BELOW: BIRTH 19 (Patreon)

I know which days are sermon days because that’s when the Masked Father is gone the longest. He’s gone at least part of the day, every day, but most of the time it’s only an hour or two, maybe three, before he comes back. But his sermons go long, as do his “visiting hours” afterwards, walking about amongst the lower classes of “Home”. 

When he’s not here, trying to brainwash me, teaching me all about what he knows of moving SIN within the body and working to convince me to aid him, to break me, I have time. 

On sermon days, I have the most time. 

I need time if this is going to work. I need more than just a few minutes, and I need to make sure everything goes perfectly, because I don’t see how I’ll succeed if not. 

He walks out the door, and I wait for one minute. Two. Three.

I count to sixty ten times before I hear his voice, translated out of a half-dozen throats into a cacophony. 

I grab exactly ten of my points of SIN and shove them towards my stomach.

The SIN isn’t tangible in the same way I am. It’s not particles in the air, it’s more of an energy, and it’s taken me a long time to be able to control it precisely enough to wield just ten out of the seventeen “units” of it I have. It takes a moment for it to go from not being real to having very real effects.

Like flooding into my Suffering Stomach.

The WOUND audibly gurgles, shifting and roiling, the sensation of my own gastro-intestinal track breaking open beneath the sudden surge of acid making my eyes almost roll back into my skull even with all of the pain I’ve gotten used to. 

It’s in the name. “Suffering Stomach”. When I used it back in the tunnel, it was only because it got diluted by rock and Saranda’s body that I kept from getting devoured by it. 

And if SIN can be used to fuel things, why not my WOUND? A manifestation of this place, designed to cause harm to me as much as my environment. 

At the same time as I feel my stomach burst and the acid begin to flood through my lower body, I stretch my chin forwards as much as possible, wriggle the bits of broken bone and tooth on the part of my Broken Gullet I can control, and bite. 

Trying to move even the slightest inch while my entire body weight is on the spike is futile. I’ve tried that plenty. But if I suddenly became lighter? If I conveniently lose a few pounds, then it’s not quite so hard to forcibly tilt my head forward around the thing impaling me, as I’m no longer being pulled down onto it quite so forcefully. 

My paralyzed lungs offer me no way in which to scream as my ruptured Wound eats through my lower intestines, my abdominal wall, and through the bone of my lower spine and hips. 

My Broken Gullet wraps partways around the spike. 

And then it’s gone.

I collapse to the floor in a pile of my own slushied meat, burning myself on the still-vital acids as I collapse nervelessly to the ground. My face lands in my half-melted intestines, and I can feel the acid of my Suffering Stomach eating into my eyes and nose. 

But the spike is gone.

I knew that when my Broken Gullet swallows things, they don’t go directly to my stomach. They only sort-of go there at all, I think. First, they go someplace else, and they do so strangely, or I’d lose most of the “food” I carved with my shrapnel-face-hole out of the bottom of my new neck-mouth. There’s plenty of stuff that fits in my Broken Gullet that wouldn’t fit past my sternum, but which makes it down without choking me. 

I gambled, and won, that that effect could be used in other ways. 

The relief is so bad I want to cry.

Instead, I take my seven remaining points of SIN and shove them as hard as I can to the base of my skull. 

Work. Please work. Please work.

If rotting away is something that happens as SIN erodes, then SIN is what forces flesh to keep existing in this place. If breathing in that infernal energy is what makes my heart beat, then SIN is what fuels my biology.

MANIPULATION OF SIN (2nd TIER)

One’s being is defined by SIN, but through comprehension, through will, a SINner may shape that definition, turning their acts of un-grace into specific steps, specific changes, and further distance from the ABOVE. More than just a thing to imbibe, the true manipulator can wield SIN as fuel, as lubricant, as multiplier of harm.

So it can also fuel my regeneration.

I push the remaining few points I have to the back of my neck and hold them there. I hold them there, even as the sensation of pushing sludge uphill becomes harder and harder to hold onto, even as I feel the energy slipping and sliding off of the lack of a clear place to anchor itself. Enough SIN pushed into harm forms a WOUND, I know that, but this is just seven points. It’s just a little, and I’m not intending to make a WOUND. I pray that that matters. I pray that this works. I pray to no one, but I pray nonetheless, desperately, painfully.

Please oh please let this work, I beg of you, please, please let this work, I’ll give anything, I’ll do anything, I’ll be anything, just please oh please–”

My finger twitches. 

Then again. 

The sensation of pain, of dissolving in a slurry of acid, is what tells me that I succeeded. The pain, muffled but never gone, roars back to me as something in my neck reconnects, as the SIN I’m holding against my spine starts sort of fading away rather than flowing into something. It fades, consumed by biology, and the nerves in my neck slide back into place.

I don’t hesitate. My arms shoot out, jerky and uncoordinated both from the healing and the month I just spent paralyzed. They work enough, they work enough, and I drag myself free of the acid, jerk my head free of the meat-slurry, feel my face slough off but keep going anyways. My eyes are fuzzy, the acid damaging them but not enough to truly blind me.

Missing the lower half of my body, missing my WOUND, even, I drag myself forward like a fucking zombie, forward, forward, away from that spike. 

There’s a wet sound. Soft. 

I look at the head in the box.

Her eye is still tracking me. Even without the muscles to move it, even made into a putty of a person, I recognize that gaze. 

Please.

I only have half a body. I’m probably losing just a shitload of blood. Wherever I go will be obvious. I’m not strong enough to fight back, not yet. 

But it’s like he said. Ignorance is what got me captured, what led me back to this place. When I hurt Saranda, he could feel it, could track me by it. How well can he track it? I don’t know. Can he tell who’s hurting who, or just the general area it’s happening in? I don’t know. 

But if I start digging now, alone, so small I need less than half the usual tunnel space, then he can’t track me. He can follow the tunnel, but can he follow me? No. If he could, why bother waiting where I was going rather than just digging down and grabbing me earlier, the moment I pulped his victim’s guts? 

I can make it. 

There’s not much acid left. I use what’s left of my lower body as a buffer to push it, moving a wet slop of blood and tissue towards the far wall, past his bed. It’s slow, I’m slow, I can’t move that fast, and the acid is running out of strength the longer I wait. 

The eye keeps following me. Screaming in perfect silence, screaming, unable to even open its lips or breathe. I don’t know how much she’s even aware at this point. The swelling of her flesh must be putting incredible pressure on her brain, must be sinking her already soft cranium out of place and deforming it further. 

If I use both hands, I’ll dig faster. I’ll be able to maneuver better. Without a stomach for things to go to, I wonder if my Broken Gullet will still transfer things weirdly, or if it’ll just drop out of the bottom of my ribcage. 

I don’t need to breathe anymore. I haven’t breathed in a fucking month. It’s amazing what the human brain can get used to. The levels of animal panic and outright agony that can become second nature when exposed to the right amount of time and the right amount of trauma. I won’t need as much space as before, won’t need to worry about airflow. I can dig so much faster now, with all of my Aspects far greater than before. 

I can make it. 

Please.

If I look back, I’ll see that eye still following me. Still tracking my movements. 

Still begging. 

I want to help her. 

I want to help her. 

My whole body trembles with the thought. Agony flows through me like blood and all of it demands action, movement, demands I do the right thing.

But I am a worm in the dirt.

What does that matter she’s my responsibility my fault I hurt her she’s here as torture to me–

I barely know her and I can’t get her out of the box without breaking it and that makes more noise and–

I got her into this and hurt her and broke her and dug through her and she deserves better and I deserve better–

I deserve to be able to do as I please and it would please me to take her apart to grant her peace to take her with me–

If I had a stomach I could–

I can’t.

 A worm does not concern itself with those caught in hunter’s beak. 

A worm merely digs–

And prays that it is not next.

The acid only softens the stone by the time I’ve slopped all of my guts over to the far wall. The wall at the back of the cave, which is at the top of the Home, which means I can dig out and up. 

It softens it enough that the first bite is easy. The second bite is easy. The third. 

I feel the matter disappear down a Gullet that eats through a mechanism, an organ system, a magic that I don’t understand. 

And then I feel it shift past me. Like indigestion, like heartburn but going down, I feel it slide out of the ragged filth of my missing stomach. 

I can make it. 

Wet sounds. Soft. 

She can’t speak. She can’t even move. All she can do is stare at me and make those little noises. All she can do is beg, in a language that neither of us invented but that both of us could see in the other, suffering in tandem. 

She begs. 

Please.

But I am a worm. 

I am a hateful beast of the earth, vile and reviled. 

So I bite into the earth. I scratch my hands into the stone, forcing parts of it to crumble around the ragged edges my Broken Gullet makes, pulling out rocks and forcing open cracks. I dig myself into the wall, forcefully, my face bleeding from pressing too hard to the rock as I try to squeeze myself into there. 

At some point I break one of my collarbones. At some point, my teeth find the shoulder of that arm and eat. 

My own flesh tastes just as vile and just as sweet. 

But no SIN rewards my desperation. Only the pain of becoming smaller, and the joy of fitting into the hole I have dug. 

I keep going. 

I keep going. 

I angle my body, and I torture myself, and every inch of ground I gain is bought in desperation and panic. I’m not so stupid that I think that Masked Father or Bratu can’t dig or break their way through a few inches of stone. I need to get deeper. Deep enough that I can dig forward faster than they could dig me out. 

I can’t hear the sounds of the sermon anymore over my desperation. 

Over that soft sound behind me.

Please. 

We both beg. Only I move forward. 

I don’t dare look back. I don’t dare stop for even a moment. 

I can Endure this pain. 

I can Command myself through this torment. 

I can cause this rock ahead of me such terrible Harm.

So I dig. 

I think I hear a sound behind me. Time isn’t so much something I track as it is something that happens, nowadays, and being in the dark does not help with that, but it must be some time after I started. It must be hours. It must be far enough behind me that I can get away.

It must be. 

I hear screaming, muffled through the rock. Yelling and laughing and rage. I feel the stone tremble, feel the walls I am in shiver and shake as I bite forward and close up the space behind me in excreted rock. 

I feel vibrations running through the wall as I dig, dragging myself upwards and outwards with every inch of broken ground and devoured stone. 

I don’t stop.

Until the shrike’s beak closes around it, the worm continues to writhe and eat and dig. 

Another inch forward. 

Another inch away. 

Eventually, the vibrations fade. The sound gets quieter. The world gets darker. 

Somehow, I can still feel her begging.

Somehow, I keep going.