> The Shapers, for all their apparent mastery of the biologics, engaged very little in the alteration of their own forms, beyond the most superficial and cosmetic measures. This is self-evident, as if they had done otherwise all modern humans would bear the imprints of such efforts, but the comparison of modern and ancient remains reveal no widespread differences—excepting the occasional aberrants attributable to individual cards.
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> Indeed, what little early writing we possess of their era reveals an intense paranoia about the dangers of such self-modification. The villains of their fictions routinely engaged in such acts, inevitably culminating in their own hubristic demise.
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> Later works showed new themes, those of supplantation. Unlike the early works, these popular narratives seemed to reflect the anxieties of the time, representing, rather than warning against, growing trends. There was a generalized fear of their own replacement, of creating monsters that could, in essence, become men.
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> Introduction excerpt of “Shaper Dreams and Nightmares: a discussion of cultural trends of the Pre-Fall peoples”, assorted authors, edited by Lord Balqre.
The ground had crumbled beneath them too quickly to move aside, as if a great maw now satisfied its hunger for them and earth alike. Jack caught glimpses of the hivers that had triggered the pit trap—bristling hordes swarming in the dim light through a warren of intersecting tunnels.
Vital Flow. Gotcha Dash. Pivot.
Jack’s cards were flawed and strange, but they had one area in which they showed themselves superior: he truly excelled at falling.
He had stumbled forward when the earth broke, so now he fell face-down. His ground-sense told him that his dash was out of safe range of a surface but Pivot swung him back to a vertical orientation. He felt the range of the dash-shadow extend until it made contact with the ground below him.
With only a cursory thought he activated it, and in an instant he accelerated down to the ground in a rush. He landed with perfect poise: an assured, unbending stance only possible with Gotcha Dash’s momentum elimination.
The others would be arriving in moments, no doubt using their own cards to navigate the fall. Jack scrambled to the side in anticipation, making room for the new arrivals.
But they didn’t appear, instead only a strange flickering light lit the depths.
He looked up, revealing the nobles and Grant suspended in a sphere of blue light, drifting down. The light it emanated highlighted stacks of twisting corridors and twisting shadows drawn along every surface.
They were slow. Even as he watched they only moved a few meters, the card effect sluggishly contracting to squeeze them through the confines of the pitfall. He could just make out the frenzied shadow of Grant peering through the bottom of the sphere.
‘He lost me.’
Jack had ensured his own safety, and in doing so isolated himself from the protection of Grant. Jack could almost scream at his own impulsiveness, of course a bondsman would have a card to preserve nobles with less developed decks.
Even as he fretted, the rustling movement of approaching hivers came from the tunnels on the opposite side of the hive, while those leading deeper remained silent. This trap had been laid in advance, and he was sitting in the sprung centre of it.
'I can't wait. I have no cards left, the others won’t be here in time. I-I need to run.'
Without recourse, he fled into the silent tunnels, even knowing that he was being driven.
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The darkness devoured. The tunnels were steeped in pitch black, a shadow that loomed into eyes and made them forgetful of light.
There was warmth, a humidity, bearing the pungency of life. The tunnels breathed, unnatural depths infested with damp echoes and the ebbing winds of distant motion.
The tunnels curled on themselves, like a hydra of absence hewn from the earth, they twined serpentine convolutions that left Jack discombobulated in only a few turns.
It was an inhuman, alien place, hostile in its essential nature to the body and mind. He could imagine madness in it.
But his steps fell true.
At first, he didn’t realize the effect, as his attention was caught by the barbs of the environs but, after a minute of desperate flight, he realized that he could feel where every footstep would land. He didn’t stumble or miss-tread, when his foot passed over a sudden hole he jolted back from a hazardous fall.
‘The dash-shadow!’ his understanding came suddenly and completely. The secondary effect of Gotcha Dash, the perception of where the dash charge would take him, gave him a precise—not quite image, but intuition—in his mind’s eye of the surface below him. He had never used it to move in darkness before but now the fringe utility was what made his navigation possible.
Every time he heard movement within a passage he made for another, leveraging his surefootedness to avoid undue noise. He could hear incoming hivers well before they arrived, as they made no effort to move silently in their rush to swarm the nobles.
He moved faster than them in the dark. They were methodical, moving forward with a hurried, but not desperate gait, utterly unlike the rapid charge the hiver warrior had launched at Stroph days ago. Jack realized they were as blind as him in the darkness—blinder even. He had imagined them utterly without weakness, implacable in their stronghold and supernatural in ability.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
It would have been impossible without the dash-shadow, he would have stumbled blindly and injured himself. Light would have been necessary for anyone else, but also a beacon for the hivers to seek any interlopers. His ability to move in the darkness was the tenuous thread that held him from immediate discovery.
In this way he fled, herded by unknowing shepherds as he sought, not escape—that was too much to ask, but mere survival. Taking another stride, another breath, to feel a single moment more—those were his ambitions.
He ran until a new peril, one he couldn’t help but feel a siren’s call towards, appeared ahead: a soft glow lit the tunnel before him. Fear of discovery urged his retreat, but the silence ahead bade him on. He found himself clutching at the air, hands clenching as if to grasp the dim light and pull it into himself.
The thought of heading back into shadow, when what might be the light of the surface fell just before him, was too dreadful a thing to condemn himself to. He stole forward, ready to turn back into the darkness, but desperate to go on. He did not wonder why his hopeful exit brought no fresh air, why the stench of biologics had only thickened into miasma with his approach. Futile hopes make artful deceptions.
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A corridor, curving gently out of sight, the ceiling rising up and out of reach to give the walls intimidating height. There was wood there, sturdy beams to secure this place against cave-in or other disaster and allow it to reach a scale impossible with the packed earth of the earlier tunnels.
Jack noted the wood’s presence absently, a discrepancy to be examined later. His attention flitted, looking for threat and or escape in equal measure. The space was unoccupied, to his relief, but there was no route out, no glimmering of daylight to beckon him.
Light came from the walls. They were filled with floor to ceiling stacked hexagons, emanating with a gentle yellow glow. The immediate comparison that came to him was honeycomb, scaled until each cell spanned half a meter across.
Curiosity drove him onwards and he approached the near wall to look closer. The hexagon was organic, a bulging membrane covering an inner chamber filled with a clear but milky yellow fluid. Jack placed his hand against the seal and felt it flex inward at the pressure he applied.
From deep within the cell a black spot suddenly moved. Jack recoiled instinctively at the motion, pulling away on reflex. The inhabitant—for that was what it was—grew larger, approaching the membrane and growing distinct as the cloudy fluid between them thinned.
It resolved into a malformed fetal creature, akin to many of the anatomical drawings Jack had seen of the developing embryos of various animals. This early in their development they all looked alike; a curled, limbless worm. That this one had motility struck him as highly strange, but clearly a capacity of the hivers.
Now that he knew what to look for, shadows were obvious in many of the cells, of many varied sizes and vague permutations in shape.
Borne by fascinated disgust, he returned to the membrane and marveled at the creature’s willingness to follow the movement of his finger along its cell.
An adjacent cell’s occupant stirred. Jack watched as it approached him. It was a little more developed than the first one, bearing rudimentary limbs that it used to paddle along until it bumped against its membrane and oriented itself towards him.
The rest came in a flood. His presence triggering an instinctual drive, the cells all around stirred with motion, blurry shadows growing distinct as they neared him.
First the small ones, bumping along in awkward forms against the barrier. Then the older, clumsier siblings, growing increasingly articulated but losing their aquatic attunement.
The wall filled with shadows, the warm and simple lighting of the corridor growing tangled as creatures flitted and bobbed against their confines, filling his vision with their jittering motion.
It was like watching their development in fast motion as each arrival presented another week, another month of development from their predecessor.
A small hand loomed in the periphery of his vision. A baby, human by every sense he possessed, looking at him from the cell with curious eyes. Its hand drummed against the membrane; a regular rhythm, delighted to have gained his attention.
Another arrived, more developed than the last. Its arms had grown a chitinous ridge, the bones of the foot grew long and digitigrade. An angry protrusion of tissue and bone down the middle of the face pushed the eyes to the side, revealing the undeveloped creature as hiver. It moved crudely, stupidly, in contrast to its neighbour.
The all-too-human infant stretched, showing articulation beyond that of a typical baby, and yawned.
Spiderlegs crawling out from a child’s maw.
Jack fled back to darkness.
He made for smaller tunnels whenever possible, noting with some dismay that they always led downward, becoming rougher, more haphazard, and convoluted—fractal in their nature. Soon he was hunching over as the ceiling descended to meet him, squeezing through gaps or squirming into an opening like a predator into a burrow. The upper routes seemed straightforward in comparison, to these lower tunnels, this snarl.
Finally he paused, breath coming in gasps. He shook whenever his attention faltered, uncontrollable shivers that could only be endured, not tamed.
The young hiver had been too bright, too attentive. He now understood what it truly meant, that hivers had been made from human sources.
Every organism holds its past in its early development, the forms its distant ancestors once resembled shine through in specific traits. The hivers begin as something almost human, their past, and then their shaper’s will distorts them, and the spark of humanity is snuffed out to make the hiver. It is written in their shaping.
These thoughts tumbled in his mind, a horror he was unprepared for, until finally he mastered himself.
He spat, realizing that the air of the… chamber had left a cloying sweet taste in his mouth, and took stock of his new surroundings, delving further into the depths that he’d now plumbed.
The character of the tunnels had changed. The sounds of movement, the breath of the hive, had grown silent. The air, stale, still, and cold. The walls were now partially rock, clearly they harvested in these depths, if crudely.
It was in this solemn tomb that he stumbled upon a hiver body, desiccated and dry like paper. He trod upon it, thinking it was just a rise in the floor, only to be sent sprawling when his weight was not held.
Blind touch revealed its form and a resentful kick produced no satisfaction, only a cloud of choking dust that sent him hacking on his way, fearfully imagining strange parasites borne on the corpse-stuff penetrating deep into his lungs.
He could imagine lone hivers descending this far, driven by a compulsion, an instinct, to dig, but without the structure of numbers they created something even less usable, even more lacking in reason or purpose. Making a space hostile and unsettling even to them.
‘One could spend a lifetime, lost in these depths.’
It was a musing at first, but a chill stole across his heart as he let the thought linger, and a feeling of claustrophobia, that had until then been absent, made itself known. The efficiency of his flight, of his ability to navigate even in the dark, had given him a sense of confidence he was now realizing was false.
One question, smouldering in his mind now lit with urgency.
‘How do I survive this?’