BELOW: BIRTH 16 (Patreon)

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My first conscious thought after I come back is that I want to go away again. It’s not unconsciousness, not really, but it’s the next closest thing I’ve experienced. All that pain, until it was nothing but pain, until my awareness is so fucked that I can’t tell where my suffering ends and I begin. 

The next thought I have is that I’m floating. It’s almost nice. 

Then I remember what I’m floating in. 

Then I’m aware enough that I can kinda-sorta see again, and in spite of everything, I smile. 

SIN: 13

WOUND CREATEDSUFFERING STOMACH (RARE): Torn open and made to drench flesh in pain and acid, an organ birthing violent digestion that burns through living and Still matter just the same.

 I breathe for the first time in recent memory. 

It hurts. 

I do it again anyway. 

I laugh. 

It comes out all wrong, my throat no longer shaped for it, but still, I laugh. 

I was right. It worked. It worked.

And, considering I’m still feeling the too-soft flesh of the person in the pit surrounding me, I haven’t been found yet. 

I made a WOUND. My plan was a fucking success, unexpected horror notwithstanding. 

I look down, and there, as I float on my back, I see what’s become of my gut. 

There’s a clenched, almost spiral scar, its color different than the rest of it, rawer, a bit red. It sits just to the right of where my belly button would be, if I had one, and it feels loose, like there’s not enough muscle tissue to hold it in place unless I’m actively working on it. 

A WOUND. One I made on purpose. A reward for my self-mutilation. 

Now for the next part of the plan. 

The surprise of another sufferer being down here, as well as the surprise of there being these strange shafts in the first place, has thrown me off. Not so much that I can’t plan on my feet. 

I look and see that its skull is still in a broken down slurry, hopefully, hopefully, unable to think or feel or anything. 

Its eye is still staring at me. 

I decide not to pay attention to whether or not the pupil tracks me. I can’t focus on that right now. I can’t. 

Instead, I reach for my new WOUND, bracing for the pain. 

If the name “suffering” wasn’t clear enough, there’s also the fact that it’s a WOUND. I haven’t seen anyone with one that doesn’t seem at least unpleasant, though outright painful seems pretty common. Its use, most likely, won’t be pleasant. 

I’m proven right almost immediately. 

My hand touches the spiral of scar tissue and it unfolds almost willingly, opening wide. Immediately, a hissing stream of pinkish material, not-quite-acid, floods forth out of it a steam, splashing into the blood and guts all around me. 

Almost immediately, a horrific gas starts to form, churning and bubbling up from the biological matter all around. It turns from the already too-soft materials of before into something more like a slurry, digested visibly and at tremendous speed. 

Perfect. 

It hurts really fucking bad. It feels like taking a dump out from the front of my guts, except it’s also like vomiting up bile, so acidic and sharp that it’s worse than anything I’ve puked up before. 

With a flex of my hand, it closes back up. Sealing the wound, keeping the stinging on the inside for now. The pain doesn’t fade much at all, but at least it stops the flow. That burst of heavy fluids was pretty intense, but already I can feel that it’s not an endless source, just like my Broken Gullet doesn’t have endless space inside of it. More than should be possible, but not so much that I don’t have limits. 

Ok. Ok ok ok.

I still feel like my gut is full of rocks, but that’s fine. I can fit some more. I’ve been holding myself back plenty. 

I turn to face the wall, open my Broken Gullet wide, and bite. 

And bite, and bite, and bite, again and again, until the ache is too much. 

Then I turn and vomit, puking up rock into the soup of the person I’ve mutilated. 

I repeat the process over and over, until there’s a solid hole in the wall large enough to put my upper body into. Only then do I lean back, align myself with the hole, and tear my Suffering Stomach open. 

The acid disgorges easily, flowing out of me and into the hole in the wall, filling it up. It’s pressurized enough that I think I could use it as an attack if I needed to, but more than that, it’s almost like napalm, the way it just sticks to the rock. 

At least, I assume it’s like napalm. Never saw it personally, but that’s the only way I ever heard it described. 

It makes short work of the rock, turning it into a slurry that oozes forth out of the hole into the pit that I’m in. Acid-molten rock falls into the filth all around me, right alongside the blood and floating guts and too-soft tissue. 

Ok.

Ok. 

There’s… there’s no way for me to dig my way out of this hole without digging through this person, or poisoning, malforming, and crippling them by filling their healing biology with things that should not be. For me to be free, it– they have to suffer. 

I turn to look at their head. 

The eye is still staring. The rest of its skull is mostly pulped, but half-intact again, like a malformed balloon of puffy, swollen flesh. 

I…

I’m not going to stop digging. 

I don’t want to hurt this thing. 

So. So. 

I’m going to gamble. 

With my free hand, the one opposite my new WOUND, I reach towards it.

The eye does follow me. It’s at least almost conscious. 

I feel sick. 

What I plan to do won’t be any less vile. 

VIOLENCE: 7

Not crazy, but high enough that I can feel the difference, especially in this too-soft flesh. It breaks more easily against me than when I first fell in here, and I know that if I try, it’ll be far worse. 

So I try. 

My hand reaches to where I think its neck joins to its shoulders, forming my hands into something like a spear, and stab.

+5 SIN

SIN: 18

It takes both too long and not long enough at all to tear apart all that soft flesh and carve its head free. 

Thus, the gamble. Will the head regrow from the body, or the body from the head? 

I hope its the head. I really, really hope its the head. 

I turn and start biting again, turning to spit out the stones and fill the empty space with acid. Again, again, again. I don’t know how long I was “gone”, but I don’t think it was more than an hour, which means I don’t have much time left until our next “shift”. Two hours of rest, of that dripping blood filling that goddamn bowl. 

Which means, sooner than later, there’s going to be people coming in here to do… whatever it is the people who come in here do. There’s no way they’re not going to come check this shaft, especially considering I’m making plenty of noise comparative to the dead silence of before. I have to hurry up and get far enough into the side of this shaft that I can hide inside a little hole of my own, and then I can start hiding out more permanently. Once I do that, I can start breathing, start drawing in more SIN, start looking for a way out. 

No choice but to commit. 

The claustrophobia is screaming.

But not as loudly as when he touches me. 

I keep digging, holding the head of my victim in one hand, using the other to clear space, crack little gaps in the stone, and disgorge the acid that I spent so much SIN crafting.

I can’t hear over the noise I’m making whether or not someone’s arrived, so all I can do is keep pushing forward. Keep digging. 

Bite. Spit. Claw. Digest. 

Bite. Spit. Claw. Digest.

Dig.

Dig. 

Dig.

And then I can fit my legs into the space I’ve carved, and what’s left of the person that was in here before starts too ooze down the little tunnel I’ve started crafting. 

I might drown in here. I might suffocate.

But it’s better than staying here. 

DIG.

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The head in my hands, still much too soft for comfort, hasn’t stopped trying to scream in a while. Which is a good sign that it’s conscious.

-15 SIN

VIOLENCE: 8 (7+1)

+1 SIN

SIN: 4

The act of mutilating this poor bastard pushed me to the threshold of another Aspect point. I put it right back into Violence again. Now that I’m building up some numbers, I can feel how it’s making a difference, making it easier to break apart the stone, to dig through it, even to digest it with my Suffering Stomach.

More importantly, at least now, it makes it much, much easier to hurt the screaming head in my hands, bloated like a fucked-up sausage. It makes it less difficult to more precisely stab a finger into its spongey, tofu-like skull, where I can take its brains apart. 

It stops trying to scream for a while. Its eye even stops trying to follow me, though I think part of that is how the wound that carved open its swollen eyelid is healing over bit by bit. 

My gamble paid off. It’s regenerating from its skull, from its seat of consciousness. I just have to keep mutilating that consciousness to shut it off whenever I can. 

It’s better than the alternative, I tell myself. It’s better than letting it suffer, than forcing it to suffer, to turn to slurry and filth behind me as I dig. 

It’s better. 

+5 SIN

And it… it also helps me. Every time. My numbers are going up faster than ever before, every time I torture the poor fuck into unconsciousness. In the time it would take for breathing to get me 5 SIN, I have to stab him a good three times at least. More than triple the pace of even the most ideal breath-pattern I’ve been able to find. 

I keep digging, swimming through my own bile and molten rock and dissolved flesh. 

I’m out of sight. I’m isolated. I’m somewhere private, somewhere where I can hide, and I can keep digging, and I can find someplace where this person can regenerate without me, and. And. 

The tunnel is so small. It takes so much to move the stone from ahead of me to behind. The acid stings my skin and the rock cuts me as I crawl. 

It’s like a bad joke, right? Everything hurts. I want to laugh, but I can’t spare the breath. There’s not enough air. 

The head in my hands stirs, and I put it to sleep again. 

+5 SIN

Every few minutes. Maybe I could be more thorough, damage it in such a way that it takes longer to regenerate, but… 

I’m scared to. And it’s a lot of SIN, keeping it like this.

I wonder if that’s why it was down in the pit to begin with. 

I don’t keep it banked this time, don’t try and move it away from my core. The instant I have enough points, I upgrade an Aspect, almost always Violence. Anything to make the digging easier, faster, better. 

I can make it. If I go far enough, I’ll hit another tunnel, or a pocket of space, some way to escape. I think I remember the direction I originally came in from, and I had to climb up to get to the Home, so if I keep going more or less the way I’m going I should find something. 

I will find something. 

I will. 

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+172 SINSIN: 13ASPECTS: 

VIOLENCE: 14 (8+6)One’s ability to cause Harm and Suffering

DESIRE: 8 (6+2)One’s ability to Perceive and Influence indirectly

CONSUMPTION: 7 (6+1)One’s ability to Devour and Endure

COWARDICE: 9 (6+3)One’s ability to Avoid harm and find Escape

TYRANNY: 4One’s ability to Command and Dominate

SALVATION: N/AOne’s ability to Exist

Crossing the threshold of 10 made a significant change to my Violence. Now, the rock cracks if I punch it. My teeth carve through the stone like tough jerky, barely needing to gnaw, and the acid eats multiple feet forward, faster than before. As I’ve pushed more and more into it, I’ve only gotten better at breaking apart the ground around me, but I started to feel the imbalance, how every movement was starting to hurt more than before. A point into Consumption helped with that. Desire, to try and sense something, anything that can point me the right way, to find a sign I’m almost free.

Cowardice, so I go faster. Away. Away. 

I’m starting to get too harmful, though. Somehow, even just holding the head in my hand is enough to make the puffy flesh get cut, bleed, burst and disgorge gibbets of meat at the slightest twitch of my fingers. 

There has to be a way to control it. Maybe with time and meditation, I could manage it with willpower and practice alone.

The claustrophobia is screaming. I’m so afraid. Everything hurts.

I keep digging.

I have to be close now. I can’t even see the blood behind me now, the pit I fell into turned completely invisible from distance or the sludge I’ve put behind me as I’ve dug forward. There’s barely any air left, but I have to be close. I have to. 

The head stirs. 

I think I try to cry, this time. My eyes color everything in red, and I know I’m crying blood. 

I pulp its frontal lobe and keep digging. 

+5 SIN

SIN: 18

The decision is easy. The one thing I haven’t pushed for, haven’t changed at all, the one I feel most reluctant to touch. 

TYRANNY: 5 (4+1)

Maybe it’s because I’m looking for it, but I swear, for a moment, I can feel my joints relax. My tightness, holding me back, is suppressed as I demand I keep moving forward. Maybe my fingers are a little more careful when I hold the head. 

With that, I think I have the stats mapped out. I’m pretty sure I know where everything goes, what everything does, which means I have more options to move forward. 

Bite. Claw. Spit. Digest. 

Dig.

Dig. 

Bite–

And it feels different. Not as densely packed. It comes apart easily against my Gullet. 

I feel my eyes go wide as I pause, just for a moment. 

I throw myself into the work, harder than before, almost manic. I’m moving fast, carving blindly forward, a worm in the bowels of hell tasting air and trying with everything I have to reach it. 

Bite. Claw. Bite. Claw. Bite. Claw. No time to diversify, no time to spit it out. It’s been hours down here and I want out. 

Bite. Claw. Bite. Cl–

My hand breaches into open air. 

With a final, violent spasm, I tear through the last layer of rock, using what’s left of my digestive juices to soften it and then hitting it as hard as I can. It cracks like thick clay, tough and dense and solid, but not against whatever supernatural power imbues my jaws, not against the impossible chemistry of my stomach. 

I breach the surface, emerging from the claustrophobic confines into someplace new. Even the act of tumbling out of my tunnel almost drags a sob out of me, my relief is so profound. 

As I’m falling towards the ground, a hand wraps around my head. 

My neck almost snaps from the force of my body falling past my head, and I feel muscle tear as it does. Before I’ve even realized where I am, I’m already clawing, swiping my hand at whatever’s holding me–

And striking cold bone, armored and plated over slick muscle.

My attacks do almost nothing. I scrape against the bone, leaving marks but failing to penetrate. 

My other hand tries to go to my stomach, my Broken Gullet trying to bite–

Snap.

The sound of my neck breaking. 

Everything goes limp. 

I want to die. 

The fingers open just a bit. Just enough that I can see out of the massive mitt holding me suspended. 

His mask is there. Right there, almost pressed against the hand.

“There you are, you beautiful thing.”