LAYER 11: SMOTHERED HOPE

Loose wrinkles flapping in the wind. Stretched and strained patches, constraining and restricting organic movement. If Dr. Vepar were to put it into words, he would probably say that quality was what drew him to the doll-like man. Maybe he related to it, or admired it. Regardless of the reason, that creature fascinated him.

As it staggered about, chained by its stretched-thin clothes, collecting scattered documents, it was entirely unaware of this fact. That glamorous phantasmagoria, born either of apathy or oblivion, clung to the man’s black suit, leaving an almost visible trail in his every movement. His almost lack of consciousness was allure, pure and simple; doll-like and receptive allure.

Dr. Vepar felt like he’d seen a less concentrated version of it before, but could it really be called the same quality of “absolute emptiness” if it wasn’t as intense? Just as a neon pastel cannot exist by definition, neither can a tempered absolute. And certainly, no paler iteration of this staggeringly numb, passive benevolence had ever captivated him so.

Despite walking the same path as his patients, this constrained creature wound up in an altogether more fascinating destination, someplace farther down that road.

“Ahem.” Dr. Vepar looked up with a start from his crouched, hunched perch on the ground. As he squatted, hunched over the measly few papers he was able to collect, the man in the suit offered the remainder of the documents in a hand outstretched downwards. “I got them for you.”

“Thanks. I mean, thank you. Really, I had a rough day today, so I really appreciate the help,” Dr. Vepar said, accepting the papers with a smile.

“Where are you headed? I have nothing but free time, if you want someone to walk you there. I’m sure you've heard about the Golden Howlings, right? It’s dangerous for people to walk at dusk these days. Even besides, the sun is setting and your hands are full, so let me help.”

Indeed, the sun was setting, conceding more and more of the sickly orange dusk to deep blue night by the minute. Dr. Vepar had dropped those papers under a ceiling on red-hot fire, and now the eastern skies had cooled enough to see glimmering, far-off suns. Did I really sit there, thinking, for that long?

“Yes, please, if you’re sure you don’t mind.” Dr. Vepar saw no malice in those glassy eyes, only the kind of doll-like fragility that the filthy streets of Wintertree eat for breakfast. And while the doctor had long since harded himself to the kinds of oozing, spiny horrors that lurk in shadowy corners, someone more innocent would surely fall prey to their machinations.

Even if it is an inconvenience to accompany me, it’s still mutually beneficial. So, it’s ok to accept his help.

At last, Dr. Vepar rocked back to his heels, and then swung forth to his toes to stretch his calves. Sitting in such an unnatural position for so long had laid a blanket of soreness upon his lower legs. He turned to face his compatriot. “Should we get going, uh...” The doctor trailed off.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I ever got your name. I’m Dr. Brundle Vepar—Brundle is ok.”

Blank poise melted into a soft warmth on the other man’s doll-like face.“Nice to meet you. I’m Uikka.” He gave a cordial smile that quivered, ever so slightly, at the edges.

Is that the struggle to stay hidden, to hold back open joy? Or something like a quivering lip, betraying tears never allowed to flow? Or is it simply a tic? Or perhaps something only I could see?

“Well? Where are we headed?” Uikka asked. There wasn’t any unpleasantness or impatience in his voice, just genuine curiosity.

“Oh, just a few blocks down. Let’s go, shall we?”

“Lead the way.”

One staggered, one strode, down streets shining silvery beneath a young moon.

Things unseen silently shriek, writhe, and burn up, all without leaving the glistening puddles they at once inhabit and exist as.

The lids of too many eyes collapse in the wake of the doctor’s sanctified white coattails.

Tongues cannot loll from mouths robbed of breath too soon to fall open.

There isn’t even time enough for these primordial larvae to gasp dramatic final breaths. It’s all they can do to wheeze out one last scrap of toxicity before falling still.

Dr. Vepar doesn’t notice. Nor does Uikka, or anyone else for that matter. Because these things that live in shadows and in the corners of vision cannot be seen. At least, not as they are.

“I have to ask: Is that suit uncomfortable?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your suit. It’s so tight on you in some places, and so loose in others. I imagine it’s like swimming with your hands tied. Do you want to go get a change of clothes? I’m sure there’s somewhere still open, even if they don’t have anything as formal as what you’re wearing right now—”

“Thank you, but this is ok. More than OK, it’s about the only kind of clothing I can deal with. Anything else is just… I feel like it’s drawing and quartering me any time I move. Like my limbs could go flying off at any moment. It’s hard to move in this, yeah, but it’s better to be locked in a box than pulled apart. You know?”

I don’t know. I don’t get it, at all. But—

“Well, yeah, that sounds like the better of the two options.” I say with a chuckle. What else can I say to that? You don’t just tell someone something so… graphic. He could have just said “I don’t mind,” and left it at that. I can respect someone for dealing with discomfort in silence. But I’m not close to him or anything.

I never needed that explanation.

Not just in principle, either; because it feels like needles of empathy are burrowing into me, piercing me all along my spinal cord and entering my brain through that tiny little hole at the back of the cranium. Each tiny spike chips away at the bone like fingernails at a scab, adding more and more tiny bone flakes to the complexly pained equation, picking and pulling me apart.

I know the feeling of great internal tides swirling against each other deep in my gut. I know how it feels to be pulled apart, from an internal point no clothes can comfort.

But I can bear it silently. I have to. So why can’t this… Why can’t he just keep this to himself too? It hurts to hear.

Maybe this pain is a clenched hatred… no, jealousy, for this blankly benevolent dollcreaturemanthing following me around showing me transcendental light—

“Hey, are you OK?” Uikka’s soft, concerned voice doesn’t reach me. I can hear it, but not register the meaning.

Nevertheless—

“Yeah, I’m ok.”

It’s an automatic response that I’ve trained myself to give. Though, over the years of forming auto-obscurity into a code, I’ve found comfort in it. In that way, it isn’t a lie to say “I’m ok” when I’m not; it’s more of a mantra to arrive at the desired outcome. It takes being seen as functional for me to be able to function.

Uikka once again snaps me out of my own head. “Glad to hear it. So, where are we going?”

“My study. It’s my home right now. Whenever these incidents pop up, I move somewhere closer to the office. It’s not very comfortable, which is why I haven’t moved in full-time, but I need to shred these files for security reasons, and, you know, sleep.”

Behind sockets of glimmering ruby, I see a dewy glint. Interest. The downy, sickly offspring of fascination. I must keep this tiny force alive. Warm. Keep the bugs from eating it as it sleeps. Nurture it into a reciprocated fascination. Why, I do not know. But I must.

“Fair enough.” A hint of mirth tinges Uikka’s acknowledgement; the most perfect and precise drop.

Drawing me ever closer, in fascinated resonance with his interest.

A slick slithering something catches my eye for a moment. It’s a spastic, sudden movement, like a puddle writhing with eels, but only for a split second. As soon as I turn my head, the miniature beast is, once again, just a filthy, stagnant puddle in the gutter.

And yet, as I walk, the feeling encroaches. A pressure. The feeling that a million minds surround me, in the air, in the water, in each and every window in each and every building and behind each and every door. Logically, they were always there. But I couldn’t see before just how many people there are, and how many minds there are besides. How many eyes are there that could see me? How many minds could form judgement on me?

I am not enough. That distinct thought shoots through me. I could not see these living sludges for so long; even now, I cannot look for them. How many people could? How long had I been locked out of the ability to See, this part of existence that feels so natural?

There are eyes in puddles of filth and rainwater. There are eyes in the mouths of each and every gargoyle. There are eyes in the shadows cast by shadows, in the crooks of soaring ceilings, in hidden gardens, in back hallways, in secondary stairwells. There are eyes anywhere and everywhere nothing should be. Watching.

And there are also eyes in every glowing window, in each twinkling pinhole in the sky, in every stray sunbeam. In each and every of those needle-like towers, grasping towards the sky like the fingers of a corpse, there are countless eyes. There are eyes in the heads of people, and in the head the people share. Those eyes are the eyes that see. Every heartbeat, a blink. Every blink, a heartbeat. Primordial perception, primed and waiting for a lightning strike to ignite it to life.

My head hurts.

Wings rustle somewhere.

A sharp unlatching is all that can cut through the haze. Even then, it barely reaches my ears. I’m too consumed by Sight, seeing these unseelie drops, to hear or smell or feel much of anything.

I should have toppled over with each of my staggering steps. I could see visions of myself passing the point of no return, biting the street, hacking blood and teeth into the dry, hot night. Spitting my mouth cottony until the tiniest hint of pink had left me. Again and again, my life flashed before other being’s eyes.

If I ever did hit the ground, it would have been a relief.

Eventually, after countless tantalizing bungee jumps into Hell, I landed. Not on baking brimstone, but something soft and higher than the street. Above it. This final fall was one into sleep. Even resting my eyes will not grant me respite from my Sight, the midsummer dreams of august fairy kings that haunt my twitching midnights and witching hours.

LAYER 12: IT TURNS IN EQUAL WAYS

I can’t see anything. I can see nothing. Nothing looks like gray fog, so all encompassing that you can’t tell if it’s pea-soup dense or just a misty haze boxing you in an otherwise-clear space. It’s all around me, impossible to look past and yet void of features to focus on. So I just stare, let the seconds drip by like drops into a basin.

Eventually, it overflows. Sparkling cold washes over my mind, cleaning out so much stagnant lukewarm filth. A single starlike point draws near from the fog, at first nothing more than a barely-visible dot of light, and then distinctly, verdantly, throbbingly, green as a poisoned sun. It saves my tired eyes from pacing for something to see and spares my mind the rot of taking in the featureless fog.

It’s only right to approach it.

I set off with vigor. My pace churns, step over step over step. I cut into the fog that held me back, and while it doesn’t give way, the feeling of progress is victory enough in and of itself. Above me, I can almost see clouds. Below me, the ground makes itself more apparent. I can’t see it, because I don’t want to look down, but the feeling of my feet tells me enough. It’s soft, but not hungry to slow my steps. Nor is it so solid as to push me forward. Every step I take is one I choose.

Time passes; though how much, I couldn’t tell you. Not a sink’s worth, but more than enough to fill a cup. Yes, it was certainly less time than I waited back in the foggy clearing.

My feet are heavy. Every step is a boulder smashed to gravel. Up, down. Raise, fall. The hammers move in cycles, and the distance to the light chips away to less and less. Never nothing, though. The wispy, taunting lantern dances away like some celestial body or the end of a rainbow. Every fiber in my legs is burnt ragged, sparking like a dying wire, but I still pull the rope again and again. The pleasant receptiveness of the ground is a repeated invitation to rest, hellish to resist, but I do. Again and again, as I am tested, I walk towards the light.

It stops running. And blinks out.

The fog fades.

I’m in a field of thin towers, columns, really. Between them, more and more swirling lights dance about, and though they are but featureless orbs, I can tell—

They’re all facing me, gyroscopically as they frolick.

Each light is watching me. Each drop of vivid chartreuse luminance is staring into my soul, with the same set of eyes. Noting my every movement, though I’m frozen like a deer.

The thought shouldn’t discomfort me. I owe these lights, every instance of their soft glow, my sanity. I faithfully followed one light to get here. Why do I doubt them now? How can I?

Is it paranoid to fear the wispy green fire, now that it’s looking at me? Or was it naive to follow it in the first place?

The world doesn’t give way to my swirling thoughts, like it usually does. I still have to reckon with, even return, the glowing stares as I damn myself to contemplation. I can’t focus.

A splitting crack rings out, and the lights scatter like crows.

Before me, a column has roughly bisected itself, slumped to either side. Inside, black stone speckled with silver glimmers in the faint pale light. Light from where?

I jerk my gaze skyward, to the purple clouds that burn like cotton balls to the west. On the opposite side of the sky, the barely-visible moon. It’s a classic picture of a sunset; but the sun is nowhere to be seen. Only its influence remains, and before long even that burns to ashes.

The sky is a blue like black. It’s the closest thing the sky has to the color of old dried blood or freshly opened veins, that black crimson. Empty, featureless like the fog. Nothing reigns here, for better or worse. Occasional clouds force the blackened blue to flirt with equally deep purple, but they drift on with time. Such is the lonely existence of the ashes of the sunset. If you’re watching these remains, you might as well not have eyes.

From the ashes, though, an igniting agent returns. That once barely-visible moon trudges along until it’s a glowing silver disc in the sky. Soft as it is, it’s still offensively bright compared to the sharp darkness. Once more, the fullness of the world can be seen.

For better or worse.

The bright silver rains down like a storm of arrows. Some find their mark on black wood towers around me. Some others bounce off that same sleek blackness, and end up stuck in the ground. The ground. The ground, a deep crimson, not approaching black like blood, but rather distinctly red, like spilled viscera.

No, not spilled. Inverted. It’s shot through with deep purple and blue strings. Veins.

Bone white light pouring down onto the resonating, pulsing, inside-out corpse below my feet.

Suddenly it stinks of gas born of the rebelling earth and the invisible things that eat corpses, of sulphur and phosphorus and fumes, like bloat and disease and death. This world I now see is a corpse foul and writhing, unmoving and full of life, stiffening, fertile, and dead. The source of life. Something stinking, foul, despised, yet known to be natural, needed even. Divine and falling apart, fiber by rotting fiber, fur falling off in sheets to reveal dark red flesh and bones a clean white.

A single drop of froth falls from my lips.

I don’t remember when I sank my teeth into the ground. But before I knew it I was gorged with rotting meat, yet still tearing away, opening capillaries with each bite. Creating miniature geysers of black vermillion. Soaking my face. At a certain point, maybe with the inaugural bite, my teeth bent and broke and tore themselves from my gums. My own gushing crimson mixed with the blood of the earth, became indistinguishable from it, just as each illuminated eye was indistinguishable from the other. Just as the eyes in each pool of shadow were indistinguishable from each other, and the darkness they resided in. Drops become puddles, puddles overflow and run into each other and become seas.

And then.

As soon as the fog set in, as suddenly as that lone light appeared, everything around me vanishes. Even my consciousness flickers out to a line, and then a lone point, of light, and then nothing.

Dr. Brundle Vepar awoke in a handsomely decorated study. Every furnishing was deeply stained wood, every chair and sofa upholstered in glistening brown leather. Brass engravings embellished every edge of the comfortably full bookcases and every knob on the glass-fronted cabinets, home to an amount of traditional medical paraphernalia neither austere nor gaudy.

Hidden among these was a singular metal rod, about a foot in length and four inches in diameter, that came to a sickeningly sharp, glistening point. A stake. A silver stake, touched by the Golden King Oberon. Dr. Vepar, for most of his life, was not an especially ardent follower of the Sun King, but he had seen some of the healing that “his people” had done and was duly impressed. He believed in Oberon the one way believes in a friend’s talents, though to vocalize such a view would be blasphemy punishable by “exile from the law”.

As he awoke, Dr. Vepar felt a surge of purpose within him, drawing him to the stake, to the Church of the Sun King, to a new mental manual. A doctrine inserted into him as he slept.

I must impale Uikka with this stake. I must sacrifice the doll who gave me eyes, if I wish to continue seeing, feasting upon the dead Earth, following glowing green orbs.

I must?

No, I want to.

It would be wonderful to make Uikka a part of the rot. It would be an honor and a pleasure to free his spirit from that crumbling doll and give him a new purpose.

LAYER 13: A NEW TREND, INDIFFERENCE

Through the pale gray cloud cover, the sun was nothing more than a slightly illustrious stain. It oozed a sickly pale yellow haze no brighter than the moon’s silver, and to the bleary, pressurized eyes of a Dr. Brundle Vepar, its position directly overhead seemed like destiny itself touching him. Reassuring him that his actions were right, done of a pure heart in the name of good faith. Guiding him, through mazes of so many needlelike spires silhouetted against an ashen sky. Pushing him forward, though his long, aggressive stride twisted necks. Each clack of his boots on pavement was like a hammer to a knee. Where the tails of his long white coat were not clasped together, they thrashed about wildly like sails in a storm, or snakes aflame, with a great rumpling of canvas each time he took a step.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Dr. Brundle Vepar moved with purpose, and it hid his pain very well. So well even he could barely feel it.

How long has the back of my skull throbbed like that? No, not just there, it’s all around my temples, too. Stress? I’m not stressed. My jaw hasn’t been this loose in years, I don’t have work today or ever again. All I have to do is indulge my fascination; show Uikka the light, and then I can do as I please.

Behind green-tinted lenses, Dr. Vepar’s gaze drifted skyward as he sliced the streets beneath him. With an almost audible intensity, he stared down the spires above. Each and every etched detail of them gleamed in the slight glow of today’s lunar sun, so even things usually hidden in shadow could be seen. Grotesque things. Images of horned beasts and masks of death, twisted birds and over-extended necks. Great wars, wrathful skies, fields of rot. Powers within, churning and roaring inside the hollow parts of people; acting as fullness, but one imbalance away from disintegrating the mind and body into loose fibers. Dr. Vepar squinted, and saw thin silver needles, strange powders and elixirs, scarlet tonics, holy fire, masked forms in white robes. He saw restrained forms screaming, contorted in agony, hammers and chisels and heads. He saw waves of suffering calmed to gentle seas and slowly baked away to dead salt flats.

The stake weighed heavy in his pocket. But it was balanced by the mallet, on the opposite side of his body on his belt. Despite his reliance on ballast, Dr. Vepar’s stride still brought to mind flight on occasion. His movements effortlessly combined winged elegance and intimidating efficiency, like a spider in its web. He was at home on these streets inundated with achingly cold mist; for the burning haze of pain behind his face canceled it out. If he felt turning a corner was the right way forward, he did so, decisively and sharply. If he felt like continuing his path, he did so with equal determination.

Small green lights, no larger than grapes, drifted in his direction from gaps in the gutters. Cautiously, like birds to a pile of seeds. One got too close, and was snuffed out beneath a hasty step. Tiny ferns with fronds too thin to even look green stretched skyward from cracks in the concrete. The doctor ground those hands to smears of chlorophyll on the pale gray. A small puffball mushroom lay in his path, and wheezed its last in a cloud of spores.

Countless small things crumpled under his heel. Not because the doctor was a malicious man, but because things written in stone along the sky stole all his attention.

Pale, milky pits of sap reflexively shut their doors in response to the vibrations of his approach. A fly, bloated with rotting crimson excrement and drunk on fumes from the Pitcher’s blood, snaps out of its sickening haze just in time to avoid Dr. Vepar’s hasty footfalls. In the next second, it is impaled between the eyes with a thorn shot from somewhere unseen.

The ghastly grapes of foxfire regroup in the doctor’s frantic wake, chattering amongst themselves and hopping about. A glowing slice falls loose from one, forming a shape like a crude crescent, and the dying beast unhinges itself into a bristling maw. Its compatriots pop in the face of rough, jagged edges that act as incisors. One remains. It stabs the initially lost piece into itself and bludgeons the murderous orb until they both burst into luminescent goo.

Dr. Vepar saw none of this, and yet gazing into the nooks and crannies of the towers, he absorbed a similar truth.

Nothing begets nothing. Everything is born from something. Yet all things return to nothing. This is the spiralling course nature walks. As soon as I think those words, I curse myself with a silent sneer. What kind of self-respecting adult still thinks that way? What’s the matter with me, to take away such a dour, trite, cliche impression from getting to see the structure of my city? I so rarely get time to run basic errands, and now that I have a free day, I immediately fall into pessimistic pseudo-intellectualism?

It’s not that deep. It just looks that way from down here.

As intricate as those carvings are, they don’t speak to anything besides the sculptor’s personal tastes. In those stones and metal panels are stories of lives wasted in indulging one’s own flittering, temporary aesthetic. Disgusting. Virtueless. How much good could have been done in this world, with the time and money and effort put into those images hardly anyone would see?

It doesn’t matter. I’ve paid them too much thought already, and I can feel Uikka is close by.

Glowing haze starts to seep into view as I walk. I flit my eyes around, but that just makes the puddles of luminescent fog expand faster. They close in, drawn downward to my pupils. Pushing my eyes against the back of their sockets. Giving slack to the optic nerve. Finally, the surface breaks, and a radiant glow fills my vision.

My ears ring.

The brightness is painful, slightly cool in color but hot to the touch.

My head feels like it’s going to split open in a ring, from my eyes around to my temples to the very peak of my neck. I would welcome a rusted gray-green pulp, in place of consciousness bearing this floating agony.

Something breaks those choices. Some pitch-black pinhole in the all-encompassing light. Then another, and another, and another, like bullet holes from rapid-fire needle shot. The cool relief of darkness oozes throughout my vision, no, my entire perception. With it, my will settles from a shredded sea frothing white to a pool, calm like black glass.

Sight returns. I’m standing on a stage, looking out into a sea of darkness, nearly absolute darkness save for the glimmering lenses of goggles staring back at me. In my hands, a birdcage. In the birdcage, loosely coiled like a dead snake, there’s a spine. A human one, probably, though the tailbone is too long. No, it’s just warped, like it’s been bent upwards and out. I don’t know what to do with this, but I should do something, right?

I look out to the audience expectantly, but the lights blind me for a moment, and I’m back in that burning void. Chained once more to agony, for just a second, but enough to draw moisture from my now-sensitive eyes. This time, I’m in darkness, standing before a slab of stone like a surgical table. Above me, bearing down on the back of my crooked neck, is a single lightbulb. That’s all I can feel on me, though; no gleaming eyes or hungry expectations, no one I have to impress.

Except one. The fascinating doll I need to impress most. But even he isn’t looking at me.

LAYER 14: THE STAKING

Uikka has traded his suit and sunglasses for a loose off-white robe, the kind of blue-tinged white that hospital bed sheets are made of. The sleeves and legs end in a thin straw-colored rope tied tight, so a little extra fabric billows over. The same kind of rope, but thicker, is tied around his waist as a belt and at his neck as a… collar, I suppose. When my eyes meet his, his gray irises alight like summer storm clouds sparking with lightning.

“How’s it going?” He asks me, too nonchalantly. “I figured I’d see you again, but I didn’t think it’d be so soon. When’d you break?”

“Break?” I don’t know what he means. I never ‘broke’. “I’m here because there’s something I have to do, as a person.” Yes, that’s right. “I have to honor my fascination, born as it is from the fullnesses swirling within me.” That, too, is true. I know what I have to do, and on the way here, I realized something. It is what I always wanted. To ████ him. From the moment I laid eyes on Uikka, I had one churning, primal desire. My will to ████ was the origin of my fascination, the seed that I drew a beautiful, complex, entirely false tree around. “At the same time— yes, this is my path, the path I cut— I must retain my humility. My art shall be nothing as sickening as the images of death and woe that dot our skyline. Have you seen them? They’re hideous images of Hell, unfit to reach for the sky, and terribly indulgent to boot. I am not so foolish, so gluttonous, as to consume such quantities of potential for excess; excesses such as as a permanent expression of that which temporarily cools my scorching mind. No emotional relief is permanent, or even as close to undying as an image set in stone or metal. To express it in such a medium is a conceptual failure. On top of that, they serve no purpose. Stone and metal bring nothing into this world, and serve no purpose but to accelerate the self-destructive spiral humans, and indeed all life, are fated to walk.” It’s all coming together! The pieces fit! I can see the lines connecting thing to thing, idea to idea! The neurons are soldering together, more than I even thought possible!

Uikka looks, appropriately, amazed. “I knew it,” he says, with a relieved smile spreading across his face. “I knew you had it in you. Now, come on, show me your art. Your art, that will begin to offset your tragedy. Show me your first steps.” He looks at me earnestly as I help him roll onto his stomach.

I set my free hand on his upper back. “Easy there. Just a minute. Are you feeling ok?”

“Yeah! Don’t worry about me! I’m jus—”

Clang!

From the moment I saw him, I wanted to stake this beautiful, fascinating doll. My carefully placed stake shoots forth from underneath Uikka’s tailbone, sloughing off skin.

A shocked yelp escapes his lips.

Clang!

A pained gasp, this time. I can see my blank white bone canvas.

Clang!

This time, a hiss. The tailbone is now flush with the last vertebrae.

Clang!

“Why?”

It took four strikes before the shock wore off and betrayal set in. It also took four strikes to bend the tailbone past the spine, something that shouldn’t be possible.

Clang!

“I thought—”

I’m amazed he’s still conscious.

ClangI

Uikka’s warped tailbone has bent up enough to send nerves spilling from the frontal side of the spine. Surprisingly, there’s little blood.

“I thought… your art was life… more life than stone…”

Clang!

“Wasn’tthatthepoint?”

He says it quickly, all in one breath, and goddamn if it isn’t hilarious. I feel my lips pull back involuntarily. “Hey, Uikka?”

Through stifled sobs, he replies. “Yes?”

“Ask me how it got burned.”

“Wha—”

Clang!

“WHATDOYOUMEAN?!?!”

He’s not even trying to hide his tears now.

“Ask me, ‘How’d it get burned?!’”

Clang!

“H-How’ditgetburned? Like tha, at?”

This is boring. “No, not like that. At all. Just… don’t worry about it, This’ll be done soon enough.”

The hammer slips. Slams into my hand. Something snaps, like a row of toothpicks being pulled apart by two rubber bands. So does the room around me, the single light, the empty darkness to my back, the table, Uikka’s broken and yet almost entirely whole form.

From behind me, muffled applause. I turn, and see a stretched, hunched, barely-human form. Face, hidden behind a bird-like mask. Limbs, long and spindly things like the legs of half a spider, peering out from behind a gigantic black cape. This giant crow before me stinks, like rotting plants, writhing peat, like glowing bog gasses. With a great shudder that rattles its skeletal frame, the upright beast begins to speak.

“Are you just going to give up?”

I shake my head. “But… Uikka, my canvas, is gone. I broke it. Can I have another?”

The crow’s voice is muffled by both his mask and his mirth. “You may have as many as you need.”

I turn, instinctively, and I’m back in the medical theater, with an unbroken Uikka in front of me. This time, he’s unconscious, or at least, already laying on his stomach. But that’s not the biggest change.

I feel eyes on my back.

The rusty darkness behind me is shot through with a single flickering light, a candle, dripping white wax onto gleaming mahogany. Two glass goggles stare back at me, illuminated in the modest flame. The shadow of a beak, long and thin like a thorn, bisects the small, orange, illustrious circle. In gloved hands, my observer holds a clipboard and an extravagant black quill, like an ostrich plume.

“Please don’t mind me.” The crow calls to me roughly, in sharp contrast to his clipped and almost whispered tone earlier. “I’ll just be taking some notes, if you don’t mind.”

“Please.” I nod, and return to my work. This time, the stake and hammer are presented in neat rows in a surgical tray, jarring alongside much more delicate instruments.

I ignore those gleaming subtleties, and pick up my preferred tools. The brutish earthly hammer and the blessed silver chisel. They’re all I need to mold this bone as marble before me.

Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting!

I’m being much more careful this time. Careful, not to wake Uikka, not to disintegrate him, not to wound myself, and careful for the sake of my observer.

Ting! Ting! TIng! Ting! Ting!

It went on like that for some time. So long, so many times the hammer struck the stake and the stale struck the bone, witn so little to show for it. Hunching over the stone table began to take a number on my back, so I clenched my stomach. Still, I was so fixated on perfection that my stomach began to ache. Not the soft soreness one would expect from extended tension; no, this was a swirling, poisonous sickness deep in my gut. Bile rising and falling like tides, something gurgling every so often, little kicks like a nest of eels dwelled in my swampy viscerae. I'm making myself sick, continuing this way.

But I can’t stop.

Ting! TIng! TIng! TIng! Ting!

This is what I am doing, and I cannot stop while observed. A bead of sweat rolls down my side. The light is not a hot one; it’s cold, and having looked at so much beneath it, I notice every little break in its uniform glow. The slight sickly green tinge, like a drop of highlighter ink in the ocean. Imperceptible to all but my sharklike black marble eyes. How about the way the edges, far to the edges of the stage, warp and shimmer every so often, just in the corner of my eyes? The way dark spots dart across the puddle of light? They’re small, tiny, but move too uniformly to be insects. Shadows? I don’t think so. In this soft-edged light, shadows are blurry things that float about with little regard for what cast them. Sometimes, they contrast so little as to barely exist, just chartreuse flotsam in a spring green sea.

Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting! TIng!

I don’t know when the second candle showed up. The second observer, the second scratching voice of a quill. Nor the third, the fourth, the fifth, or any countable number besides, until the frantic clawing of inky needles became even more maddening than the ignus fatuus lantern above me.

“Don’t mind us.”

Ting! Ting! Ting! TIng! TIng!

I tried my best to comply.

Ting! Ting! Ting! TIng! TIng!

When it all got to be too much, I kept my head down, stared at those drifting shadows, and remembered the heinous carvings in the sky. I remembered hate, the burning hate I had for those supposed objects d’art that did nothing but pull me, kicking and screaming, backwards, into a body of hot blood and wax wings.

How much have I changed?

Another juvenile platitude. It’s been said so many times it’s lost all meaning. “No one could possibly give their all to escaping some mental Hell of their own creation, only to end up back there.” I muttered this last part under my breath, maybe just to hear my own voice, or hear something besides the infernal scratching and the glimmering rings.

Ting! Ting! TIng! Ting! Schlop!

Another misstep. Where a clean “Ting!” should have rung out, something wetly squelched. The stake wouldn’t move now. So much of the flesh around the base of Uikka’s spine was raw, not even bleeding but oozing, and cavities had started to make themselves visible. Blackened crimson caverns. Like blood under moonlight. Some glisten beneath this hypnotic lantern. Others remain bone dry and flaky. The closer I look, the more entrances make themselves seen, stacked on top of each other like cells in a beehive. The stake is stuck in one of the first ones I noticed, just above the hip and to the left of the spine. Wiggling it around, the silver clacks against bone more often than not. It’s probably been sucked in by some kind of weird postmortem vacuum.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

I frantically twitch the stake around in circles, like a loose tooth. Each time it clicks on the bones, I feel some heat within Uikka grow more intense.

Drops of cold sweat slither down the sides of my ribcage, tickling me like caterpillars falling off a cliff. I have to stifle a laugh.

“Is something the matter?”

The voice comes from behind me. It’s the observer in the birdlike mask.

“Not a thing. My hand is stuck, that’s all.”

“We can’t have you smearing the canvas. Allow me.”

Uikka erupts into green flame, pouring skyward from each hole in his back from a basin that will never empty. The table is now a pyre. That fascinating doll is gone, up in smoke, with something precious trapped inside.

Everything falls away around me. The mahogany darkness, the pooled orange glow, the rivers of melted wax, the glimmering eyes, everything. I’m standing in completely empty darkness, once again.

“Are you just going to give up?”

I don’t even need to turn. All pretenses of decorum are gone. The masked observer speaks in a hoarse, pained croak, drawing out his words. Slurring, drunk on his own presentation. Beyond satiated, gut bulging with the seeds that were supposed to grow under my care into fruits of my labor. Mine.

“Disgusting creature. Scavenger. Walking rot.” I can’t stop it. I babble inanely, words beyond definition, shapeless, formed only by feeling, what feels right. “Filthy, unclean, feathered, raucous mouth, feeding and shitting and bleeding and squirming your filthy tattered wings all the way to the cesspit.” Something peels from my back and hits the stone floor with a wet slap. I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt.

My spinal cord being ripped out should hurt, but it doesn’t.

Some rusty shadow forms in the gap carved by my vertebrae. In the dark crimson line bisecting me. That line grows in depth, pops out, flails around and becomes something inhuman. A tail.

I can feel drops of shadowy fluid fall into my hair, writing lines in the white-blond. I can’t see it, but I can feel the pattern in my mind’s eye, as if I am looking down—

Down from above.

At last, I turn around.

An eight-foot tall pillar of flesh cloaked in black cloth looks down at me. That mask, like a bird’s head, sits abandoned at its base. In place of a face, there was a crawling mass of black droplets.

No. Not black. Red. Deep red. Blackened crimson. Squirming.

Something tells me that this deep red is not blood, but something in our blood. All living things’ blood. This is the “primordial soup,” the ancient sea, lifeless but fertile. The Sea Of Fools. I don’t know why that phrase springs to mind. I don’t know why I know any of this. I shouldn’t know this. I shouldn’t even think of it. But now that it has been thought of, it will not go away. No matter how empty or gargantuan the box, it will not sufficiently contain my perception.

A long, thin, insectoid leg emerges from where the mouth ought to be. Then another, and another, and another, shockingly black against the deepest crimson. Four in total, in a row, drawing close. Before the thorax can emerge, the stomach bloats beneath loose black robes. A nest of serpents, steeped in slime, burst forth, vomited by human-shaped potential. They paint the stones dark with their ooze, landing with individual impacts yet writhing as one baleful, pained mass.

One pops like a grub beneath a fishhook. Then another, then another. Four pillars, thin like twigs yet unwaveringly bearing a fuzzy spider’s carapace, like a coffin studded with beady eyes. Twitching, frothing mandibles extend towards me in slow motion, hairs and fangs alike aimed at me like nails. I could count the bubbles of spittle, could see the venom pooling, when the spider, too, burst; this time into a glowing red speckled with gritty, ashy sand.

The lightest gray hide. Visibly rough. Tiny eyes twitching like flies. Tiny black eyes. Tiny black frenzied eyes, seeing nothing but given the knowledge of blood in the air. It has no legs to land on the ground. Instead, it continues out of the seething mass of the ancient sea, growing and growing and pursuing me as I stumble backwards. Hunched. Thick. The neck of a gargoyle. Endlessly starving, or just frenzied, and at some point pained. It’s gone too far to stop. The shark’s head continues towards me, even as it weeps amber tears from unseeing eyes clotted up with ashen blood. It cannot stop. The neck, thick as it is, eventually buckles under its own weight, with a sickening crunch and a fountainous fanned spray of bright red. Red too bright, red so bright it looks like paint, so bright it almost glows next to the dried squirming pillar.

Next to go is the mask, lying forgotten on the floor. The beak lengthens into a stinger, the goggles unfurl into transparent membranes, the myriad leather and rubber straps roll up and harden into countless legs, twitching and stretching like a crab’s. It alights with a great buzzing and drifts towards me, a nonchalant bumblebee on a summer’s breeze. It drones on and on towards me, paced and unstoppable. It could hunt me down, and I could not escape. I could run, but it would outlast me. I could cover my head, but it would simply eat through my hands. Any blows I could deal would ricochet off its exoskeleton. There is no point running or hiding or fighting. I know this as I know the name of the Sea Of Fools.

The buzzing slows to a soft hum, and then stops all together. My quivering palms, raised in front of my eyes, twitch at nothing, feeling imaginary spikes of dual-clawed feet. But they never come.

In front of me, the great insect lays on its back, stomach skyward and legs coiled. A dry husk, completely and utterly dead.

Skewered suddenly. Pulled haphazardly in one direction, and then another, by some jabbing black arrows my eyes cannot discern from the shadows around me.

As if in response to my thoughts, a mass of antlers before me ignites, like a chandelier, orange flames flickering on each point. In the newborn light, I see crows. So many crows. Nothing more warped, though. Nothing is strange about them but their number. I can’t count how many there are; they look almost more like a mass of jutting wings and beaks than individuals of a shared species. But no, stragglers in the far corners of the room jump and glide about, trying to approach the feast before them, the feast my fear built. There’s one thing they haven’t touched.

My spine.

It lays stark white against the deep rust of dried blood on fabric. Wholly dry, wholly inedible. Coiled and alert. Like a snake. The bone chain I held on stage in that dream that seems a century ago.

Silently, proudly, owls descend on the crows. I barely notice, lost as I am in the depths of vertebrae. Feathers fly, organs ripped from downy breasts, beaks grow scarlet. Owls and crows alike fall to talon and hook and beating wing. I stare evermore at the snowy serpent I birthed. The frothing madness falls silent. Not a movement can be seen, save for the gentle drifting of down feathers like snow.

Beneath the lights bone bore, as the newborn Tailed Beast cradled his separated spine, the observers descended. Their beaked mouths opened just a little too wide, and they drank of the luminescent scarlet. They gorged themselves on the corpses of combatants corvid and strigine alike. Eyes, organs, scraps of muscle and fat, bone, skin, feathers, all that could give life was consumed in a frenzy. Pointed beaks drained the corpses of their remaining blood. Heads with empty sockets, dangling spines like tails, lay off to the side, but even they were not wasted.

The vultures exerted themselves fully, prying and gnashing, trying and bashing, straining fingernails and beaks and the strength of their own bones as pliers and hammers against seemingly unopenable craniums. Frantic scratching, bone against bone, bashing head against head, in a display almost as violent as the battle but far less futile. For the skulls did give way, and out spilled teaspoons of gray matter with the consistency of cotton cheese, sometimes wriggling with madness or worms, but mostly blissfully still.

Dr. Brundle Vepar simply slumped against the wall, pinching his tail and gazing into his prize for a thousand yards. The vultures did not pick at him even once. As still as he was, he was undeniably alive. Frothing with fullness and purpose beneath a still exterior.

An exterior like a still doll.