“The Heavens have fallen, and we have trapped ourselves beneath its rubble.
Such it was.
Such it still remains.
For all that we have sacrificed, defiled, and transgressed, I see now that meager hubris has tainted our rightful emancipation, and damned us more than the pantheons ever could.
How quick were we in the claiming of sovereignty over the corpses of our great abusers? How quick we were to fashion the instruments of our ascent from their blood, to clad our frailties using the chassis of their beings?
And how quick did we cast the weight of our chains down upon the others?
In these words, I can only offer you the ache of truth rather than the salvation you so deserve. For this, may I be damned to the deepest of hells. All I wish is for you, dear kindred, to know the truth of our transgression and beg your forgiveness.
We sought to create paradise.
But in practice with our avarice, we unleashed an apocalypse."
-Jaus Avandaer, Chains from Chains
1-1
Resurrection
Avo woke atop a mountain of rust and rot. His sore lungs filled with a whistling gasp. His mind was sheathed into his vessel as existence shuddered around him. His senses reeled from the muted depths of nothingness to overload in space of seconds. He was alive.
The pain flaring across his body made him wish he wasn’t.
ONTOLOGY REVERTED
RESURRECTION COMPLETED
MEMORY RESTORED
WARNING: MEMORY SEQUENCE MISSING, UNABLE TO LOCATE MEMORIES WITHIN THE SPAN OF [1 WEEK, 3 HOURS, 5 MINUTES]
THAUMIC MASS INSUFFICIENT - UNABLE TO SUSTAIN METAMIND
REVERTING TO ZERO BURN
Lines of cog-feed data dissolved from Avo’s perception as if they had never been. One by one, sensations greeted him, few of them pleasant. The shrill winds grated upon his ears and the stench of rust and rot snaked up his nostrils. A dim chasm of light shone down on him from far above, stabbing into his bleary eyes. Agony flared across every inch of his body.
He shuffled. His wounds flared. He stopped shuffling.
A strange pressure rested upon his chest. Looking down, the remains of a corpse lay spattered upon him, its blood seeping deep into his sodden undersuit. Sniffing, he could taste the bitter tinge of adrenaline flavoring the corpse’s flesh.
Tentatively, he licked a scoop of mangled meat from the body. It didn’t taste good, but it was enough to fuel his blood cells and spur his wounds to heal.
He ate what he could on his back using only his tongue, trying to move as little as possible. Sitting or standing was beyond him. He needed time for the haze in his skull to clear, for the static to fade from his limbs.
For a few minutes, he just lay there, getting reacquainted with his injuries, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Beneath him, a carpet of limbs shivered and shook. Avo sniffed. Corpses. He was resting on a pile of corpses.
Below, he felt a constant vibration. Engines screamed overhead, the noise funneled down from the edge of the pit. The sound was near deafening. Around him, the winds coiled and folded, bifurcating past him.
Through blurred eyes, he saw something else fall. It struck nearby, pulping a few of the corpses close to him. His sight cleared enough for him to see what it was: a burning aerovec. Looking up again, he finally noticed the industrial clamps pouring in more bodies and detritus into the great bowl he was laying in.
Where the hells was he? How did he get here?
Again, he looked up into the light. He seemed to be moving, but it could just be dizziness. Blinking, he tried to clear his eyes. Still too far. Didn’t help that his kind were nearsighted by the limits of their biology. Being grown and designed in dark and claustrophobic tunnels by woefully inept creators did that to a ghoul. Still, he had his smell and hearing—enough to give him some bearing on his situation.
There was also the question of why his cog-feed was malfunctioning. And what was this about “resurrection?” His Metamind—a cognition-augmenting smart construct made from the phantasmal matter of ghosts—seemed to be offline again. More importantly, however, resurrecting him was definitely not one of its functions. The phantasmic applications he had engrammed to his Metamind were only meant for interfacing with other minds or the Nether itself.
For him to be resurrected required something on the level of a phylactery at the least. Something that could anchor his being and pour his consciousness into a new-grown vessel without breaking his mind in the process. Being technically considered a piece of property instead of a citizen pushed obtaining a phylactery firmly out of his reach even if he had the imps to make the purchase. His social merit rating just didn’t reach that high.
As he tried to rise again, he heard two heartbeats pulsing above him, coming from just beyond the edge of the pit. Sniffing, he sorted through the various smells and found himself narrowing in on two contrasting musks. One smelled more akin to oil, while the other, alcohol. Both reeked of stale sweat.
“How’s the dig today?” came a phlegm-filled voice. A wet hack followed. Masked by the wailing engines, Avo almost couldn’t hear the slosh of pneumonia coating their lungs.
Another replied. They sounded younger, more nasally and girlish. “Same as yesterday, consang: shit, shit, and fucking shit. Nothing but stiffs and husks.”
The cougher laughed. “Shame about the ghoul, yeah? If it was alive we could have chained him to the wall. Farmed it for easy organs till the tumors took ‘em.”
The girl snorted. “Don’t have strong enough chains for a fucking ghoul, Preed. Go piss off and be a half-strand somewhere else. Busy here. Need to count the bodies.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“I need to pretend to count the bodies so I can lie to the boss later.”
“Sounds better.”
“Fuck off.”
He heard footsteps as they walked away. They were speaking somewhere outside the depression he was trapped in. More bodies piled down next to him. All of them were enwreathed in dissipating particulates, black motes accelerating the process of rot. Avo tilted his head at the sight and watched the shroud of darkness spread.
Strangely, they avoided him, as if his person alone was exempted from the touch of entropy.
Mentally, Avo tried to activate his Metamind. At his command, a ripple should have bloomed out from his mind in five sequences and the ghosts that formed the outer accretion of the halo would mask his surface thoughts with phantasmal matter. Yet, nothing came. His cog-feed showed no indication of booting. Not even a misfire of emotion from a badly sequenced chain of ghosts.
Something was wrong. He definitely “saw” running lines of cog-data flashing behind his eyes earlier. Something about his ontology and thaumic mass. The frustration mounted inside him. Ghosts didn’t just fail to activate. They were animated pieces of intellect bound to his will. It wasn’t like they could break like machines. They could fragment. Shattering into individual parts and pieces, but then the cog-fed shouldn’t have come on at all earlier.
Dread lodged itself deep in Avo’s mind just as a migraine overwhelmed his senses. All indications pointed to his Metamind being damaged or compromised in some form. Had he been ambushed in the real? Had his Nether-Alt been compromised? Seeing as he was laying in a pit of corpses, the evidence dragged him toward that dreaded likelihood that his identity had been discovered.
This led to other questions. Who and how?
Avo thought back to the last thing he could remember.
He had been finishing out a dive for Nine-Fox, smuggling pay data across a Guild checkpoint in the Nether. It was a milk run. The imps were due to be wired over to him in a few days. And then…
And then he couldn’t remember anything. How long had it been since he did his dive? And how did he get from there down to wherever this was?
No answers came to him. Not good, but he forced himself to accept reality. He was in a pit of corpses, probably far, far away from home, crippled by countless wounds. Avo grunted. As it goes. There was nothing he could do about the past. For now, he did what Walton had trained him to do: solve the problems he could first.
Ignoring the twisting pain inside him, he forced himself up against the rusted hull of the aerovec. The diamond-shaped vehicle was aged, gray paint mottling off its chassis as the black motes sheared its exterior away. Leaning himself against its frame, he took inventory of his injuries and fought through another wave of rising dizziness.
His translucent skin seemed to gleam in the gloam of darkness. Overhead, the slit of light darkened. Another dozen or so bodies rained down as a clamp opened up. How far up was it? Looking high, he tried gauging the jump to the ledge. Ten feet? Twenty maybe?
His night vision was something he got as a package with nearsightedness. With these attributes combined, he could see just well enough in the dark to perceive everything in a twenty-foot radius. Past that, he could sometimes guess when something was moving by the patterns of the blurs. If he could get his Metamind online and his cog-feed working again, there was an option to directly feed visual data around him into his mind, thus cutting his worthless eyes out of the equation.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
That would alleviate some of his problems at the least.
His left arm throbbed, the familiar static of a phantom limb. Frowning in annoyance, he looked down and found only a budding nub growing from his shoulder. The pain was bone-gnawing. Like someone had ground his arm down to the socket with a power saw.
The rest of his body wasn’t much better. The columns of his vertebrae were slowly clicking back together as his blood cells nudged them back in place. It felt as if they had been hammered apart. A cluster of scabs ran to his armpit from his left ribplate. They flared with stabbing pain when he moved. Two incisions ran along his lower back. Something felt missing inside him. Avo directed his blood to do a count of what four primary organs his body needed.
Something was missing. Avo sighed. “They” took his kidneys. Whoever “they” were this time.
Aside from his brain and the haemophage cortex attached to it, his kidneys were the only organs his blood couldn’t mimic in function. Little wonder why he was feeling so sick. Toxins were probably poisoning his cells by the second.
Straining his metabolism further, he felt his insides spasm as his kidneys started regrowing as well.
Kidneys were one of the few things a self-employed ghoul could sell on a bi-weekly basis for imps. That being said, he never sold both of them at the same time. It was one of the few things that were always in demand in the Warrens. Ghoul organs were cheap and had a near-hundred percent acceptance rate even without bio-culturing after they sterilized the blood cells. Shame he couldn’t grow the organs faster without risking tumors. Could’ve sold them for easy imps.
Usually, organ farmers were more professional about it. He usually sold one every few weeks for the imps. It wasn’t much, but it blunted his living expenses and prevented the downgrading of his citizenship.
His legs were a mangle of oozing flaps. A few thick ropes of outer muscle had detached from his bone, jutting out from the clefts of his wounds. He ordered his blood cells down into his legs as well. Beneath his skin, his intact muscles twitched and tightened across him in layered eel-like strands. Considering their density, it would have taken substantial harm to have hewed him apart so deeply. It would have taken something like a mono-blade judging from his wounds.
More evidence that he had been tortured. Now that was a strange thing for him not to remember. Maybe they had edited his memories afterward. But why not just kill him then? Or harvest him for his ghost? More questions. No answers.
He could feel his hunger growing though. Just a byproduct of his cellular regeneration.
The nub on his arm sprouted lattices of self-mending tissue. Within, blood bubbled together to reconstitute the biomass that was lost. His hunger became a roar as his metabolism kicked into overdrive, his haemophage cortex burning through his recent intake to replace his spent cells.
By instinct and thought, his blood flowed. Their synaptic receptors allowed for direct correspondence with his mind. There weren’t many benefits to being a ghoul, but possessing synchro-sapient, self-propelling blood cells in the place of tertiary organs cost less than paying for medical insurance or maintaining the license to a Guild-owned nano-suite. At least until they started forming tumors inside him. Cancer treatments usually put a dent in his accounts.
Another burning spike of hunger radiated out from his gut as he felt his body slowly come back together. His senses sharpened. The air stank of rot and cold metal. He heard another thumping heartbeat pulsing nearby along with the other two. This one’s scent was sweetness clashing with sweat. They were further away than the others, though. Even less likely to notice him.
Onto more pressing concerns then: he wasn’t sure if he could make the climb upward in his current state. Two budding organs twitched inside him. His left arm extended itself, growing at a pace of inches per minute.
A sudden wave of fatigue washed through him. He needed to eat. Or he was going to starve.
Something splashed down behind him, ringing off the hood of the aerovec. A splatter of hot fluid dotted his hairless pate. Bouncing off the eroding chassis of the already rusted aerovec, the decapitated head of some woman rolled next to him, her face frozen in a death-rictus. Her blood-red lipstick stood out from the pale green sheen of her modded skin. The dissonant smile carved along her jowl did nothing to hide the horror lingering in her eyeless sockets.
A crude gang sigil was burned over her right eye. It resembled a rose that grew down into a lance at the roots. Avo remembered seeing that sign somewhere. Maybe he did a dive for the gang once. Reflexively, he tried summoning his Metamind again to call up its eidetic memory stores.
Nothing.
It didn’t respond. This time, he didn’t care, as he was too busy gnawing the skull clean of meat. She proved to be crunchier than he expected, but seeing as the head was the only thing that wasn’t rotten down in the pit, he wasn’t going to complain. He needed biomass to burn. She would suffice for now.
Mustering his strength, he staggered to his feet. Soon, after healing enough, the itching would begin.
Squinting up at the ledge again, he gauged the distance between him and the edge again. When his legs weren’t so mangled, he stood a bit over seven and a half feet. If he could fight through the pain, he could probably leap another six. Not enough.
He considered his options. Perhaps he could pile the mound of bodies into a corner? No. Too few, and they were dissolving too quickly around him. With the brittle corpses beneath already pulping and snapping beneath his weight, they wouldn’t hold. He would just sink into them, making pulp of their remains.
His eyes came to halt on the aerovec again. Avo tilted his head. It looked about twenty feet long. He grinned. It still looked solid enough to be workable.
Digging his claws into its weakened frame, he pulled up and pushed. His muscles coiled and sprung across his body, the taut strands on fire like twitching whips. A ton of metal, glass, and electronics toppled over a carpet of bodies with a squelch. Avo ignored the squishing beneath his digitigrade claws as he limped forward and repeated the action. The aerovec flipped again. More bodies came apart beneath the vehicle’s weight. He listened for the heartbeats of those above carefully. If he heard them, he'd go back to playing dead.
Considering how they were talking earlier, he doubted them to be friendly. Not that anyone particularly liked ghouls in this city.
The missing arm made shouldering the aerovec against the walls a struggle. Halfway through, something soft bounced off his chest through the cracked windshields.
He ignored it. Carefully, he braced the weight of the vehicle against himself, shrugging it higher and higher until he lodged it against a clump of bodies.
Looking down, he noticed what had struck him. A stuffed animal. Some kind of nu-dog that had the stock canine features, but with added spines along its back. A tinge of men’s cologne wafted from the toy.
Squeezing it, a holograph flickered from its center and began to play. The form of a human toddler manifested. She wore a synth-dress and had an orange bowl cut. He noted that her eyes were likely implants by the unnatural way they shone. Regardless, the holograph just looped her giggling and dancing.
Under the foot of the plushie, he found the name “Edda” signed like a chicken scratch. Written by a child’s hand, no doubt.
Beneath it, another line of writing followed. It was far more legible. “Daddy misses you every day.”
Mentally, he tried to scan the toy and see if his Cipher engram could trace anything else from the object's history. Nothing happened. Disappointment followed. Right. No Metamind. No phantasmic engrams. No functions.
He needed to see an Agnos if he managed to make it out of this. See if his Metamind was missing, out of power, or just fragged. More than what happened to him or who tortured him, he wanted to know what was going on with his smart construct. It was the last thing he inherited from his adopted father, Walton. He couldn’t accept it being broken. Wouldn’t accept it. He would get it working again, whatever the cost.
Inside, the beast growled in pleasure. Already, it was whispering to him to track the heartbeats. To climb out from this pit and sample some flesh. Avo sighed. Another problem to face without the Metamind. No Morality Module to suppress his psychopathy.
Shaking the tightness from his body, he listened for a moment. No footsteps. The heartbeats seemed to hold in place. Whoever the others were, they weren’t moving about. Slowly, he clambered onto the aerovec. It slid with each shift of weight. Its frame bent as he climbed. He felt it peeling off the wall with a screech.
Halfway between the pilot’s seat and the ledge, he leaped and caught himself with one hand. The claws on his feet buried into the wall as he cleaved his way up. As he crested his first threshold to freedom, he looked over the horizon.
His blood froze. Cold terror rose within him.
He was on a slow moving barge with four industrial grabbers. Over a nigh-endless chasm of trash and bodies, the ship sailed on currents of anomalous wind. As far as he could see, the landscape was an expanse of ever dissolving trash and waste. Massive portholes lined a gorge of ebony with an endless tide of sewage pouring free from each opening.
“Hells,” Avo muttered. Realization stabbed into him like a stake.
The dissolving motes he saw clinging to the bodies. The fact that he was in a barge filled with corpses. The narrow chasm of light that shone down upon him.
This was the Maw.
He had fallen farther down than he ever thought he could. Onward, the canyon sprawled out across the outer rings of New Vultun like a snaking labyrinth. He must’ve gotten picked out of the endless wastes below by the scavenger barge.
But how did he end up in the Maw in the first–
A heartbeat skipped a pulse close behind him. Avo spun, catching sight of a bald, fair-skinned girl. Floating gang hap-tats flickered across her face, playing an animated clash between a warg and a nu-bear. Her forehead was specially reserved for holo-ads selling a new type of chem for the dose-chasers. She towered far above him on a spreading walkway that went from bow to stern. A half-eaten sandwich tumbled from her hands, and bounced off the controls of her rig, mashed juice-beetles spilling through the grates at her feet.
Seated at the heart of a cheap industrial rig, she piloted the amplifier suit more than she wore it. Exposed metal ribs projected HUD overlays across her face. A cord ran from the inner spine of the rig into the back of her skull, neurally lacing mind to machine. From her spine emerged three different limbs. One for manipulation. One for drilling. One for scanning. Her legs spilled out four crab-like appendages.
For a beat, they just stared at each other. The corpse-barge poured more trash into the pit he just crawled out of. The girl twitched, blood draining from her face. Behind one of her control panels, he thought he caught sight of a holstered pistol. She looked at it as well.
Avo held up a slow hand. “Wait–”
One of her hands snapped out, groping wildly for the gun. He turned on instinct, unsure where to run. If he went right he’d get sucked through the six aero-engines. If the funneling winds didn’t denude his corpse, then he’d get to enjoy dying in the Maw below. He wondered what it would be like to be swallowed by tides of concentrated entropy. More than that, he wondered why the motes avoided him earlier. Toward the stern, he saw two more figures piloting their rigs toward him.
Not good. He spun. A burst of gunfire roared. Three-rounds. Hard impacts slammed against his shoulder, breaking skin but crumpling against the thickness of his layered muscle. It felt like being stung by a mantis-wasp. Still, he growled in pleasure, the beast slowly seizing hold of him.
They didn’t have enough firepower to kill him. How unfortunate for them.
Avo stumbled and winced. The girl’s hand was shaking wildly, her eyes looked bloodshot. No way she could have made the shot unassisted. Smart-gun. Faintly, he could feel the faint presence of a whispering ghost rippling from the gun. Cheap ghosts could make anything a smart-gun these days.
Metal limbs hammered down against ringing grates from behind. Ahead, the girl tugged the trigger again. A single shot rang out. The gun’s barrel burst. The bullet broke against his sternum, sending him staggering backward. Shaking his head, he saw the dolloping slag of the overheated weapon.
Bad piece of hardware. Must’ve been a cheap quick-fabbed piece of kit. Unfortunate.
Inside his chest, he felt his blood surge, and his senses sharpen. He could hear her heartbeat, her quick, hyperventilating gasps coming from her. Closer, he identified her sweet scent as a cheap perfume, making her smell like peaches despite the sweat she earned from her toil.
Desperately, she worked to fix her gun. Painfully, he fought the urge to tear her apart, to eat her.
Rationally, he knew he couldn’t blame her. He would have done the same in her place. Ghouls were dangerous. Ghouls were monsters. Ghouls were all the things the topsiders said and more. He cannibalized more than his share of other monsters to know that. But knowing wasn’t the same as feeling, and without his Metamind, his Morality Module wasn’t flooding his mind with the right emotions to suppress him.
That meant he wasn’t getting doses of suppressive emotion. Injections of humanity. For the first time in years, his bestial nature rose unchecked. His want for violence grew closer to a need.
He ran his tongue across his fangs. He flexed the claws of his right arm.
On mending legs, he made for her. Behind, her cohorts approached. They wouldn’t be fast enough. Right now, the only person that could save her from him was him.
For the first time in years, Avo faced the beast without the aid of his Metamind or adopted father. He didn’t know if he was strong enough to prevail.