever the other thing is, it’s torn apart its tendons, ripped open its insides, unraveled its ability to resist, and it keeps tearing out thick, messy chunks, and keeps cutting, and keeps eating.

And I lay there. Swallowing down the red. 

_________________________________________________________________

The chewing has gotten slower. There’s less blood now, less noise. It’s slowed down. I hear the Shambling Hoarder less than before, its movements barely more than the occasional shift of mass, that then gets eaten in turn. 

The funny thing is? I’m doing better. 

It still hurts, of course. It still feels terrible, obviously, blatantly, entirely, but I am doing better. There’s less blood around me now, and more ability to breathe.

+23 SIN

SIN: 112

It’s fucking hilarious. I’m already approaching the threshold of change again, maybe an offer of some new evolution or… whatever. 

And all it took was some more suffering. Just some suffering! It’s literally all suffering here!

Hilarious.

And I’m better in other ways, too. I suffer here, but as I eat, and breathe, and as time passes, I also heal.

I’m healing back kind of wrong, obviously. My ribs were in tatters. But my organs have come back into shape. Membranes have closed, bringing things back together, in towards the middle of me. 

Muscle and ligament seem to come back first. Pulling things back into place. It’s the bones that grow back wrong. Where they connect incorrectly, they bind themselves back together, malformed. 

I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to walk properly. My hips are in all sorts of pieces, and they’re coming back together weird as hell. 

But they are back together. There is, in fact, structure to me. And where there’s structure, there’s stuff that my muscles can cling to, and can pull on, and can move with. 

And by this point, the pain is barely even worth mentioning. Everything is pain! I’m suffering all the time! It hurts to breathe, and that’s the barest, mildest agony that I’ve got. So what’s a little more pain, if it means that I can stand?

For the first time since I first woke up, I put a hand to the wall, and start to lift myself higher. Inch by inch. Bit by bit. 

One foot hits the floor beneath me, squishing against the blood that still remains, forever un-drying. 

Then another. 

I’m hunched. I’m twisted. I’m barely functional. 

But even on shattered hips, even with some truly tremendous fucking agony, they’re put back together well enough to provide structure. Structure enough to stand. 

Structure enough to take a step forward. Structure enough, with my one good hand on the wall, to start moving away. 

A slurping sound echoes behind me, loud. 

I move. If I wait too long, it’ll do to me what it did to the Shambling Hoarder, so much fucking larger than I ever was. 

“Ỵ̵̬̿̋͋͋ō̶͕͒̂̑͝ű̴̦̱͇̪͒̎̍͠.”

That’s not a chewing sound. That’s a word.

It can speak. 

It noticed me. 

“أنت. आप.”

I don’t know what it’s saying. It hasn’t attacked me yet. It hasn’t tried to kill me yet. Maybe it’s full. Maybe it’s not hungry anymore. Maybe–

“你.”

That– 

I don’t speak it, but it’s a real language. It's a language I recognize. The intonations, at least, seem familiar, like something I’ve learned before, like something I’ve heard in some context at some point. 

I stop moving. 

I don’t turn back, but I force myself to stay standing, to stay still. 

“お前だ.”

There. Another language I kinda-sorta recognize, that’s kinda-sorta familiar. Something I watched, maybe?

“Tu.”

That could be anything. That doesn’t mean that–

That doesn’t mean that it’s another person. That it’s someone who doesn’t want to hurt me. That–

“You.”

That– I know that. That language. That’s… that's what I used to speak. Those are the words that I think with. I don’t know the name but I know it, I know of it.

I turn my head to face it.  

It’s standing in a crater of meat. A cradle of bright red, like a sun in a dark night sky, the only color and so very, very loud. What was the Shambling Hoarder is now so much minced slurry, less than a quarter of the size it used to have. 

It still moves. Individual muscle fibers, twitching and shifting.

The thing that took it apart is tall. Slender. A sleek thing of black, like an eel given limbs. It looks like a stick figure, or like a child’s drawing of some fucking shadow monster, its fingers almost as long as my forearm. Except they’re not fingers, are they? They’re claws. Knives. Fucking daggers, multiple feet long, coated in the blood of the hungering, snuffling thing that tortured me. 

“You know this,” it says. “You know my words.”

I almost laugh, but it doesn’t work. My throat is open. My mouth has no lips, because it’s all shattered, all torn open, all made visceral and shattered and turned to a gullet. 

Instead, I just nod. 

“You’re weak,” it says.

I nod again, slow. 

The act feels more exhausting than even standing. More painful than every misshapen, broken bone, more painful than the air I breathe, the way my heart, on occasion, beats, with every dozen harsh, dragging breaths. 

The thing tilts a head, almost as slender as its arm. Tall. Alien. I don’t see any eyes on it– just a slash, where black teeth are painted crimson, which moves strangely, but says the very same words I hear, some-fucking how.

“Are you new?” it asks me, its voice distressingly normal, coming out of that impossible face. An androgynous thing, human-sounding but still off. Still strange, just more normal than anything else I’ve seen or felt or heard in this place. ‘

One more time, I nod. 

“How long?”

I shake my head.

“One day? Five day? Ten?”

I shake my head. 

“More than twenty?”

Shake again. Really need to figure out this whole speaking thing. 

“Mmh. New. Small.”

I don’t nod this time. Why bother?

Whatever, whoever, this thing is, it hasn’t killed me yet. It doesn’t even seem to want to. 

So I wait. 

“Do you know?” it asks.

I raise a hand, a third option from “yes” and “no”. 

“Where we are. What we are. Have you heard? Have you spoken?”

No. 

The eel-thing nods again. It stands, rising a bit higher, two or three times my height. It’s entire body is like a fucking knife, stretched out into a stick figure. 

It raises a hand, and points it at the squirming meat. 

“Come.

“Eat.

“Listen.”