BELOW: BIRTH 08 (Patreon)

Ok I'm still sick and still recovering but I am writing again which means we can get back to being on schedule kinda sorta almost maybe if I try really hard. I'm still 20 or so chapters ahead, but gonna post 2 BELOW chapters today, 1 tomorrow with the RfR update, then two more thursday, maybe. We'll see! Even with all the planning in the world, which I very much cannot say that I have done, I am still an improviser at heart it seems. I'll figure it out. Or I won't, and that'll suck and be sad and eventually be fine anyways I guess!

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It’s strange, emerging out of the cave. I think, even now, part of me was looking for a difference in the lighting. There was no light in the cave, after all, just pitch darkness of shadow and the pitch darkness of the stone intermingling, cut by the blood that ever-drips. Part of me just sort of assumed that there’d be light out in the tunnel.

There isn’t. It’s just as perfectly, entirely, utterly dark. There’s just more of it.

There’s also another arrow. 

It’s there, bright and crimson and carved into the stone. It curves away to the left and then sort of… up. Or maybe it’s meant to indicate forward? In?

It’s a direction. 

For the first time since I awoke in this nightmare, I stand on my own two feet, whole and secure. They’re shaped wrong, both too thin and too long, without the muscles some part of me from before is instinctively designed to use. But they are mine, and they serve me well enough that when I take a step, I do not fall. 

So I start walking. 

One step after another. Unbalanced at first, irregular, but then more smoothly, more confidently. Whether it’s my Aspects or just having a moment, I start feeling confident enough to be able to step cleanly forward, one at a time, into the dark. 

I don’t go quickly. Being able to walk makes me much, much quieter than when I first emerged, crawling and dragging myself forward, but not silent. My breaths are still heavy, loud, enough so that I pause my breathing every few steps to listen for any other sounds. 

I am not alone in this place. Being healed, being stronger than before, doesn’t offer me any kind of certainty against the likes of another Shambling Hoarder, or something like the thing that killed and ate it. I might be above the least of the lessers, but I am still, foundationally, lesser.

So I stay still, and I stay quiet, breathing only when my lungs demand it of me. I step cautiously, one foot after another. 

And I wonder about the cells I see, here and there. 

Cells. Cubbies. Gabs. Wall-wombs. I have no idea what they might actually be, but I recognize them. While I don’t see the slime-trail of blood I left behind, it might be because the Shambling Hoarder ate it, or because the eel-thing took me somewhere far from where we met. Still, I see other holes that I’m pretty sure are the exact same thing I crawled out of. 

And I’m pretty sure that, if I crawled into them, I’d find something to eat. 

There’s got to be some of them that are empty. I crawled out of mine, after all. Maybe most of them are empty, I don’t know. 

But I found something… someone to eat right next to my own emergence. So there’s probably quite a few more Wretches… people, in the tunnels around me. 

My WOUND let me eat stone, and keep starvation at bay. I don’t think it can kill me, but I saw what just a few days of it made me do, and I don’t intend to go back to that. But being full of rocks is more to distract from the hunger than not. 

I don’t get any SIN from it, as far as I’m aware. Less than I get from breathing, at least. They sit heavy in me, implacable, dense, but ultimately holding back the need for higher fare. 

I can handle it for now. Maybe forever. If eating rock is what it takes to never eat a person again, then maybe that’s alright. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. 

Most of my doubt comes in the form of thinking of that thing. The Shambling Hoarder. If I meet another one, would that be alright to eat? Would that be forgivable?

I know what the words behind my eyes would say. I don’t know whether or not I’d agree with them. I suppose I’ll only find out when the time comes. 

I reach a junction, a bend in the path before me. The tunnel ends, and there’s a pit before me, through which I can see three paths. 

It really is like being in a cave system. Like being underwater, maybe, exploring some strange dungeon. I drop down as slowly as I dare, crawling along every handhold I can reach to avoid making a sound as I descend into the junction, exploring the three-dimensionality of the space. 

One path drops down further, a long tunnel going down. Another opens up into what seems like a larger cavern. The third is more like the tunnel I just left, but holding a curve, slow and gradual, and I decide that it reminds me of the way that the arrow carved on the wall curved.

It’s more guidance than I’d have otherwise. More than I’d have if I traveled in either other tunnel.

But is that worth it? 

I believe that the thing which lobotomized and ate me does, in its own way, wish me well. I just don’t know how well, or what kind of wellness. Maybe its idea of shelter is a bit different than mine. Ultimately, it’s in my hands. 

Do I trust in a benefactor that literally tore me apart and ate me? Do I trust in my own instincts? Do I gamble, blindly, and try to trust in random chance that picking a different direction will lead me somewhere, to something?

I don’t want to get eaten again. I don’t want to be torn apart into a limbless, gutless thing, trapped in a hole at the whim of someone else. And as much as I crave that silence coming back to me, that ability to be nowhere and nothing instead of a thing of constant pain, the idea of having it be done at the whim of something else… 

It’s frightening.

I’m afraid. I hurt, and I’m afraid. 

Gamble? Decide myself? Or trust?

I’m in hell. Trust, even in the world before, came in short supply.

But I still turn to follow the curving path. 

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It’s disorienting, being in hell. I’m never not hungry, and I’m never not tired, so neither one of those helps to gauge time. There’s no day or night here, no change in the light, or its absence. Sometimes I prick my finger on the broken edges of my gullet, just to see some color for once, to see that brilliant crimson against the backdrop of black. 

I make sure to leave my finger up against where my throat used to be, letting it drip into my Broken Gullet. Better not to leave any kind of trail if I can avoid it. 

A while goes by. A few hours? A day? Long enough that I stop to bite into some of the stone around me, letting my WOUND carve it apart enough that I can eat. It’s a little harder to walk than before, weighed down by rocks in my “gut” as I am. So they do kinda-sorta exist inside me, somewhere, instead of just vanishing away magically. 

But they don’t stop me from moving, and so I keep walking. And so I keep moving forward, even as I am. 

I’m so focused on walking forward, step by step, that I miss the first signs. 

There’s blood in the rocks. 

Just a little bit, and just here-and-there, not splattered. Because it never seems to dry, it still glistens wetly, offering little patterns in the rock. 

I don’t know what they mean. They just seem like little patches of red, soaked in to provide a kind of… outline. 

Huh. 

I was looking for symbols, or patterns, but it’s… not that. At least not obviously that. It just sort of seems like a little bit of blood has been spread over a little bit of the ground or bits of the wall, offering a little bit of definition. Enough to see by, if one were to have absolutely no idea what else to look for. Enough to attract the eye of the discerning without broadcasting itself.

So. Trust means something, even in hell. 

I follow the path. 

Unlike before, it doesn’t take me very long to find something. 

It starts with the sound of violence.

I hesitate, but not for long. Violence is something, and it’s been… well, a day or so since I started walking, and a lot longer since I wasn’t in a cave. I might not be allowed to go insane here, but my mind still aches at all that isolation. I crave something, anything, so the sounds of screaming and of heavy impacts slows me, but it doesn’t stop me. 

What does is the sight I finally find at the end of the curving tunnel. 

There, crouched nearly prone to the ground, barely peeking around a corner, I catch sight of a gruesome abattoir. 

The tunnel broadens out into a chamber with one other tunnel coming in from the side opposite the one I’m standing in and another heading almost straight up. I can see every detail of it in perfect and stark relief, because every inch of it is splattered in crimson, to the point that the black of the stone is obscured beneath neon violence. 

At the center of that violence are four figures, three of them arrayed against one. Of the three, two of them look about as strong as I feel, mostly like scrawny humans with some sort of dangerous looking deformity. One has a hand that looks stretched, made to hold too much muscle and bone until it turned to a club, their face set in a snarl. The other has long, skinny legs, elevating them higher above the battlefield, where a long pointed stone spear stabs down at their opponent.

They look almost human. They also look distressingly wrong somehow, though the exact reason why, I can’t see from so far.

The last two combatants are something else entirely. 

An armored skeleton, too skinny and too muscular at once, its face closed over with a plate of some kind bone, stands across from something like a jaguar, if a jaguar were made out of overfilling and then stretching out a human body. Malformed and grotesque, both of them circle each other, coated in blood, with the armored, skeletal and hyper-muscular creature keeping two massive fists clenched while the feline abomination crawls on all fours, its fangs dripping. 

The temporary peace is broken as the jaguar-thing rushes forward, throwing itself at its opponent. 

I get a good look at it as it moves. It’s like the top of a person’s head was split into a massive set of jaws, while the rest of their limbs and torso were all twisted away from each other to face the wrong directions, yet somehow work anyways. It lands on the armored figure, which seems slow by comparison but moves faster than I can, clawing its hands into the gaps in the bone-plate while yowling out an unholy sound of hate and hunger.

The fleshy armored figure grunts in response, a sound like a bass drum hitting my lungs, and starts swinging, punching up into the beast’s gut until I see ribs break and distort. The creature yowls again, gurgling now, but doesn’t relent, digging its skull-maw into a corner between neck and shoulder and tearing out strings of muscle tissue. The armored skeleton roars, deep and groaning, and grabs the not-jaguar by a hind leg to swing it around. 

It slips out of the skeleton’s hold somehow, crawling over it to bite at the back of its enemy’s knees, forcing it to stagger. The armored figure swings around, its spine distorting horrifically out of place to let it slam a fist into the not-jaguar hard enough to shatter half its skull.

The blow knocks the not-jaguar to one side, granting both sides a momentary reprieve. Their wounds are bad enough to kill a living thing, and the pain must be excruciating, but neither one stops or even slows, getting back on their feet quickly. 

But the not-jaguar is faster. A long tongue (is that made of brain matter?) laps at the blood, and its wounds are already closing, already allowing it to move again. It slams into the armored skeleton hard enough to knock the considerably denser-looking figure back.

Which, apparently, is what the other two were waiting for. 

The maul-fisted figure runs forward, swinging recklessly into the not-jaguar’s front-wrist. It shatters with a crack, but that doesn’t stop the beast from whipping its arm at the wretched, human-like thing that hurt it, breaking a lot more in return and sending it flying. Before it can pursue, the armored skeleton punches its face, staggering it, only to be forced to block as the massive, animalistic thing bears its body down. The armored skeleton is large, almost twice as large as me, but the not-jaguar is bigger, heavier, faster. 

The long-legged wretch-thing manages to take the distractions offered by the others to step in and thrust its spear into the not-jaguar’s shoulder.

It yowls, trying to turn, but the spear refuses to break, embedded directly into the joint and acting as a point of leverage. The stilt-legged wretch staggers back, totally unable to hold onto their weapon, but it’s long enough that the armored skeleton has recovered.

It grabs the spear in one hand, making it look like a stick in its massive grip, and uses it to lever the not-jaguar to the ground, where it yowls and rips at the nearest thing, lapping up blood all the while.

So it goes. On and on, back and forth. Every time one side takes a hit, they keep going, or force their bodies back together long enough for supernatural healing to reassemble them. For the wretches, it can take ten minutes or longer, and often seems painfully incomplete, barely letting them stay upright rather than splattered to pieces. The armored skeleton seems to be repairing itself, but more slowly, and doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by missing chunks of musculature or broken bits of bone-armor.

Meanwhile, the not-jaguar heals fast. For a superficial wound, seconds. For a deeper strike, maybe a minute, maybe two. Every time the other three put it on the back foot, it allows itself to take a grievous wound to pull back, circling or retreating only long enough to heal and leap back in. 

The wounds do pile up. Damage continues to accumulate. Even the not-jaguar is clearly flagging, though less so than the other three. But when no damage can kill, and pain isn’t a reason to stop, the fight just keeps going. 

I watch it all. I keep watching as blood splatters over older pools, as chunks of flesh are ripped out and tossed aside. As these four figures struggle and fight, with increasing shows of desperation, trying their best to take each other apart.

Eventually, one of them succeeds.

The not-jaguar catches the mace-handed wretch off guard, baiting it into range for the thing’s skull-jaw to crack even further open and bite. The maul-hand, its shoulder,  and most of the ribcage on that side gets torn off the the Wretch’s body, and they shriek in abject agony. A moment later, a paw-hand-leg slams into them and knocks them back against the wall so hard that organs splurt out of the newly-made cavity in their anatomy. 

The armored skeleton tries to advance to cover things, but the not-jaguar is faster, and without someone covering its backside to punish its movements, it uses that speed to full advantage. Both of the stilt-legged Wretch’s legs shatter and are ripped off as they scream, shaken like a chew toy before being slammed hard enough against the ground that I hear their skull crack open. 

And then there were two.

I’m pretty goddamn sure who’s going to win. The armored skeleton is too slow, and doesn’t have any definitive ways to break this thing apart. The not-jaguar has the latter problem, but not the former, and whatever damage it takes heals faster than the skeleton’s. 

It leaps at them, long, wrong-sided limbs wrapping around the smaller, denser figure, as it starts working very very hard to crack its “jaws” open further. 

They struggle, and it sounds vicious, and violent, and brutal, full of tearing flesh and cracking bone, but the skull of the not-jaguar keeps widening, keeps wrapping its way around the skeleton’s thick, armored neck. 

The stalemate lasts for minutes, ever-worsening for the skeletal monster’s side. 

I watch. I count. 

Three minutes. Five. Ten. 

Its head is almost enclosed in those jaws. 

On the back of the not-jaguar’s “head”, a half-human face weeps tears of blood, its mouth sewn shut but leaking further crimson and pink fluids. 

Trust has a place in hell. 

One side fought together. The other, alone. 

I don’t know all the details. I don’t know if I’m making the right choice.

But I made it pretty much as soon as I saw the not-jaguar wrap itself around its prey, turning its head at a more and more disturbing angle to fit its jaws around them. 

At the eleven minute mark, it finally turns enough that the eyes on the back of its head can no longer stare directly at the tunnel I’m in.

I break into a dead sprint across the room.

My lungs bellow as I drag in as much air as I can, feeling it stab the inside of my chest with every inhale. I pump that feeling through my body, pushing enough fuel into myself to force my heart to beat again, just once. 

That’s all the time I have before I reach the beast and jump as high as I can.

My body is unfamiliar. My strength, uncertain. But I get up high enough that I can grab on with all my strength and hoist my Broken Gullet up to the back of this thing’s neck, right where its head meets its spine. 

I bite down.

A sound of screaming not unlike a baby’s bursts out of the thing, a horrific cry of pain that spits out bits of brain matter and bile all over me and the skeleton. Instantly, the beast detaches from its prey, turning its body around in a disgusting display of flexibility to grab at me–

But the skeleton is there, and it doesn’t hesitate. Its massive mitts thrust forward out of the broken hold the not-jaguar had on it, grabbing both of the beast’s arms and keeping it trapped in place. It tries to yank itself away, parts of its arm-legs degloving from the force with which it tries to pull free, but the skeleton holds fast, the crunching of bone coming from beneath its grip. 

And I keep biting. 

It’s tough. Chewy. Harder than the stone, in some ways, because the stone didn’t writhe, doesn’t fight back or shift beneath a tough outer layer.

But I have eaten flesh before, struggling and not. I am new to this world, but what I have learned, I have learned well.

I bite. And bite. And bite.

The jagged-edged, broken-toothed thing that has replaced my mouth, my throat, the upper part of my sternum, slashes into the not-jaguar’s neck over and over as it screams and cries and thrashes. 

On the fifth bite, I break the skin. 

On the tenth bite, I make it past muscle.

On the fifteenth, I hear a crack, and taste marrow on what’s left of my tongue.

+13 SIN

The beast’s head comes off in one final bite, with one last, hateful squeal.

The eyes on the back of its head track me, even as the skull tumbles to the floor, and its body goes limp and lifeless.

I stare back into its eyes, and keep eating.

+15 SIN.

I am rewarded for my hunger.