BELOW: CRAWL 21 (Patreon)

I can really move in this body. There’s a seamlessness between thought and action, a fluidity that I never had as a Wretch or Hungering Ghoul. There’s enough strength in even my non-WOUND arm to lift me up over a lip of stone or to support my weight, and my legs have enough strength to really push off, allowing me to run, slide, jump. 

It’s like being young again, properly young, the kind where you don’t know how much your body is going to hurt as you age. While it’s still unpleasant in this body, still as painful as ever, the only thing actually limiting me is the pain, not my range of mobility ot muscle mass. And with Slithering Worm active, every time I grab hold of something or take a step, my skin and flesh ripple, carrying me forward further. It’s not a true synergy, I’d be better off just using the skill or just running, but the combination allows me to keep moving and to switch surfaces faster than ever before. 

For the first time since I have come to hell, here is something that doesn’t feel entirely wrong. 

It would be a lie to say it feels good, though.

My skin is too soft, too rubbery, strange and uncomfortable. My flesh is jiggly, half-soft and half-lithe, with uneven deposits of fat between muscle groups. I think  my legs might be slightly different lengths, and my fingers are a mess on my one “natural” arm, and I haven’t even tried feeling how my face looks because I know intrinsically that it wouldn’t be right. It’s a privilege to be able to run, to feel soreness and stabbing pains but not be stopped by them, but it’s also a reminder. I have so very, very far to go from being in a body I want to be in. 

I miss having skin I can run a hand over without discomfort. I miss the sense of not being terrified of looking in a mirror. I have always had issues with my body, sure, but it was mine, hard-earned through work and care and learning, through fashion and choice and modifications. This thing I am shoveled into by the powers of BELOW is better than what came just before it, but better and good are cousins at most. 

And yet, I make the trip back to the beast’s cave in a third of the time it took me to reach my earlier destination. 

It looks the same, but I have changed. The hole I made for me and my fellow SINners seems smaller, now, and my massive Desire Aspect tells me so much more. I can see minute scratches from the beast’s movements, smell blood and exhaustion in the air, taste the way the wind dies around a bend in the tunnel, keeping that scent captured and out of view of would-be ambushers. 

Compared to when I awoke, capable of seeing nothing without painting the world with my blood, I feel like I finally can just see. At 44 Desire, I think I might be able to navigate purely through touch and hearing now, leaving behind the need to discern shades of lightless black with my eyes. 

Not that I will, but still. Scary shit. 

It seems quiet. Which is good, probably. They’re just resting, and the beast is quiet. It’s fine. 

I still don’t know how long I was down in that “home”. Or how long my transformation took. 

Quietly, I tap my new claws against the edge of the hole I carved to hide in, making a pattern. I’m still stuck with my Broken Gullet, but that doesn’t mean I can only communicate via writing. Tapping a little rhythm is as good of a sign as I can manage that I’m sentient and not an immediate danger. 

Still, I enter the crevice slowly and gently. My appearance has changed completely at this point, turned completely alien save for the Strong Arm That Hates and maybe the Broken Gullet, and seeing a stranger creep slowly into one’s home is horrifying enough without being stuck in a lightless literal hell. 

It’s a bit more of a squeeze than it used to be to slip inside my hideout, but that’s fine. My evolution is focused a lot more on being squirmy and slithering than on being strong or solid, and even without dislocating anything, I can tell that I’d be able to slide into far smaller spaces. There’s just so many advantages to having this evolution, and if it didn’t take so damn much to be able to modify my transformation, I’d be tempted to start climbing immediately to the next gate. 

The idle thoughts slowly come to a stop as I keep tapping and climbing, hearing nothing in return. 

They’d have heard me by now. So they’re hiding, uncertain who it is, preparing an ambush. Protecting themselves. Like they should, obviously, I designed the hole into our cave explicitly to have as little space for a larger creature to move as possible for that exact reason. It’ll be fine, though. Even if they impale me through the brain, which I think I can avoid with some effort, that’ll be alright. They’ll tear into me and eat me and I’ll just not fight back and write on the walls until they realize it’s me. Pain isn’t so bad a thing when everything is pain, but I can’t help but think I’ve maybe gone through more of it than most newcomers to the Abyss. It’s got its advantages, that. 

44 Desire Aspect is a massive boost to my senses. I can feel and see and hear so much more than before. 

I don’t hear anyone moving in the hole. 

It’s not a surprise, when I enter the hideout properly, but it is a heartbreak nonetheless. 

It’s empty. 

Blood doesn’t dry in hell. The walls don’t change unless they are changed by force. I have no way of knowing how long it’s been since they left, because nothing rots and there’s no real wind and everything is just Still unless acted upon. 

So even with the words on the wall, I’m not sure how long they’ve been gone. 

“I wait no longer. They need me. Thank you for what you’ve done for me. I am glad you survived.”

Written in Samir’s style, carved into the stone facing the entrance to the hideout. Beneath it, in Laroia’s slower, softer scrawl;

“Sorry. Hope we see you. Thank you.”

How fucking dare she. 

The surge of fury hits and then abates just as fast, my mind recognizing it as illogical even as the feeling tries to surge up and drown me. 

“Thank you.”

That fucking idiot. Those two goddamn bastards. I told them to wait. I made a deal with Samir. Two more hunts. I had time. I had time, damnit. And thanking me? For what? For not being here? For waking her up? For teaching her how to debase herself to survive in this place? She’s my responsibility because I woke her up, because I’m…

And Samir. Samir. Fuck it, maybe I’m a hypocrite, but how fucking dare he be this stupid with his goddamn principles. They need him? What proof does he have of that? What can he even do if he goes back? Does he think he will be rewarded instead of punished, that he’ll hold the attention of the Home for longer than it takes to torture him and go right back to torturing others?

Maybe he can help. Take the attention off of others, fight on their behalf, like he must have been trying to do as a guard when I first met him. So weak and still trying, still fighting. Walking right back into a trap shaped like comfort and like the shell of care, and what’s worse is he might be right, and maybe he’s doing exactly what his ideals demand of him, to go back to people he may have spent months or years with rather than sit here and wait for me while I was gone. 

Fuck. FUCK.

I have no mouth, so I take out my fury on the wall beside me. 

Strong Arm That Hates is only too eager to assist me, muscle spasms driving the limb even harder than I intended into the stone so that it shatters around my fist. The fingers bleed as I clench so hard that the nails dig into my palm, and I slam again, and again.

Stupid me. Oh, yay, I’m stronger now, I found something and survived it, surely that’ll be the only challenge, the only torment, the only price to pay. Because of course ontological suffering isn’t enough, physical agony isn’t enough, gotta have the agonies of time and people, too, because why not, right? 

How long was I gone? Days? Weeks? How long did they wait? How do they even know where the fuck to go?

Through the stone, I hear a rumbling sound above me. The scrape of claws tells me who it is. 

The beast. Stirring thanks to me slamming into the stone of the wall hard enough to break it. I doubt it was unaware that someone was out here, but I didn’t approach its cave, so it didn’t care, except that now, I’ve made a mess. Drawn attention. 

The beast is still stronger than I am. Especially with the way I lost some of my Violence Aspect during my transformation, I’m weaker than it by a considerable margin, and it’s been in the GHOGIEL gate probably for longer than I’ve been in hell. 

Yet somehow, I’m not really afraid of it this time. 

Maybe it’s the bigger fears and worries overriding it, maybe it’s the horror of having my identity colonized and transformed against my will that I just surpassed, or maybe it’s just that I’m really fucking anxious right now. But the thought of a big animal with big claws just doesn’t scare me like it used to. Sure, if it hunts me I’d get eaten, but also, I’m smarter than it, I’m stranger than it, and fuck it, I’ve got some shit I want to do other than sit around in a cave digesting. 

I am more than it in every way but the most violent. It guarantees nothing, but promises much. 

I slip out of the tunnel of my hideout, now empty, and decide not to wait for the beast. I emerge, walk down the tunnel, and use Slithering Worm to climb quickly and slickly into its cave. 

I can sense its initial surprise, almost immediately turning to aggression. Before I have any chance to try and communicate with it or control it, one of its claws is coming at my face, longer than my forearm and sharp enough to shear through rock. Slithering Worm deactivated the moment I came into its awareness, but I reactivate it with a flush of SIN, burning a point to use my sternum to wriggle backwards across the stone as well as my arms. 

I don’t have time for this. 

I want to convince the beast of who I am and that I do not want to fight it and that I offer it more than it would gain from eating me.

The SIN cost is only 15. Go me for being specific. That also means that once I do this, I won’t be able to cancel it, no matter what the beast is doing to me while I’m attempting it. It’ll cost too much. More specific, less cost to cast but more to cancel. 

That’s fine. 

I activate the active variant of Lust’s Blinders, and the world fades to nothing but the space between me and the beast. Any internal monologue is drowned in a sudden wash of intrusive thoughts, appearing and disappearing at the exact moment where they can make a difference. 

Slit your own throat.

I do it without hesitation. My blood spatters along the entrance to its cave, and the beast advances, twice as fast as me but briefly surprised by the action. 

Vomit. 

Suffering Stomach spasms, the open cut in my side clenching painfully and forcing some of the bile in my guts out through my Broken Gullet. Ignoring the weird quasi-spatial properties of the gullet, I feel my sternum, my esophagus, and everything between stomach and mouth light on fire from the pain of the acid going the wrong way. It’s more potent than before, and it sizzles as I puke it up, and I can feel chunks of my airway and throat muscles coming up alongside it to splatter against the ground.

Throw it at the beast.

Before I have a chance to commit to the thought, my Strong Arm That Hates is already acting, a troublesome fact that leaves me with more shit to worry about. It spasms, splashing the acid forward, burning away part of the skin on itself to hit the beast.

It recoils, fast as fuck, faster than I am even with the evolution and stat increases, but not quite faster than gravity or fluid dynamics. Several droplets hit it, and it hisses out something almost like a word. 

Then it pauses. 

The acid doesn’t burn it. Not nearly as badly as it burns me or the stone, anyways. 

Get up into the cave.

I do so easily, barely feeling the strain past the agony of the vomit. One of my feet touches some of the acid and even though it’s lost some potency, digging into the stone, it’s still fresh enough to start sizzling and eating through the first layer of my flesh. 

Open your arms wide. 

I present a larger target. 

The beast’s confusion is replaced by the dead-eyed instincts of a predator. It has reduced itself to claws and force, so what need does it have for puzzles or misunderstanding? Here is the intruder, which it does not care to try and recognize, or cannot. 

It moves so fast that the Hungering Ghoul would have seen nothing. 

The Hungry Singing Worm, on the other hand. 

Grab its claw and put it into your WOUND.

The Strong Arm That Hates and my regular arm are perfectly in sync for once as I grab the incoming attack and impale myself on its sharpness, pulling it as deep as it will go into the open slash on my side, deep into my organs.