BELOW: BIRTH 09 (Patreon)

And the aforepromised second chappie

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The messy sounds of my “chewing” are all that I can hear for a while.

I say “chewing” with the quotations in my mind because there’s not really a jaw for me to work with, and most of my teeth have either grown in crooked and strange or been replaced by bits of sternum and cartilage, sharpened to shattered points. My “chewing” is more of a violent sawing motion, done with my whole upper body at once, stripping every bit of material I can get my Broken Gullet around and then simply… inhaling it. Kinda. It’s a very messy version of swallowing, especially not with the amount of still-twitching tissue the not-jaguar is made from. 

It’s dead. Kinda. As dead as anything gets down here, I suppose. Without its head, there’s nothing it can do, no way that it can move, but the nerves and muscles aren’t dead in the way that I’m used to, in the way that things used-to-be in my time before this ABYSS. The blood doesn’t stop oozing out of it, and automatic jerks and twitches come as I “bite” into reactive bits of flesh. 

But it doesn’t fight back. It doesn’t express that agony as anything other than involuntary reactions. And that, I suppose, really is the very best that I can hope for, down here. 

I know for a fact I eat more than should fit in my stomach. More than should fit in my whole torso cavity, to be honest, and that’s besides the fact that I’m not really capable of traditional chewing, meaning it’s even thicker and tougher than before. 

But I do, eventually, feel full. I do, eventually, feel a pressure in my gut, the flesh intermingling with the rocks I ate before in whatever weird inner space I have inside my WOUND. Eventually, it starts to affect my… “real” body. My gut starts to distend. It starts to feel heavy when I move, and I can feel a weight shifting around inside me. 

It would feel disgusting, if it didn’t taste so fucking good. 

I don’t know how long I was in that little cave. I don’t know how long I spent there, trapped, with nothing but myself and rocks to eat, and I worked very, very, very hard not to eat myself. 

Even raw. Even bloody. Even still squirming.

It’s so fucking good.

Wet. Warm. Iron and tissue, protein and crimson. A bitterness to it, a wrongness, but it just makes it go down sweeter, that it isn’t all-perfect. Like coffee on a cold morning, bitter, but all the sharper for it. Like drinking down booze, a mixed cocktail whose acidic backdrop only makes the rest of it scream louder. 

I’m so glad that it isn’t screaming. 

I’m so fucking sad that it isn’t screaming. 

I don’t know if it’s because it would make me stop… 

Or.

When I can eat no more. When I’m so full that it’s starting to hurt, that I begin to fear the horror of having to puke some of this divine thing back out of me. Only then do I stop. 

Only then do I look up from my meal, at the three other wretches around me. 

They’re not all healed. The one with the maul-hand is still missing half its torso, is still laying on the ground where it was thrown, but at least it’s kinda-sorta sitting up now. The stilt-legged one is standing, to my surprise. It’s recovered its spear at some point, and is using it as a crutch, but still using its broken long-legs to stand on.

That must be painful.

The thought is so fucking funny that I would laugh if I could. 

But my jaw is gone, and my throat is full of flesh. 

Everything is painful.

And, of course, there’s the strong one. Huge, compared to me, and with a body built like some sort of golem, nearing seven feet tall or higher. Its hands are more like mitts, designed for bludgeoning more than delicacy, and it looks skeletal, like every bit of skin was peeled off and replaced with more bone, which wraps awkwardly over bulging musculature, leaving enough gaps that the crimson is always visible.

In one of its massive mitts is the not-jaguar’s head. It’s still writhing. Still trying to bite.

The face on the back of its skull, not quite human, is still crying. Tears of red.

All three of them are just staring at me. Waiting. 

And… I can’t talk. 

Awkward. 

I lean back, off of the… well, not a corpse. 

My meal. 

We keep staring at each other. 

They could kill me. Easy. Even with only two of them, even with all three of them dreadfully wounded, I’m not particularly impressive, am I? 

But I could run. They’re not approaching, and I’m not so full that I can’t move. Slower than normal, but slow, compared to not-moving-at-all, is a good bet. 

They’re not approaching me. They’re not attacking. They’re just… waiting.

So, instead, I raise a hand. Slowly. 

And wave. 

I can practically feel some of the tension escaping the cave, in spite of all the blood everywhere. The stilt-legged wretch raises its hand back, waving gently. 

“Spreek?” asks the skeletal golem, its voice like gurgling wet cement. 

I shake my head, then pause, raising my hand and shaking it back and forth in a “so-so” motion.

The skeleton nods, turning to the stilt-legged wretch. It looks surprised at being looked at, and then shrugs, turning (and wincing as it twists a broken ankle) to indicate the tunnel behind them. The one that leads straight up. 

The armored skeleton grunts something, before turning to the half-torn wretch to one side. They just sort of raise their remaining hand to point at the missing chunk of torso going on, before grunting and growling something that does sound like language, at least. Not one that I recognize, and the addition of a missing lung doesn’t make it any more intelligible. 

The skeleton grunts again. Turning back to the stilt-legged wretch, it makes a little motion with its head (impressive, considering how thick its “neck” is), and starts turning around, slowly. 

Outside of combat, it almost seems lethargic. Clumsy. Its every step is heavy enough to make a thud sound against the stone, made wetter by the blood, as it treks over towards the upward tunnel. 

The stilt-legged wretch blinks, then seems a bit panicked, almost confused, before starting to limp over to the half-severed wretch. The two broken figures reach for each other, making a mess of slopping organs, blood, and broken legs.

By the time they have themselves put back together enough to support each other, leaning heavily against the stone spear, the bone golem is already at the entrance of the other tunnel. With one hand, it digs into the stone directly, and hoists itself up. Its feet dig in just as easily, and it shoves itself up, up, out of sight. 

I can’t imagine that the two other wretches will be able to follow. The shaft is nearly vertical, and… well, one of them is moving on shattered bones, the other is missing a whole pectoral and half their ribcage. Not exactly a good situation for rock climbing. 

One of them turns back to look at me as they go.

The armored skeleton isn’t there. I’m full, but maybe they don’t know that. It could kill me easily. 

These two, alone, probably can’t. 

Is it a test? Or just… does the skeleton just truly not care? 

I don’t know. And I can’t fucking speak to them, because the SINs I’ve done apparently saw fit to grant me this fucking maw instead of a mouth. 

I miss having lips. Funny, that. Lips, of all things. I remember going to the dentist, and how even the slightest fucking change to my teeth can feel so incredibly fucking weird, and how what I have now is miles beyond that. But lips… somehow I miss those worse. 

They didn’t attack me. Some of them, at least, seem close to me in strength, close to me in their capacity to do harm. They can speak, even if it’s a language I don’t know. 

Hell is forever, right? I can learn a new fucking language. I have the time, apparently. 

I get up, feeling my distended gut unbalance me before I adjust, and start walking over to them. 

The tension’s back. The fear. Both of them are facing half-toward me, their journey stopped as I approach. 

I don’t try to reassure them. I don’t know how I would, even if I tried. So instead, I just walk right past, making sure to give them as much space as I can, and approach the tunnel. 

There’s blood here too. Blood on my malformed little hands. Blood all over me. But it’s enough of a slope that I can still reach a handhold, secure myself, and climb a step up.

It’s dark, up the tunnel. No blood to paint it. Going from the incredible brightness of all that crimson back to the pitch dark, so dark that it looks like a wall or a hole. I can’t see where it goes, or if there’s an exit somewhere that I need to veer off into. 

But I climb up. I keep climbing until I’ve passed my own height, until I’ve gotten higher than I can reach on my own. 

I spend a few moments securing myself, making sure I’m anchored into place enough that I won’t slip. I try my best to use what’s left of my tongue to lick some of the slippery copper off of myself, enough that my hands are covered more in half-spit than all-blood. 

And then I turn back around, looking down the harsh slope I just crawled up, and reach a hand down to the two wretches down below. 

________________________________________________________________

The process of climbing up is not a pretty one. If not for the sake of immortality guaranteeing their survival, I wouldn’t want either of them to even attempt it, and even with that, the nail-biting pressure to keep them from falling down and having to restart the climb is plenty shitty too.

We make it, but the skeletal figure is long, long gone by the time that we do. The cracks they left in the walls / floor are the only trace they were ever present at all by the time we get to where the tunnel suddenly opens. 

It’s less natural than even the normally weird tunnels tend to be. There’s a massive channel, as if someone excavated one tunnel into another using explosives. Or maybe just explosive force. A few dozen feet from where it first started, this massive crevice just yawns open, shattered into being who-knows how long ago, with just enough space for someone to walk through. 

Judging by the bright red footprints trailing deeper into it, the skeletal golem managed to squeeze itself through here. Without any other indication of where to go, and with neither of the other Wretches in any shape to go any further, it wound up as the only way to go. 

By the time we’re up there, the formerly maul-handed Wretch has lost… maybe half its internal organs? I think I can see its heart sort of dangling inside its chest, like a weird chandelier that sways gruesomely. The stilt-legged one is better off by far, but considering the fact that its legs have started going backwards from all the weight of pushing it and its… friend(?) up the tunnel, it’s not having fun either. 

They’re both gasping, but the stilt-legged one at least has the ability to speak to me. It turns to me, nodding its head, almost hyperventilating. How it’s able to breathe so much, so fast, I have no idea, but clearly it’s either more used to or more capable of breathing than I am. 

But it uses some of that breath, as we stand in the colossal crevice, to talk to me.

"लानत है... व्यभिचार। मल। मैंने कभी नहीं... भगवान, यह चोट पहुंचा। वह चोट लगी थी। I... धन्यवाद। " 

It’s whole sentences. I’m pretty sure it’s got a bunch of cursing, too, but if anything that just makes it feel… better. 

A whole sentence, from a whole person.

I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite work right. Instead of trying to garble something back, I give the most universal sign I can possible offer. 

I give them a thumbs up. 

The stilt-legged Wretch laughs. Then, shakily, it starts using the spear as a staff, dragging itself forward into the dark of the crevice. 

I turn to look at the half-dead wretch behind us, knocking on the stone beside me to draw some attention.

“Ah! कोई बात नहीं। जल्द ही कोई ऐसा आएगा जो उसे ले जा सके। अन्यथा यह उसे और अधिक चोट पहुंचाएगा।”

And it turns back around to keep crawling. 

…Alright then. That sure seems like some kind of “don’t worry about it”, and the torn-open Wretch isn’t really in a position to offer any other opinion. What ability I have to examine it’s facial features tells me one thing plainly enough– the agony’s gotten bad enough that they’re not really all the way here anymore. 

Maybe it’s better off leaving them there. What am I going to do otherwise? Drag them around? 

I turn into the dark, and go deeper into the crevice. 

I reach the stilt-legged Wretch as it drags itself along, and reach under its torso. It stiffens, as if terrified for just a moment, but when I don’t bite down it relaxes, just a little. I hoist it up, pushing through the sounds of pain, and put one of its arms over my shoulders.

We walk the rest of the pathway like that, with me supporting it, it making little sounds of agony and helping as it can with the spear. 

And no matter how dark it gets, there’s the blood of the footsteps before us. Leading us forward, in the black sharpness of this strange crag. 

Like all things, eventually, it ends. I almost slip as it does, because of the sheer amount of color that pops into being ahead of me as I turn a corner. 

At first it looks like an impressionist art painting. Some kind of weird nightmare of a thing, designed and redesigned until it barely looks like anything, but also is nothing but sharp angles and clear lines. 

It’s like a beehive. Dozens of the cubbies, or cells, like the one I emerged from, enlarged and hollowed out into proper tunnels or maybe caves. They’re layered, with little pathways carved to go into the higher and lower sections of the great cavern I’m walking into. 

It’s just as sharp and ragged as the crevice. Like someone opened up an entire chunk of a mountain, tore it wide, and scooped out a sliver of a mountain, leaving all the gaps within as it gets closed back up. Around each of the excavated little caves, or tunnels, or whatever the fuck, there are other, squarer things, things like the spear my would-be companion is leaning on. Pillars carved of stone, holding up little roofs, or improvised little doorways, other signs of civilization. 

It’s like a beehive, but it’s a village. And it’s painted.

Every shadow, every harsh angle, every corner that might vanish into the dark has been coated in a thin film of red, beautiful and bright. A reversed shadow, like the light is all darkness and the darkness is all red. Disorienting, but easy to see by for maybe the first time since I’ve been here.

This is a place. It’s a place and it’s designed to be lived in. 

And at its gates, where the crevice turns to a valley and turns to the sharpened, torn-open village, is a skeletal golem of flesh and bone. Beside it, a towering thing, its four limbs like that of a spider, balancing on knife-edged points, its face like a big open maw, its eyes at the back of its throat. Between the both of them, a man. 

The first entity I can call a man, at first sight. Or male-adjacent, anyways. The smooth chest, shaped something like a figure from a catalogue. Long, strong arms, atop well muscled legs. 

And a thick, heavy cock dangling between the both of them. 

For all the world, it looks almost human.

Except not. Of course. Too smooth. Too muscular. The muscle groups in question organized all wrong. Too much hair in strange places, like horse-tails coming out of forearms and thighs and back and shoulders. 

And its face is not a face. It’s like a mask. Like a fake thing, the smile on it painted on, but painted on well enough to look disturbing instead of fake. 

That’s worse, I think. I don’t know. 

The man that is not a man looks at me, a sword in his hand made of bone and sharpened rocks, and spreads his arms wide. 

“Ŵ̴̠͔̯̩̾͌̑͠ę̵̼̩͎̲̻̇͜l̶̢̛͎̯̯̲̤ͅc̸̱̦͓̐͊̓̾̊͘o̵̝̪͎̅̈́ṁ̷̮͙̤͙̮̀͂ȇ̴͔̰͙̾ͅ,” he says, in a language that I do not understand but whose word I do. 

“欢迎.”

“स्वागत है”

“Welcome.”

I raise a hand to that. 

“Ah! A sinful tongue for a SINful place. Stitched together out of so many others. Just like this place, no? Just like us. Welcome. Welcome to our little den of suffering, fellow beast. Welcome. Join us in our agonies.”