BELOW: BIRTH: 12 (Patreon)

“In my time, it was often said that those missing one sense would find others heightened. I wonder if speech could be considered a sense. Perhaps your deprivation has allowed you something new.”

I don’t respond. I don’t fucking know this person, and what little I know of him isn’t exactly encouraging. 

He’s standing too close. His mask is nearly pressed against my face, and he keeps approaching when I reflexively jerk back, keeping that near-nonexistent space between us the same. 

“You don’t strike me as ancient. No, you strike as fresh meat does, wet and slick on the plate, not the dry things so common about these tunnels. Tell me, how long did it take for you to emerge from your hole? A day? A week? An unknowable amount of time, of course, but estimate for me, if you please.”

I try and crawl back, forced to move on all fours, but he keeps approaching. The only limit seems to be that he doesn’t touch me, at least not yet, but I can feel the heat of him, the warmth, the pressure of having a body so close to mine. 

The only times I’ve had someone this close to me since I woke was when I was hurting them or they were hurting me. 

I… I don’t know if there’s any other way for us to be. Down here. When your heartbeat hurts, can touch ever be anything other than agony? 

I want to keep crawling backwards. Away. Even if it wouldn’t hurt to be touched, it would still be… he’s too close. There’s something distressingly intimate about the proximity, and I don’t like the way that he’s enforcing it. 

“Ah! My apologies. Here I am speaking about your enfeeblements while demanding answers through the same factor! Yes, I understand the difficulty. Shall we return to whence we came? One for yes, two for no? You are young, yes? You did not suffer the debilitation of rot in those tunnels, did you?”

And then he stops. He just… stays there, perfectly still, waiting for me to respond, enforcing that same unpleasant, intimate closeness. 

I don’t hear him breathing. I don’t think I heard him breathing while he spoke, either. The words just sort of… happen, somehow, as if they arrive in my ears without needing to travel there. Another aspect of his presence that feels so very…. Pushy.

I don’t think he’s going to leave until I say something. I’m not sure if striking him would even do anything. In spite of my transformation to a “Hungering Ghoul” rather than a “Wretch”, as the system calls me, I’m very similar to how I started. Besides my wound, I’m maybe a bit wirier, a bit taller and lankier, but it’s a difference of inches, not the profound alienness of the creature before me. 

He’s so much stronger than me. So much stranger. 

I blink, once. Hard. 

“Ah! I knew it! What a privilege, what a joy, to see one so young find such success! So often we suffer alone, in the dark, before we ever extract ourselves into what limited freedoms we can find in this place. Do you know how many of us only find ourselves after an extraction? Hunted down and dug out of the walls of this place, like precious truffles from the dirt. Only then do we find it in ourselves to wake. Only then do we stir from blind suffering and dissolution. Did you know that?”

Again, full stop. Like every sentence, every bit of conversation, is rehearsed, and he’s just waiting for me to say my lines.

I blink twice.

“Oh, yes, you are a youth. Barely a babe, aren’t you? Did you even have to dig yourself out, or did you crawl free while still fresh? What a specimen you are. What a darling beast. What a shame you’ve broken yourself so, cast aside even the remnants of language left for us, for the sake of accepting that vilest and most necessary of SINs. And to think, I thought you just a lucky two-pence, plucked from the dirt, only to find a wealth instead. Were you old, old, then perhaps the taste of what you just wrought would be but opportunity, but novelty, but so new to this place, and already, you have found one of the paths? Already, with Tyranny so low, you have found a way to grasp at what defines us all? Oh what luck indeed.”

Abruptly, he lifts himself away from me, moving without warning and leaving my skin tingling with adrenaline from having someone so close and feeling so powerless at once. 

“Blessings be! What joy, Samir, that you have brought home to us such a loving new family member. What a gift, that Adrian’s continued suffering has wrought such worthy recompense. Tell me, has my darling Bratu told you of our home? No, I suppose he wouldn’t, would he? Not particularly verbose, our local bludgeon. Not even particularly self-aware, nevermind aware of others. Come! Come, to your feet, darling devil! Walk with me, that I might play Vergil to your uneducated Dante.”

I… I think I got that reference. Sort of. The names seem familiar. Were they the names of real people? Does it change depending on if they were or weren’t real? They ring of story, perhaps. 

I slowly get to my feet, moving carefully. After sitting still so long, the pains that I’ve gotten used to have become fresh again, sending tingling pulses of agony through my joints, my tendons, my muscles and bones. 

But I can stand, and I can walk, and I’d give a lot for this man not to drag himself back into my personal space. So I stand up, and I match his smile with a gaping WOUND of my own.

He’s taller than me, too. I’m like 99% sure I was tall before I died, so it’s a little extra dose of dysphoria for the road. 

“Excellent! You can understand at least a majority of what I’m saying, though I would find myself delighted to learn I’ve encountered someone erudite enough to enjoy my references. I’ve worked terribly hard on them, you know, and it’s quite a challenge to get even the smallest tidbit of fore-knowledge in this place. Come along then, come along, and I’ll introduce you about the community, hmm?”

He starts walking, and outside of flat-out refusing him, my only real option is to follow. 

He walks right past Bratu, the hulking bone-golem, ignoring him entirely and leaving Samir still trapped in the cave behind the brute’s shadow. Maybe it’s a trick of the mind, but I swear, for just a second, the thousand-pound figure turns to stare at me, eyes almost entirely black but somehow still making me think that they’ve locked onto me. 

It’s not human enough for me to recognize any kind of expression, but something there…

Hmm. 

In moments we’ve gotten far enough that the cave is just one among many, differentiated only by how low and far back it is compared to the others. The painted outline of everything being stark crimson makes it feel like I have some sort of night vision, able to see shapes but struggling with depth and perspective amidst the all-black of every material I can see. In spite of the scale of it, for a place designed to house people, there’s not a lot of room in this strange cavern, and only four layers of pathways to reach the highest rooms and spaces compared to these on the lowest floor.

The masked cult-master of this place is already walking up one said pathway, heading higher. 

“It may not yet seem like much to such a recently-suffering soul as yourself, but havens such as ours are rare things indeed. Why, it feels that I’ve been down here a decade and still, I’ve only ever managed to uncover isolated pockets, half the size of our lovely little estate or less! We’re the largest community of the dead this side of one of the great barriers, and I must admit, I’m rather proud of our efforts as a community to sustain such a place.”

The path we start to take curls upward, allowing me a bit more perspective. I notice that there are two sides to the lowest floor, facing three different entrances, each one pointing in different directions. One half of the space is dedicated to the tunnels I saw earlier, used as sort of makeshift apartments for Wretch-level SINners, but the other half, which hides beneath the path we’re using, seems to have… pits? Holes dug vertically instead of horizontally. 

But my “guide” isn’t slowing down enough for me to get a good look. I don’t think he’d attack me so overtly for disobeying something so vague, but…

Well, a cult in the living world can be bad enough. In a place where you can’t die? Where power dynamics are literal and enforced by supernatural power? I don’t want to risk it. Not yet. 

I follow along, struggling to keep up. Outside of short bursts, most of my efforts have been to move slow and quiet so far. 

“As you’ve seen, down on our first layer, we have our stalwart defenders and the freshly aware, those who will one day rise to meet the higher tiers but who have yet to take the steps to overcome their lingering origins. Here, upon the second level, you can see more of our more seasoned community members.”

And he’s not wrong. The variety of shapes, sizes, forms, WOUNDS, all vary wildly compared to below. If the dozens of Wretches I saw are all a malformed half-step from humanity, those on the second layer are the ones that have taken a step further. Maybe a dozen, maybe two, they mill about, hanging out in groups, isolated in their own caves (which I notice have more carved furniture, little trinkets, small decorations), or watching closely as we walk by. 

So closely. So cautiously. Aware and careful about it. 

I see feathered things, sharp quills, spiked bones poking through flesh, people on all fours, people too tall to walk normally, too small to reach anything and thus skittering about with all-different transformations. If there were dozens of caves below, there’s maybe twenty on this level, all of which are full.

My “guide” doesn’t stop or wait for me, simply continuing past this second layer and the crowd upon it. 

“Of course, here’s where I intended to bring you to begin with, if you’d shown promise; the third level. Here, those who can best serve the needs of the community find themselves justly rewarded for such things, and we find ourselves gifted by their presence.”

The third layer has only eight or so caves, each of them with some sort of curtain or curve in the stone to hide their interiors from view. I see a large area has been carved into a sort of bubble in the rock, harsh marks opening up more space for what looks like some sort of track or field made of stone, painted in crimson. On the opposite side, reachable only by slender walkways branching from one end of the cavern across its walls, is another such clearing, with a few layers in and of itself. Two floors have been carved there, with additional rooms that I can’t discern the details of just yet. 

“The fourth floor, of course, is for those like myself, the members of the community that act as anchors, securing our position and organizing us all,” says my as-yet-unnamed “Vergil”, waving a hand at a sharply inclined slope carved into the stone leading to the final layer, a good few stories higher. “Irrelevant to you for now, and I barely spend much time there anyways. Too much to do, you see, and too much desire to spend time amongst my fellows down here.”

I know a line when I’ve fucking heard one. Sure enough, his smile never shifts, that mask kept pristinely placed on the curve of the uncanny valley to be just-barely not wrong, and he barely even has it turned to me, as if he doesn’t even need to see me.

But he does see me. I know that. I’ve heard the soft sell before.

“But here, on the third, is what I wanted to show you,” he says, turning to point us both back at the living-quarters section of the third floor. 

There, carved into the wall above the cave entrances, is a series of sigils I at first took for claw marks. They’re crudely but sharply cut into the stone, filled in with never-drying crimson that paints them in stark relief against the pitch-black of the stone they’re in. 

I don’t recognize them. They don’t look like any language I’ve seen written down in my fuzzy pre-death memories, no matter how I squint at them or try to interpret their designs. 

And yet, I know exactly what they say. Without even knowing how I’m reading them, or if I’m reading them, the information is simply appearing, as if tied to the shapes themselves and not my understanding of them.

It feels gross. Wrong. The knowledge is being placed there by something that’s reaching into me in a way I don’t even understand, and I want to look away, I want to stop staring.

“Vergil’s” hand lands on my shoulder, his body once again right next to mine, looming a good few inches over me, keeping us both facing that far wall.

“Magnificent, isn’t it? A gift of this place, in spite of all its curses. A language spoken by all. A tongue whose meaning cannot be misunderstood. You’re smart. You can see them. Do you understand?”

There, carved into the wall, the symbols blare their own existence at me.

TOGETHER WE ARE STRONG. ALONE, WE ARE PREY.

WE ARE ALL THE FAMILY WE HAVE.

Below that, in smaller but no less sharp or imposing words, are two columns. The one on the left is pretty short:

DO NOT DISOBEY THY PARENTS

DO NOT FORGET TO PRAY

DO NOT HIDE FROM YOUR FAMILY

DO NOT NEGLECT YOUR WORK

DO NOT LEAVE HOME WITHOUT BEING TOLD

DO NOT CONSUME FLESH WITHOUT GRACE

The one on the right is a bit longer.

COME TO THE SERMON

OBEY THY ELDERS AND THY PARENTS

FOLLOW THE COMMANDMENTS OF THE FAMILY

WATCH YOUR SIBLINGS CAREFULLY

TELL YOUR PARENTS AND ELDERS OF HARM TO THE COMMUNITY

REMEMBER WHAT YOU ARE GRATEFUL FOR

CARE FOR YOUR COMMUNITY

LOVE THY FAMILY

FEED THY FAMILY BEFORE THY SELF

PROTECT YOUR COMMUNITY BEFORE THY SELF

And beneath the list of do’s and don’t’s, a final message.

OUR HOME IS ALL THAT WE HAVE

“Not a perfect list, I well and truly know,” says my guide, the overly masculine thing whose hand is still wrapped around my shoulder, keeping me still and facing where it wants me to look. “But when faced with the enormity of such a place as this, we must establish some rules. I’m sure you understand. Those who follow the commandments of the parents above will find themselves safe, protected, part of a community. Those that fail in their responsibilities, who neglect their home for their own gain, are punished accordingly, but we are nothing but fair. Exile is only for the worst amongst us, the darkest demons whose very presence would tear this place apart with selfishness.”

And, I think to myself, keep the “worst amongst us” from voicing any particularly loud counter-arguments or complaints. I’m sure that the politically and/or physically dangerous SINners would be let loose to go wherever they please, yes, definitely, for sure.

“Usually it takes a few days to introduce someone new to the commandments, but you’re a special one. A genuine specimen, and a fascinating one at that. Manipulating SIN so early on? I know a liar when I see one, and you’ve been quite truthful, dear sibling. And in such a place, honesty is one of the few virtues we have left.”

I want to scream. Or bite him really, really hard, and try to run.

The message that led me here stops me.

IF U SEK SHELTR, FOLLO AND OBAY

If I do as I’m told, then this place might well be a shelter. I suppose I didn’t really think through the fact that I might not be able to leave if I change my mind.

Or maybe, if no one can die here, my “benefactor” decided that eternity would be enough time for me to figure something out. 

Of course the first and foremost sort of community I find in this place would be a fucking cult. The Family, with stronger, more useful members kept on tiers above those that toil below in shittier conditions. There’s barely enough motivation to do good up in a world where suffering is conditional– why would I think that it would be better here?

And is this better than the tunnels? Than the endless, lonely dark, full of hungering things?

The logical part of me wants to say no. The rest of me, the majority of me, the me that was trapped in a hole in the dark for so long I can’t even guess at the days and barely at the weeks? 

I think I would suffer worse, if it meant having a home. If it meant having someone to talk to. 

The thought makes me want to vomit. 

My guide slaps me on the shoulder, as if sensing the conclusion I’ve reached. 

“Not many so recently come into this place have done as you have,” he (it) whispers to me, as if we’re friends. “I felt the SIN shift within you all the way from my place of worship. For someone so early to this place, so unformed and unSINful, unWOUNDed, to be able to manipulate it? That’s a sign of someone with potential. There’s a home for you here, my toothsome friend. A Home.”

Again, he claps me on the shoulder.

“Well! I apologize for my excitement, dear heart. Forgive a parent their joy, hmm? Perhaps you can take a few hours, wander about before you head back to your quarters. I’ll have a talk with the other elders, get Bratu back where he’s useful rather than letting him keep bothering you and good old Samir. You deserve your rest after such an event, and once you’ve had some time to think, I know you’ll see the value of having a home here. Take a moment, explore! I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunity to get to know each other better later.”

Something in his anatomy twitches at that last sentence. A little thing, felt more through the arm wrapped around my shoulders than anywhere else. 

But the exaggerated features are striking enough that I get a picture. 

His arm around my shoulders is a thing of pain and discomfort, true, but it’s not agony. Not like my heartbeat, not like my breath. It wasn’t too painful helping Samir around, either. Touching another is a thing that can happen without the same sort of agony as most other actions I’ve felt. 

I do not like how this man seems to enjoy touching me. 

So I just nod, carefully, ignoring how my Broken Gullet makes the motion splatter a bit of saliva across my chest and still-distended gut.

I want to die.

I can’t die here, and my body isn’t worth thinking about if I can change it. 

“Good! I knew you’d see the wisdom.”

He lets go of me, leaving me feeling sickly and sticky, like he left some sort of residue though I can tell that he did not. His mask turns to me, that faceless face smiling the same smile as always.

“We’ll speak more soon, darling. Take your time, ask around if you can, and at the very least, I’ll see you come next Sermon, yes?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He leaves, and I watch him go for a moment, heading towards one of the “homes” here on the third floor. 

I turn to look down off the side of the walkway I’m on, free of any sort of railing or safety measure. I see the fifty feet or more that I could fall, past the second floor and its two-dozen members milling about, socializing, interacting, down to the first floor, kept half-obscured and even more full of lost souls, far more listless.

If I fell from here, I’m pretty sure I could crack my head like an egg. Get some sleep. 

There is protection here, I can tell. Enough, perhaps, to encourage people to have joined up willingly. It’s a temptation. 

But I can’t help but wonder whose blood they used to paint this place. What’s in the part of the first floor hidden beneath the walkways, dug further back into the cave wall? Who excavated this place? Why did they have two Wretches guarding an entrance if they had stronger, more versatile SINners that could do it better?

This is not a good place. 

I suppose I’ll stick around long enough to find out if it’s better than that lonely dark. Maybe I can at least get some answers about where I am, and what I can do. 

But this is not a good place, and I do not delude myself that its suffering is only incidental.