Fin knew, in that way that was becoming more and more certain as wisdom melted into foresight, that most warriors from other clans would fail to remember their time as sharpies. In the transition from child to adult, they would lose some measure of those first primal instincts, that hazy certainty about how the world worked on the basest of levels.
The Walking Into the Sea Clan was gifted, in that way. The wisdom of the sea gave them a deeper memory, and so Fin, despite being only three days old, could recall everything that had happened over the month since his birth. His older brothers, newly pupated, striding unflinchingly into the black ocean. Their return, two days later, bodies hardened by proximity to the Seeking Corpse, grown large and strange as they consumed its cunning.
And then their deaths. The Sun’s descent, them fighting it nearly to the last. Only mother and a few warriors slinking away into the depths, retreating into the deepest darkness to hopefully survive and repopulate.
Leaving the sharpies behind. Him, and a score of siblings.
But it was not only the past he recalled. The blood of the sea was knowledge, and that blood pumped through his veins; he knew things that had happened long ago, too.
The first Clanboss finding the Corpse. His ancestors gradually trading land for sea, until they could barely walk under the clouds. The deeper histories, whispered by Hidden Moon’s voice in the currents and Oldest Bones’s dreamlike visions; the Serpent God, mother to the leviathan they had feasted upon for countless generations.
And before that, the Earth Emperor. And after that, the Tyrant Sun. Even as he walked into the sea like his people had since the beginning, Fin’s head was swelled with memories that added context to who he was. To what he was betraying.
He could remember how the Sun descended countless times, before being driven back up by giant men and howling machines. How its worshippers gathered, trickling in from their hidden corners until they became an army. The battles they fought, wild, ravenous, revelling in an openness they hadn’t enjoyed for centuries even as they died by the hundreds.
Being driven northward, always northward, before they could dig down far enough.
Hate. He hated the Rotting Sun, hated its sycophants, hated his mother for leaving him behind. It did not matter that he could not possibly have survived the depths before his pupation; the hate burned through all context, within or without. He hated the pus in his belly, hated the way it fed on him as he fed on it, hated the way he could feel it understand him. Accept him, accept his hatred, agree with it and name it justice.
His feet touched the water. His body, thin and transparent, long of limb and soft of bone, luxuriated in the feeling as he slipped under. He was not truly a creature of the sea – one more thing to hate, that his heritage had been stolen from him before he could have ever understood what it meant – but knowledge, once gained, was hard to forget. His body remembered the echo of the sea where there was only light and fury now, and so it conformed to that shape.
He swam further out, deeper down. The light from above disappeared immediately, leaving only the Sun’s radiance cutting through from the bottom. Bubbles of steam brushed against his skin, then streams, and soon there was more gas than liquid. Still he swam, deeper and deeper, leaving the land behind in a crooked mockery of his ancestor’s traditions.
The land warriors had sought to drive the Sun into the sea, to drown it as its brethren had drowned when Uriel had cursed the sky and Joe stalked the earth. To bathe its foresight in the depths, and finally be rid of it.
But the Rotting Sun was not only a ruinous calamity. It could think, in a fashion. It could learn.
Hunger. The power to take, to consume. The power its followers had been gifting it for countless years – that it was taking from him, even now. And so it had consumed the great corpse, a feat a thousand generations of warriors could not accomplish, and taken all that remained of its cunning. It could live, if only barely, in the depths where only leviathans made their home.
Those land-dwellers still waited on the shore, ignorant, waiting for it to either die or leap into their waiting jaws. They had already killed the army that had slain Fin’s clan; it was only him and his few remaining brothers, now.
Perhaps what he hated most was that understanding. The mirror he saw when he looked into its decaying form, when it screamed curses equal to those that had killed the sky into his head.
The Sun knew him. It hated him more than he hated it. It loved him more than he loved it. It knew he was rotten – but what was rot, if not the intermingling of life and death? Love and hate? Beauty and cruelty?
The Sun had killed him before he was born, and made a new thing in his image. What could he call it, other than father?
Dozens of sinuous shapes slid through the ocean, cutting through the water and steam alike. Fin’s brothers were like him, cruel parodies of what they should have been – but they were alive. They were strong, filled with caustic hate. A burning, terrible lust for vengeance at the world. They swelled with it, as he did, growing as they descended, tempered by heat and light the way their forefathers had been tempered by cold and darkness.
As he approached the lowest point, the very bottom, time seemed to slow. His motions, his body, grew distant and unreal.
As the seabed came into view, so did the corpse. Not the Seeking Corpse – that was gone, gone, swallowed whole and melted down – but a much smaller one. Not a great serpent, many-headed and noble even as it bled wisdom into the water, but the humble skeleton of a warrior.
And as Fin touched the sand, his webbed limbs adhering to the grit like plant roots, he saw the shadow below it. It stretched out, cast by the acidic light of the Sun behind the corpse’s spine – but it was too dark, too round, the edges too sharp.
“If you take the next step, you will be lost,” said Oldest Bones.
“It is not too late. You can choose who you are,” said Hidden Moon.
Fin rested himself on the sea’s floor, silent, looking at the bones and the moon’s shadow underneath. Then his mouth, wide and full of needles, flapped open. “This is your fault. You drove it here.”
The water flowed across his transparent skin.
“All paths lead to death. Accept it, and be at peace.”
“You curse us, yet follow the thing that did the deed? You lie to yourself.”
The pus boiled inside him, in his stomach, his veins, his heart. It burned him, leaving meaning behind.
YOU WILL DIE
EITHER WAY, I WILL KILL YOU
THERE IS NOTHING ELSE, NO PEACE, NO TRUTH TO SAVE YOU
ONLY SUFFERING
ONLY THE WORLD, WHICH MUST BE PUNISHED
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
CHOOSE
The gods fell silent. The Sun shone, unmoving, as caught in the slowed time as everything else. The corpse and its shadow, unable to follow him should he walk deeper into the sea. In the distant murk he could see his brothers, equally frozen. Only he could move, only he had a choice.
A memory came to him. One from long ago, before the Walking Into the Sea Clan was born. A serpent, lulled to sleep by music and the promise of peace. Its cunning subverted, its wisdom preserved in Salt.
His limbs moved. He went forward, into the light. The hatred is cruel, but it is beautiful. It is… an answer, a meaning. There is nothing for you to offer me that could be greater than that.
The corpse sank into the sand, quietly accepting. The shadow flickered and disappeared with a wink, never real in the first place, a trick of perspective.
One hundred and forty-four men, only days old, encircled a burning dead star. In their hearts was an immense enmity, a desire to bathe the world in suffering, to snuff out existence itself. A hatred for every thing; themselves, the living, the dead. They cried out, and the star, sitting in the place where ancient knowledge had fermented for eons, replied.
The star shone its light on them, and they died.
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In the mortal world, the word city conjures images of tall buildings and wide streets, of the bustle of humanity as it strives towards prosperity.
In Hell, a city is a blood-soaked abyss that exists only to torture its inhabitants. Whorefrost was no different; carved into the deepest valley in the northern reaches, as far from Black Volcano as it was possible to be – tunnelling further into the ground would actually move them closer – the lightless hole was so far removed from the network of roadways that it was nearly impossible to find even with a detailed map.
And that was exactly how Hell Prince Galob liked it. Why attract visitors? Citizens are only a nuisance, with their demands and pathetic wallowing and endless schemes. Better to be unfindable, a place for prisoners and imprisoners. Chattel and prince, sheep and wolf, grass and cow.
Today, as the light of the centre graced their little slit in the icy barren stone, Galob decided he was sharp. He was bony, prickly, like a bundle of thorns and sharp nails.
And as he envisioned it, his body shifted and changed to match – he was a fiend, the pinnacle of demonkind, able to morph himself into any shape in the time it took a lesser creature to blink their worthless, delectable eyes. As the pained screams began to filter up from the pits he inspected himself: a many-limbed body, not dissimilar to a tumbleweed, with eye spots hidden in the shade of protruding spines. There was no pattern to it, no way to predict which direction the scything edges would cut; the colouration was sickening to look at, designed specifically to force even the most hardened eye away for a fraction of a second.
Perfect. A masterwork, as always. As the Prince of the city, no one would dare attack him – but that was no reason to be soft. If he were to be unseated… no, unthinkable. To go back in the pit with the rest, after having spilled so much blood crawling out? Inconceivable.
His body shifted again, this time in movement rather than transmutation. Clinging tendrils carved dust off the edges of his throne. Speaking of the pits… The screams seem to be petering out early today. I’ll have to switch the torturers out with their meat soon – no doubt the wretches will have devised a new set of horrors over the last decade, down there in the dark. He had no lips to smile with, but his glee was real. I can’t wait to see which ones have gone from imp to ifrit. Maybe there will even be another fiend this cycle? I’d be able to trade them back to the Emperor for twenty fresh imps, juicy and succulent.
The thought coated his thorns in saliva, the caustic substance further etching his throne where it was ground into the stone by his ecstatic writhing. A hole, no larger than the point of a quill, expelled a stream of air with immense force as his whistling voice cut through the fading screams.
“Adjunct, bring me the first torturer!” The words were spoken in one of the true demon tongues, a language no living creature would understand. “I’ve decided that they’re switching places early.”
Silence, no reply but the fading echo of the final scream from deep below.
Galob went utterly still, his instincts sharpening. Slowly, he unfurled and disentangled his many limbs from his throne, ghosting across the floor as though his body was weightless. The antechamber to his personal slice of Hell was empty, stacks of coins and ingots left unattended.
His blood cooled further. Hatehate Hatehatehate Dragon, his adjunct, would never dream of leaving his perch atop the mounds of wealth for anything but a direct order. At the speed of thought his skin turned glossy and black, thorns becoming the notched edges of coins as he nestled into the corner of the room.
Minutes passed. Hours. He did not move a single hair’s width.
And then, finally, the future meal that had dared to touch his property revealed itself.
It was a simple thing, sleek, reminding him of a newborn demon just beginning to understand itself. It was built like a mortal creature; sensible, symmetrical. There were none of the little tricks more advanced demons learned, no nightmarish patterns to break up its spiritual silhouette or sacrificial grotesqueries to sink curses into.
It was like a seal or mudskipper, crawling across his floor on limbs more suited to water than solid land. The two front limbs were webbed, while the back were flipper-like – but that was where comparisons to earthly life ended, at least on a surface level.
Its flesh was transparent, organs – organs! The waste! – visible as lightly coloured blobs, a larger central mass glowing a sickly pale green. In a clearer environment it would have been effective camouflage, but the frosty northern mists that Galob liked to keep around for ambience left it quite visible. In terms of body shape, it was slightly more respectable – four limbs, but no visible head, no sensory organs at all that he could detect. Teeth jutted from its underside in something that might be considered a jaw, but there was no esophagus. It padded forward, drooping under its own weight, seemingly harmless.
The Hell Prince had never seen such an obvious trap in his life. It was insulting; even if he deigned to believe a demon could reach such a staggering size without learning the first thing about body construction, his underlings had obviously disappeared. Did it think he was stupid? Was it bait, to get him to reveal himself?
He allowed the demon to go past him, not moving as it pawed listlessly at his piled riches or as it entered his throne room.
Only minutes later, when it came back through, did he strike. Unfurling his tendrils, he struck first with soul-rending curses before laying in with barbed whip-strikes. The thing died near instantaneously, half-liquefied before he even touched it, its meat parting like the soft jelly it resembled. Before its gore could even spatter the walls he engulfed it, assimilating its flesh as its soul bobbed in delicious outrage.
Flavourful. Poisoned? Why? Is it some kind of idiot savant? Something that managed to dodge every other demon in the area for millennia, growing in complete isolation? He had no explanation, it was completely bizarre.
Well, obviously it didn’t kill my meat by itself. I’ll go down level by level, see if I can’t scrape up something to show for- ah?
His body rumbled, muscles twitching involuntarily. “What is this?” For a moment his memory drifted back, back to a particularly nasty death via inhaling a blowfish. No, impossible. No poison could affect me – I transmuted it directly into flesh, there’s none of it left! His orifices frothed, saliva glowing faintly with pale luminescence. No! I refuse to believe I fell for a trap- I am a Hell Prince! The lord of this city for ten thousand years! I earned my position, slaughtering my way up the ranks, learning every trick twice over; there isn’t any enemy who could outsmart my hard-won experience!
And then the disembodied soul pressed against him, and his flesh writhed against his will. “You?! No, I refuse!” He slid across the ground, his movements chipping and flinging tiles into the air. “You can’t have it! I’ve been building this body since before you were shat out of your first womb! I refuse!”
With a mighty heave, he flung the soul away with all the power he could muster. It flew into the wall, impacting the stone with a mass that no soul should have, and as additional confusion played through his mind he collapsed in a twitching heap.
There was stillness for a moment, before the shuffling of a dozen blubbery flipper-feet caught his sensory hairs. Then the soul rocketed into him again, pushing him towards the drop with the motions of his own limbs, and he began to feel real fear for the first time since he had been granted Whorefrost by the Emperor's will.
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As they fed the last monster into the blazing portal, Fin allowed himself to relax. Whatever this place was, it was terrible. The air, the ground, everything was a mess of burning pain, the ambient energy hostile and corrosive.
But not nearly as hostile or corrosive as what he had already swallowed. The ball of diffuse energy swirled, screaming obscenities, until its hate melded with the Sun. The portal grew again, just slightly, now large enough that a Joeist could have fit their shoulders through.
Not nearly enough. The thought was far from despairing; it was anticipatory. They had lost over fifty of their number assaulting the fortress, but it seemed that they were immortal – his brothers were already becoming alive again, flesh sprouting from their disembodied spirits in fits and starts as they struggled to control this new energy. The same was not true of the natives, who were part of his god now.
Lit from both above and below, Fin fed his hate into the new corner he could feel in his stomach. His limbs lengthened, thickened, and his teeth became sharper and more numerous. The eyes he had lost in his pupation returned, bulging with pus, as his bones reconfigured for walking on land.
Wearing the form of his lost childhood, Fin howled at the sky far above, a hateful sound full of triumph and longing.