BELOW: BIRTH 15 (Patreon)

Wabama wabama. Posting these so back-to-back means I don't always have a ton to say on the second post, dash gnabbit. I'm having fun! I wanna write more. I'll aim for 5 chapters through the weekend, so if we manage 2 chapters today, 2 tomorrow, and then if I can manage 1-2 every weekend day before I gotta do monday's RfR, I'll be big sexy stronk baddie goodness. And if not... well, we'll cope, I dunno. The fear of burnout remains, but the itch is so much louder. Itch. Itch.

Type type type type.

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I’m at a critical threshold. The issue is double-sided, pressing me from two different directions at once. 

I have enough SIN flowing through me that, the moment I let it go, it’ll reach critical mass. What that weird evolution-trance will look like on the outside, I don’t know, but if even a single mote of SIN escaping me was enough for the Masked Father to notice, then I’m damn sure he’ll notice that. That’s the hard place.

The rock, on the other hand, is the fact that I’m running out of any ability to hold it back.

Keeping the SIN in constant movement, constantly forcing it away from myself and whatever part of me consumes it, is a constant effort. Even keeping myself in a perpetual fugue isn’t enough. There’s no way for me to maintain perfect meditation at all times, and for me to be able to control any more of it would require exactly that. Soon, it’s going to slip out of my grasp. Hours, maybe a “day” at most. 

I need a place. Somewhere isolated, at least in part, where I’ll have long enough to be able to act before I’m caught. Considering how fast Masked Father moves, how perceptive he seems to be, and even the other, still unknown figures up on the fourth floor of Home, I need someplace that meets a lot of conditions. Hidden, defended, private. 

In a cult compound. Where everyone’s homes are literally big open caves, and the overseers are literally always looking down on us, and have supernatural senses. 

Easy. I already have a place in mind.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. 

I almost feel it slip away. It almost escapes out of my control. 

I hold it in and keep myself calm, choosing not to lash out at Samir. His eyes look at me with concern. 

I must look rough. Samir’s legs are still fucked, though they hold weight a lot better now, but even still, for him to come all the way down to where I am at the back of the mining cave is no easy journey. I don’t need to speak a common language to see that human touch, the care for another. 

I don’t know what I’ve done to make him think I’m worth all the effort. I certainly don’t feel like I’ve done much to help him or even be a friend to him. Maybe it’s enough that I’ve learned a few phrases and not been a dick to him, or maybe my silence makes me easier to empathize with. 

Does it matter? He seems a good person. Good people don’t really need an excuse to be good people. 

I shake my head, waving him off. “I’m ok”, I signal, a couple basic gestures we’ve built up together getting the message across. He raises an eyebrow, saying something along the lines of “you sure?” back at me. 

I wave him off again. The less he knows, the better.

He gives me another worried look, then points a thumb back over his shoulder, and it’s only then that I realize that everyone else has already left. The other lesser SINners are checking out of their work rotation, all moving together in an exhausted haze over towards the exit to our little mineshaft, back to “rest”. 

Good. It's time, then. 

I turn from the crevice I’ve dug into the wall, ignoring the blood and bits of teeth I’ve left behind in it. A consequence of my focus– the pain helps keep me from drifting off, and the constant work keeps me from thinking too hard. The balance has gotten harder over the last few days. 

That third sermon was the final straw. I think I have enough information to do a few new things, get some tools I need, and it only emphasized how much Masked Father is interested in me. I don’t believe it’ll be too long before he confronts me more directly, or I get called up to that altar and “blessed” with a new WOUND from the community. The balance of risk to gain no longer justifies following along blindly, not to me. 

I walk, slowly and carefully, past Samir and up towards the rest of the shuffling bodies. Even at a near-crawl, I’m still faster than the crowd, all of us forced to squeeze through an entrance too small to fit more than two people at a time. 

The claustrophobia still feels loud. Here, in the press of bodies, it’s different than the pit I was left in, but the echo of it is just the same. 

I always feel claustrophobic here. I have since I first woke up in that tunnel. I felt it in the corridors, where the Shambling Hoarder and my teacher dragged me out. I felt it sharper in that hole I was left in, limbless and blind. I feel it here, every day. 

I feel it more and more the closer the Masked Father watches me. I choke on it when he touches me. 

The crowd keeps shuffling, and I go with it. Step by step. Slow and steady. Just do as I’ve always done, and swallow the pain for the sake of moving forward. To do anything else is to come apart in this place.

Such is BELOW. Even in “sanctuary”, the pain never stops. 

Samir places a hand on my shoulder, and I want to tear it off of me, tear it from his limb, rip and tear and let some of this unbearable tension free. Instead, I swallow it down, and keep my SIN moving. To do less would be to lose everything, and I will not. 

It takes me a few ragged, painful breaths before I’m stable enough to pat his hand, slowly shifting it off my shoulder with a gentleness I don’t feel. 

He’s beside me, his spear clicking on the ground as we advance. We’re almost at the exit now, the last of the crowd making their way free, thinning out. 

“Time alone” I sign at him, hoping he listens. I can’t share more, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I barely have the patience to say that much, but it’s either ask for space or shove him away, and I don’t know if I could handle anything that active right now.

Thankfully, he nods, though he doesn’t look happy about it. “मुझे बताएं कि क्या आपको मदद की ज़रूरत है।,” he says, and while I don’t understand the words, the tone is familiar. Empathy. An offer of some kind. 

I just nod and wave him away. 

We reach the front of the line, and Samir goes out first, leaving me the very last person in the mining cave. 

Most of the first-floor “family” go to the cave for menial labor. A tiny portion go up to the second floor, or maybe higher, to do whatever it is they do up there (and I don’t think it’s just chores), and a slightly less tiny portion of us go into the other entryway, to the side of the mining entrance and beneath the overhangs of the pathways leading up. Their mutations are notable, their shape distinctive, but, most importantly, they leave before we do.

So, as the last person exiting the mining cave, there’s no one looking at me as I use the crowd and the shadows to slip off to the side into that hidden space.

Like I said. Easy. 

It’s dark here. 

It’s weird to go back to true darkness when technically, there’s never light, but the outline of Home, painted in startling crimson, makes space and dimensions easy to grasp. Without them, the pitch black of lightlessness and the pitch black of the stone blend together so harshly that it makes me feel blind. 

Weeks in the Home have adjusted me to a new paradigm. But months down in that hole, kept sane by what I can only imagine to be supernatural means, gave me plenty of experience to fall back on.

It’s smaller here than the mining cave. It’s shaped more like a room, too, less a cavern and more a dedicated space with a ceiling that’s smooth and blends right into the walls around me. Even the floor is smooth, worn by the passage of feet over what must be years. I advance, moving as slowly and as stealthily as I can, as absolutely quiet as I can manage. 

There are walls here. Only a tiny entrance near the front, total blockage from everywhere else and no clear line of sight for anyone above to look down. No one who knows I’m in here, no one here to tell on me or present a complication. It’s the best possible space I can think of that I can access, as the entrances / exits to the Home are always guarded, either at their front or their far ends. 

Maybe I could just stomach it. Digest my SIN, transform, move up to a higher floor. Prove that I have value as more than just labor, that I have more than just potential. I could try and make friends with Samir properly, meet other Wretches and lesser THAUMIELs down here, try and build what little community I can here. 

But it feels like I’m drowning every time he touches me. The dread of what Masked Father is building up to, the way he looms over me, fill me all the time. Being powerless beneath someone who wants me as he does, whatever the context, makes my guts roil and my blood burn and like I’m going to vomit even when my stomach is full of nothing but rocks. I hate it. I hate him. I hate whoever else is up there with him on the fourth floor, allowing him to act this way.  I hate the sermons, the way this place tries to control us, the way that it worms into my head in so many ways, over and over, every aspect of it that keeps us from the dark and monstrous outside just another form of abuse. 

I can’t stay here. I thought that I could, at first, even with that first night and how aggressively the Masked Father reacted to my meditations. I thought things might get better. 

The only way things could get better is if I kneel down and do as I’m told, completely. If I bare myself and do what is demanded. 

The claustrophobia is choking me, every moment of every day. I can’t stay here. I refuse to. 

I walk deeper into the only hidden part of this place, and nearly fall into the first hole. 

I slip, my feet catching on the edge and only barely letting me push myself back and onto all fours. My breathing stays regular, calm, forced, because every breath has to be intentional in this place, and my intent has to keep everything inside of me in control. 

The hole is rather similar to the tunnel I crawled out of when I woke, slender, not wide enough for someone to lay down in it. It’s vertical, though, dug straight down into the earth. Now that I’ve seen the first of them, my mind adjusts my perception of the space to new possibilities, and I see the others. 

Dozens of them. Dozens upon dozens of holes, dug into the ground in this secretive chamber. 

I keep myself entirely still, listening as hard as I can, but I hear nothing. Either they’re too deep for me to hear something inside them, they’re empty, or the things inside are also being very, very still. 

I don’t think it makes any difference. If anything, this might help me. If they’re not too deep, maybe that can be an added layer of seclusion. 

I crawl forward as I am, on all fours, past one, then another, ten and twenty of the vertical shafts, moving towards the very back of the space. Only when I reach the far wall do I look towards the closest shaft, letting myself lean over it and risking my head to stare down it. 

It is just as dark as everywhere else. Just as featureless. Just as empty as the rest of the cavern for as far as my eyes can go.

But it does go deep. 

My jaw-throat aches from a long day of digging, the pain triggered by the thought. Maybe I can dig my way out through one of these. I’ve been holding back for so long, but if I really push myself, and craft the right WOUND…

I’m already risking everything. Why not more?

I arrange myself, inch by inch, until I can start sliding down the shaft, letting my hands and feet spread out and using my back as an anchor to slide down the hole rather than fall down. 

I slide down, down, down deep. Maybe thirty feet, straight down, my hands and legs burning up with friction, then more, then more, until bits of blood are marking my passage down into the dark. 

It hurts, but falling faster might break something in me. Better to be torn apart by the friction than to break to pieces and have to recover. So I keep falling, bright red painting my path down, down, down. 

The pain and the effort of swirling SIN inside me distracts me so much that when more red appears, I don’t notice it at first. 

Then some more, my foot slipping on the fresh fluid and almost making me tumble. Then another flash of red, brighter and larger than any I’ve left yet, from an angle I’m not touching. 

Forty feet. The walls are coated in red, and I have to press myself hard to the wall, skin peeling off faster, muscles only barely catching on the stone, bone starting to scrape. 

I want to scream because it hurts hurts hurts hurts–

I land with a crimson splash, and a scream echoes up out of the pit. 

It takes me a moment before I notice that I haven’t been breathing for a while. It wasn’t my scream. 

I’ve landed on someone. 

They look like they might’ve been a Wretch, once. A long time ago, maybe. Before someone came and broke their limbs, over and over. Before they were stuffed down into a hole smaller than they are, their flesh breaking and bursting. They were large, at least at some point, and where I’ve landed is soft and slick and wet and hot–

I landed on soft flesh, and the weight of my fall has broken its skin, forcing strings of intestines to leak out into the puddle of crimson down here. 

I see a face. 

The reason I say it might have been a Wretch once is that it’s not anymore. It’s contorted, its limbs soft and springy and seemingly boneless. Its face is like a slug that’s been overfilled, a sausage of meat and flesh vaguely shaped to humanoid proportions, too puffy to make out any expression. Its eyes have swollen shut, but my fall broke so much of them that the side of their head has torn open, and I can see a massive, swollen pupil staring out through the wound of their eyelid. 

It opens its mouth to try to speak, and all that comes out is a broken wail, like an accordion that’s been stabbed. But it’s still loud. 

Before I’ve even had time to process what’s happening, I’ve pushed myself off its too-soft torso, dragged myself forward by its too long, boneless limbs, and grabbed its face, crushing its mouth shut. 

“SHHHHHH,” I hiss, like a malfunctioning kettle. Without language, it’s the most I can offer. 

Out of the gash in its cheek-to-temple, that pupil, bloodshot and too-wide, tracks me.

It is so afraid. I can see every ounce of its agony, the suffering, and every time I move I feel myself sinking into it, its muscles too gentle to resist me. I feel things breaking and bursting every time I move, and my weight keeps it from moving, keeps crushing its too-soft torso as it struggles to breathe. 

It can’t die down here, but every single movement of mine tears into its tissues, ripping it apart. Like moving through a person made of silly-putty. 

I want to vomit. My stomach is full of rocks. My SIN is slipping, closer and closer to the inside of me. 

It begs me with its eyes to make the pain stop. It’s so, so scared, and everything I do only makes more of its insides get forcibly squeezed out of its body, filling the hole we’re in with even more blood and offal. 

I…

I’m swimming in it. 

The claustrophobia screams.

If I had breath in my lungs enough, I might do the same. 

I want to die.

If I do, I know I’ll wake up right back here. 

SIN: 32

A few points snuck past me, despite my best efforts. There are so many, many more, slipping out of my control every moment, dragging me towards power or transformation. 

It keeps making a noise like air escaping a burst bag, and beneath my feet, its intestines bubble and shift powerlessly against me. 

It keeps looking at me. It doesn’t look away. It doesn’t look away.

SIN: 2

VIOLENCE: 7 (5+2)

Seven Violence. My highest Aspect, now. 

I brace my feet on its play-doh insides and push my arm forward as hard as I can. 

My hand pushes through its mouth, jaw, into its skull, into its skull, until I touch stone behind it. 

The eye doesn’t stop staring at me, even as I pulp its cranium and everything in it. 

SIN: 10

It stops trying to scream. 

I’m left in the quiet of squelching organs, putty-like muscles, and drifting, bursting organs. 

I’m swimming in it. 

I want to die. 

Instead, I turn my open hand and its blood-stained digits towards me. 

My stomach, just beneath the ribs, is harder to push into than the screaming thing of too-soft flesh, but I manage it. Skin, then muscle, then the shifting bubble of slicker tissue that defines an organ.

I crush it, bursting it open like a fruit, and try not to vomit up all the blood it shoves up my throat. 

My hand stings from the acid washing over it. 

It stings worse as I take all of the Sin I’ve been forcing to keep circulating out, “uphill” through muscle and bone and vein and through none of it at all, down into my broken-open organ. 

The momentum barely holds. It’s barely enough to keep it from tumbling out of my control entirely and slipping back down into my center, and even then, some of it does slip. I don’t manage to put all of it into one place, even after all that fucking effort. 

It hurts. 

It hurts. 

It hurts.

The human mind is not designed to feel its own hands pulping flesh and organ inside its torso. 

IT HURTS.

The SIN shifts down and out and in, and I do everything I can to hold it in the right place, directly into the gaping harm I’ve just caused. 

It’s slipping. 

I’m losing control.

IT HURTS.

I want to scream. 

I make sure not to breathe, so that I can’t. 

There, amidst all that soft flesh and the pool of blood and in the dark, IT HURTS.

I lose control. 

I cannot fall unconscious here, but the pain is enough that I still sort of… go away.