XIII.

Vagari awoke two-hundred years in the future to the sounds of furious wailing. Vines coiled around his waist and shoulders, binding him as tight as the strangeness that had overcome him. Vagari didn’t know what pulled him free of the entrancement, but he instantly recognized the chance to struggle. With grit teeth, he writhed and wriggled, trying to pull some part of him free, but even with his considerable strength the vines held firm. “I warn you, wretched thing, leave me be!” Howled the demon wrathfully before crying out in pain. “Argh – you foul, wretched little thing! You dare defy me? I could crush you into ichor or swallow you whole!”

“Try it and I’ll chew my way out!” shouted BP defiantly. “Now let him go!”

“Insolent thing! Arrogant! Contemptuous!” the demon roared in such a fury Vagari could feel the vibrations of its voice carried down through the tendrils around him. “You think to command me, cambion?! Filthy thing! Once I’m done with him, I’ll thrash you within an inch of your miserable half-life.”

“No, I don’t think you will,” snapped BP. “I don’t think you can, in fact! I don’t know why, but whatever you did doesn’t work on me. And you, you can’t do much without it, can you? Can you?!”

“Piss and bother – you think you’re so smart, don’t you, wretch?!” the unseen captor hissed. “But they said you were to be left alive, not unharmed. Maybe I’ll strangle you, or pull off your limbs, huh? Would you li-ow! Horrible rotten thing!” The demon howled in pain; a great porcine whine accompanied by a violent spasm as it no doubt tried to shake free of BP’s jaws. In that moment, Vagari could feel his binds grip loosen. “Try again, you… whatever you are!” BP croaked with a loud spit and as much firmness as her avian voice could muster. “I’ll keep chewing you up! And if you try and eat him, I’ll chew you up! I’ll keep chewing and chewing, even though you taste horrible, until there’s nothing left!”

The demon started groaning and grumbling in an audible struggle with the concept and decision it hadn’t expected to have to face. Distracted, its grip loosened just enough for Vagari to pull an arm free. “Maybe – maybe – maybe… Maybe your threats are empty, little wretch,” the creature mused, “and maybe they aren’t. But I know my master doesn’t make threats, but promises. So, I call your bluff, cambion – he dies!”

“Many have tried, devil, but it just wouldn’t take,” spat Vagari with a struggled laugh. He had the palm of his free hand lined up with the origin of the voice, right upon that roaring engine of spiritual fire burning bright within the veil of white that only he could see. “I see you, now burn – dheht-hengnis!”

It happened in an instant, the ignition. As soon as the word of power rolled off his tongue, Vagari’s hand erupted into a torrent of infernal flame. The demon shrieked in fear and agony as the eldritch fire shot up the length of it. The flames quickly grew to encompass it, giving shape to its titian body as a silhouette in the mist. It writhed and lashed weakly while it suffered its own threat of being swallowed whole. “BP?!” shouted Vagari, looking frantically for her with his sightless sight, but the towering inferno made it next to impossible to see anything else. “BP, where are you?!”

“O-over here,” she called back, accompanied by the sounds of splashing. “I’m okay! I’m… I’m okay. He threw me into a hole – the jerk! What was that?!”

Vagari let out a sigh of relief. From the sound of her, she was no worse for wear from the ordeal. “It was a demon,” Vagari informed between weighted breaths. “A creature from… beyond that broke through into our world.” He slumped down upon the ground and tried to still his racing heart. That wasn’t the whole of it, he thought as he watched the illuminated outline of the creature crumple and fall under its own dead weight. Someone had left it there for them – for the both of them. The watcher from Site-B, no doubt, Vagari thought, remembering the many stars of infrared dotting the walls. “I’m beginning to think I’m in over my head, friend…”

“What, did you fall in a hole too?!” BP blubbered excitedly. “Feel for an edge! Don’t lose which way is up!”

Vagari laughed and sought out to find her. “No, no I’m fine, BP. It’s an expression,” he announced patting blindly for her, “like biting off more than you can chew… Though, I guess that’s not something you’d have to worry much about – eh? I… I must thank you, BP. You really saved me back there.”

“Not a problem,” she said cheerily from the mist. “You would have done the same for me – I mean, you have!”

“I suppose I have,” Vagari uttered softly, his mind lingering on the induced dream, the memory of lives passed. He could see her now, a dot of heat nearly blended in with the beacon of hellfire. So small against the wall of flame, against the world really. How could something so small be so brave, he wondered, and so much braver than him – than Val. Would he have really done the same? Val wouldn’t have. Val didn’t. Why Val? Why that memory? Vagari grit his teeth at the wonder. Was the demon sent to probe his mind, to figure out who he was? The question swam through his mind like schooling eels, a feeling that quickly translated into the real world as his consciousness began to fade. Vagari’s breath caught in his throat as the panic set in against the fast-approaching helplessness he was helpless to fight. His lungs burned as he struggled to breathe, and once more the world faded to black.

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“I found you,” he could hear BP say, her voice first of cheery disposition before mirroring the feeling coursing through him. “Vagari? Vagari, what’s wrong?!” the words bounced and rebounded. “Wake up, Vagari! Please, Vagari! Wake up…”

“Val, wake up…”

--

Vagari felt a coldness wash over him as he fell through a vast darkness. That coldness was growing familiar, withstandable even, unwelcome as ever, but withstandable. It covered him head to toe in pins and needles, a numbness of body and mind reminiscent of a waking limb. Vagari fell and fell into that voidic place, into that feeling, until Vagari was but a distant memory and the past became the present. Val wasn’t the first born, but the fifth. He awoke from what felt like a fever dream – a nightmare visual experience encompassing the very concept of biology, growth, and evolution. First, he had been himself – a man – but then the man faded away, melting down to the basest building blocks, and the man he was became a footnote in a long hellish process of change. The mind had still been there, the fear, and the agony; the body, however, was gone, changed into ichor like a caterpillar gone to cocoon.

He had felt life and death a thousand times within the hellscape of that mental prison. With each revival he awoke within the dream changed, improved; a process that continued until he at last fought his way back to reality. Or was it just a different nightmare? The world he awoke to, it was a cracked mirror image of the world he had known. In his absence it had since become as shattered and unrecognizable as his body. Val tried to bar the escaping scream by clenching his teeth, managing to reduce it to an agonized sob. Though the cycling purgatorial dream was becoming faded and more unreal with every passing moment, the truth of it stuck firm in the waking world in the form of the monstrous body he stole from it. Val stared down at his hands, now long, skeletal things with claws grown to rip and tear, to rend to bloody ribbons. “No… no – no – no – no…” Val uttered painedly, knowing the rest of him reflected the horrid design. “This isn’t real, this… this can’t be real… Malcom? Carla?! Is anyone… Is anyone still here?”

The light of the gate room pulsed like a heartbeat, one slow and dying. The infinite power of the facility seemed to be nearly drained – an impossibility Val couldn’t help but suggest. He gazed about at the room around him, at the ruins, at his world turned catastrophic. They were over four-hundred feet down into the earth, and yet he could see a beam of light dividing the room intwine. “Moonlight?” Val wondered in thought as he dragged himself to uneasy feet. “How… How is that possible?” Suddenly, Val heard the shifting of stone and a muttered cry. He wasn’t alone. The fine hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end as he dared to near the location of the muddled cry. “Hello… Hello? Is someone there?”

“Understand… understand… understand… I – I don’t understand…” uttered a whimpering voice, seemingly brought to life by his own. “Please stop… stop… Stop, it’s too much! Stop… I don’t understand… I can’t…. I can’t, it’s too much…”

“My god…” Val uttered in shock as he neared. What he found cradled within the collapsed rubble was something wholly offensive to the senses, a mound of gibbering gray flesh – something changed like him. Its face was morose, skull-like with deep cavernous eyes and a lipless mouth. The whole of it was covered in leathery skin, clinging tight to its oversized torso, and shrunken infantile limbs. But, most notable about the prone creature was its massive and seemingly exposed brain that draped back over its shoulders, sagging roughly against the rocks around it.

It took everything Val had not to throw up just looking at it. It sobbed and groaned as it kicked its almost vestigial limbs about as if it were trying to ward off attackers. As realization sunk in, disgust soon became second to pity. Val wasn’t sure what or who the creature was, but he was sure it was in the same boat as him. It was human, one of his colleagues, possibly one of his friends. He couldn’t just leave it there – them there. He lurched towards it on long unfamiliar limbs, arachnoid hands held up shakily in a show of peace. “I… It’s okay…” Val stammered in a voice not his own, his vocal folds raw and unused. “Let me… Let me help you.” The being either couldn’t see him or didn’t care, as it only continued to babble nonsensically as he drew near. Val stared down at it and then up. Judging from the blackened slick around it that led up the wall, the creature had come from near the observation room. Was it Dr. Cain? It had to be, Val decided; she was the only one ever up there. Val slid uneasy hands beneath her and looked away as he lifted her up to his chest. “It’s… Ugh… It’s okay, Barbra,” he whispered, trying not to gag on the smell. “I’ll get us out of here.”

Val looked around the ruinous chamber. There were nine fleshy growths upon the walls. “Eggs?” he thought to himself in horror. “No, cocoons… Five open, four still incubating.” A debate raged within him, whether to stay and wait for the other four – whoever they were – or not. If they were half as addled as Dr. Cain seemed to be, there would be no getting them out all at once. So, the decision was made for him. He and one other were all he could manage, and barely that. “I’m sorry,” Val said to the others. “I’ll come back for you; I swear it… I’ll… I’ll come back.” Val hoisted what used to be Dr. Cain over his shoulder and left the gate room behind. The elevator leading up had since become nonexistent, with the door leading straight into the depths of a vast gorge. Where the rest of the complex used to be was only a hole, an immense crater half-filled with water. Whatever had happened while he was out had been utterly catastrophic. Val was amazed that the gate-room managed to survive as intact as it was. The level of devastation was beyond anything he could imagine.

Val turned his gaze skyward. He had been correct in his assumption that the eerie glow illuminating the divided gate-room was moonlight, but he quickly noticed something wholly wrong about it. The moon above wasn’t the one he remembered. It was shattered, a crumbling trail of rock following two-thirds of its former glory as it cut across the sky. “What… what happened?” Val uttered as he stared in disbelief at the ruined world he had awoken to. “What the hell happened? Barbra… what did we do?”