She awoke to feel the ground underneath her pulsating. Not as one may feel from a rocking boat or the sloshing of a water mattress - but rather far stronger and fuller. Her eyes were bleary and unable to penetrate the darkness that surrounded her. A deep, rhythmic thumping resonated in the air as the acrid stench of blood and bile invaded her nostrils. Trying to comprehend where she was, she climbed onto her hands and knees. As she lifted herself up she felt a sticky residue clinging to her cheek, and when she tried to wipe it away using her hand she discovered that it too was covered in the same substance. With this, her sleep-addled brain began to awaken and she felt a jolt in her chest as she realised that she had no idea where she was.

Casting her mind back, before she had awoken, she realised that there was nothing. Though she had a concrete sense of Self, the memories which should’ve informed this Self were gone. As if they had never been. She jumped to her feet, but the pulsating of the ground caused her to stumble. She instinctively stuck her arms out to try and catch herself, colliding with a wall. It squished slightly under her weight and palpated with a similar rhythm to that of the floor beneath her. Jumping at the bizarre feeling, she pushed herself off of the wall and steadied herself. She stood there for a few seconds, trying to slow down her hyperventilation. She closed her eyes so she could focus, but she couldn’t remember anything from before she had woken up. Not even her name. She reopened her eyes, realising that the endeavour was futile for now. Her eyes, now accustomed to the dark, scanned her surroundings.

Bile rose in the back of her throat. She stood in a narrow corridor, its walls close enough that she could touch both at once. Every inch of the corridor was covered in flesh. The pulsating of these walls exposed impossibly large arteries and veins which webbed the entirety of the corridor. The thumping around her was like the heartbeat of some great beast, but this place was not the insides of an animal. It was a crude mockery of a living being. The corridor seemed to weep, blood dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls, only to pool on the floor. Realising what the sticky substance that covered her body was, she could no longer hold back the rising bile and vomited onto the floor. Her retches only served to expel clear liquid which soon gave way to dry heaving.

She heaved for several minutes. Even without her memories, her body rejected this unnatural space. The mental burden of fear exceeded her capacity to bear, and so, instead, it overflowed into this physical response. With each choked heave, her body began to feel more like her own and her mind began to order itself once more. After she was finished, she took a few deep breaths and stood up once more. Looking behind her, she saw only a wall, meaning that she had no choice but to proceed forwards. The thought of proceeding deeper made her hair stand on end and her body quake, but her rationality won out. The only way to find an escape would be to continue onwards.

The way that the ground squelched underneath her feet made walking difficult. However, she soon became used to it, and was able to quicken her pace. Her eyes and ears were strained to their limits, the only sound other than the thumping of the walls being her laboured breathing. After ten minutes of this unchanging corridor, she saw a light in the distance. Though she felt an initial surge of excitement in her chest, she tempered it, instead continuing with renewed vigilance.

Another five minutes of walking elapsed before she arrived at the source of the light and stepped into a room, perhaps four times larger than the corridor that she had emerged from. The walls were lined with eyeballs connected together via their optic nerves, casting a faint glow outwards. As they looked around at random, so too did the vector of light that they effused, like a macabre rendition of fairy lights. But she did not register these horrific entities, instead, she was drawn to an object that stood in the centre of the room.

An edifice made of flesh, perhaps five metres tall. Its agonised form twisted upwards towards the ceiling, emitting an otherworldly, deep thumping. It was a different sound from the shifting walls, resonating with her soul and causing her entire body to quake. Her legs began moving her towards it involuntarily. As she drew closer she saw that what had initially from afar looked like just another fold in the edifice was actually a hole. It seemed just wide enough to fit her arm, and without even thinking, she reached inside of it. It fit her perfectly, tightening around her once her shoulder entered.

She felt her soul leave her body. She saw herself, a woman with matted brown hair covered in blood pressed up against the pulsating tower of flesh. She kept moving further away, now able to see a complex network of corridors and chambers, all almost identical to the one that she had awoken in. A chorus of screams in the millions, no, billions, no, trillions, sang out in unison. She tried to clutch at her ears to shut out the voices, only to realise that she had no ears to close, forcing her to endure the mind-splitting choir. Right before her sanity fully crumbled, the maze disappeared, along with the screams, into a pitch-black void.

Slowly, points of light began to populate the void. She began to rapidly approach them. As she drew near to some, she saw that they were stars, bodies of incomprehensible size that exploded with violent force. She stopped once she had arrived at a particular white star. Looking ‘behind’ herself, she saw something that she had no memory of, no attachment to, yet she still knew what they were. It was the Earth and the Moon. Before she could fully process this, a mass of plasma was ejected from the Sun. Instead of simply falling back into the gravitational well of the astral body, it instead moved towards the Moon faster than light itself. In an instant, the ejection pierced the Moon all the way to the depths of its core.

The plasma wrapped itself around the core. Then, from this lover’s embrace, a ball of flesh was born. Without hesitation, it consumed the rocks around it, growing until it had subsumed the entire Moon. She could see mountains and valleys of flesh, gases being expelled from craters, and oceans of blood forming tsunamis tens of kilometres tall as the entire Moon breathed. Once the tsunamis had circumnavigated the entire globe, the Moon imploded. Then it exploded outwards. In an instant, her entire vision was nothing but red. She panicked, but the red soon faded and gave way to an endless plane of white.

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Sitting in this plane was a beast. It lay down on eight legs, seven tails swaying and one hundred and eight wings unfurling from its back. Its face was adorned by six masks, arranged in a circle. Each mask wore twisted expressions of insanity.

Fear, the weapon by which the Coward and the Fool project their delusions upon the World.

Anger, the weapon by which the Conqueror and the Wounded lash out at the World that has wronged them.

Joy, the weapon by which the Addict and the Blind delude themselves into believing that the World conforms to their ideals.

Sadness, the weapon by which the Defeated and the Malformed surrender themselves to the World.

Disgust, the weapon by which the Vengeful and the Serpent guide the World to act according to their will.

Surprise, the weapon by which the Lazy and the Slow understand that the World does not accommodate them.

As this information penetrated her brain, she saw the face of the monster beginning to open up. The masks flourished like the petals of a flower, revealing that behind each mask was another one. Its face kept unfurling, growing wider and exposing thousands of masks. Claws stabbed into her brain, a thousand different expressions being injected into it. Though she had no voice, she screamed, feeling it help to alleviate the pain. She screamed until it was all she could hear, until all that existed in the world was her frenzied shrieking.

An unknown amount of time passed, until she found that she was no longer screaming. Though her brain still ached, no longer did it feel like an animal was burrowing inside of it. Her awareness of vision came back to her as she realised that she was inside a cone made of the masks of the beast that she had witnessed. No longer did they bring her pain, instead they stared at her as she recovered. Towards the tip of the cone that contained her, she saw a white point of light. Without thinking, her tired spirit began to move towards it. Once she brushed up against it, a vision filled her mind.

A humanoid creature stumbled through a world made of mist. It ran for hours, and then days, as though it had limitless stamina. However, it did soon reach its limit, falling to the ground on its hands and knees. Breathing laboured, its entire body seemed to quake. Only growing stronger with time, until it became bone-rattling spasms. The creature released an inhuman screech and brought its left arm up towards its circular mouth that was lined with razor-sharp teeth. Without hesitating it bit into it, tearing it off from below the elbow. The sickening sound of crunching bones and the tearing of flesh rang out as the monster feasted on its own body. Still chewing, tendrils of muscle hanging from its mouth, the creature once again stood up and began to run. This food seemed to allow it to last another several days, but it soon had to collapse to the ground once more. This time it ate the rest of its left arm. The next time, its left leg, opting to crawl instead of running. Its right leg. Chunks of its torso, intestines, chest, and even its own heart. Everything was shoved into that gaping maw. Once only its shoulders remained, it ate its right arm and used its neck to move along the ground like a slug. Then it ate its lips, cheeks, and finally its tongue.

After many months it no longer had any more flesh to consume. All that could be heard in the world of mist was the haggard breaths of the creature. Everything else seemed to be still, even the swirling wisps of fog making the world feel stagnant. Slowly, ever so slowly, the creature turned into dust. She could not tell whether the emotion contained within its beady black eyes was one of regret and consternation, or relief. Steadily, the world began to fade.

She found that the light was being replaced by a glassy black orb. From this orb, thousands of tendrils extended outwards, each one connecting to a mask. Light that fell onto the orb became reflected in these tubes, flowing into the masks. This flow of light shifted between each mask in rapid succession. Something deep inside her resonated with the orb, and for the first time, she felt the thumping of her own heart.

She was suddenly back in the room of flesh. Her eyes exploded, vitreous gel leaking from her sockets as her liquefied brain flowed from her ears. She should have been dead, yet she was still alive, much to her despair.

Shouldn’t have seen, can’t unsee, impossible to-

She began slamming her head into the edifice of flesh as she released frenzied shrieks. She quickly began to claw out her scalp, desperate to get to the brain underneath. Flesh crawled from the edifice onto her arm, consuming her.

This place… cradle of life… visions of the future...

Her manic screams became louder as the images she had been shown replayed in her mind without end. Tears poured forth from her eyes as saliva dripped from her gaping mouth. Yet the images kept playing. The flesh consumed her whole body, turning her into a twisted creature. As it consumed her face, eyes turning into beady black orbs, she had a final thought.

Please, I don’t want to go.