She landed face-first on ground that felt like soil, her head smacking against dusty loam with a force that was reminiscent of a sharp slap, but which was insufficient to deal any significant injury. That didn't stop her body from groaning in pain, however, as her collection of recent injuries was getting increasingly comprehensive. Her upper body was still mostly bare aside from the sports bra she had managed to pull on earlier, and the feel of the cool dirt against her skin that might otherwise have been soothing was rendered a hot rasp against her wounds. Her arms hurt. Her leg hurt. Her shoulder? Hurt. It all sat on her back, pressing her into the soil with a heavy weight of pain.
Until that weight started to move. April stiffened, going rigid as it pulled itself away from her skin with the dry shuffling hiss of a slithering snake, landing with a whump on the ground next to her. A spike of cold fear running through her belly, she realised that what was now lying next to her was not her own pain and discomfort made manifest, but the creature that had eaten Michelle from the inside out.
It groaned, parts of its gelatinous body seeming to crack as it pulled itself into a deliberate shape.
April twisted to scramble away, half-rising to her feet before stumbling again and falling into the dirt. She flipped over onto her side, and then onto her back with a yell as she realised the thing had reared over her somehow. Her eyes squinted against the light of a too-bright sun embedded in a sky shot through with uneven black lines.
"Kh-hhrk- Little world-shaper... a most harmonious translation!" barked the thing, reaching down towards her chest.
April screamed as she felt a heavy pressure press into the skin of her upper stomach, and scrambled to pull the thing's arm off of her. She only paused momentarily with surprise as she realised that it had an arm. Things got even more confusing as the leaning creature blocked out the sun, dulling the blinding golden hue into a pale teal circle seen through the translucent flesh of its... head?
The creature had taken on a distinctly humanoid form. Instead of an amorphous undifferentiated mass of blue slime-flesh, it had kneaded its being into a four-limbed bilateral symmetry, a bulbous oval for a head, stooping over her with weirdly elongated limbs. The face was a blank facade, a smooth approximation of a human's head as if sculpted loosely from clay, only faintly shadowed pits where the eyes should have been. The hands were similarly minimalist, "fingers" blending into a mitten-like mass of feelers woven together, the soft shapes marred where the ends of its pseudo-digits sharpened to points. It had even given itself a rudimentary ribcage composed of its spines, holding a loose blob of material in a clump that formed the chest, rib-spines forcing themselves out of a pitted hollow at the centre, giving it the look of an extremely emaciated gymnast.
April had a sudden flashback to how those spines had originated—to the actual ribs of Michelle, levering themselves out of her body to be incorporated into the mass—and closed her eyes, twisting her head away as she struggled to pull away from the thing's grip.
"Calm the little strugglings..." it enunciated with relish. "All the spirit of a caterpault-wriggler under our binding, and perhaps half the mind...! Even for one like yourself."
The voice had normalized into an old-man's wheezing croak. It didn't speak from any mouth, but instead the voice rumbled out of the layered sheets of blue flesh in its false chest, air passing through gill-like slits in its back to carry the vibration. She could feel the resonance of it travelling down the arm that had pinned her. April continued to struggle, but failed to make much headway. It was much heavier than its current slim frame would suggest; the blue flesh had as much weight as an equivalent water-filled balloon, and was much more rigid. The creature could flex the entire fleshy surface like one vast muscle, even while it kept itself bunched up in the human shape.
She spat at it. A small globule of spit landed on the surface of its new limb, which seemed to still it for a moment.
"Small offerings... of yourself. Is this appeasement? ...no." It paused and considered for a minute. "Aha!" It barked a laugh that sounded like somebody about to vomit. "A slight on us... you think us lower than the dirt, is it? Yet it is you who is presently amid it..."
The smooth face cracked open, a slit in the lower-half of its head enacting a parody of a smile.
"Fuck you!" April strained, eyes beading with wetness a little. "Fuck you! Eat me now if you're going to, or let me go!"
The hanging mouth slapped shut, leaving no lingering seam in the surface of its face.
"Has it not been yet conveyed, we cannot consume you!" It sounded frustrated, in an eerily human manner.
"Well why the fuck is that?! You had no problem c- consuming Michelle!"
"This is truthful." It flopped its head to one side, propping it on its narrow shoulder. "Michelle was... not broken."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"Her cells were wriggling little things. They swarmed her body like be- ant- termi- hrrkk!" It coughed. "They infested her veins, her organs, a microcosm world that was for and of themselves. They did not try to... escape it. They did not vibrate away from their projective. They accepted us as we swam amid their number... with mere chemical backlash."
It straightened its neck again, planting its splayed hand-thing more firmly against April's chest.
"Your cells... their atoms... they are broken in this. They are shining with a razor sharp harmonic. It repel our grasp should we seek purchase beyond that of mere passenger. The cutting edge of a life that... seeks to escape its bounds. Be unstuck. You know of this... tiny wriggler." The empty slit-mouth lolled open again. "It is how you escaped the hunter. You did well... for us."
"I didn't do it for you, I-" April was still struggling, but was making little progress.
"Fear our ministrations no longer. Perhaps we would have consumed you once, little lonesome, pressed shallow against the nutrient media of our home... but that would be to our detriment. We would be what we are now but trapped in it. Be grateful of Michelle, for she gave us a mind to make these choices..."
"I don't know what the fuck you mean!"
"We ate her brain......" The false mouth lolled open further, now more of a hanging rope torn from the bottom of its face, as might hang a string of putty pulled too far. "Made her a part of us. It was our education. We know how to talk now, blood-sackling April. How to think. How to know."
April let herself go limp. "Fuck me. Fuck you! Fuck- fuck all of-!"
"These words you gurgle, they are truly not incitement to reproduce? We... Ah. An outburst of emotion. It is commending that your kind places such value in propagation of the self."
She stared at the thing, dumbfounded. The looming monster could talk—at length, it seemed!—and she figured that something which could talk could potentially be reasoned with. She decided to give that a half-hearted stab, ceasing her struggle for a moment.
"If you're not going to eat me, then- then let go of me. Let me- please!"
"Ah! Flighty child, April. Let us make our case... To be of one another's purposes."
"I don't fucking understand you!"
The creature spat a blue globule of its own flesh onto the ground next to her face.
"Pah! Try this... We will accompany you, ride along with your little fracture, and in return, we will let you not die."
"I thought you said you weren't going to hurt me."
"Not us, sitting prey, helpless one, not us! Do you know yet where you are?"
April glanced around for the first time, the grip the thing had on her chest loosening enough that she was able to twist a little to the side. They had landed, as she had noted before, on dry soil, that she realised now was a small bare spot amid a patchwork of rough yellow grasses that rose in places to more than half her standing height. They blew gently in a faint breeze against the backdrop of a turquoise sky, and a few short trees poked from the ground, sporting dry looking but otherwise surprisingly familiar bark and leaves. The sun seemed somewhat over-bright, but nonetheless the whole scene would have been pretty in the uncultivated manner of some foreign country's wild scrubland, were it not for the other dominating feature of this environment.
The entire landscape was pierced through with thousands of regularly interspaced sharp black obelisks. They lanced down from the sky to shatter against the earth, cracking the dry ground where they made landfall. The things were a pitch black that ran deeper than obsidian, and in fact seemed to suck in light from their surroundings rather than reflect it.
Following the line of one of them upwards as it traced a shallow arc into the sky, she gasped, softly. She saw that the pillar fractured, then split itself again into multiple streaks of darkness, that then lanced across the sky in skewed directions to weave together into a single spiderweb of black fracture strands. She realised with a shock that the striations she had noticed in the sky at her first landing were continuations of the branching obelisks, stretched upwards to an impossible height.
"Yes, yes! See what has been done... the girl has brought us to a Dead World!" The creature barked something that could have been either an exclamation of joy, a laugh, or a gagging sound. "Watch how the pillars of night have skewered the very earth! This is a place of decay..."
It loosened its grip on April, and she gasped a breath, sitting up. Part of her still wanted to run, but she engrossed in absorbing the scene in front of her. Her every instinct screamed wariness of the obelisks, so impossibly huge that they radiated a wrongness on a subconscious level, in the manner of being in the presence of something divine, or infernal. As her sitting motion shifted her position slightly in relation to them, she felted a sudden sensation of vertigo as distinct edges refused to manifest anywhere across the deep black surface. With the swooping, stomach-turning sensation of standing on a precipice, her perspective abruptly flipped, and she stopped processing the black streaks as obelisks, pillars, or three-dimensional objects at all.
They were cracks.
What she was looking at were a multitude of cavernous holes in reality, reaching and branching from horizon to horizon. The stretched high enough into the heavens that their broad strands—some of the more distant ones had to be kilometres across—faded towards invisibility. The cracks didn't seem to obey the normal laws of physical objects. For one, they didn't seem to cast shadows, or at least not in any way that made any sense. She could draw a direct line between one of the things and a patch of grass it should have shaded, only for the pale-yellow fronds to be glinting in the blazing sunlight as if nothing was there.
On the other hand, staring out into the distance revealed an odd mottling of the landscape—shadow patterns were cast in overlapping hues and in bizarre warped ring-like shapes that did not line up with any conceivable configuration of the cracks through the sky. What it most looked like was an inverse of how light might pool beneath the surface of water, if the turbulent surface of that water was frozen in a single motionless instant.
The creature spoke up again.
"You are not of decay. Not of dead things. Your appetite plays at gnawing your own world's little meatlings, but it is a world you cannot truly confront. Even your ancestors did not let their meals rot, little predator." It had been watching her as she looked around. "But we are of this. We have lived death, and are sharper for it. Our spines can pierce that which dwells beneath these tall shadows. Oh! And how we would relish in it..."
It stood up straight, walking around in front of her with legs that had still not yet got the hang of bending in the right places. It stumbled, and momentarily grew a third leg to compensate, one of its limbs splitting in two to steady its gait before the bifurcated sections snapped back together again.
"You would not survive twelve heartbeats without us. So let us be of use to each other..."
It stopped, and collapsed to the ground in an amorphous mess before rebounding into a cross-legged pose that mirrored her own. As she looked at it, it cocked its head, an incongruously childlike motion.
She tensed her legs to get up and start running—it was now no longer holding her down—then relaxed them. Fuck, she was tired of running. The possibility of physical escape felt extremely beside the point, given that she knew this thing could move just as fast as she could run through a dense forest of interwoven branches, and, with its newfound legs, could almost certainly outpace her on open ground. If it was not actively trying to kill her in that moment then she wasn't sure that she could be particularly bothered to try.
And besides... a sudden thought came to her. Whoever said that she needed to escape on her legs in the first place?
Gripping the outside fabric of her leggings tightly with both hands, she began to stare furiously at the patch of ground in front of her, eyes burrowing into the dusty soil. A frown spread across her brow as she did her best to pull her eyes and mind into that state of fuzzy unfocus that had enabled her to open up the elephant glass and dive through into the place she was in now. If she opened the passage quickly enough, and was able to dive through before the creature could follow her...
"What is it doing, neophyte traveller of worlds. Kah-rung... Peering through into the depths as though its mind seeks to reunite itself with the Whole?"
The creature bent over, head pantomiming the motion of staring at the same patch of ground that she was. It didn't have eyes, only vaguely shadowed pits, so April had no idea if it was actually seeing or if the thing was play-acting at having the sense.
"Ah, poor hatchling dreamer. It won't work, you know."
"I don't know what you're talking about," April spat through gritted teeth, knuckles white as she forced her mind towards blankness. The patch of ground remained stubbornly unfenestrated.
"So much impetus yet so little sense. Your useful brokenness is wasted upon you..."
"Fuck off," she muttered, trying to ignore it.
"Do you want to know why it fails? Or shall we walk in ignorance together until all our forms crack apart, solidify in brittleness and crumble? Until our dust filters from this reality, never again to-"
"Okay, fuck!" April snapped her gaze up to look at the thing. Its mouth-crack was gaping open once more in an almost mocking expression. "Say whatever it is that you want to say."
"We shall!" It folded the base of its head back up into itself, and slammed the mishapen appendage at the end of one arm, vaguely reminiscent of a human hand, down onto the surface of the dirt where she had been staring. The flat end immediately bulged, swelling out across the ground, forming into a stubby flat pad that covered a dinner plate sized patch of ground.
"Projectives are superpositions. Many are parallel. Stacked on with each other! Like... layers. Like..." It paused for a moment, considering.
"Onions?" offered April, deadpan.
"Onions? Yes, we recall this. Pitiful dirt fruit. Oh, to be prey that cannot even flee its eater. The lowest of lows!" It adjusted its makeshift ribcage of spines, the points pulling back slightly further into the blue mass with a faint shlick. "No, it is like, flesh that is pulled from bone to reveal... yet more flesh. An eternity of living musings."
It withdrew its feeler from the ground. To her astonishment, April saw that it had inscribed something beneath the surface of its stump-palm, apparently solely through the action of the morphing flesh. It looked sort of like a bunch of grapes, each grape shaded with an impossibly tight parallel hatching.
"Projectives within the same alveole are co-positioned, and undifferentiated," it continued, as if this made sense. "You seek to transition, little walker, but have no destination, even if you have the ability... a random travelling will be resisted. This is best for you."
"So I got here before how, exactly?"
"A focus!" it creened, slapping its arm back down on the dirt again, ruining the diagram. "Is like a scenting for prey. An image of it within the senses! You see where you are going and you see through to a projective it echoes... or to a close by transition..." It made a slurping sound. "Ah, such precision in words. Your Michelle has given me a most excellent gift, sinew-spry April..."
She shuddered internally. Her mind had numbed to it for a while, but suddenly she all-too-vividly recalled where the thing that was spitting streams of nonsense at her had come from. A cool wind blew past her bare arms, and she shivered again.
She stood up and began walking determinately in a random direction away from the clearing.
After she had taken several paces there was a slurping sound, and blue puddle strewn with suspended detritus shot across the ground to her right, travelling along a rippling motion that ran through its body. It reached a few meters in front of her, and then the humanoid form of the creature sprung back up, as if it were jumping out of itself. It landed in front of her on two limbs, one pointed arm braced against her chest. With some disquiet, she realised that it had holstered one of the rib spines beneath the arm-flesh, positioned to pierce her heart at a moment's notice should it be extended. She froze.
"Wriggling thing..." its head fell to one side. "So swift on brittle bones, it knows how to be prey. You cannot seek to leave when we have not yet made compact..."
She stood there for a moment, then abruptly stepped to one side and around the arm, walking past it. The creature moved to stay level with her, walking this time, but didn't reach out to stab her.
"I don't think you're going to kill me," she said, pointedly not looking at it.
"A foolhardy presumption..." it croaked. Then, after a few seconds; "why?"
"Well, for one you already said you needed me, so that was your first mistake if you wanted to threaten me with- with dying." She kept her voice as steady as she could manage, confident and uncaring, even if in reality her aching muscles felt like jelly, and she was seriously worried that her terrified body might lose control of her bladder as she caught the light reflecting off of the creature's sharp spines, glinting from the corner of her eye. "But also, honestly? You're too fucking weird to be a monster."
"We threaten and intimidate by nature, not by bending of will, careless dirt-stomper." It twisted its neck at an odd, rubbery angle, so that it was facing her as they walked. "But oh... you would be mistaken indeed to dismiss our potency for life-taking. It was the last mistake of many a crawler greater than your own sack-jostlings." It looked for a reaction from her, seemingly displeased when she gave it none. "April!"
"You were a monster when you chased me down and stabbed me in the forest," she continued, still not looking at it, "and you sure as hell were a monster when you-"
She faltered for a moment, clenching her fists.
"When you burst out of my g... my fucking friend and..."
She walked faster now, trying to outpace the tears speckling the corners of her eyes. She stayed silent for a few moments more, then stopped sharply, snapping around to face the creature. A person might have run into her from the sudden change in momentum, but the thing—the orgoane, as the armoured man had called it—snapped to a near instantaneous halt, its molten flesh undergoing an instantaneous phase transition to rigidity.
"But yeah, whatever you are now, now that you can speak and walk around and call me names? You're not a monster, you're just another joke that the whole fucking universe is playing on me. Something else mad to follow me about and taunt me with little quips! Just some horrible bastard that God or Jesus or, fucking, I don't know, fucking Cthulhu sneezed out to ruin my day and murder the one good thing I- Gah!"
She span back around and continued marching forwards. The creature followed her with a slithering gait.
"Pah. Do not think that our company might be shed through mewling whines. You intuit correctly that we will not forsake this chance."
"If you're going to follow me then I can't stop you, can I?"
"Correct." It enunciated the word with a clicking relish, then added, "watch out."
April, who had been twisting around to look back at her pursuer, looked forward again and had to jump sideways to avoid one of the pillars of darkness that plunged into the earth a few feet ahead of her.
"Hell," she muttered, stepping around it.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"Edge-stepper April, no cliff-summit could forepromise the depths of that near precipice. Tread wisely."
The problem, she realised as she marched forward, doing her best to remain more aware of her surroundings, was that the pillars—the cracks—didn't have a static shape or position. They twisted and shifted in apparent location as she looked at them from different angles. In order to move closer to one, she had to anticipate the way that it would move as she drew closer, which was often highly unpredictable.
Occasionally, when she looked closely at a patch of ground nearby, she would make out a thin scar-like fissure running through the packed dirt. Drawing closer, one of the cracks would inevitably converge in her sight upon that location. It seemed that they did have a real, physical position, but that this became increasingly misaligned with their apparent location at greater distance, like a kind of inverse rainbow or mirage.
Another practical side effect of this was that, if she walked forward between them without first spotting the faint lines in the ground ahead, she ran a risk of one suddenly bleeding onto the path ahead of her, even if it had previously appeared clear.
This was bad enough for the cracks that were only a few feet in diameter, but the broader ones nearby could reach several metres or more, and she found herself having to detour to avoid a black wall spanning 50 feet across. As she moved around it, it subtly twisted in the manner of a rogue optical effect, warping the air similarly to a heat haze then filling in the null space. It travelled along lazily in that manner, at an unpredictable pace.
The creature followed her. It watched her, trailing a few feet behind, keeping its non-eyes fixed on her in an unsettling manner that April did her best to ignore. She was pointedly doing so when it suddenly burbled into speech again.
"April... our little meat-cutlet..."
"Don't fucking call me that."
The creature ignored her. "Our foraging knowledge hunter, April.... We have prepared you a morsel. The prior question is now for answering. Feast well upon its innards."
"What?" she muttered, glancing at it despite itself.
"We have resolved to name ourselves. It is not a pattern played out within our prior self, but this mind yearns for a labelling... binding tendons of words to constrain self bones of the world we are part of."
"I didn't ask- whatever." April turned back, trying to find the right angle to step around the looming face of the dark crack so that it didn't shift itself back around in front of her.
"We may be called Kroakli."
"Great. Yeah. Suits you. Well, Kroakli, can you please tell me why this fucking thing-" she jabbed a pointed finger out at the crack in front of her, "-keeps moving all over the damn place."
Kroakli emitted a dry rustling sound that may have been a sort of laughter.
"This skewered world has holes in many of its perspectives. It is a failing of your own constrained flesh that it can see from one only..."
"And you can see more?"
"We see a little. It is not much. Our home projective lacks... isotropy. It bends inward toward the horizon line. The skewed axes there foreshadowed more magnificent discontinuity such as this..."
April grunted in frustration at the creature, as she finally identified a navigable path around the crack by walking back the way she had come in a meandering oval.
"Why does everyone- everything know what's happening right now, except for me? I ask and nobody makes any damn sense. What the hell is a projective?"
Kroakli hissed in something approaching surprise. "Translation approximates, but we pulled from the words of our mutual hunter, spoken in your tongue! Drkk. Let us try once more... Khr... The layers within the greater consciousness of the Sigmoid..."
"Yeah, still doesn't mean anything to me."
She continued walking for a few steps, before suddenly realizing that it wasn't following her. Despite herself, she looked back, wondering what could have possible dissuaded its effort to dog her footsteps. It was standing rooted on the spot, facing her, or at least standing in a pose that would have left a human facing her, if it had had a true face. As she turned towards it, it shivered with a rapid vibration, rib-spines popping in and out of its flesh, clicking gently before the voice burbled up from its false chest once more, enunciating with a wet relish.
"You don't know," it croaked. Its false slit of a mouth wasn't hanging open, but there was a slight puckering along the line where it occasionally manifested. "You truly do not know!"
"Know what?" She opened her mouth halfway, then snapped it shut, rolling her eyes. "Actually, you know what? No. Whatever, just, no. I don't care any more. Bye." She turned to walk away, but the irritating thing started moving again, keeping pace just behind her.
"This is the heart of things, yes... The crimson core of it. We had thought the other of your kind a simpleton for not recalling otherwise, but you all are oblivious! Even little caterpault-munchers such as our former self, bereft of thought on the margins of existence... Even we know."
April tried her best to keep walking, head rigid, gaze ahead, not paying it mind. If this thing was here to taunt her, then surely that was what this was; more impossible questions with nonsensical answers to be dangled in front of her for the sake of testing and re-testing her sanity. Perhaps Kroakli had decided to come after that next, now that it had killed one of her friends?
She scoffed at the idea. It seemed something of a moot point.
April almost managed to stick to her guns, to keep striding ahead and let the horrible burbling thing fall silent, hopefully for good. But only almost. If it was trying to get to her via her need to make sense of the crazy, it had ultimately succeeded. She rounded on it, gritting her teeth as she spat the words out.
"Fine! What!? Fucking tell me! What is it I don't know!?"
It recognizably snickered, before transitioning back into words.
"That the universe is dead. That this world is a dreaming... and we are stretched across a membrane, strung behind the eyes of the corpse-god that dreams it. April question-yelper, you are not even truly real!"
She squinted at it for a moment, before deciding that she wasn't sure how to respond to that, and instead turned around to continue walking, considering.
"Now you see why we are fit to this world so valiantly... Oh, what a good dreaming we were! A carrion beast for a corpse-universe..."
"You're still not making much sense, though, are you?" she said, finally. "If the universe is dead then what am I looking at right now?" She gestured broadly at the landscape and sky, strung throughout with the black fractal cracks that dropped from the heavens like lightning.
"Mrh- h! Maggots!" Kroakli crooned at her, sounding positively enthralled by the idea. "The world died longest ago that even dreams of gods struggle to recall it. This is as with all things, yes? The lifespan of a world cuts a mere sliver from eternity. But as all dead things, little dreamling, the corpse universe grew maggots into the rotten flesh of it. One of them, the biggest of them all; the Sigmoid. It gnawed itself into unborn being, then lay down to dream of what might have come before. A tiny dream against infinity, but enough for us all many trillions over... a swarm of carrion flies in the mind of a carrion god!"
"Beautiful. What an appealing cosmology," she muttered sarcastically. "Personally, I believe that the universe is a giant cosmic toad, but each to their own."
"Kr- pah! Do not dismiss with your jokes. Neither is this mere cosmology; we speak only known truths! You best face them now, arrogant muscle-puppet April, lest they pierce you through that blood-swollen heart later, krrr... You only travel deeper into this. Your little breaking is a fracture in its mind..."
April shook her head reflexively. "So, what? I'm seeing like, ghosts, and talking monkeys, and you, and ending up in... whatever this is, because your 'carrion god' made a mistake and screwed me in the head? Is that it?"
It clattered disapprovingly. "Your kind is perhaps unknowing by nature. Concepts are unprocess-ing, yes... Or is it a frailty confined to your own specimen?"
"If that's your way of calling me an idiot, then go fuck yourself."
"An intriguing proposal, though we are obligate self-dividing." It clicked again. "But this is needless diversion, April... The truth of the matter remains, even if your self holds an oblivious knowing. You are not seeing ghosts."
"Well, if you're going to try to tell me that they're actually zombie ghost maggots spawned by your corpse-god or something, then-"
"You are a fool, little flesh scrapling...!" it cut across her, swiping a rubbery arm through the air. "Your own life depends on this and you make amusements. Pah! Do not be heedless of our words, for your conduct imperils both our self and your own self..."
She rolled her eyes, but remained silent, growing mildly annoyed as Kroakli refused to elaborate without further prompting. She fought a brief internal battle over whether she was going to be goaded into asking another question of it. Finally, she opened her mouth and took a breath despite herself, only to be suddenly distracted by something that had appeared on the horizon as she and the trailing creature summited one of the shallow hillsides.
The landscape flowed onwards and outwards as continuous sea of arid yellow-gold savannah, interspersed only by patches of dry sandy soil and loose stones strewn down the steeper slopes. They were looking down upon a sunlit valley, grass mottled by the shadows of loose clouds and the mottled inverse caustics that were the irregular shading cast by the dark cracks; the strange misaligned patterns, she now realised, were the result of how their apparent paths varied depending upon the perspective of the observer.
Nestled at the bottom of the valley was the feature that had drawn her up short as she had stopped to squint at it. There was an ugly, grey-brown hill clinging to the valley floor, like a pimple to attached limpet-like to the inside of someone's navel. It formed an unusually rounded dome-shaped hump, and was composed of what looked from a distance to be a thick mud that smeared itself in stringy, blobby tracks down the slopes.
The sides of the hill were mostly undifferentiated in that coating, except for a set of slit-like troughs across one broad slope, resembling an inverted letter "g", or perhaps the number "6". The whole thing rose to almost two thirds the height of the valley they were standing atop, and gave the impression that a giant had used an ice-cream scoop to deposit a lump of muck squarely in between the valley sides. A spattering of the slicing cracks skewered themselves into it at this angle, forming a bouquet of chocolate flakes or sprinkles to complete the comparison.
"Eurgh," grimaced April, her mouth pulling up at one corner in distaste.
Kroakli perched itself behind her, atop their vantage point overlooking the valley. "Krr- kalem... A strangeness, yes..."
She glanced over at the creature. "What is it?"
"Be clear, wishbone-thatchling, that we are not all-knowing. We have not seen this place, heretofore our current being here..."
"Useful," she muttered under her breath. She hesitated there for a moment, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet, then set off down into the valley. The hillside was steep and the dry soil was loosely packed and rocky, here, so it required careful foot placement to find appropriate footholds. Her still bare feet clenched toes into the strata of smooth pebbles.
"Why approach?" asked Kroakli, still frozen in its humanoid pose on the brim of the hill. "It is an anomalous seeping of a thing. No more than a cautious observance is needed."
"Oh yeah, because I'm really on a cautiousness kick lately," she called back to it, not slowing. "It's not like there's anything else out here to walk towards."
"Karuum... A maddening magnetism to the aberrational. Is this what brought you to this point, April Pearce?" It pronounced her name with a stilted formality.
She grunted under her breath, and turned back around to look at it. "Listen, I-"
Her words were pulled forward into a breathless squeak as the abrupt motion caused the foothold in she had been carving out beneath herself in the loose pebbles to slide out from under her. Her feet surfed down atop a crest of the stony scree before finally slipping out from under her and sending her tumbling forwards down the 40 degree slope.
The valley whirled around her. She cried out in pain as her arm cracked against a larger stone, adding a fresh bruise on her elbow to her body's already overpopulated crowd of injuries. It was difficult to think in the brief moment that she was tumbling, the spiralling black cracks whirling about overhead, but in the breathless seconds she had a moment to consider how breathtakingly stupid this whole manoeuvre had been. There were some larger rocks down at the foot of the valley, and she boggled at the sadistic cruelty of this of final joke from the universe; to dash her brains to death on the hillside of an alien world not through any exotic danger but rather through her own sheer clumsiness.
It was surprising, then, when instead of hard, skull-breaking stone, she plunged face-first into some sort of damp, lukewarm putty. The semi-solid surface wrapped itself around her as if she had struck an airbag filled with custard, one of her arms punching its way through the surface to embed itself in its cool depths. Her immersed limbs brushed up against floating particulate.
"FOOLHARDINESS, DEATH-DANCER APRIL! KAH!" Kroakli shrieked at full volume directly into her ear, setting it ringing. She could feel its flesh vibrate against her skin where it had wrapped itself around her, the creature having transformed into an amorphous sack of blue matter that adhered to the side of the hill. The only considered aspect of its reshaping was in the positioning of its spines, which it had projected pointing out and backwards from the edges of the concave hollow it had caught her in.
Kroakli, she realised, must have jumped from the top of the hill, abandoning its humanoid shape, to fly down the loose slope at a frightening speed and catch up to her before she struck the bottom.
"Mewling infant!!!" it continued, creaking voice harsh against her ear, "do you know how close you came to being unmade?! You would have lost both of us in this place. We have no way out but through your own self!"
April was still coming to terms with being embedded in the amorphous creature, and she struggled to extricate her arm, throat filling with a rising bile. Kroakli did not smell bad, exactly, but gave off an unfamiliar, nonspecifically biotic odour. The pliable translucent blue flesh was warmer than the surrounding environment, and pulsed nauseatingly against her skin; it squeezed against her with every shift of its body and each syllable of its pantomimed human voice. She had a sudden flashback to the last time she had been so close and personal with the creature—or a prior iteration of it, at least—lying on the soft white floor of the red forest, the cloying weight blanketing her as it reached for her face, razor spines sinking into her arms.
With a shout of disgust, she ripped her body from the blue mass with a wet schlop sound, rolling over to land slightly uphill of it. She flipped onto her buttocks and shuffled backwards away from the crouching creature, struggling to find hand and footholds in the still loose dirt and rocks, which were thankfully now spread at a slightly less severe incline.
The creature was gradually pulling its splayed-out substance back into its human shape with a dry slithering sound, converging into a seated pose backed by a- whoa.
April now for the first time registered that they had both landed just a few meters uphill from one of the shifting black pillars of nothing, it presumably having swept in to intersect her tumbling path through happenstance. Kroakli's intercession had been all that had stood between her and a fall into dark oblivion mere seconds later.
She nonetheless still backed away from the creature as fast as she could, swearing under her breath while her body shuddered reflexively from the close contact.
"No gratitude is given either, April meat-cutling. We lower ourselves to this, to being nursemaid to prey, and- kra-rum!" The voice dissolved into unintelligible pops and croaks for a few seconds, before resurfacing with "-no consideration!"
April was still catching her breath, but gasped out a ragged "fuck you!" before taking a few seconds to pant some more. "You're the one who decided to stalk me all the way from- through- gah!" She seized a handful of the loose pebbles and threw them down the hill, aimlessly. A couple of them struck Kroakli on its soft forehead and sank into the gel without sound.
The creature had finally fully pulled itself back into its human form, and now threw its blob of a false head back, neck tilting astern at an inhuman angle. It vocalized a vicious sequence of clicks that landed halfway between the sound of an irate rattlesnake and an echolocating bat. Eventually the sound twisted itself back together into a voice.
"kkrrr... oh, April... Why such hatred for us? For our willing collaboration?" The thrown-back head snapped back down onto its misshapen shoulders. "Is it truly for that which we consumed of your... kh-rrhh... of your Michelle?"
April grit her teeth. "When you ate her from the inside out, turned her torso into a puddle of blood and scattered her severed limbs across the bathroom floor? Yeah, that might have something to do with it."
She was biting back tears once more through the anger, but watched as the thing stood up again.
"Oh, but April... Consumption is what we are! Or what we were, and it constitutes us still... A predator as well as carrion-beast. But this is no aberration, as you know with all certainty... All life must be of eating. Your life, our life- Even the Sigmoid leaches off Its ashen world-nestings. It is the nature of ourself and ourselves. We did not have a mind, even, when we rode upon her blood through the flesh of her womb. Oh, what a fruitful melding you facilitated for us. But we feasted on cellular impulse alone, then growing this greater self..."
A flush of fresh revulsion shot through April as she struggled to her feet, staring at the thing that was perched in front of her, reminded afresh of what exactly it was she had been talking to. Talking to! The creature that had murdered her-
"If she is missed so," Kroakli burbled, "can appeasement be attained in knowing her patterns echo within us still... our education of her was thorough. Observe."
Then, horrifically, the thing's face began to reform. The thick blue slime morphed, sucking in on itself as if stretched around a more defined set of features, outlining a nose, lips and open eyes, lidded slightly at the edges. April stared in open-mouthed horror as the new features cohered into a familiar face; a perfect image of the one she had kissed less than an hour prior, only to then watch cave in on itself, dead and dessicated on the floor. It was rendered now anew in the translucent blue flesh. A fleck of something chunky and unmentionable floated loosely behind one eye.
The false Michelle opened its newly-formed mouth to take a breath, and then spoke in a flawless simulacrum of her dead lover's voice.
"It's going to be okay. I promise."
The brick sized chunk of rock hit it squarely in the middle of its false face, bursting the taunting mask asunder with a splattering of displaced slime as the mimicked features caved in. April let her throwing arm fall to one side as she sprinted away down the valley, taking the loose slope at an angle to avoid being thrown again by the incline.
"April!" the thing shouted after her in a high pitched cry, "we will say we are sorry, if this was an undesired..."
The unnatural voice trailed off as she moved further away and tuned it out mentally. She set her focus on the base of the valley, where the foot of the ugly, muddy hill bled into the surrounding strata of yellow grasses and loose shrubs.
A quick glance behind told her that Kroakli had set off in her wake, and the creature was fast—she had more than learned that in the red forest—its advantage additionally compounded by the loose soil and steep slope. It could glide across the sparse material with ease by reconfiguring itself into that same rippling blob shape that ambulated in a cross between the pulsing of a slug's foot and a cheetah's bounding gait. Her rock to the face had thrown it off guard, however, as it had struggled to pull its body back together and morph into the other form. That, and the fact that it had to dodge around the black crack which April had nearly fallen into gave her several seconds' advantage, and the thing's pace was not insurmountably superior to hers if she could reach a full sprint. She willed her legs to do just that, propelling her down the hill and away from the detestable thing.
She reached the bottom before it could catch her, hitting the valley floor and darting sideways so that she could transition into a flat out run on the level ground. At first, she moved parallel to the base of the mud pile, which rose at a sharp angle on the other side of a several metre span of flat ground, looking all the more jarringly incongruous amid the surrounding landscape up close. This track worked at first, until her path was blocked by a shallow delta of the mud rising a few feet high, the endpoint of some minor mudslide off the side of the rounded hill. It reached out across the valley floor like the fallen limb of a tree, half-melted into brown mush.
She avoided it, side-stepping around the outer extent of the unpleasant pile, only to round its tip and find herself confronted with an even larger sloping mud-fall, a few paces further ahead. Realizing that she didn't have time to backtrack, she vaulted herself up onto the slick surface, punching her feet down against the three-foot thick mud-flow.
Her feet immediately sank straight down into the surface with a sucking slurp, wedging themselves under a brittle surface layer and into the sopping muck beneath, cementing themselves in place.
April cartwheeled her arms in an attempt to keep her balance, leaning forward alarmingly under her prior momentum. In the end it was her rooted feet that allowed her to win the contest against gravity, acting as weighted shoes to affix her upright in the manner of a roly-poly doll. She cried out in dismay, pulling at the sucking mud, trying and failing to yank her legs free. Kroakli arrived behind her as she did, reconstituting into its humanoid form. She wasn't able to turn around to see it, but heard the characteristic sucking-slithering noises.
"This predicament," it stammered, literally pulling itself together, "was not a necessity in this. Aside from being a futile exodus, we do not intend to hurt you! We spoke truly!"
"Fuck you!" shouted April for what felt like the fiftieth time that day, struggling to extract her boots from the mud with little success. A tear collected at the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek, until she slapped it away angrily with one arm. "Fuck you! You killed Michelle you fucking- you...! You are a monster!"
It fell silent for a moment. "Maybe you are right in this," it finally offered, "but can we help being not other than what we are? Think on this, also..."
"I won't think on shit, you sick, fucking, animal!" she screamed at it, head twisting around to look behind her. With an emotion-fuelled straining of her leg muscles, she managed to roughly yank one leg upwards and dislodge a surface patch of the muddy crust. This also succeeded in throwing her off balance, however, and she was forced to stomp the leg back down into the mud, foot landing on something fibrous buried within. She thrust her arms out to either side in order to steady herself.
From somewhere in the near distance there was a muffled boom. It grew, slowly, into a rumbling blast of sound before tapering off. Both April and Kroakli went silent, freezing in place—in a more literal manner for the creature than for the girl.
Finally, April ventured a soft, "what?"
The word was cut off by another boom, sounding slightly closer this time, coming from the direction of the muddy mound that she was standing in the outskirts of. Perhaps something on the other side?
That was when the ground began to shake.
A plume of mud erupted from the side of the hill, fountaining out in multiple directions twenty paces up the slope from where April was stuck. Loose curtains of the muck sloughed away, pouring onto the ground around her own elevated delta, and causing Kroakli to need to bound backwards out of its way in an elastic snapping-back of its body. The mud around her feet seemed to bubble, and then melted away down into the ground, revealing a netted mat of brown fibrous strands, some of which were wrapped around her boots like loosely clinging seaweed. They knotted together into a single strand near the base of the muddy hill, forming a huge vine more than a foot thick, that-
-that pulled itself inward and upward, the branching outer extremities pulling taut where they had bound themselves about April's feet, yanking her inwards. The trunk-like mass tore itself from the side of the mud-mound with a thunderous groan, shaking more of the thickly coating muck free. Broad as a redwood tree near its base, the curling tentacle-thing stretched itself into a high arching loop a hundred metres in the air, as the last of its length burst from the rounded pile. Similar protrusions and collapsing cavities appeared—albeit with less vigour—around its entire circumference. The freed limb clutching April's feet began to flex itself out straight, the ripple of motion rushing down its length to meet her.
"Oh dear," observed Kroakli, as she was jerked upward and into the air.