LAYER 17: (TRUTH IS) BETTER THAN SUICIDE
As all living things do,
That limp form burned fuel and churned away.
The brain swirled and contracted like a great eye, seeing everything it wanted to see. Everything it looked for.
The Steely Manticore had struggled to be born, and now it would do as it wilt.
Those words echoed amongst images of a lonely planet in a bleaker void. The man who once held a name, then a yellow cloak, then a page in a digital bestiary, had read them once. Once upon an evening snowy, in a castle courtyard, he read those words.
Do as thou wilt.
Something about that struck a chord in that freezing gray, and he vowed to himself to live by those words.
Was he really doing “as he wilt,” though, or was he doing as his psyche wilt? Was the world expressing itself through the Man In Yellow? Was his supposed hedonism actually a surrendering of control to some higher power?
Those gaps in his memory. Were they, truthfully, gone, or were they appeasements to an otherwise-unanswered God?
Doubt resounds against hollow steel.
I can feel something pulling me deeper into my own head. Whether I should explain myself, or keep silent, I don’t know. If I do say more, then what do I say? I’m touched by Alice’s gesture, and I don’t want to seem cold, but I also don’t want to assign more meaning to it than was intended.
Was it out of love? I feel loved. It’s a nice, warm glow I haven’t held in my chest in a long time, ever since “that day”. I’m scared that it is. Now that I hold this warm lantern, I’m terrified of losing its radiant shine. Not so scared I’d lose my head, no, I keep things cool, analytical even. I won’t misstep. This is a dance I’ve danced countless times over, and then again never in my life. I’m not afraid of love, or something being done out of love, or of “that day,” of anything within or without. It’s when the inside and outside of myself mix that I start to worry. Physically, or emotionally, what’s inside me should stay inside and what’s outside should stay there.
I wasn’t awake. Because now I was staring at a page of my bestiary, or rather at a pale blue screen that I couldn’t read with my thousand-yard stare. I was looking into a single pixel at a time, but not really; I was looking into my entire self and trying to figure out what my most recent thoughts said about me. How to reconcile them with the frail continuum that is Alistair Macabre.
A tap on my shoulder. “You’re ok?” Alice asked. She tried to hide the bullets, but it was a loaded question. I could tell, from how shaky her voice was, that this was a desperate search for some anchor to her empathy.
So, I did as I would; I nodded. “Don’t… touch me, though, please.”
It was a lie, from a certain point of view. But from a certain point of view the sky is purple, or red, or black, not blue. From certain points of view, there is no sky, just a gradient atmosphere. The most immediately useful truth would have been that I was not ok. I felt myself recoil from even a soft touch. I was spiraling into my own head. That much, I knew. But I also knew I had to try to get better, for not just my own sake, but Alice’s. Because she knew it was a lie, most likely. She was hardly even asking in the first place, more of a declaration: “You aren’t ok right now, just so you know.”
In that way, it was more useful to interpret her words as “I feel that you’re in pain,” rather than “Are you ok?” No matter how I look at it, that was reassuring. No matter why she carried me to the chair, Alice empathized with me, even after my dumbass stunt.
A notification shattered my second mask of thoughts.
Hey. How was it? Did I help you any? Did you find anything interesting? Sorry for all the questions. Everyone’s just curious. Well, I’m sure you’ve seen, but people are losing their minds, on the main boards even. You’re famous. Like, crazy famous, as the person who became a hunter. You’re kind of a meme. Ah, but not like a funny meme, like, you’re a grassroots celebrity. An idol, even. Anyway, if I helped you, mention me in your post. I could use some of that fame too you know.
-MortalKombatUltra
I can’t do this right now.
I really don’t need some pseudo-cult to develop around me. I don’t want power, or fame, or anything. It’s too much trouble. I just want to do some good with my life when possible, so that I don’t have to worry about it when I do things for my own sake. I don’t want to have to deal with faceless followers calling my name, because each of them has a face, it’s just that you can’t see it from a seat of power. I don’t want to be that, some symbol for drifting souls to latch onto, any more than I want to be a parasite on a personality. I just want to live until I die, hopefully with a net positive of happiness.” I bury my face in my hands, and realize I just said that— all that— out loud. Dammit. Even someone who lives in my shadow shouldn’t have to hear my externalized monologue.
Alice just nods, though.
Everyone thinks this way. Alistair is not special for aspiring to be a scratch against emotional entropy. “I think you should just do what you want to do.”
“How,” comes their muffled reply, “Can I do that, when I can’t even do anything I need to?”
“People are prone to lashing out when they’re in pain, or tired, so don’t hurt or exhaust yourself, for a start. And more than anything, you need to enjoy the life you have. Like it or not, you were born into this world, so you can either tie yourself up with fake obligations to some vague notion of “society” or cut loose, do what feels right. Excluding what hurts people, of course, but that’s exactly it: excluding harm, not including some vague, subjective “virtue.”
Alistair sits up. “But that’s wrong. I’m no different than anyone else, so why should I do what feels right to me and not what feels right to some other person? And what if both of us are wrong?”
“There is no “wrong” or “right”. Just do what makes sense to you, and let things happen as they may.”
“What if I told you my current actions “make sense” to me?”
“I’d ask you to explain them.”
“Can you explain yourself, then?”
“You’re overly selfless, I think, and scared of being selfish. That’s dangerous, because it leads you to keep your distance from other people so you don’t hurt them. Compared to an overly selfish person, though, your actions lead to the same outcome; hurting other people. So why bother cloistering yourself like this? If you were too selfish, you’d still hurt other people, but not yourself; you’d reduce harm.”
“But that’s not enough, and besides, I’m still hurting people.”
“I’m getting there. Abandon the perception of yourself as “selfless” or “selfish”. Stop watching yourself so closely. You’re a person, first and foremost, not a number in a universal calculation. You and I are gonna be dead in about fifty years. Do you really think the sun or the moon give a fuck about fifty years?” I’m fed up with their mopey bullshit at this point, and I’m tired myself.
Alistair didn’t think about anything; the fact that I only woke up when they got here, the effort I put in to get them to their chair, the time I spent fretting over them in their sleep… all of it, they took for granted. And that’s for the best; Alistair’s spread too thin as it is, and I want them to be happy, but I, too, have limits.
She was right, of course. I couldn’t call myself an occultist without “Doing as thou wilt,” or at least being familiar with the concept. But—
“I get all the happiness I need from doing good for the world. Like seeing you rest when I headed out earlier. Knowing you were sleeping peacefully brought me comfort as well, comfort I might have needed to survive. I don’t know if your support there would have been worth the trade off.”
“Rightttt. Well, just wake me up next time, ok? Don’t feel bad about this last time, I know you’re doing your best, but there’s no inherent virtue in discomfort. So if you’d feel more comfortable with me, let me know and I’ll go with you. I get more than enough sleep anyway.” Alice smiles softly.
I nod and give an affirmative “mhm,” with a similar warm grin. “I think I wanna stay in today. If that's ok with you?”
LAYER 18: SIGNS OF THE SWARM
I spit and spit and spit pink froth, I hack until my throat is raw, but the taste will not leave me. The terrible, stinging, bitter smell of fearlessness; if I have one weakness, it is that. I don’t even want to imagine the taste of a mind drunk on the stuff, on courage. The stink alone is enough to repel me.
I look at the unconscious form in front of me and curse its owner’s lack of coordination. How hard can it be, to stay on your feet when you’re running for your life?
Spots of the road glimmer in the pale blue moonlight. There’s the pools of slightly crimson spittle, and grayish vomit shot through with more concentrated scarlet, all turning a sort of purplish-red. Then there’s the colorless glass from the lightbulbs that shattered in the wake of my mad, starving dash. That is truly beautiful to behold; each piece is a microcosm of the gorgeous eye of lunacy above me, distilled into a single shard. It’s almost hypnotic.
Stolen story; please report.
But I can’t focus on that now. I need to return to the Castle and take my revenge.
I was there before I even knew it, scuttling along the nearly-empty streets on scythe-tipped spoke-like legs with the speed of a cockroach in the sun. My faithful companion, the moon, has been on me like a shadow the whole time. Looking up into the sky, I think I asked it for fortune, or protection, or something like that. Something like a blessing, but unclean enough for a plague rat like myself.
I had made peace with my role. I am as I wilt, and I wilt myself to spread disease, rot, decay, paranoia, and all things filthy so that I may feed. Even with my bounded field destroyed, I’d just make the world my domain. Instead of relying on a set loop of actions in my hunt, any method would be on the table until proven inefficient. And thus, my plague would spread.
The moon was looking upon my back, casting my warped silhouette into the twisting mess of towers ahead of me. I knocked on the thick wooden (pine? They smelled like it) doors with a gnarled metal claw. No response.
I knocked again.
No response.
And I smelled no fear. Just the, by now, overwhelming sharp coniferous stench of the doors blocking me from the chambers I needed to return to, one way or another.
I knocked again, heavier and more frantically, and this time the door opened.
Fell open on it’s hinges, really.
Mechanically, almost.
Slowly, too, like an old man getting up from his chair, and with the same kind of creaking and groaning.
It’s like the door wasn’t even latched, let alone locked.
This was strange. When I was a member of the Society we kept the door locked tight, whether the castle was occupied or not. The only key was gold, lots of it, and it had to be gold. Cash would not suffice. As for a key proper, I never saw one. I was never the first one to arrive and never questioned who locked up. The less one knew about the workings of the Society, the more one could learn about the world outside it. So I never wasted my time questioning the order of things, I just accepted that they were in order and did as they taught.
The lobby was dark, but not pitch-black like it was on the Day Of The Obsidian Pyramid. My ally the moon spilt enough blue luminance from behind me that I could make out the checkered tiles on the floor and the glimmering silver ornaments on the walls. So, I walked deeper in. I stalked down countless velvet-lined hallways, opened countless elegant doors, peered into so many studies and bedrooms and rooms with no purpose. Eventually, at the end of a corridor that was so sheerly long it had to border an outside wall, I found something other than a room.
The door was slightly shorter than the rows of others, probably because of the convex arch at the top. It bucked the gilded mahogany uniform the rest of the interior doors wore, too, instead looking to be made entirely out of unvarnished wood, knob, hinges, and all. The knob even had bark on it, presumably to act as a grip. With a quivering claw (Dammit why am I shaking when I’m not even scared) I unlatched the door and looked out upon a muggy, almost oozing stairwell. The kind you’d see in any skyscraper, at least in shape.
In place of the standard fluorescent bulbs, though, were pulsating sacs that emanated a dull sickly glow, somewhere between green and yellow. The walls were littered, no, covered in metal motifs; insects with spindly legs, humanoid, bug-eyed creatures, shapeless things that I can only describe as natural. They were probably responsible for any amount of visibility in the stairwell, given how dim the light was, it needed all the help it could get to be reflected around the place. I took a cautious step onto the landing in front of me and felt the ground give way, almost recoiling at the touch of my sharpened foot.
In the green glow, I assumed it was just some sort of moss. This was a grave mistake.
I descended the stairs. I don’t know why, in retrospect. There was no reason why I didn’t go up, but I had a feeling like I knew this place and knew nothing good was above me. Like all the ennui of searching that led to this staircase would just be repeated again, and I don’t have it in me to do that again.
With each staggering step downwards, I noticed the environment changing around me. Everything seemed to get brighter, and I saw why, looking closer at the walls. The metal forms seemed to blur together, or melt into each other, forming these hybrids of humanoid and insect, the deeper I ventured. Then
I turned the corner on the final set of stairs.
I hadn’t noticed the floor grow softer, either.
But when I reached the bottom I certainly knew. My scythe-claw pierced the swollen ground beneath me and released a sickening squeal of gaseous decay. I looked up, slowly, and saw it.
Before me was a room, each of its five walls heaving with mammoth pulses. The air was heavy and hot and thick with fluid. Metallic sacs hung from the walls amongst great glowing pustules like the ones in the staircase. Indistinct black blurs swam about inside these, making them less useful as a light source. But that’s ok. Some things are better left to the shadows.
I could tell some things, without having to see them. Like how the room had a pile of eyes in the center, or how the ceiling was a grid of girders and wires connecting to the metal walls of the stairwell like some massive circuit. I didn’t need to see what was in those metal pods, or the glowing ones for that matter.
And I didn’t need to smell the pheromones it spilled forth. I really didn’t need to know that it was rejoicing in the same predatory throes I felt when eating fearful brains. I turned to the stairwell in a panic, and dashed back up, my spindly legs passing five, seven, ten stairs at a time even as I could feel myself shaking to pieces like a rupturing heart that refuses to stop beating.
I didn’t even notice the wall of flesh that had constructed itself in my path.
Shockwaves sent pieces of metal, of me, clattering to the ground, but I didn’t waste a second tearing at the sickening purple meat before me. I clawed and clawed and clawed with fury, divine fury befitting a god of knowledge and the hunt such as myself, with rage at this living cradle of filth that would eat me, use Me to keep itself alive? Unthinkable. A scythe snaps off in the striated meat, and I attack with my pincers in its place. It’s almost more efficient, like a storm of scissors.
It’s not long before the tissue before me is so thin that I can see the pale green light on the other side. I can’t help but to feel hopeful, that maybe I can survive this too. With that hope comes clarity to a maladapted mind. I think back to what I could scry from my dreams, terror squids and blobs of flesh sculpting humanity into global dominance, and I have to say, it checks out. I could have seen an elder one and lived to tell the tale! Some sound rings out, bell-like and joyous, just as I open a hole in the squirming obstacle before me.
The hope against hope swells up once more, and I attack with renewed vigor, hacking my way through with everything I’ve got. My scythe stump, I find, has developed into a sort of two-fingered hand, so I pick up the remains of my old leg and throw it back into the fray until I’m confident I’ve dug out enough space to crawl through.
But I can feel the decay and the hunter’s glee at my back, and so knowing there’s no time to waste I have to rely on my metal shell to cut some of the path. Legs scramble to keep their hold, their hydraulics fail and reset themselves, and all just to get my head through to the other side. I have made it through, though.
Parts of me snap off into the mass of flesh.
I WILL NOT FAIL.
A sickening, squelching pop rings out.
I slide forward, glistening and small.
The metal shell is not a part of me anymore. My body is raw and red, rotten, wasted away, with visible bones in some places. Everything that kept me alive, that inspired fear, is gone. I sting all over. I’m covered in a thousand raw cuts, or maybe just one big one. I think I’m skinless.
No, that’s wrong.
My face still has skin, skin and a metal mask that’s still laughing along with me. Laughing tears of joy, tears of blood, all from warped eyes on a twisted face. The only complete part of me, anymore, is my face. The rest is rotten and atrophied, closer to a corpse than to anything you’d call as a human. But it’s
Still
Not separable from what once was me.
Not entirely, anyway. Strings of flesh, veins, still tie me by the abdomen to my abandoned skin in the metal shell. And I don’t have the strength to tear them away.
So I’m dragged back into the maw, slowly, like a puppet behind a bus, and I regret calling that purple-cloaked figure a “doll” when I’m now so fully at the whims of another entity but hey, it’s not like anything can be done about that now.
I’m leaving a trail of clear ooze, and I’d honestly prefer if it was blood, though I’m sure all that is in the Manticore’s shell by this point.
My bony legs, or what remains of them, all four, are locked against the flesh wall. There’s no strength in them, it’s just brittle bone keeping me from being swung up and eaten head-first. And just when they’re about to snap—
“Well, now, look who it is.”
My eyes roll back instinctively.
Behind me
There is an imposing presence, cloaked in minty green fabrics with the crown of a Hercules beetle on his head.
I can’t do anything. I want to scream at him, that he started all this by including me in his sick ritual and stealing my mind and warping my thoughts but that’s not even true, this was all my choice from the very start. Or rather, if anyone was a maladaptive influence it was the Society, not the Beetle King, not this massive form I suddenly want to call—
“Oberon. Sun King. Or at least, the Earthly avatar of him.”
I can sense a flayed smile beneath his shadowy hood.
“I see you’ve met Titania’s pet project. That’s too bad. No one should know of both of us. That’s just not fair to everyone else, you know.”
Some splitting pain rings out, from the crown of my head downwards. Then again, from my left ear. Finally I see it, a giant insectoid club foot swinging down to the top of my head.
The Man In Yellow, in his final moments, thought desperate apologies, but could not vocalize them.
A skeletal metal image was added to the wall right by the Door Between The Cosmos, that silver door that marked his descent into death.
END OF THE MANTICORE ARC
Owl-like obsidian eyes jolt open. It’s the middle of the night, and the churning of great machines in- and outside the hospital window keep the child awake. The others in the ward are sound asleep, and so this child stays up, an outcast among outcasts.
MEDICAL MECHANICA COMING SOON!