BELOW: CRAWL 12 (Patreon)

“Where am I?” Samir signs at me, somewhere between fear, confusion, and genuine anger at me coloring his features. 

“My plan,” I sign back, introducing him, somewhat awkwardly, to the immediately too-small space I’ve designed for myself and Laroia. I made it for two, after all. If Samir is going to stay here a while, then he’ll need extra room.

“My plan,” he signs at me, yelling something that I don’t recognize. As much as I’ve become semi-conversational in his language, enough to pick up the basics, anything more complicated or accented is still beyond me. I know he knows that, but hey, if I got my brains bashed out by someone I trusted, I’d probably be pretty pissed off too. 

Laroia is looking back and forth between the two of us, clearly confused, for which I can’t blame her. I did, in fact, bring back a brain-damaged stranger, who is now recovered enough to be yelling at me in a language that she doesn’t speak. 

Ignoring Samir for a moment, I turn to the wall, biting out part of my finger for the blood and scribbling onto the stone. 

This is Samir, I write for Laroia’s sake. He is a friend. A good person. I tricked him. If he leaves, he gets tortured, and I get caught.

Because honestly, why bother lying? What do I have to lie about?

Samir waits generously until I’m done writing, tracking the letters. It seems like he can read some of the language I’m writing in, an equally nameless tongue as his own, but he’s not fluent in that either. 

What a bundle of clowns I have gathered. What a delightful, terrible, deeply annoying challenge. 

“¿Estás hablando en lengua de signos?”

I nod, because yes, we are speaking in sign language. Laroia brightens immediately, turning to Samir and bowing / curtsying slightly, then starting to move her hands in–

Oh goddamn, Laroia knows sign language. 

Not the one we’re using, obviously, because we’re making this one up as we go. Which makes this version way better and also infuriatingly worse, because come on, what do you mean we have yet another language we don’t all share? 

It’s fine. This is good. This is fine. This is actually better than I thought it would be, genuinely, and being pissed about it is stupid and due to panic. Which I admittedly have a lot of.

She and Samir sign back and forth at each other until he manages to get across that he doesn’t actually know whatever much more fluid and competent language she’s using. At that point, he turns to me, then to Laroia, then back to me.

I write Laroia’s name on the wall, then Samir’s. I point to one of them, then the other. 

Between and below the both of them, I write the name I’m taking for myself. “Worm”. 

It’s fitting. 

Laroia nods, smiling, then bows her head again towards our newcomer. “Samir!”

“Aah… हाँ. La-roia?”

She nods again, and I feel a little illogically hurt by the fact that she seems much more comfortable around him than around me. Which does make sense, he can speak, after all, and doesn’t have a gaping WOUND for a mouth, and he wasn’t there when she was woken up into hell, and… yeah. Lots of perfectly valid reasons and basic logic pointing to exactly why she feels more at ease here. 

It doesn’t take long for her to win Samir over a bit, but he’s also not an idiot. I can see from how he glances over his shoulder towards the exit of the chamber that he’s realized another part of my plan– namely, that he doesn’t know the way back. 

I left no trail of blood or SIN behind me. I used Lust’s Blinders active version to take Samir back “in a way that the Masked Father won’t track”, and I think that it worked, though abstract things like that are blurry with the skill. He was neither awake nor particularly alive the whole way back. 

Chances are he can still be tracked anyways, but I’m gambling that the blend of brain damage, distance, stone between him and Masked Father, and my skill all have done enough to at least slow that down. Ideally, it might be enough to make the cult leader give up on Samir as a lost cause, because, respectfully, he’s not that impressive, and the kind of damage he took was more than reasonable considering being near a fight pit. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Samir was sent there as some sort of political play, or just to torture him and get him out of the way. Punishment for the roommate of the escapee, a “test of loyalty” type deal. 

Or maybe I’m wrong, and any moment now, the Home’s armed cultists and higher SINners are going to start coming down the tunnel to my little hideout. 

It’s fine. It’s better this way. This is a risk worth taking. 

Fucking fuck, I’m hungry. 

I thought I was past being easily affected by hunger, but here I am. As Samir and Laroia both continue talking around me, taking my distraction as an opportunity to connect, I can already tell what’s causing the change. 

Ever-Starving Beastling, my new skill under my Consumption Aspect. The description comes back to me as easily as thinking about it.

Eat, eat, eat, and yet you never find sustenance. Chew, chew, chew, and never find satisfaction. In that endless hunger, find the truth of who you are, and the truer-still facts of your nature as less than an animal. Unnatural, cursed, yet still you find meaning. The more you starve, the more your bestial nature emerges. The more you satisfy your urge, the greater the depths to which your starvation may fall.

I’m hungry. Hungrier than before. That hunger makes me stronger, somehow, or makes me more “bestial” at least, and the more I eat, the hungrier I get. Whether or not it stops the starvation temporarily, just deepening how far I can eventually fall, or actively does nothing to sate me, I don’t know. 

But I can find out. 

With a sigh, I turn my back to my two fellow SINners, opening my Broken Gullet and preparing my Suffering Stomach for some fresh renovations. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I make it about halfway through a new alcove-room in my shitty little improv cave before the scratching interrupts all of us. 

Laroia and Samir have both been chatting away almost freely, though how they’re communicating or how much each of them is following the other, I have no idea. However, the scratching brings both of them to dead silence, putting us all into a profound quietude. 

The beast is awake. 

Samir may not know what’s going on, but he’s a smart guy. He follows my and Laroia’s example as she comes up behind me and I crouch-crawl my way out of the little hiding spot I’ve made for us, poking my head out. 

I want to find the beast.

I emerge from my improvised tunnel and see nothing, because my awareness has eyes for only one thing. 

It’s the same as I remember. Those long, too-many-jointed limbs, reaching out of the dark to slowly maneuver its body out of its cave. The massive, too-sharp claws emerging from the ends of its hand-paws, tearing apart its flesh to emerge longer and sharper than any natural weapons. That face, half-muzzle, half-skull, twisted and elongated and all wrong, all of it connected to a body both rippling with muscle and distressingly slender. 

Its face turns to face me, those doll-blank eyes taking note of me as one might any other part of the scenery.

It huffs at me, just the one time.

It’s the most acknowledgement I’ve gotten from it yet, and it’s clear what it wants. Time for tribute. 

I don’t really have anything to offer.

I mean I’ve got some SIN, I kept breathing while bringing Samir back, I was breathing while I worked, but it’s not much. Less than ten points total since I pushed myself up to two different upgrades in my Aspects. 

Still, the accord is obvious. As is the potential cost of failure. I can imagine what it’ll do if it’s disappointed with my sacrifice, and I’m fine with it. 

I stretch out my hand, my bones interlocking weirdly to make the limb longer as my Ossified Jigsaw makes of my skeletal system a weird puzzle.

It stretches out a claw, easily piercing through my palm in spite of my improved Violence and Consumption, and I push all that I have forward, up to where our flesh intersects. I take every single unit of SIN I have, save that single point that stands at the center of the pond of my being, offering up all 8 SIN available to me.

It waits as the black treacle oozes out of me and into it. It waits afterwards for the rest of its payment for our little symbiosis. 

I don’t retract my hand. With my eyes, I try to communicate sincerity, that I have no more to offer. 

There is a sound somewhere between a word, a hiss, and a growl from the beast. 

The next thing I know, my arm is gone. 

All the way gone, in fact. It took my shoulder, most of my shoulderblade, and a good section of ribs and collarbone both with it, carving me like I’m made of dough rather than flesh. I barely even feel the claws at first, but the jagged edges of the obsidian-like WOUND makes the feeling clear a moment after. I don’t manage to scream, though I might have if I’d had a regular mouth rather than my Broken Gullet. The best I manage is a gurgling whimper-moan sound, animalistic and agonized and without an ounce of dignity in it.

The beast takes my arm, holding the stump upright so less of the blood is spilt from it, and eats it in a single gulp. 

And then it approaches me, and its limb crawls past me. Its shadow gets closer, though there is no shadow in this world of all-black, but still, I can feel its presence, pressing down on me. 

At first I just assume it’s going past me, choosing one direction of the tunnel to travel in rather than the other. It looms over me in a way that dwarfs me with its size, that makes it clear, in spite of how much I’ve grown in the last day or so. I wonder just how much suffering it’s taken on to trade for that power, or just how long it’s been alive down here for it to have grown as it has. Is it in the GHOGIEL gate, like Masked Father said he was? Is it further? Probably not, not off vibes, but it could eat me and not even notice. 

It spares me on a whim. It spares me because I can offer it more as a worm than as a meal. 

One of its arms lilts toward the opening behind me. Towards Samir and Laroia.

An arm is not enough. 8 SIN and the fifteen more it must have gained from eating me aren’t enough. 

I don’t step in front of it. I couldn’t stop it, not like that. 

But I didn’t bring them here to be sacrificed. 

I don’t know if it would only take a piece of them, or if they would be devoured whole by it. If it wants more symbiotes or if it wants to punish me for my lack, to consume them whole to punish me for my selfishness in growing rather than feeding it. 

It’s awkward, wrapping my arm around my chest, but I manage to pull the muscles in my back, to push it forward as far as it goes. I don’t have time to dislocate it. 

I bite down around the bicep, and between the rip-saw of my Broken Gullet and the weird way it sort of vanishes whatever goes down my gullet, I tear off my own arm. 

God. God, it hurts so much. Fuck you god. How fucking dare you make this place. How dare you make me, only to leave me here.

It lands on the floor, right below the beast’s muzzle. 

It’s crawled so that its arm has stretched past me, awkwardly moving up the tunnel I carved to keep myself safe, to keep the people I’ve dragged into this safe. That leaves its main body towering over me, the pressure of its weight so heavy and so vast that it belies its actual physical mass. Its muzzle drools some of my blood back down onto the ground before me, mingling with the blood of my self-severed arm. 

Blank eyes. Not a doll. A shark. Staring at me with nothing but hunger. Nothing human behind them. 

I don’t think that it would speak if it could. I don’t know that there’s enough of a person in there to remember how.

It hurts so fucking much. There’s blood flooding into my lung from where my collarbone used to be. My body is wobbly without the ribcage on one side to hold me up. 

The beast slowly lowers its head down until it’s touching the ground. Then, gently, almost politely, it stretches out a long, languid tongue, lapping up every drop of blood and wrapping around my fallen limb. 

It lifts it up slow, then drinks down the arm like it’s nothing. Like a wet sausage, my Ossified Jigsaw coming apart without conscious intent, it slides down its throat with barely a gulp. 

For a moment, we just stare at each other. 

Then it opens its mouth wide, and lowers it down over my other shoulder. 

The offer is clear. There might not be a person behind its eyes, but cruelty, it seems, goes deeper than personhood here. 

Its free hand scritch-scratches at the tunnel entrance. 

I lean into its teeth. 

It bites down. 

For a while after that, I’m not really there. I’m not really… me. I’m still alive, and I can feel the fact that I’m going to have to come back to myself, to identity, but for a while, the pain is bigger than me. There’s always more pain, I think. Always a deeper or more intricate version of it, a way that it gets through all of the things you’re used to. 

I notice time moving by pain. Notice linearity through the way that I’m being eaten, and then I’m not. 

I am moved. 

I lay still somewhere. 

Eventually, sometime, someday, the pain diminishes enough that I become me again. I become aware again. 

Both of my shoulders are missing. The front of my chest has been eaten away from me, chewing through my sternum to get at the sweetmeats below. Most of my guts are gone, though the beast ate around my Suffering Stomach WOUND to avoid burning itself. 

But my spine is intact. My upper organs are still there. I’ll heal. And in not too much time, either. It’ll take time for the arms to regrow, but I can compensate for that in the meantime, somehow. Maybe my other new skill can help with that. 

Samir and Laroia are both in the room with me. I’ve painted the floor of it with my blood, which flows everlasting from any broken body so long as it has an avenue to do so, unscabbing. But I’m alright. I’ll be fine.

It’s aaaaaall part of the plan. Sort of. More or less. 

Admittedly, this is not the best start. But hey, that’s life, right? That’s hell. 

That’s BELOW.