LAYER 15: RIPPED THE SOUL

I awaken melancholy and exhausted for the umpteenth time this week. I don’t know why it is that my eyes fill with tears as soon as they creak open. Or maybe I have too many explanations; each and every time I awoke I could put a different name to the reason for this hollowness. Loss? Anxiety? Just a plain lack of sleep? I don’t know for sure. It could be any one of those, or any combination, or none of them at all. Self awareness is probably entirely out of my depth.

I probably don’t know myself very well at all. It’s certainly easier to hand the wheel over to the endless carousel of cavorting medicine men, presenting me with their formulas and fullnesses.

Sunlight. Moonlight. Human’s light. More stress. No, be yourself. Free time. Timetables. Relax. Tense up. Don’t fight it. Take these pills. It gets worse before it gets better. Listen to your body.

It’s enough to drive anyone off the deep end. The dichotomy, between the self-declared iron-clad objectivity of medical science and the mushy human body, so prone to tear itself apart in the face of logic and code, it all just amplifies the absurdity. Everyone’s just a test subject for their own good. No one knows anything, myself included.

That’s right. I don’t know anything either. Who’s more likely to be right: a great old field of study, elder to immortality, or someone who had to be taught to think?

How absurd. How prideful. Disgusting. My left arm throbs with a sharp, heavy pain.

Bow down.

My head feels like it’s being pressed by some towering industrial machine, while also being too hard to crack. So instead of opening up peacefully, my scalp burns just below the surface. So hot, it’s tantalizingly close to numbing, but never quite does.

It might be getting worse, but it’s been like this forever. My head’s always ached like this. My brain’s always swirled, and been swirled, like this. It could be even worse.

With quivering hands, I extract a single pink capsule from the amber bottle that always seems full. I swallow it dry, with an eyeful of parched and blinding midday light, as I open the door. Stinking plastic and sickly powder draw a chalk line as the pill drags its feet down my dry gullet.

My head is numb. It still aches, but I can’t feel the throbbing pain, just a pulse. Like the moon over a still sea, the cause remains, but not the effect. The vice grip on my head is still as constraining as ever, but at least it doesn’t hurt.

I take a sudden left off the sidewalk into a narrow street soaked in cool purple shadow. With the blinding off-white gone, so many little details of the world make themselves seen. They jump out of concrete and stone, like frogs from tall grass. They bare fangs like tiny needles. They whisper in a hissing chorus, something that should have driven me mad but instead actually settled my mind a bit. Their chant speaks to me, in its lyrical prophecy.

“Come before us, one raised of thorn

O, sharpened pill and pointed bone horn

Why dost thou wander, empty, forlorn?

Speak thine woe and be reborn.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I woke up this morning like I’d just beheld a terrible tragedy. It’s like a loose thread in my mind; I can feel wrinkles of gray matter coming undone as I pull at it, desperate to find the source, but it all just disintegrates.”

“Speak to us not of concerns of flesh

For meat and brain, we have none left

Speak purely of mind, whole and uncleft

Our words will guide you on your quest.”

“Well, I suppose I don’t exactly know that my brain is crumbling—

“AH! The truth, for what you truly perceive

Is little more than the sum of your belief

You believe in no line between mind and the meat

But that’s all backwards, according to me

This world’s a big one, as I’m sure you’re aware

Between truth and illusion, a border, a hair

How can you tell what’s a lie, and what’s actually there?

What’s objectively present, and what is merely thin air?

Reach out a hand? How do you know that it’s yours?

Ask a second perspective? Are other eyes so pure?

Lean on your friends, on your common rapport

And believe what you like? I can see the allure.

But there’s just one problem with solutions like these

The common affliction ailing humanity

There are infinite truths, between you and me

But without love, none can be seen.

We humans are a species in love with the lens;

We look through the keyhole and peer over fence

Look for outstanding evil, to justify our ends

But behind our own backs, nothing is different.

Seeing everything would drive one insane!

Corner of a padded room, babbling, inane

So what’s the solution? Can I cut through the pain?

Or will I be empty ‘till my dying days?

Seek fullness, seek treasure

Look for love, control weather;

It’s all the same, apart or together —

AT THE CENTER OF THE SPIRAL IS A VOID.”

I jump. The singsong, multifaceted, rainbow voice of the street faeries morphs into something deep, harsh, and evil; a single beam of blinding white light. Illustri—

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

The voice, no, the roar came rushing back into my ears, subcutaneously filling them with ringing static and a torrent of hot blood.

“DO NOT BOW BEFORE PANOPTICON. KNEEL NOT BEFORE PERCEPTION. THE ALLFOLD PATH LEADS TO DEATH BEYOND IMAGINATION.”

“I’d be a l-lot more l-likely to t-take your advice, i-if I knew who you were.” My teeth chatter with shock, like my quivering fingertips and unsure legs.

Because, that’s the thing— the more I hear this voice speak, it’s not so scary; more warmly booming than intimidating. Once the shock wears off, I’m sure I’d be more than happy to discuss things with it.

“Look, please just say things clearly. I can’t understand otherwise. I’m a Thymoystichius; I’m not supposed to be able to interpret impressions well, or at all really.”

“YOU WILL KNOW SOON ENOUGH. FORGET NOT THIS ENCOUNTER.”

I can’t get a word in edgewise before the Needly Chorus erupts again.

“Set out, evermore, onward, young raven

Like Hero Eleven, forthwith determination

Unchained, but tied, fast to incantation

Search out a crimson peak for your salvation.”

With those words, the sun hit its midday position, finally drying up the last of those wriggling shadows and the myriad voices with them.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have any clue what to do next. But I actually have a pretty good idea what the “crimson peak” is. Among a range of spires, clad in blue-gray haze and shot through with occasional sandstone striation, one bright red tower stands defiantly above the rest, like a trickle of blood from the sky.

LAYER 16: THE ONE WHO WILL FEEL YOU

In a matter of steps, too many to count but not enough to take them to the Crimson Tower, Alistair stopped sharply. As if chained in a yard and out of slack. No sooner have they stopped than my vision twists, grows fuzzy, and then fades to a pale black, like a computer screen through closed eyes.

Something hits the ground with a thunk. The kind of solid, yet resounding noise great stalks or masses of vegetable matter make. The sound of crunchy water-filled cells sloshing into each other like solid waves. Fullness, falling into itself.

I turn around, expecting to see food refuse or limp compost dropped from a far-away window. Some decaying pile of green and brown. I didn’t expect to see a person, much less one dressed so resplendently, standing there in velvety crimson robes. Dark hair, like blinding thorns over his eyes, but still definitely looking at me with a stare like a hawk’s.

He covers the dozen or so feet between us in a blink. “Hey, Alistair,” he says by way of greeting. But I can’t hear the rest of his words, because he reaches out an empty hand—

Augustus’s touch covetously drips to my left arm like molten metal, making contact that should have wicked my skin aflame. I should have melted like wax, judging from the pain, sharp enough to repel my arm from his grasp almost instinctively.

I immediately feel stupid for allowing it. Of course, his touch didn’t leave so much as a mark of reddened tenderness. Though it felt like white-hot metal plunged into my arm, to any third-party observer, I’d look crazy for reacting as I did.

I swear though, for just a minute, I saw flesh slough away like a thick liquid, blood evaporating, and—silhouetted against a hot glow like a sunset—a collection of tiny metal rings locked between the two bones of my forearm.

But of course, no such thing had happened. Despite what flashed before my eyes, my left arm is in unmarred continuity with the flesh around it.

I look up from the arm I've been dumbly staring at for who-knows-how-long, back into a newly formed distance between myself and Augustus. I must have stumbled back without thinking, but so far? Or, alternatively, such a short distance? It’d make sense for me to have reacted like I’d been bitten, or else to run for a distance, but creating this middling distance would do no good in the face of a real threat. So, it couldn’t be true instinct that drove me back.

Ah. I’m going fuckin’ nuts.

“Uh, Alistair? You okay?” Augustus’s words finally reach me. I have no idea how much he’s said that I’ve just ignored. I really must seem crazy.

“Yeah, yes, I’m fine. Sorry about that. I just… must have bruised that arm or something.” It’s a terrible lie, one that doesn’t even begin to cover my reaction, but it’s got to be better than no explanation at all. “What are the chances of seeing you here, huh? I was just going to…”

Well, that’s not good. I’m trying to regain normalcy in this conversation, and I can’t remember where it was I was expecting to see him. Was it the hospital? No, they hadn’t wanted to see me for a while.

Augustus stands before me, head tilted slightly, looking at me with softly concerned, hidden eyes. Eyes I cannot see, but know I can trust.

“I don’t remember. Well, I was going to see you, but I don’t remember where, or why. I just knew I needed to see you, like a string or a rope was pulling me towards you.”

The corners of Augustus’s mouth curl upwards in an amused grin, sending wrinkles just past the scarf that hides the bottom half of his face into the cheekbone borderlands beneath his blinding, tangled mane. “Geez,” he said, breathily—no, while sighing, “you’d think you could remember something as important as a fight to the death for justice.” His disappointed words were betrayed by a playfully chiding tone. “I envy you. You must have an exciting life, for something like that to slip through the cracks.”

“It’s not like that!” I slip into his groove. “Well, maybe it kind of is. I’ve just had a lot going on, and I can’t keep up with it all.”

“Is that so.” He doesn’t ask it, really, he states it, more bluntly and teasingly. Head tilted back more than normal, to look up at me down his nose.

“Yes! Well, I’m going to join you. If you’ll have me. Please.”

“And so I join you, as you join my Lunar Insurrection.” Augustus smiled, saying ordinary words like a rehearsed incantation.

And that’s it. There is no flash of lightning, or rumbling of the heavens, no dramatic shaking of the numbing gray norm. I am now sworn to another’s ideal, by my own volition. It makes sense; fail to produce a reason to live, and you eventually latch onto another’s golden veins of purpose. Sate your thirst; let your empty husk be filled.

“Well, we should probably have some way of contacting each other, besides chance encounters. Do you know the forum group Salomon.is? There are some interesting resources on there. If you get the chance, check it out. I’m usually on the more news-focused boards, gathering intel. The stuff about street-level info is usually just a bunch of hoaxes at best and malicious disinformation at worst; stay FAR away from that. My username, for the time being, is C4rdinal, but I’m at risk of deletion. This is dangerous work!”

That slight bit of uncertainty flies from his lips like a feather, eventually settling in my stomach. This is, I think, the first time it’s really hit me that this is something real. It’s not a call to adventure like in the movies; I’m making a life decision here. Words I’ve never heard before spring to my mind; dramatic phrases like quotations I’ve never read. They mush together in writhing masses of veiny purple metaphor, and the inside of my head starts seeping and running like sickening ink.

“Don’t worry.” Augustus looks at me with softened eyes, a hand on my shoulder. “We’re more tightly knit than the Church of the Sun could ever be. Everyone by my side joined me by choice, and stays by choice. In that, we have an advantage beyond numbers or influence.”

“Well, I feel better about that, at least.”

“As you should. Now, we are severely outnumbered, and relatively unknown. Before you met me, did you ever know of the Lunar Insurrection? I assume you knew of the Sun Church, though maybe not their specific crimes—”

“I knew all about them.” I don’t tell him that I chalked up the stories to exaggerations, even when evidence was right in front of my face. Evidence like Luna, torn to shreds by her own will to fight. Evidence like doctors preoccupied by the sky, of all things. A thousand more pieces of past, all connecting by golden strings before my eyes. They cross each other, weaving and almost tangling as they create a tapestry meant to carry current. Igniting current. A theory that sets me ablaze internally, filling me with golden flame.

“Yes. I’ve always known, but before today, I did nothing.”

“Well, today is as good a day as any to start.”

I don’t have any words.

It’s common knowledge that the best way to start improving is to stop declining. But it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.

No. It’s being said to me for the first time. It’s been said in my vicinity, to my face, and within earshot; ostensibly “to me.” But this… this is the first time it feels like advice rather than applied platitude. But who cares how it fee—

“Well then! With that, let’s get you acquainted with everyone!” Augustus interrupts my train of thought, though it’s not an entirely unwelcome interruption. He gestures grandly to a set of square double doors, stained a deep reddish brown. They’re vaguely familiar, like I’ve seen them in a recurring dream or looked past them a million times. I’m so caught up in my thoughts I almost don’t notice them open automatically. That should be impractical for such heavy slabs of wood, but maybe they’re lighter than they look. Or maybe it’s just the anachronism, such old-fashioned doors opening automatically, that sets me off.

LAYER 17: DISSOLVE

Beyond the doors lies another implacably fanciful scene of mundanity. People stand scattered, like chess pieces mid-game, on tiles alternating white and red. The ceiling is so high, it’s a wonder the chandeliers can manage to light the place at all. Their intensely electric glow nevertheless stretches to the pinstripes of velvet in the crimson walls and even manages to make the floor tiles gleam. With the room being decorated in such cohesive colors, the inevitably-clashing ensembles of the crowd below should have ruined the almost hypnotic effect; but if anything, the varying hues all synchronized very nicely to create an iridescent sheen to the bottom of this picture.

The air wavers. Not with heat—the entrance hall retains a comfortable temperature despite the crowd—but in a way almost suggesting a ripple through the atmosphere

Were those staircases always there? The balcony was, but the staircases? Those ivory banisters, so shockingly bisecting the monolithic vermillion, should have made an impression long before now.

Maybe I was just distracted by the crowd. Yeah, that has to be it. It’s like that dream that used to play again and again, almost nightly in retrospect; the one where I stood, unapproachable, and lost myself gazing at stains in an unfamiliar ceiling. I guess I just open myself to the suggestion of aimless haze in gatherings like these.

Before I know it, I’m inside, over the threshold and beneath the ceiling that stretched to the sky. One foot on a red tile, one on white. Ugh. That’s gonna bug me. I try to match my feet on the red tile in front of me, and wind up turning myself around. Again, I take a stretched step, over the inverted set of tiles directly in front of me and into the next matching pair. This time, I take care to put my feet as close together as possible… but my caution goes unrewarded. In the pointed oval between the arches of my boots, there’s a sliver of dichotomy, stark and mocking like a jester’s tunic. Red and white.

I lost track of how many times I tried to stand on just one tile, and how many methods I used besides. Shuffling my feet almost worked, until I tried to nudge the last stubborn sliver of my heel free from the red tile. But on the last twisting heave, I pulled a little too hard and crumpled into the scarlet square. Maybe I was too frantic, too emboldened by my nearing victory against the impossible floor; but either way, when I got to my feet, each was firmly planted in different colored tiles.

I eventually find myself at the leftmost of the twin stairways that trace the rounded edges of the semicircular room. Vermillion carpet tumbles down the steep steps, shot through with brighter red lines that draw my gaze against the current and to the balcony. Overlooking it all, our host. From this distance he’s a pillar of a man, faceless and featureless beneath scarlet fabrics and a mask of dark bangs like brambles. Despite appearances, he’s apparently especially alert as he waves me over excitedly.

Once I’m in earshot, he allows his sharply overlooking decorum to fully melt away. “Alistair! Come here! I’ve been wanting to show you this since we first met. Trust me—it’s much more fun than anything out here.” He pushes aside a thick velvet curtain the same color as the walls, one I didn’t even notice from the bottom of the stairs. “After you.”

I guess this has something to do with being a strategist. So, without asking any questions, I duck under Augustus’s arm and into the dark hallway.

“Follow me,” he requests, and I do, past dim orange sconces and mahogany doors bleeding navy blue in the dark. From there, our countless muffled footfalls are the only thing breaking a comfortable silence. My Ariadne leads me through turn after turn, left, right, left again, never opening any of the alluring doors that flank us on our journey.

At some point, we come to a hall of windows. A clear night has fallen since entering this hidden labyrinth, and its descent dredged up a moon one sliver away from fullness. Drawing my eyes back in from the window, they snag on a familiar captivating ceiling. It weaves a golden tapestry under pale blue and deep shadow. But a duelling glamor interrupts my fall up into the rabbit hole. Augustus finally unlatches a door, directly behind me.

In the second it takes me to glance over, he’s slipped out of view, leaving an almost-empty door frame behind. Through the portal, I can only see a single wavering light, tempting death as it dances freely in place. A candle. One candle, in an otherwise pitch-black room.

More things come into view as I grow closer. Gnarled piles of antlers in each dusty back corner. Feathers, no, entire wings dangling from the ceiling on thin strings, in a fractured parody of flight. A gleaming bronze ornament shaped like a tree, each of its many boughs capped off with tiny glass bottles. The far wall is the last thing to make itself seen. It ‘s mostly the same velvety wine-red as the rest of the walls, save for one giant dark gray curtain directly opposite the door. Augustus steps forward—he was waiting along the wall, right next to the door—and unceremoniously pulls the curtain down, snapping rings and pulling anchors from drywall with repeated, maddened, entirely silent tugs.

“THEY’RE DEMONS! THERE ARE DEMONS IN YOUR COMPUTERS! YOUR SCREEN IS A HELLMOU—”

A red blur, a sickening crack, and the unhinged voice falls silent. A Church Hunter appeared, seemingly from thin air but truthfully from the thick inky shadow. It shrinks into a crouch over the unconscious madman, muttering something the whole time. I don’t need to hear what it’s saying to know the Incantation of Ritual Justice. In the name of Father Sun, we find thee guilty of crimes against an aspect of the Solar Presence. Golden One, please forgive this foul fractured outcast, in your prominence. The creature’s silence is evidence enough of guilt. Amen and adjourned.

Another crack rang out, and then another, and another. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The Hunter didn’t stop. Thwack. Thwack. Thwhelch. A breakthrough, perhaps of skin through bone. The resounding evidence of brutality grows wetter and wetter until it sounds like great sucking steps through a marsh of gore.

LAYER 18: SILENT TORMENT

I blink a couple of times. There’s… something shapeless in my head, a silvery glowing mist going from my eyes through my brain down to the back of my neck, like some concussive cataract clouding vision and perception at once. I feel like I could float away at any moment, like I could disintegrate from the inside out. Is this how it feels to be one of those shuddering homunculi? Although, I don’t remember where I’ve seen it, an image of a pale, rail-thin Vitruvian Man, strung up on a wall, shivering so hard its spread limbs might just snap off—

A sickening crack interrupts my thoughts.

I bite my tongue to hold back a gasp.

Tongue still clenched beneath my teeth, I turn a corner and come upon the nightmarish scene. A Church Hunter, perched like a vulture over a collapsed human form. And to its back, a forest of spores glowing a sickly pale green. They sit like eyes on stalks, eyes that can somehow giggle with full and earnest joy. The Church Hunter stands in a flourish of its bright red cape, pulls out, no, materializes one of its guns, and starts beating the jumbled pile of limbs in front of it until they don’t even have that shape. It’s sickening. It’s sickening, and yet, I can’t look away.

I’m always like this.

Transfixed by evil things, like those strung-up flesh constructs tearing themselves to bits. I can never act. I’m damned by the will to freeze, and pride myself on never fleeing. But it’s not like I fight. Not at first. I have to talk myself into it, each and every time.

When you subtract the unthinkable, whatever’s left, no matter how undesirable, must be the correct action to take.

I constructed this saying a long time ago. I fished it out of golden ideals and quicksilver ether, bit by bit, and then hung it up on the inside of my head. A mantra, for when my feet refuse to move and my blood refuses to flow.

I don’t even have to recite it anymore. Which is good, because I no longer have a tongue. The inside of my mouth filled with heat and the taste of copper. Splat. The blood rapidly drained from its now-fractured basin: my jaw, split into writhing mandibles. From the stump of my tongue, a thin cartilaginous tube unfurled. It should be horribly painful, but it isn’t anymore. The sensation of cold wind hitting my palette from below used to feel like a violation; now, I hardly notice.

I can’t notice, because I have to act.

In a step, the distance between myself and my target halves, then halves again and again. Before I know it, I’ve overshot the Church Hunter, and it’s alerted to my presence. But it doesn’t matter—I can fly. I can move in a dimension these programmed instances of a mind can’t even wrap their— no, its head around. This is going to be easy.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Then why did you hesitate to act?

For a second, my steps upward—wait, no, flaps, steps taken with the wings are called flaps— pause, just long enough for the Church Hunter to get me in its sights. And with a tinny blast, I’m spiraling to the ground on wings like hole-punched paper. The swirling seconds seem like hours in free fall. Where did I go wrong?

That’s pretty obvious; I damned myself the second I overthought my actions.

I know that action comes before philosophizing, but I can’t seem to put that into practice.

These wings are useless if my brain is chained to the ground.

Images flash through my mind. That little girl with her disintegrating teddy bear. The stranger in the purple cloak who looked at me with glittering eyes. The homunculi on the walls, the surviving ones who thanked me for rescuing them, who called me a hero.

Why am I remembering that now? Why am I only just remembering that now?

No. I won’t do this again. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that I did, in fact, remember those people who looked upon me as a hero.

The spiral inside my head doesn’t stop there. As I spin internally, my body goes into a corkscrew in the opposite direction. Physically, I progress. Mentally, I look back. I look back on a time I’d forgotten, or maybe just not let myself remember. And I don’t see a thing. I don’t see a thing I don’t already know. I know I saved those homunculi, because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I hadn’t.

That’s right. I see it. From behind, as if looking over my own shoulder, I see something terrifying, something stretched and pale and dripping with folds of skin like wax, thanking me for saving it.

Even if it was just that one I saved, that one homunculus’s continued life is proof of my own.

There’s no reason to stop now. Even if I failed to save one person today, I have to fight for the chance to save someone tomorrow.

Sight returns to me. I’ve unthinkingly pierced the Church Hunter in the gap between helmet and neck guard. I’ve shot it through with a giant needle. Shot it through the bottom of the chin. My extended proboscis crinkles with each stinging, heavy breath I take. Hungrily, devouring oxygen even as it feels like it’s tearing my throat apart. The crinkling stops. Any section of papery membrane that came in contact with the black mud beneath the Hunter’s armor has been sucked away by its viscosity. It’s long gone now.

Parts of me, mind and body, are long gone.

My memories of saving the homunculus, actually taking the actions to save it, are rotting, rotting with scraps of my mouth and the powdery scales from my wings. All that remains is the vague shape of someone called Luna Elise Lavenza, and the mind that knows herself as such. But—and this is the time for these kinds of thoughts—why? Why is a fractured version of me still seen as, and expected to be the same person? Is it even wrong to assume I’m the same person? Have I changed so much, from the person I was when I saved that homunculus?

No, I’ve definitely changed. And just as a tattered shirt is no longer a shirt, but a rag, I am something other than the Luna who was born into this world. I am no longer a human, but a hero, something with an entirely different purpose compared to a human. I am not alive to live, or to know love, or to look at the stars. If it wasn’t necessary to stay alive, I wouldn’t eat or sleep or breathe. I have to improve.

I have to be better than the Luna who froze and let so many people die.

Because I’ve traded normalcy for this strange purpose, I must achieve it perfectly.

The stone wall behind me, studded with spores as it is, rots into phosphorescent powder with an earthy crack like roots being pulled from the ground. Behind it, a tunnel stretches into a pale green haze. The walls are lined with craggy stones, and even from here it stinks like plants and animals rotting together as one writhing mass. No, not just plants and animals; it smells like the world itself rotting, like dirt and stone and meat and wood all falling into a shapeless pulp together.

When presented with the entrance to a dungeon, there’s only one thing a hero can do.

The ground (floor?) inside is a mass of hyper flat stone and steel slabs, slick with moss and stale moisture. Each step is a massive effort; every footfall has to be at least roughly parallel to the ground, so I have to lift my knees up and outward mechanically. It feels wrong, but not as wrong as the ground sliding beneath normal steps.The hazy, bile-colored glow in the distance is like an underground horizon. I never approach the source no matter how far I advance, but I never walk in the dark, either; I’m surrounded by these tiny floating lights, wispy and willowy and bathing my surroundings in an almost neon phosphorescence. They feel almost like a kindred presence guiding me along, and despite it all, I almost feel like I’m dreaming, or walking through a garden of some kind. It’s nice, in the way being sad or sick is when you know someone will comfort you. Slightly uncomfortable, but certainly not the worst place to be in for a little while.

Hours pass. The utter silence starts to wear on me. My careful steps ensure not even the clack of shoes on stones break up the moments. These lights that once seemed so friendly turn my stomach now, almost mocking the sun with their green-stained attempt at off-white. Is my heart even still beating, with nothing to time itself to? Am I even alive? Is the endless expanse of silent fog depriving me of my life as well as my sense of space? Why do I even bother taking these exaggerated steps on my numbed legs? Forward, ever forward, again and again, for what? All I can hope for is a spark of pain. Why won’t my legs protest my unnatural gait? Why do they stubbornly hand me step after perfect, monotonous step?

It’s hopeless.

“It’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless…”

A chorus rings out, echoing off the hard stone walls.

No, that’s not right. The voice is coming from the walls. The walls. The walls—

The walls are a chattering mess of clattering teeth and clacking jaws. Yes, jaws; what I thought were stones upon first entering are actually… skulls. Piles and piles of skulls. Crumbling, dilapidated crania, each one a now-abandoned home to a human mind.

“Oh, so you’ve finally noticed us. Welcome to the Maze Of Rot, where demons gather! Although… You don’t seem to be a demon. Are you? No, what are we saying, you’re not a demon to us. But to the people above us, you just might be.”

“I know the Sun Church has designated me an Instance of Gremory. I don’t need you wasting my time, telling me things I already know.”

“So, you’re aware, you’re aware, are you? Good, good, goodgoodgood, that saves us a lot of time. You don’t want us to waste your time, so that’s good. You don’t want us to ‘waste your time telling you things you already know’; would it be a waste of your time, to tell you things you don’t know?”

“Obviously not, so long as it’s helpful.”

“What is helpful? Do you want us to tell you where you are, where you’re going, where you’ve been? What lies beyond life, what lies beyond death, what sleeps below and above you? What lives on the surface of the moon and the core of the sun, what makes you who you are? Between us, we know everything. But we’re not telling! No, we can’t tell you everything. We can tell you one thing, for now; one question, answered with poisoned decorum and chattering poise. So, ask away, dear Instance of Gremory.”

I’m really in no mood. This kind of excessive presentation is the kind of thing that slows me down, freezes me in place. It’s no different than picking apart my thoughts in the heat of battle; just a waste. “Can you tell me how to get out of here?”

Yes. After all, this place is… it’s sick. It’s steeped in sickness, and that sickness is seeping into me in turn.

“Why do you want to know that? We saw you, we did, you walked right into the Catacombs, without a moment’s hesitation, you just walked right in there. Why? Why do you want to leave now? Why not stay a while longer? Stay, stay with these old bones for a while, attempt to atone, or just enjoy our home!” The walls let out a chattering cackle.

“I want to leave because I’m not feeling well. It’s not really any of your business, but that doesn’t matter. Now can I go?”

“Why would you want to go? Do you think, oh, wethinks she does, the little moth thinks she’s going to feel better in the fresh air? In the night sky? Does she think she needs the moon to feel better? No, no, no no no; in here, this is just like the moon, this is the cosmos in microcosm, this is the whole wide sky bottled up and put in a tunnel, just for your drinking pleasure! Come on, down the hatch! Keep walking and you’ll feel better!”

“If you’re just going to be a headache, I’ll keep walking until I get to the end of this tunnel. No matter how long it takes, there has to be an end. If the sky is contained down here, there has to be a bottom to this bottle.”

The voices adopt a new singsong tone. “Maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t; we don’t know…”

“Don’t screw with me! You’re the walls of this place; you have to know. Why wouldn’t you know? You go all the way down and all the way back up; you know fully well there is a point where this sick tunnel ends.”

“We’re not the ‘walls of this place,’ no, we aren’t. We’re just skulls. We’re just people. We’re just lives, subjective experiences, chemical reactions. We never thought we had to “know” everything, or save everyone, or anything stupid like that, no, we never looked up to the moon or the sun or the stars and thought ‘mmmm, yes, we belong up there,’ we never pretended to be something more than human or less than human or post-human; we just lived and died, in peace and happieness.”

“...I see.”

I don’t get it, though, not really. How can anyone be so proud of their indifference? In a world like this, so full-to-bursting with pain and tragedy and death, how can you live without a constant blistering anger? How can you say you’re alive without that basic reaction? It’s simple; everyone knows people shouldn’t be killed for being sick, or acting out harmlessly. What’s the point of being a part of the human species if you can’t even acknowledge that simple truth?

To tell you the truth, I want to tear these walls of skulls down. They’re starting to look a whole lot like enemies. I don’t even see individual bones when I look at them anymore. In the shadowy gaps between skulls, I see the slit visors in those terrible bucket-shaped helmets turned sideways. The faces just become texture over one mass of black mud, hiding behind a death mask.

I want to tear down these piles of chattering grinning armor, dig into them with fury, like some clawed beast. But just when I approach the wall—

“I apologize for them.”

A resounding, soft voice, at once comforting and controlling. Reassuring. Motherly, but not doting.

“Please forgive them. I’m afraid it’s not often we get visitors, so they’re not very… approachable.”

She talks about the skulls like they’re her pets.

“Please, let me get you something to drink, at least.”

A skull, directly in front of me, with its mouth at eye level, starts to—

Oh.

It starts to hack up something. Little crumbles of something brown and shriveled, like a giant raisin, fall out through the bottom of its mandible. Suddenly, it lunges forward on a snakelike spine, curling up and then sharply back down again. Locking hollow sockets on my own eyes from above, like a twisted-up gargoyle. With scarcely a creak by way of warning, a torrent of a liquid like pearlescent milk pours forth from its hollowly unhinged maw. The stream hits my face hard, a sharp coldness pushing past my loosely closed lips, down my throat, out through my nose. It’s so hypnotically sweet that I instinctively gasped at its first appearance to capture even a wisp of its… grace? That grace damned me; now, trying to plug my mouth shut is useless against the flood. My mouth fills, then my stomach, and my throat, as more pours ever forth. More of this hazy stuff that makes my head spin and my skin tingle. What is this, anyway?

As if reading my thoughts, the voice again worms in through my ears.

“You are drinking Soma, the milk of the Moon. Relax. It’s ok. You were born in the Moon’s light, and so her milk will help you to grow. Ignore the sensation of the Soma clashing with you. Does the body, mind, or soul of Luna Elise Lavenza feel any better? Healed, perhaps? Maybe even improved? Do you think you’ve improved?” She asks these last questions coaxingly, like she already knows the answer and just wants me to confirm it.

It doesn’t matter. It’s not like I can answer, not with my mouth perpetually full of sickly fumes and frothy liquid. My footing shakes on the already slick ground, or maybe it’s my head spinning; either way, it doesn’t free me from the vomiting faucet that almost seems to follow me. Celestially. Like the Moon.

My face is numb from the cold, completely prickling with a thousand little needles, and I can barely think, I’m so dizzy.

The walls ripple. The floor seems to swim beneath my feet—no, I’m sinking through it, straight through it and into something far less stable than stone. And yet, I can move through solid rock as if it were nothing more than fog. If anything, despite the somewhat unstable footing, it’s actually easier to walk on the mossy-seeming “second floor” than the sheer, slick stone slabs I had grown (almost) accustomed to.

So, I press on as I have. But it’s not entirely that simple.

About fifty steps down the catacombs, my head starts to spin, counter to the direction the walls were but around twice as fast. It’s not that it’s dizzying; despite the speed difference, the two effects have a kind of dissonant effect that cancels out the feeling of movement. No, the problem is the movement itself. When the issue was all in my eyes, I could write it off as an effect of the Soma and move on; now, though, my head may as well be turning on a point. It certainly feels that way.

I can’t even tell which way is forward anymore. I’ll have to trust these walls, gelatinous as they appear to be, to lead me to either the bottom of, or exit from, the catacombs. But when I go to steady myself on the shattered monolith of skulls, something unexpected happens; my hand sinks through, as my foot did to the floor, to a wall bearing a familiar springy texture. It’s just like the second floor.

This might be a bad idea.

It might be a bad idea, but I have to try.

I place my second hand on (in?) the wall, and approach slowly. Slack builds up in my elbows, and before I know it, my head is inside the wall of skulls.

It’s unbelievable.

The air is thick with humidity, and warm enough to lull me into a daze almost instantly. Everything is bathed in a silvery glow, like a midsummer’s daydream, and the light just keeps splashing off every glamorous pearlescent surface. It’s… It’s a palace. There’s no other way to put it; this room is a monument to some silver nobility known only in dreams. Columns, gilded in silver and shining iridescence, stretch far above my head to a vaulted ceiling higher than the stars. The floor, now solidly beneath my feet, is a frozen sea of cream-colored marble tiles, shot through with rivers of silver tears. Before me lies an austere room, bare like a mausoleum save for a single chair.

No, a throne. Four elaborate silver legs hold up an empty seat of velvet, dark blue like the night sky, and a back-rest to match. The silver frame is covered with engraved images of somethings like flowers… sea creatures? It seems that way. Jellyfish, anemones, slugs like flowers; and in between, gleaming patterns, nonetheless rough to the touch, that evoke corals of all varieties. Maybe it's the blue-approaching-purple velvet, maybe it's the delicateness of the creatures carved into its silver, or maybe it's just the glimmering aura around the whole thing, like a pearl found in a daydream. It reminds me of... Alistair, that kid in the purple cloak, the person who seemed so broken and burning with pathos. Thinking about them again brings a heavy moisture to my eye, one I can't even feel until it grows too heavy for my eyelashes to bear and it rolls down my cheek.

I can’t help it.

Sobbing, I approach the throne.

LAYER 19: JASMINE AND ROSE

In the space Augustus has just opened, there stands a golden statue. It’s easily six feet tall, but it stands above me on a stone base about a foot high. It still seems like… somehow, like this undeniably static object is looking down at me, reaching out its hand to me, like it’s offering me its grace. It’s sculpted with a certain prominence, a nobility above any throne. There’s a feeling of love in its craftsmanship that goes beyond artistic passion and into fanaticism. Pride in one’s work would manifest in slow, careful hammer strikes, whereas the fervent reverence with which this… thing was made has left its entire body textured with tiny, constant, uniform craters. Despite this, it still gleams in the low candlelight, casting flickering and warped reflections on the narrow walls of its home alcove. Its outstretched right hand almost touches my nose with the still, cold tip of a delicate finger.

That hand.

That hand, contorted like a dead spider, yet still undeniably beckoning me in tableau, opens up like a mouth. If it were made of flesh, it would have glistened with serum before giving way to crimson saturation; but this is a metal hand. It’s a metal hand, so it’s perfectly normal that the outer layer should slough away like that. There’s a mesh frame underneath, more bronze than the gold skin, but surprisingly still as reflective. The fractured candlelight bounces around inside, sometimes flitting up into the hollow arm for the briefest moments, but mostly falling on the walls as radiant pinpricks.

“That’s supposed to happen,” Augustus reassures me. Those are the first words he’s said to me since we left the entrance hall. And they’re betrayed, too, by his giddy grin and by the suppressed mania staining his tone.

As if on cue, though, something else starts to happen. Those tiny fiery stars cast about by the mesh start to grow dim; the air itself seems to be getting thicker. No, not thicker, but redder. Redder. So much redder. Like the candles have fallen over and risen up to consume the room; but they’re still the same as ever. Little waxy white soldiers standing faithfully at attention with their heads on fire. No, the air is red because something red is mixing with the oxygen in a way light just can’t.

Saffron-colored mystic mist

Venting from the fingertips

Of solar golden prominence

Something rings in the back of my head. There are circles in the back of my mind; so many tiny thin circles bumping into each other, ringing out, colliding with the top of my spine, tearing a path like clattering ripples. At first, it seems like a textbook case of pool-table chaos theory, but no— they’re resonating. Eventually their message makes itself heard over the fading superfluous din.

It’s so simple.

It’s so simple, and so stupid.

If anything like that could work, it would have done so already.

Either way, I’ve heard it a million times.

That simple, crunchy, almost raspy beat; plainly electronic, I’ve heard it a million times. It’s boring. It’s not interesting. There’s nothing impressive about it.

And the words? The words are nothing. Nonsense about heaviness, vast skies, various specific flowers, all the same things I've heard so many times before. I’m not interested; it’s just nonsense. Trite, immature metaphor. Spit it out already. I don’t care about the sky. I don’t need wings. I don’t want to fly, or think about flying; I don’t want anything

The song grows quiet, and a voice speaks over it, though only barely.

What are you so afraid of? You think there are demons in the computer?

What?

You think there’s something wrong with what the computer brings you. It has to be demons in the computer, right? It’s the only explanation for these Unsee occult images shot into pulsing electronica, asking to grant your wish. And this is a crossroads, right? So make your deal with the Devil and stop holding up the line.

Stop that. You sound crazy. I’m not crazy.

That’s right. I’m not crazy.

No, I think you are. I’m not.

Well, I’m as sane as you are.

I can’t be crazy.

Anyone can be.

I tried so hard to pass their tests. I’m not crazy, I’m a genius. They love me, or at least, the smart ones do.

If you’re so smart, then how come you’re here? Talking to yourself in your head, playing a game of conversational ping-pong with a swirling counteractive force?

You’re not real. At the very least, you’re not a real part of me.

You’re acknowledging my existence. And I am replying. That makes me real enough. Can you say the same?

What?

What are you, beyond “the will to be considered valid?” Do you have an identity of your own? Personality traits? Likes and dislikes, that you would stick to even if someone smart disagreed? Do you have any taste? Goals? Dreams? Desires? What about—

Stop it.

Wishes?

“Please, just stop. I don’t want anything, least of all to be asked what I want. Please, stop, just don’t worry about it.” I’m so impassioned that I speak my thoughts out loud, shattering the string pulling me into my head.

Even if I had a wish, so many other people deserve that chance more than I do. So many people who have been wounded or lost family to the Church Hunters, people who have lost everything, so many people who never had anything to begin with. A whole world out there.

A whole world of people who don’t need to be anything in particular to be worth a damn.

People who can dumbly drift from place to place, with the label of “Sun” or “Moon” as a magic ticket out of being seen as a freak. People who can like things without having to consciously suppress their interest. People who are allowed to have passions without being analyzed, or asked why. People who are allowed to dream without being some “inspiration” to the “drifty-minded Thymoystichius,” without the pressure of spotlights and pedestals. People without any chains under their skin. People who are allowed to live.

If you wanted, you could be that. Or at least, you could work to make that an option.

“...I don’t want that.” But why?

Why... don’t I want that?

Because that world has been baked into me, and I’ve been baked into it. It’s a part of me, and not an irrelevant one. The world does inform some things about me. My fascinating ability to flow, from metaphor to metaphor and topic to topic? That’s something only a Thymoystichius could possess. We shouldn’t get so hung up on things like “making sense” to anyone but ourselves.

But that’s just selfish.

You’re talking to yourself. Of course you’re going to wind up selfish. Both parties are the same person; we make up 200% of this conversation. Make a single concession to me, let me get one word in, and you’ve been twice as self-indulgent as you could be by talking for an hour to one other person. But you just let me keep going, so I guess you must really like yourself.

I don’t think you’re me. You exist, but you’re not me.

I am, but that’s ok. What are you gonna do when you wake up?

Wake up?

You think anyone could do this and still be conscious? Tell me, what do you see?

I see… I see a hollow sun. A hollow sun, and a beach, and a visible aura of pain because my head is throbbing to the beat of a drum machine. I see a field of crosses sticking out of the sand, and I see… A woman dressed all in black, standing among them.

Interesting. You think there’s any place like that outside of your dreams?

There could be. I don’t know everything; everyone knows that.

What do you think?

I don’t know.

Fine. What will you do when you can no longer see the beach? When you see the statue again, and Augustus, and the candles and the antlers and the feathers and the red walls? What will you do then?

I don’t know. Whatever I end up doing, I suppose.

You’re hopeless.

And with that, the dream I didn’t even know I was having shatters around me. The last thing I feel is a tiny warm hand folded inside my spindly and freezing grasp; and then even that heat fades away.

In its place, an emptiness rushes in like cold water. A vacuum filling me with nothing. My left arm is little more than a mummified string of linked bones; at least it feels that way. I can’t actually see anything. Before me is an endless expanse of white, like a photo negative of a view behind closed eyes. It’s the nothingness of eyes opened too wide, the void wrought by trying to see everything. But I don’t want to see, or know, everything. I know that’s not possible.

A terrifying image fills the space in an instant. It’s not of anything in particular; but it glistens like open flesh or polished stone, some color between purple and rusty brown. Striated, shot through with deep blue, a tableau of swirling shapelessness. What’s before me is a contradiction, something that cannot exist. And it doesn’t; I know it doesn’t. It’s only an image of something, not that thing itself.

The image disappears, and is replaced in an instant. This time, it's a picture of a pile of objects in a dark corner, lit only by a harsh camera flash. Some of them are hard and defined, some are light and feathery, others still gleam wetly. All of them are neutral toned; some blend in with the off-white carpet, others are a deep, ashy gray, and still others are a silky brown that approaches gold. But for all I can describe them, none of the objects have a name. That fabricy-looking thing is like a lampshade, but it’s half-inverted and looks like it’s melting. Sure, that curved handle might be a part of an umbrella or cane, but it catches light with the wet clarity of opened flesh. That thing over there might be a bird’s wing, but it’s studded with human-looking eyes. And the more I strain, the more each item bleeds into the next. Eventually, it makes more sense to classify the pile as a single, multifaceted object.

The next image is a hand. It’s a hand, though not a human one. Each of its seven fingers are longer and thinner than seems possible. Indeed, they’re gnarled at the joints, wrought into a claw like a dead spider, straining against dull green skin stretched too tight, as if this design brings pain upon the poor creature cursed with it. It has no nails, only glistening patches of raw skin. Its fingertips are studded with hairlike barbed fibers. It’s terrible. I can’t stop looking, even though no matter where my eyes fall, I find some new baleful perversion of what a hand should be. I find so many new ideas of a lifelong misery baked into the flesh. This hand fills me with existential dread, and I still can’t tear my eyes away.

The image changes.

But the hand doesn’t disappear.

It’s just moving now. Moving so quickly, so decisively, cutting through the air with none of the creaking agony I would have expected. Those fragile-looking fingers dance gracefully, as if pulling strings of an invisible harp; the skin has more give to it than I expected. It stretches, but doesn’t break. This is an almost hypnotic experience, seeing so many parts moving so deliberately, all at once like a perfect, tiny machine and a thriving animal.

The hand is gone; for as long as a blink, the void is back before it gives way to a new image.

I think it’s a hallway, but it’s… bleeding. Bleeding a thick fluid, so deep purple it approaches black, from the line between the ceiling and wall, in ropes shaped like needles.

The hallway vanishes as soon as I register what it is. There’s a blinking void, and then something else.

A tangled pile of antlers, so sheerly pale that they seem to glow. Then something lined with feathers as a bird’s wing, but entirely the wrong shape. Curved backwards like a U, too gently to have been snapped. And studded with what appear to be human eyes. It looks to be still, unlike the hand, but the more I look, the more those eyes seem to stare back at me.

They blink in unison, and the image alights into embers from the edge

The void reappears for a brief second; its entropic aura is a cooling water for my red-hot mind. But the hammers strike again.

A golden statue. Clang. Hiss. A thick-barreled hand cannon in a hand covered by a latex glove. A squeaking finger pulls the trigger, and muddy black sludge shoots forth from the barrel with a wet sucking noise. When it hits the air, it seems to harden into tentacles. One of them is tipped with an eye, one a knife-shaped shard of bone, one a mouth of needle-like teeth, and the rest are tangled in a knot around the grip. Shards of a latex glove sink into the viscous fluid.

A blink of the void.

Someone standing in a corner, back to me, head hunched over or else missing entirely. My eyes flash down to their feet; I see a pool of blackened crimson just in time for the whole scene to crumple back into nothingness.

The void is closing its eyes, briefly, but longer than blinks, between images now. I have no idea how many of these things I’ve seen, growing more explicitly terrifying the more restrained the display. I’ve long since lost the ability to discern individual objects; things just register as “wet tubes” or “dry glimmers” or “structural monoliths”, impressions more than names as such. And the hammer clangs, again and again, dully beating these images into a hot, receptive mind.

A thin wet slice through shapeless flesh, rimmed with tiny down feathers. Clang. Hiss. The void makes itself known for longer and longer each time, it seems, letting my brain fully harden around each nightmarish instance. The reprieve is anything but a blessing.

A small, harsh light gleams off wet purple tubes, thick and corrugated and writhing with life. Thrashing around, kicking up a thin green fluid, before connecting (locking?) into unmoving bricks of bone, forming a circuit board of flesh. Clang. Hiss. Black scraps of bloodstained fur hang off a deerlike skull stained gray with rot. Clang. Hiss. A wall covered in tiny faces, carved concrete masks of tragedy weeping crimson tears. Clang. Hiss. Ragged horns jutting from an unmistakably human forehead. Clang. Hiss. A stinking sac of bile, wriggling like a bloated leech and with such fervor that it starts to tear itself apart. Clang. Hiss. The same eternally moving thing, this time being pierced through from above with a golden spear, again, and again, and again, almost frantically. Clang. Hiss.

The final vision leaves me shaking. I’m standing on warm ground in scorching air, being watched by something I can’t turn my head to see. My eyes are fixed eternally skyward, watching as a darkening crescent continues on its collision course to the sun. Slowly, like a car crash, the two begin to overlap, and the world shatters around me. I’m returning to the endless field of pale entropy. Before my sight and heat are consumed by pale chill and endless white, an image burns into my retinas. Something like a hollow sun, something like a white flame filled with the shadow of the moon. Something I’ve never seen before, but know, instinctively, as an omen of some sort.

The cold abyss gives way to a familiar room, warm with candles that smoldered short and cluttered with organic matter. Feathers. Antlers. A golden statue in front of me, and a man in red robes sitting cross-legged, as if meditating, in front of it. But I can barely take all that in, because I’m shaking now, shuddering so hard I can barely keep my footing. Withdrawal, I think. I think I became addicted to that slideshow from Hell. I think I need some kind of metal medicine. I think I’m really sick now. I think…

I think there’s something living under my skin. Or else, my brain is telling me there is. No, there’s something in my left arm under the skin. Scratchscratchscratchscratchscratchscratch. I scrape and scrub, but neither the dull sting nor pale red under my fingernails bring any relief. It’s deeper, and far too unclean, baked into me. I need surgery; I need a sturdy hand and solid metal to get this thing out of me.