BELOW: BIRTH 20 (Patreon)

Time is a thing that happens. It happens to me, and around me, and at no point do I recognize its passage as more than a haze. 

I don’t know if blood loss is an issue in Hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a factor. Light-headedness is a bitch and a half to deal with, and sort of keeps me in the same perpetual fugue state I’ve been in for a while, this time whether I want to be or not. There’s no air here, not as far as I’m aware, though maybe “air” is just empty pockets of space down here, because I’ve never really felt wind, except if that was the case then why would I get a reward for breathing?

Not like it much matters. Every moment my mouth isn’t full of stone is a moment where I’m actively working to change that. 

I feel my body keep trying to heal, but it does so in an unnatural way, growing out without ever really closing the wounds. Scar tissue is a pipe-dream, but every time the edges of my wounds rub up against the miniscule pocket of space I’m in, they get chewed up again, always keeping me about the same size. 

One arm, most of a ribcage, and a head. All I have left. And yet, I can’t help but feel absurdly happy just to be alive. To be free. In misery, suffering the sound of that silent look at me, and in pain, still starving, still hurting, but I don’t fucking care, because I’m not there anymore.

Feels like I just keep crawling from one fucked up cave to another, ever since I wole up. Might be nice to do something else someday. Find a big field. Maybe some fucked up nightmare ocean. 

Or not. Nightmare ocean sounds bad. I definitely used to be scared of open waters. Maybe I’ve replaced that with a fear of closed spaces now, though. The human brain can adapt to a lot, but fuck, this is a lot of bad experiences in very tight spaces, over and over and over and over and–

So I don’t get any fresh SIN, which sucks. No way to upgrade my shit, design a new WOUND, anything like that. And yet, I find that I don’t mind, because there’s at least two things I can do that don’t seem to really require SIN at all.

GNOSIS and Aspects. 

Building my Aspects with SIN is definitely a lot faster, and a lot less painful, but it’s not the only way. This place punishes suffering as much as it punishes harming others, because either way, it seems, existence itself is considered a SIN by this place. Acting in line with the descriptors in the Aspects allows me to deepen them, entrench them in me, train them. 

And GNOSIS. So far, I’ve only managed to acquire one, and only managed to use it with SIN points, but I don’t think it’s required. Gnosis is a comprehension. It’s understanding of some kind, esoteric knowledge, and there’s more things to think about than just the fucking xp system for this abominable piece of shit existence. 

I’m digging, going in a straight line, as best as I can. I’m going to keep going until I stop. I’m going to keep going until I can’t anymore, and then I’ll stop and keep going.

“ONE WHO ENDURES STILLNESS”

Common Title

Trapped, unable to move or even breathe, this SINNER has maintained their consciousness, has kept their sanity and self, refusing the erosion of Stillness. 

+1 TYRANNY

+2 CONSUMPTION

+15% STEALTH WHEN PERFECTLY STILL

SIN DEGRADATION SLOWED BY 7%

I’m not Still, but that slow-down of whatever “SIN degradation” is will keep me going a little longer than someone else. And maybe I’ll get another title while I dig. Maybe I’ll…

It’s all maybes. All nothings. All distractions to keep me busy while I’m still moving. 

I dig. I eat. I shit out the mess from the hole of my ribcage. I dig. I eat. 

I find a lot of time to think, when I’m not trying to build an escape plan in my skull, or actively enduring the Cult Bitch’s constant fucking blabbering, or dreading his return. I spend a lot of it thinking about who I used to be. 

The memories, as always, tease me with their vagueness. Toy with me by forcing me to forever chase them, and yet forever have them slip through my fingers. 

It’s like trying to remember a dream, except the dream was me. It was decades. It was moments that defined who I am, because it wasn’t by happenstance that I crawled out of a hole in the ground. It was by choice. It was by will. It was because I was a real person, and I still am, and I’ll do everything to stay that way. Everything. 

So I spend every moment that I can remembering the person that existed before me. 

I was born someplace tropical. Bright. I got bit by mosquitoes a lot. I used to be allergic to them, and they would swell up huge. I drank chocolate milk a lot. Spaghetti and meatballs, but I preferred it with cut-up hot dogs. 

At some point, I stopped being there. I moved, I think maybe with my mom. I had siblings. I fought them, sometimes, but I loved them, and hated them, and loved them worse but the best I could. 

I had a job. I traveled, sometimes, and I liked to go places with lots of greenery, with lots of beaches, places that had languages I had to learn. Sometimes it was about that job, and other times it wasn’t. I liked to write, to paint, but mostly write. I knew sword-fighting. 

I was in love. At least five times, I think, for different periods each time. I wasn’t in love when I died. When that person ended, in a way. I was alone, then, at least in that sense, though I was still loved, and I loved many. I had friends. I had community. I remember dinners, parties, dancing, hiking, watching movies together. I remember that I used to love horror movies, and shitty movies, and action flicks, and stuff that had bright neon in it. I remember… some movie with a bald guy, and it was so bad, but it was so bad it would make me laugh and laugh, and I would pause and spend time talking about it and annoy the hell out of everyone I was already annoying the hell out of. 

I liked to cook. 

I’m alive. I used to be alive. I used to be a person. All of that darkness, all of that suffering, it’s all I have except the dream that came before. And what a dream. What a horrible, fading, brightly lit dream.

I used to love colors. Purple was my favorite. Neon and dark and swirly, and it went well with orange and yellow and red and even blue, all of the wonderful things that used to be so real but which are gone from me now, save for pitch and crimson. 

I think that’s the trick. The real thing of this place, of BELOW. It makes us less than human. 

It takes away pleasure. Comfort. Joy. It takes away even the memory of these things, turning them to a slurry of half-real things that can never be fully held. Nothing to eat except each other. Nothing to breathe except needles and toxic gas and burning embers. Even touch, that most human of needs, is replaced, transformed into a thing of pain, discomfort, suffering, because touch hurts, because being in this body hurts. 

No comfort. No community. No life. No death. No safety.

No past. No future. Only an interminable now, and all the suffering it holds. And it holds as much as it can, and as much as it can is a lot.

It makes the dream of hell, divided by nine layers, into a bad joke. There, at least, the punishment is finite. There, at least, there is purpose. There, at least, you experience one torment at a fucking time. 

This place is all of them, forever, and the only comfort is in more suffering, visited upon another. It is the burning of the lake of fire and suffocation and crawling on one’s belly in the dirt and being violated and being forgotten and being unmade and being made into something horrific, and it dares to say that I deserve it. 

That very first message. 

YOU HAVE DIED

YOU HAVE SINNED

YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED

THE ABOVE ALL IS CLOSED TO YOU

Judged by what? Sinned how? What could anyone do to deserve this?

Nothing. My understanding of what is moral does not allow for that. There is no one and nothing that could ever deserve the kind of torment visited on me here, and I know already that others have suffered worse. And I can imagine some truly profound, depraved fucking shit, especially after a few weeks with Cult Bitch.

I hate him. I want him to suffer as I have suffered. I want him to hurt so much worse than he hurt me.

And yet, not even he deserves to be here. Not even he is worthy of this place. Every single emotion I have falls beneath the simple fact that my ideals define me more than my emotions, just as the life I lived before this defines who I am now. 

This place should not exist. Nothing in a truly good or truly loving universe could ever allow it to be. This place, in and of itself, disproves any reality of a kind and loving God, because anything omniscient that creates or even allows this place is something which cannot be fundamentally good. 

So say I.

I judge this place, and I find it vile.

I judge BELOW, and find it wanting.

Better an infinite nonexistence than this. 

That’s one of the things I remember about who I was. One of the loudest things.

When I was alive, I didn’t believe in god. In heaven or hell. I thought that, when I died, I would go to the same place as before I was alive. I would dissipate, and everything that I am would continue on, just in a combination different from the one that made me. 

Frightening, in a way. But peaceful. Peaceful and beautiful and poetic and kind. To continue to be part of the same wonder that created me in the first place, part of a land of infinite cold and dancing stars and billenia of years, of grass and laughter and art and tasty food and books and music, oh fuck, oh god do I miss music. 

It would have been good. 

And even if it was just nothing. Even if it was just wishful thinking, and I’d just end, just cease to be, just not exist anymore and be gone forever and not even be real enough to understand that, to feel that, to fear that, it would be better than this. 

A hell of punishment, even, would be better than this. 

This is a hell of apathy. A hell of hate. A hell whose existence sees me, and judges me, and finds me worthy of torment and suffering infinitely, for no other reason than that I chose to exist in the face of agony and pain and the unknown. 

For no other reason than that I exist, BELOW blesses me with torment, forever and ever, amen.

I hate it. 

I hate it and it is not because it hurts me, though it does. It is not even that it insults me, though its every fiber and fragment insults me profoundly. 

It is a hate born of wrath, which I have always thought of as rage born of justice, born of righteousness, born of judgement.

YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED

That’s fine. I defy its opinion. I do not acknowledge its view of me. It is wrong, because that which created it is wrong.

I judge it first, and I find it wanting.

I find it wrong. 

I see hell, and I know its existence to be unforgivable and impermissible.

I can’t die. If I cannot die, then someday, I will have lived many, many lifetimes more than I was ever alive. If I cannot die, then I can be forever.

Except I won’t. I will not be forever. I will live as long as BELOW forces me to live, and when I wipe it from the face of existence, I will go with it. 

And even if it means I go nowhere at all, it will be better than this.

That is what lives in me now. That is what drags me forward, further and further out into the dark. The certainty, absolute and utter, that if I have infinity, I will infinitely unmake this place, and anything and everything that tries to stop me. 

So I dig. 

So I do not stop. 

So I do not breathe, and I do not heal, and I do not feel full and I do not feel well and I do not feel anything except pain and the certainty that I have infinity, and that this place has infinity to learn to fear me. 

Anything less would not be enough. 

So I dig. 

And the wall in front of me breaks. 

And I fall free.