BELOW: CRAWL 08 (Patreon)

The beast’s feedings are sporadic. Sometimes they come only hours after the last one, sometimes days, and it has no desire to share any kind of reasoning or schedule. Which leaves me and Laroia very much in the awkward place of being totally bound to its schedule, which we can neither predict nor influence. 

It’s a curse and blessing. On the one hand, it leaves me perpetually on edge, desperate to leap at any sound emerging from its cave. On the other, it offers me time, and the constant stimulation of anxiety helps to battle back the overwhelming ennui and the desire to escape into a sleep I can’t have.

Well. I could have it. I even made a spike about it. 

It’s not all I’ve made. 

With Laroia’s presence, we both need more space than the little divot offered. She was suitably impressed and horrifically disgusted at the process of me digging a fresh cave for us. It’s a much more demanding process when I have to fit more than an upper torso, head and arm into it, and takes a lot longer, but eventually my Suffering Stomach and the weird mostly-real space that my Broken Gullet leads to make an adequate opening. From there, it’s only a few more days to scrape and melt and eat my way into a proper chamber, though an interior designer I am not.

But a worm must dig, and dig I do. 

The divot becomes the first step to enter into a little tunnel, only large enough to let in one person at a time, and only if crouched and crawling. It’s the best I can do to make it defensible before I start digging decoy tunnels and spike traps and shit, but the space behind it is much more open, coming out to an actual room. 

There’s two little alcoves, one for me and one for Laroia, where we can curl up and rest when we need it. There’s little grooves of acid I’ve carved into the walls, artistic shapes that mean nothing but feel better to look at than the nothing of the all-black stone. There’s room enough in the middle for both of us to sit together without being forced too close. 

And there’s a spike at the back, in case I ever want to try practicing some more self-lobotomy. 

Being on an endless march towards an impossible, unrealistic goal doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take breaks if I need to. 

As a base of operations, it’s not much, but it’s something. 

And it’s always temporary anyways. We have to keep moving if we’re to keep apace with the beast, after all.

Its hunts take it to that super-cavern more often than not, which makes sense. It’s the size of a hundred football fields at least, larger than a city, and other creatures explore it aplenty. While the beast tends to hunt other SINners like itself, so bestial they’re not recognizable as very human, we do find marks of others. 

A human footprint in a pool of blood, leading off in one direction– and then up a wall, and then upside down on the cavern ceiling a mile away. 

A sword of bone and rock, like that of the legionaries, broken and discarded. 

A headless body, crucified against a stalagmite, its intestines pulled free from it and splayed out in a carpet of viscera. It twitches when the beast takes a bite and steps through the rest, uncaring of the guts it pulps beneath its clawed hands. 

But it’s mostly other predators. 

A dozen-armed thing that moves like a centipede fused with a slug, an all-too human face at its front distorted by a jaw that stretches wide enough to swallow me whole. An elephantine beast, like a Hoarder-type, but rippling with muscle and skinless, moving by dragging itself with a single massive limb. Something that was too dark and quick to make out the details of, hidden in a pit and which leapt at the beast while it passed, ambushing it perfectly.

I liked that last one best. It was the closest the beast came to losing, the closest that Laroia and I came to being eaten whole and digested for who knows how long, but I got to be useful. And the more useful I am, the more the beast comes to rely on me.

Crouched over that antlion-like monster, its every edge bladed and too sharp to cut or bite, it looked over at me. It stared at me with those dead eyes as it ate of the molten flesh at the center of its prey, where my Suffering Stomach burned through its armor and stunned it with pain. 

No words. No attempt at communication. It still demanded its tithe of SIN afterwards, feeding from me just as willingly as before. 

But it looked at me as it ate. 

Laroia’s been eating too. Not much, just enough to stave off the full effects of starvation and no more. The animal need to eat is hard-coded into us, even and perhaps especially here in the BELOW, and I know that if she really didn’t eat, it would drive her near-rabid, as it did me for a while, so I insist whenever I can that she take more. Once or twice, she even listens, though the look on her molten-wax Wretch face is haunting enough to make me almost regret it sometimes.

But it’s either she eats enough not to be stupid or too weak to act, or I lock her up in a cave without limbs for a few months to force her to learn to push through the starvation. Like my mysterious benefactor did to me.

I would rather not do that. Not if I don’t have to. 

But steadily, through horrific hunt after trial after hunt, even as the beast we follow takes its tithe, my SIN climbs. 

I’ve decided to hard-focus in on what I know works. While getting as many skills as I can get is important, as is boosting all of my Aspects at once, I don’t have enough resources to afford to be non-optimal. If I have a build that works, I need to dig into it, which means that my Desire Aspect climbs higher ahead of the others. 

Especially because the beast looked at me as it ate. 

VIOLENCE: 14One’s ability to cause Harm and Suffering

DESIRE: 23 (20+3)One’s ability to Perceive and Influence indirectlyLust’s Blinders

CONSUMPTION: 14 (13+1)One’s ability to Devour and Endure

COWARDICE: 13 (12+1)One’s ability to Avoid harm and find Escape

TYRANNY: 13 (11+2)One’s ability to Command and Dominate

A good spread, advancing quickly. I can feel myself changing, bit by bit. It’s like adolescence all over again, the way that things suddenly seem lighter than they used to be, how running feels different all of a sudden. I know that if I met the me from before the Home now, I could probably overpower her with only minimal effort. I’m still in the same range as a newborn Wretch, but it’s in the same way that a career athlete is in the same range as a person going for a jog for the first time ever. Not an insurmountable difference in the midst of adrenaline and chaos, but long term? 

But there’s a cost to hard-focusing my Aspects as I am. I never really have any SIN left over. Nothing I can use to build more WOUNDS, not enough to really practice my GNOSIS with. 

So I need to get more.

That’s where my skill comes in.

Once again, I leave Laroia behind in the den I’ve carved, with written instructions not to leave even if she hears the beast heading out on a hunt, and go out on my own. 

My body’s still twisted and grown-in wrong from my time desperately tunneling out of the Home, but it’s gotten better. My Aspects help, pushing me forward more powerfully, helping me to deal with the pain, keeping my joints and bones from tearing into me from their poorly regenerated angles. But there’s more to it, I think. The more I raise my aspects, the more my body starts to feel… mine. Natural, somehow. The dysphoria is still a bitch, but less of one, and I start finding new ways to move, new rhythms to move to. Yes, my body is gradually returning to its original “baseline”, as I think all bodies are forced to in the BELOW, but it’s different from before, and on the way, I feel like I’m starting to infest it more.

Which is good, because sometimes I need to be very present in it indeed.

I want to travel through the closest, safest path to a place where I can use my skill to find targets both dangerous enough to be a risk and safe enough to not be a guaranteed loss if I face them, without being directly in danger or leaving a trail.

COST OF SIN: 7

COST TO CANCEL: 189

Again, the active use of the skill gets cheaper the more detailed I am, but gets more expensive to cancel in turn. But by adding more conditionals and clearer objectives, I can actively manage the drawbacks of the ability. There’s a limit, though. It has to be a want that can be summed up in one sentence, I have to have it all clearly in mind, and my intentions do seem to carry some weight to it. I can’t just blab my way through a forty-page document like a lawyer trying to weasel their way through a wish from a genie.

It’s still strong as hell.

Having the whispers in my mind filling me in on each action I should take before I take it is as overwhelming as it is helpful. Knowing where to step, in what way, having your body instinctively fall into perfect patterns, is a bitch and a half, and I move faster than I ever could without the skill. It doesn’t give me super speed or anything, but there’s no time lost to processing, to hesitation, just the obedience of the constraints I’ve given myself. 

I’m scared of it. The ease with which I drift down into that fugue state of following the skill’s orders.

I blink, and I’m there. 

The passive effect of the skill reasserts itself as I come to awareness in someplace new. I know, at least as best I can ever know, that where I am, sitting at a point where the tunnel I’m in branches into three others, with further forks visible beyond and behind me, fits my want. I can find prey here. 

I’m not bold enough or stupid enough to use the active skill again here. Not when there’s active danger or the certainty of changing circumstances to come. Instead, I keep from spending any more SIN, and just use the passive effect.

I want an opportunity to earn a title without an overwhelming amount of danger.

My direction splits in several directions, erasing some of the paths ahead and behind from my awareness. But there’s a lot of directions, and none of them feel… close? Still hard to pick up nuances with that sort of thing. 

Narrow it.

I want an opportunity to earn a title without an overwhelming amount of danger that’s within a few hours of walking from my current location.

Three pathways. I could pick one at random, probably, buuuuut. 

I want an opportunity to earn an impressive title without an overwhelming amount of danger that’s within a few hours of walking from my current location.

The skill breaks. 

Damnit. All of a sudden, my awareness is total again, free of any blank spots I can perceive, the way it does when I “want” something that isn’t possible or doesn’t exist. 

Alright. Too narrow. If I go back to the previous–

Everything but the path before me simply stops mattering. 

The skill is back. Louder than before. Immediate and intense, enough so that it sort of surprises me.

That hasn’t happened before. Where the skill broke and then came back. Is it actively getting information from the world? Did something change, inform the system, and the system informed me, or is this a trick somehow? What’s…

Always more questions. Always more unknowns.

My want remains the same. My Desire remains loud and true, because even if it broke now, my sincere desire would immediately be to find out what the fuck is going on. 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And I need to gain a lot if I’m going to become what I want to be.

Ensuring that the skill remains purely in its passive state, I head forward into the dark, blind to other paths and to details unnecessary to my arrival at my desire.

_____________________________________________________________________

I do not know how long I walk. The skill doesn’t keep track of things like that, and since I don’t need to breathe to fulfill my want, it’s one of the things that drifts past me. I try to do so anyways, just to keep a steady influx of SIN incoming, but I’m certain that my active efforts to remember it don’t mean that I haven’t forgotten it for chunks of time. Probably for the better– less sound that way. 

But there is still sound, which surprises me. Lust’s Blinders blinds me to most things that don’t fit directly into my Desire, but not when they’re relevant, as they now seem to be. 

Ahead of me, there is the sound of battle. 

Just as promised. Just like I wanted. The sounds of other people suffering, and an opportunity to join them. 

My skill stays stubbornly loud, even as I approach and my Desire shifts. I want to see what’s going on, want to understand where I am, who’s fighting, why, how risky it might be– but the skill stays true, pointing me to my deeper want. 

So I don’t see much of the world around me until I step past a threshold, squeezing my body out through the gap that Lust’s Blinders has sent me through. Then, I experience a new and confusing sensation as my awareness spreads apart, opening wide, without my skill having lost its strength.

I’m back in the cavern. Or another just like it, perhaps, some other vast, colossal space which screams of disturbing amounts of scale. Just like the other, there’s a thin outline of crimson across most of it, telling tales of a few million battles and slaughters that have sunk into the cracks and crevices and never dried. Just like the beast’s hunting grounds, the air feels oppressive, the possibility of danger around every corner. 

Unlike the beast’s hunting grounds, there are the sounds of active conflict here.

I bring my focus back together, coming out of my skill-fugue to finally see what’s right in front of me.

A massive space has been cleared of stalagmites, emptying the cave into something almost like an open field. Unlike the rest of the cave, it’s not black. There’s so much blood upon it that the whole thing has been painted a thick, syrupy crimson, vile and bright against the all-black of the stone of hell.

It ripples and splashes in a constant back and forth from the war being fought on its surface. 

There are so many bodies its hard to see them properly. Like looking at ants crawling over each other, but most of the ants are larger than me. 

I see legionaries, like the ones hunting the beast, fighting alongside tall, lanky ghouls, wearing organic materials made to look like gas masks. I see Wretches by the thousands supporting a back-line where crawling things are prodded, stabbed and burned until they approach, convulsing as they launch munitions over the front line fighters. I see a person wearing stone like silk, swinging their ribbons like a whirling dervish. 

I see a goat-headed thing scream louder than anything I’ve ever heard, and the sound resonates until hundreds of sets of intestines explode from every SINner around them and start trying to stuff themselves back in through the wrong holes. Perhaps in retaliation, a gibbering sound starts to echo, and I see something winged and too fast to track falling out of the sky at the enemy caster.

The resulting explosion of force, flesh and fire against a bulwark of invisible shielding makes a bunch of the combatants liquify around them, but the goat-headed thing raises one of its six arms, unharmed, and makes a hand sign I don’t recognize. 

The sensation of my eyes popping like grapes over a fire is a fresh agony I’d rather have lived my unlife without. 

I have to scramble away to one side, blind but to the sounds of conflict, as my skill clashes with itself. Fear makes me want to retreat, but blind will insists that this is where I am, where I should be, and refuses to let the skill unlock itself. 

Pumping SIN into my face, I spend a good half an hour cowering at the edge of the battlefield, feeling the gelatin of my eyes regrowing too slowly. Eventually I gain a hazy, red, blurry version of my vision back, and manage to peek over the tiny little hole in the cave I’ve found to hide in. 

There are rivers of red, running from the battlefield and down the trails of the world around me. Some of them are pooling close by, a pool of spilled viscera and crimson that I could swim in. 

I look back to the war.

I have no other word for it. It’s war absolute.

The goat-headed thing with many arms is now missing half of them and some of its ribs, but still it bleats, its own organs emerging from its wounds to form strange symbols in the air. 

Something that looks like shredded chicken rewoven into a mask charges forward, all four of its legs crushing Wretches and stronger warriors beneath its hooves (which are made of calcified fingers). It swings whips of meat that lash the world faster than I can follow, making a rolling wave of thunder cover the world and burst my eardrums as it liquifies everyone ahead of it. 

And then something hits it, and its upper half turns to chunks of red while its lower half spasms, trying to keep running. 

Something opens its mouth, which has another mouth in it, and rolls like a ball, licking up stray combatants that face each other with simpler blades and claws. It’s stopped by a squat abomination that looks stretched in all the wrong ways, which stabs a chain of stone into the rolling mouth-thing and starts whipping it around. 

There are organized groups. There are individuals. There are battle lines and there are hordes of milling bodies tearing each other apart mindlessly. 

In the far distance, something that I thought was the opposite wall of the cave lifts itself up and makes a sound like a thousand wailing mothers. The sound of rain fills the distant horizon, and here, less than two-hundred feet from me, a woman made of snakes that are made of centipedes that are made of fingernails is swimming through a SINner that looks like a four-armed warrior with a face made of horns, shoving herself down his throat like a blender. Two of his hands grab at her tails, while the other two stab swords larger than my whole body into his own stomach, trying to impale her while she’s inside him. 

The sound is so loud that my ears never have the chance to heal. The cacophony of war doesn’t stop, and all that makes it through to my senses is the occasional crack of what sounds like gunfire and the impacts of giants carving each other apart.

And a slurping sound from behind me.

I turn, and see that the pool of the war’s effluvia has attracted visitors.