BELOW: BIRTH 17 (Patreon)

The fucker keeps me awake the whole damn time. No pulped skull for me, just the agonizing, humiliating trek back up into Home. My legs drag along the ground, the open wounds of my stomach acid and the scrapes from the rocks forcing me to leave a crimson trail as I’m dragged back. 

It’s Bratu that caught me, that holds me now. His massive hand, large enough to wrap around my whole torso if he wants, drags me about by the head, the fingers just wide enough that I can see out of them as I’m dragged. 

The Wretches stare at me as I go by. The THAUMIEL SINners, those who I’ve worked alongside for weeks, all watch, and none of them say a word. No one says anything. The cult watches me as I’m paraded through the street, a limp rag of meat used to paint a trail across the first floor. 

I think I see Samir, but I’m not sure. Perspective is weird right now, staring sideways out of the malformed hand that grips me. 

I hear the Masked Father speaking as we walk, but I don’t listen. The hand muffles it, and I can use the mix of suffocation and the numbness of my broken neck to distract myself. I know what he’ll be saying, or at least I can guess. He actually talks less than I expected. I suppose the display of humiliation speaks for itself. 

Up one flight. Then the next. Then the next. 

I glimpse the commandments as I’m dragged past, up towards the fourth floor. 

In spite of myself, I’m afraid. 

I’ve never been to the fourth floor. No one I know, except Masked Father, has seen what it’s like up there. I don’t know what I’m going to see. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. 

The claustrophobia is screaming. 

I can feel it already. His touch on me. Every bit of fear I’ve felt over the last weeks is bubbling up in me, burning inside my guts, making my new WOUND seem like a cheap nothing in comparison. 

I think I’m crying. Hard to tell. 

I catch glimpses of the fourth floor through the hand holding me. More words, carved into the walls and painted bright with blood. Symbols I don’t recognize, and strange patterns. Displays of art, stylized faces, complex swirls and designs. I see one, then another door, more ornate than any of the ones below. 

The angle is all wrong, so I really can’t see it all that much, but I see the moment where I pass through one of those doors. 

A few moments later, Bratu’s hand opens, and I fall to the ground. 

Barely a second after, his mask is in my face. Too close. Too close. Close enough that his presence alone feels like someone touching me, and I’m so paralyzed that I can’t even pull away from him, even if I wanted to. 

“I knew I was right about you,” Masked Father says, the smile on his mask feeling more real than I’ve ever seen it. “I knew it. The moment I sensed that SIN escape you, I knew. I suspected earlier, of course, that WOUND of yours, but just a suspicion. But such fine control of SIN, at such a tender age of emergence? Exceptional. And now here you are!”

He lifts me up so easily that I wonder if he ever needed Bratu at all, if it was something that he did just for fucking show. My paralysis is absolute, such that I can’t even move my neck to keep my head upright, but on the plus side, the pain of getting impaled on a spike hanging from the wall is somewhat muted. 

Not gone, though. Never gone. The only thing that truly makes the pain disappear is to not be– everything else is a reduction at best. 

“When you vanished, I assumed you’d simply stopped holding back, dug properly down into the mine. But what a shock! What boldness! You went to a place forbidden to you, explored our deepest dark, found even the dark of our greater SIN, and emerged stronger. Look at you! A WOUND, crafted by hand, by amateurish artistry! And your Aspects! Oh, I can almost taste how much more you’ve become.”

His hand comes up and gently caresses my face, the spike impaling me through the shoulder to keep me upright dripping blood onto his wrist and the long, fine hairs of his arm. 

“What a lovely joy, to be proven so truly right. What a privilege it is to see so very well.”

Then he claps, making me blink, the only way of flinching I have. 

“Such entrepreneurial spirit demands just as much reward as it must merit punishment! I’m sure you have ever so many questions. Your inabilities are a terrible weakness, of course, but I suppose I don’t mind an audience that can’t interrupt.”

He reaches down to take something out of my hand, something I didn’t realize I was still holding. The soft putty-skull of the SINner I met down in the pit comes back into my field of view, its shape distorted and malformed from my grip upon it. Its lower jaw and cheekbones have been broken and reshaped into indents by my fingers, which somehow kept ahold of it even as I was dragged along. 

“This… ah. I almost didn’t recognize you, dear. This is Saranda. Silly name, I know, but she chose it, and who am I to deny such a simple choice?”

He presses its (her) face into his mask, the painted-on facsimile of a smile touching where her lips might once have been in a parody of a kiss. 

I think she’s still brain-dead. I hope she is. I would pray, if I thought it would make any goddamn difference. 

“Saranda, joy that she is, came to us a few months ago. Estimating time is tough, but physics makes for an adequate clock, in spite of its tenuous hold on our piece of reality, and she spent quite a bit of time serving right alongside the rest of our Family. And yet! Oh, and yet, the time came that needs had to be met. Saranda here decided that she would be better off hiding away, refusing to join us in our labors, suckling at the teat of Home without ever giving anything back. We can’t have that.”

He puts her head down on a shelf, stepping away from me long enough that I can force myself to stop focusing on him and look around. His home, if that is what this is, is painted crimson, but carved so much more cleanly that it barely needs it to be visible. 90-degree angles and sharp edges make for counters and at least two tables, decorating a room three or more times larger than the caves we live in on the first floor. The style is simplistic but well made, with multiple alcoves carved out. In one, I can see bits of stone and what might be flesh, carved into shapes and words in languages I can’t make out. In another, there’s–

My mind recoils. I want to vomit. I want to cry I want to die I want to not be here. 

In one of them there’s what looks like a mass of flesh, coated in fur, thick and soft and heavy. I don’t see it breathe, don’t see it move, don’t see a face, but almost on instinct I can tell that it is alive. A living being, shaped to a purpose, made soft. 

I force my eyes in another direction, turning to look at–

There’s a larger alcove. With a bed. 

Skin, flayed off the bone, long-since drained of red, with the soft growth of fur turning it to something almost plush, wrapped tightly and pinned with needles to a low platform of stone. 

It’s a bed.

“Everyone and everything has to contribute,” Masked Father says, carefully arranging the head (Saranda’s head) on a shelf opposite me, where her swollen face fails to look at me but remains in my line of sight at all times. “Including you and I. We’re not going to just feed people for free, not when food has such cost. We’re not going to house someone if that bed could be given to another, better member of our family. So her punishment, and her contribution, and her reward? Evolution.”

He turns back to me, flesh churning beneath his mask and his long hairs flowing with the movement. “You’ve been there. You’ve seen that black ocean. Those screaming, freezing currents that drag us down further into the dark, towards where our SINs have led us. But one’s journey through the dark can be shaped! Your cannibalism allowed you the possibility of that Broken Gullet. Allowed you to evolve to a Hungering Ghoul. But it’s not just choice that causes us to change, is it? Sometimes, it’s other’s choices visited upon us that change us most.”

He walks over to me, each step measured and precise, almost like a dancer, one foot balanced perfectly in front of the other. Until he’s close enough to reach out. Until his mask takes up almost all of my field of view. 

“Break someone’s bones often enough, consistently enough, and they can be made to change in fascinating ways. Stuff someone so full that they bloat, and they might stay that way. Limit one’s options, cripple their possibilities, over and over while visiting upon them the same acts, over and over, and when they at last reach the threshold, when they at last receive a generous donation of SIN that pushes them to where the family asks them to be, those currents of black water will drag them down, down, down, surrounding them with weak and powerless pulls and a single almighty whirlpool that pulls them right where you made them to be.”

I’m not breathing, I realize. I don’t know if it’s because my lungs are paralyzed or if it’s because I haven’t even thought to inhale since I got here. 

Masked Father’s head moves to one side, tilting like a bird, and I see Saranda behind him. I see her twitch a little, her too-soft flesh deforming under gravity as she comes back. 

“It takes effort. So much effort to get it right. So many times, over and over and over, to figure out how it works. But eventually, given enough time, one can get quite good at it. Everyone believes, wrongly, that we all suffer equally down here, that every moment is suffering and that’s what must be, but it can be worse. You can be a thing whose bones are too soft. Whose skin is too fragile. Whose insides are like putty, and whose blood and flesh regenerate evermore, filling a pit down in the dark so that everyone else may eat.

“And, as you might have noticed, so those responsible can become more.”

His smile has never felt sharper, or worse. The fact that he hasn’t touched me since he hung me from this fucking spike almost feels worse than if he had, as if the anticipation of the horror is build-up enough. 

“Brutes and monsters see SIN and know it to be a thing of direct violence, of direct consequence. Tear someone apart, gain SIN. Torture someone, gain more. Eat someone, gain more still, over and over. The big beasts of the dark do all three, in sequence. There’s one type of beast I’ve met out there, a Hoarder, or one of their varietals, which hoards SINners on its skin or in its stomach, digesting them constantly, but sequentially, so they heal just enough to be digested again all over. But the strength of humanity has ever been our ability to work as packs, to build together.”

He steps back, a little spin adding some flair to the act as he wanders back between me and Saranda’s head, which is twitching now. 

“Hurt someone, and you gain power. But make someone else hurt someone, and you gain power without even needing to be in the room. Less, sure. But if you make industry of it? Make a family of it? How much of that trickling crawl can you gain?”

He turns back to me, ever the showman. 

“Quite a bit, dear. Quite a bit.”

He steps up close now, and at last, at last, he touches me. His hand comes to one shoulder, his other coming up to cup my face in an almost-tender act.

I feel sick. 

“That’s how I found you, you know. All my strength, all my senses, all of the Aspects and WOUNDS and GNOSIS I hold, you escaped all of it, so clever were you. But in the end, it was your SIN that led me to you. Every time you hurt poor Saranda, I felt it, trickling up to me in the tiniest little stream of confession. And once you learn how, you can track it. You can feel where it’s coming from. I knew where you were the moment you pulped your poor sibling by falling down into that deep, dark hole, and I knew where you were every moment after.”

He comes so close that I think he’s going to kiss me. At last, finally, I can feel him breathing, feel where he’s breathing from. Little slits on the underside of his mask, along the edges of his “face”, drawing in air in a constant, unending stream of inhale and exhale. 

He doesn’t even need a face to breathe. He just needs a mask with which to smile. 

“You did so well. You prepared so thoroughly. But you didn’t understand. Your ignorance led you right back Home. Right back to me. So beautiful, and so full of potential, to do so much so completely unaided.”

Closer. I think the tip of one of my broken teeth brushes his mask.

“Don’t worry. Such a glorious effort deserves a glorious reward. I’m proud of you. The newest member of our family, but already so accomplished. That ignorance is not a SIN I will demand of you. I will cure it instead. I will pull it from you and help you eat it alive. I will teach you, and you will be a part of our Family in truth.”

And then he pulls back, putting his face close to mine and his body tight against my side, so that my inability to move my neck forces me to stare at Saranda as her mouth opens, and, lungless, starts trying to scream. 

“One way or another.”