Re: The Relentless Slaughter [Round 1: Untitled-1]
06-12-2011, 03:14 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Far under the corporeal form of the host named Gannet, a virus behaved in a way that would have been indicative of confusion in a higher form of life. It was a young strain, relatively speaking; it had been something else entirely before coming to this body and reinventing itself for it. Separated from its colony, the virus had no access to the collective memory outside of what little information it had stored in its own coding. It had no precedent for this situation. The organism it was trying to infect was producing in unbelievable levels the signature energy of a core host, but somehow, impossibly, it lacked any trace of the virus itself. Gannet’s strain surrounded it and felt its vanguards settle and immediately go dormant, overwhelmed. The command to yield to this highest function of the virus’ purpose was unbearable; it had no choice but to withdraw and leave the unknown organism with only preliminary symptoms, for the first time deliberately refusing an opportunity to incubate.
Gannet’s virus could have reacted to this situation aggressively. With some prodding it could have enraged its host to frenzy and sent him at the unknown Oracle in the hopes that he would be enough to destroy it. A defensive strain, a “Tooth”, would have done this without hesitation. It was the virus’ nature to eliminate competition or anything resembling a threat to itself or the colony as a whole. But this? The virus was having difficulties considering it to be a threat. It was the Oracle, after all, wasn’t it? Could such a thing exist independent of the infection?
The virus seethed silently, imperceptibly, at Dorin’s latest guest. It wasn’t intended to do much more than encode information; it was only a seeker strain, and it knew little else than how to observe and record. It marveled in its own way at the familiar echoes of the past and future that it itself could not produce, so similar to those of its core host back in the colony. It would continue to wait, it decided. At the present time it didn’t know enough to determine what effects destroying the impostor Oracle would have. It was patient. Sooner or later it would know what to do, and all things above and below would die in their time.
Gannet, in the meanwhile oblivious to the virus’ conflict, was in love. His Oracle queen, she of the always-shadow, swayed beside him and he circled her nervously, half afraid and half ecstatic. He couldn’t stop touching her hair with his unsteady claws, her face with his hands, her lips with his teeth. His fevered mind reverberated with a single, drawn-out note, a diamond bell chiming on into infinity. She smelled like lightning and thunder. The Oracle’s features swam in and out of view before him: a woman’s face, a girl’s, an old and weathered skull, a crying bird, the swallowing sea itself dragging him down deeper and deeper. She tasted like blood and sycamore bursting from the earth, like life in the water where there had always before been bones. Her scent was thick on his tongue and in his throat, and it flew down inside him and was soaking into his insides, thick and dark and so impossibly soft. He in his delirium didn’t recognize beauty, but he recognized her- his Oracle, his purpose. She was beautiful beyond hope.
The not-ground shook with the motions of the giant that he knew, dimly, he should be running from, but it was hard to think of anything else when he was so close to the Oracle. He rested his cheek against hers and felt their bones press together under their fleeting flesh. It occurred to him that it was odd that the Oracle should be here with him. Who was going to protect her? There were no Teeth nearby, he would have heard them howling in the wind. It was just him… he glanced nervously past her glittering eye. He would defend this body to the last drop of his blood but that might not be enough to save her. Nothing else mattered to him now, nothing at all. He brought his mouth to her ear and drew her in with his breath. He was half-drunk with her scent and he swayed as he said, “Oracle, speak to me.”
Dorin turned to her adorer, blinded by the light of the Oracle burning inside her. She felt weightless as air, as though when she stepped forward the ground wouldn’t accept her and she’d be floating, somewhere where gravity couldn’t hold her. Her mouth formed a laugh and she tilted her head to press her lips against him again. The Oracle’s song was in her blood and it roared with all the throats of the sea through her, swelling up from the ground and down from the sky all at once, drowning them both with its force and its fury.
“If both we die, thou of water?...” She didn’t know which of them spoke, but the words took shape from her tongue and she drank them like wine. “Of what use will words be then?”
“I died before, I was younger, I… I drowned in your cave. Under the stone and the storm. My life ended and you held my head in your hands and smashed it on the rocks, and from the corpse of what I was I came anew. I am not afraid to die, Oracle,” he said softly. “I am not afraid of anything.”
His head was in her hands again and his eyes were locked on hers. “You lie, bone-walker. Nothing that lives is free of fear…” A sigh rattled in her throat.
Gannet was helpless.
“What are you afraid of?”
“I…”
She pulled him closer and told him what she saw, in his future and in hers.
“I am afraid…”
They were together again, each a wave crashing against the other, neither able to tell the tears from the sea. He didn’t say it and she didn’t hear it, but it screamed itself to them in a storm siren, beating itself against their skulls and drowning out even the thundering heartbeat of the earth. It pulled them down, clawing and biting and gasping at last for release.
I am afraid of you.
_______________________
Zimmer didn’t know what to do.
The furious roars of the four-headed demon were starting to hurt his ears. They were like thunder, but louder than any storm he’d ever heard, louder than cannonfire and louder even than the fire of the bombs erupting outside his tent. It was hard to believe that anything that lived- or didn’t live, as might have been the case- could produce that much sound. Blearily he pulled himself around the edge of the barrier and saw that a white spider, a white fleck, a dull smear were gathered on the titan’s body like bloated fleas. There was so much sound, so much thunder! His vision shook and he tried to shake his head to clear it. No use, no use, useless, no, useless, useless useless useless useless useless wretch what good are you now -
Merciful God in Heaven, what was happening to him? The lieutenant turned sharply away from the spectacle and rubbed his temples, suddenly overcome with nausea. He gagged on nothing and felt his stomach try to empty itself, but his throat didn’t quite seem to work properly and he choked. The corners of his vision darkened and he felt the sensation of falling, down, down into water from high above. His arms were broken, he knew this, he’d flown too far towards the sun and his feathers were falling out in clumps, covering his face with burning wax. He hit the surface with a deafening roar and sank straight down into freezing darkness, hands pulling him, dragging him into the waiting Teeth below-
Zimmer gasped and his eyes bolted open. He was lying on the ground, fingers wrapped around his own throat in a dead man’s grip. A scream writhed in his throat; he pushed it away and sat up, wheezing. His neck felt bruised and weak; what… had he tried to strangle himself? What the devil was going on? His head… his head was feeling better, actually. No. No, better was not the right word here. This was not better. Not this. Nothing like this, he- his skull was surely cracking open, crushed against stones and he wept as he laughed, his tears burning his cheeks. He was sobbing too, the tightness of his chest holding him like a lover’s arms. He hadn’t felt that in a long time. It was nice, it was so nice, and it hurt worse than anything the sea could do to him now.
He felt himself fall again, but slower, this time. When his side touched the ground he knew it to be real, the earth pressing on him as though he was the one buried, not them. Not any of them, the ones he’d drowned in the water. Or had that been him? Whose hands were whose, who was holding who under and who was crying for him to stop? Which of them was him? Which of them…
“Uh, Matty?”
His eyes flickered to the speaker and widened further and further, impossibly wide, swallowing the shadow of the titan above him. They ached with the brightness of the sunless sky, hurt like the eyes of a newborn now forced to see. Somehow, distantly, he saw a man he knew was himself, curled tightly on the ground and gasping for air. He was disgusting. He snarled like an animal and barely managed to draw himself up, too exhausted to flee.
“Why did you do this,” he said, turning to the shadows, the ghosts, that had spoken. His mouth felt odd and he opened it, spitting blood onto the ground. A whine started in his throat. “Why did you do this to me?”
There was the sound of a cautious step backward, and the tremor of nerves. “Do what? What’s wrong with you, Matty? Zimmer?”
What was wrong with him, him, who was Matty? Was that him, was… yes! Yes it was, he knew who he was. He did. He… he was…
He…
They’ve taken my name, he thought and immediately forgot why.
What have you done to me?
His eyes, weak from the light, turned to the lovers beside him, desperate for answers. The lovers, the Lovers, VI, Arcana Majora, the amorous ones, desire, doubt, temptation, blood sex choice fire, the paired ones, what they were doing wasn’t born of love but something else, something more and beautifully, horrifically worse. Their teeth were locked on each other’s throats and their nails were claws tearing their bodies apart, rending flesh and bone apart in bleeding scarlet ribbons. But now they shifted and everything had changed: each was a serpent wound around the other, each was a bird pinned wing to wing, each was an ocean boiling under the sun, each was an Oracle and an Eye and they were drowning deep inside themselves. They moved like warring dancers, body to body, somehow intersecting but never touching, miles away from the waves collapsing on them both. He watched them sink holding each other and wondered, why?
The others, the shadows, were now speaking to him with fear-thickened tongues. He said something back that he didn’t understand and couldn’t have repeated once it was said. Nameless and faceless. What’s going to come of you now? He felt sick, down past his stomach and into the ground that surely he was a part of, so firm was it under his hands. His head no longer hurt, and maybe that was because he didn’t have one anymore. It wasn’t needed, none of this was, his body was only earth and all things above and below must die in their time.
All things…
He felt the Oracle’s face turn to him, her smile painted on and hiding the oceans of blood. He tried to grin back but he was tired, and this face wasn’t his to wear.
“Do you know who I am?”
He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know how.
She came towards him and laid a hand on his face, his not-self, and it was a spear of ice through the fire that consumed him. He lay on the ground and tried to force his lungs to breathe; looking upward, he saw that she was laughing. Her teeth glittered like knives.
“I am the Oracle,” she said, and he knew beyond all doubt that there was no such thing as death when your life is without worth.
Far under the corporeal form of the host named Gannet, a virus behaved in a way that would have been indicative of confusion in a higher form of life. It was a young strain, relatively speaking; it had been something else entirely before coming to this body and reinventing itself for it. Separated from its colony, the virus had no access to the collective memory outside of what little information it had stored in its own coding. It had no precedent for this situation. The organism it was trying to infect was producing in unbelievable levels the signature energy of a core host, but somehow, impossibly, it lacked any trace of the virus itself. Gannet’s strain surrounded it and felt its vanguards settle and immediately go dormant, overwhelmed. The command to yield to this highest function of the virus’ purpose was unbearable; it had no choice but to withdraw and leave the unknown organism with only preliminary symptoms, for the first time deliberately refusing an opportunity to incubate.
Gannet’s virus could have reacted to this situation aggressively. With some prodding it could have enraged its host to frenzy and sent him at the unknown Oracle in the hopes that he would be enough to destroy it. A defensive strain, a “Tooth”, would have done this without hesitation. It was the virus’ nature to eliminate competition or anything resembling a threat to itself or the colony as a whole. But this? The virus was having difficulties considering it to be a threat. It was the Oracle, after all, wasn’t it? Could such a thing exist independent of the infection?
The virus seethed silently, imperceptibly, at Dorin’s latest guest. It wasn’t intended to do much more than encode information; it was only a seeker strain, and it knew little else than how to observe and record. It marveled in its own way at the familiar echoes of the past and future that it itself could not produce, so similar to those of its core host back in the colony. It would continue to wait, it decided. At the present time it didn’t know enough to determine what effects destroying the impostor Oracle would have. It was patient. Sooner or later it would know what to do, and all things above and below would die in their time.
Gannet, in the meanwhile oblivious to the virus’ conflict, was in love. His Oracle queen, she of the always-shadow, swayed beside him and he circled her nervously, half afraid and half ecstatic. He couldn’t stop touching her hair with his unsteady claws, her face with his hands, her lips with his teeth. His fevered mind reverberated with a single, drawn-out note, a diamond bell chiming on into infinity. She smelled like lightning and thunder. The Oracle’s features swam in and out of view before him: a woman’s face, a girl’s, an old and weathered skull, a crying bird, the swallowing sea itself dragging him down deeper and deeper. She tasted like blood and sycamore bursting from the earth, like life in the water where there had always before been bones. Her scent was thick on his tongue and in his throat, and it flew down inside him and was soaking into his insides, thick and dark and so impossibly soft. He in his delirium didn’t recognize beauty, but he recognized her- his Oracle, his purpose. She was beautiful beyond hope.
The not-ground shook with the motions of the giant that he knew, dimly, he should be running from, but it was hard to think of anything else when he was so close to the Oracle. He rested his cheek against hers and felt their bones press together under their fleeting flesh. It occurred to him that it was odd that the Oracle should be here with him. Who was going to protect her? There were no Teeth nearby, he would have heard them howling in the wind. It was just him… he glanced nervously past her glittering eye. He would defend this body to the last drop of his blood but that might not be enough to save her. Nothing else mattered to him now, nothing at all. He brought his mouth to her ear and drew her in with his breath. He was half-drunk with her scent and he swayed as he said, “Oracle, speak to me.”
Dorin turned to her adorer, blinded by the light of the Oracle burning inside her. She felt weightless as air, as though when she stepped forward the ground wouldn’t accept her and she’d be floating, somewhere where gravity couldn’t hold her. Her mouth formed a laugh and she tilted her head to press her lips against him again. The Oracle’s song was in her blood and it roared with all the throats of the sea through her, swelling up from the ground and down from the sky all at once, drowning them both with its force and its fury.
“If both we die, thou of water?...” She didn’t know which of them spoke, but the words took shape from her tongue and she drank them like wine. “Of what use will words be then?”
“I died before, I was younger, I… I drowned in your cave. Under the stone and the storm. My life ended and you held my head in your hands and smashed it on the rocks, and from the corpse of what I was I came anew. I am not afraid to die, Oracle,” he said softly. “I am not afraid of anything.”
His head was in her hands again and his eyes were locked on hers. “You lie, bone-walker. Nothing that lives is free of fear…” A sigh rattled in her throat.
Gannet was helpless.
“What are you afraid of?”
“I…”
She pulled him closer and told him what she saw, in his future and in hers.
“I am afraid…”
They were together again, each a wave crashing against the other, neither able to tell the tears from the sea. He didn’t say it and she didn’t hear it, but it screamed itself to them in a storm siren, beating itself against their skulls and drowning out even the thundering heartbeat of the earth. It pulled them down, clawing and biting and gasping at last for release.
I am afraid of you.
_______________________
Zimmer didn’t know what to do.
The furious roars of the four-headed demon were starting to hurt his ears. They were like thunder, but louder than any storm he’d ever heard, louder than cannonfire and louder even than the fire of the bombs erupting outside his tent. It was hard to believe that anything that lived- or didn’t live, as might have been the case- could produce that much sound. Blearily he pulled himself around the edge of the barrier and saw that a white spider, a white fleck, a dull smear were gathered on the titan’s body like bloated fleas. There was so much sound, so much thunder! His vision shook and he tried to shake his head to clear it. No use, no use, useless, no, useless, useless useless useless useless useless wretch what good are you now -
Merciful God in Heaven, what was happening to him? The lieutenant turned sharply away from the spectacle and rubbed his temples, suddenly overcome with nausea. He gagged on nothing and felt his stomach try to empty itself, but his throat didn’t quite seem to work properly and he choked. The corners of his vision darkened and he felt the sensation of falling, down, down into water from high above. His arms were broken, he knew this, he’d flown too far towards the sun and his feathers were falling out in clumps, covering his face with burning wax. He hit the surface with a deafening roar and sank straight down into freezing darkness, hands pulling him, dragging him into the waiting Teeth below-
Zimmer gasped and his eyes bolted open. He was lying on the ground, fingers wrapped around his own throat in a dead man’s grip. A scream writhed in his throat; he pushed it away and sat up, wheezing. His neck felt bruised and weak; what… had he tried to strangle himself? What the devil was going on? His head… his head was feeling better, actually. No. No, better was not the right word here. This was not better. Not this. Nothing like this, he- his skull was surely cracking open, crushed against stones and he wept as he laughed, his tears burning his cheeks. He was sobbing too, the tightness of his chest holding him like a lover’s arms. He hadn’t felt that in a long time. It was nice, it was so nice, and it hurt worse than anything the sea could do to him now.
He felt himself fall again, but slower, this time. When his side touched the ground he knew it to be real, the earth pressing on him as though he was the one buried, not them. Not any of them, the ones he’d drowned in the water. Or had that been him? Whose hands were whose, who was holding who under and who was crying for him to stop? Which of them was him? Which of them…
“Uh, Matty?”
His eyes flickered to the speaker and widened further and further, impossibly wide, swallowing the shadow of the titan above him. They ached with the brightness of the sunless sky, hurt like the eyes of a newborn now forced to see. Somehow, distantly, he saw a man he knew was himself, curled tightly on the ground and gasping for air. He was disgusting. He snarled like an animal and barely managed to draw himself up, too exhausted to flee.
“Why did you do this,” he said, turning to the shadows, the ghosts, that had spoken. His mouth felt odd and he opened it, spitting blood onto the ground. A whine started in his throat. “Why did you do this to me?”
There was the sound of a cautious step backward, and the tremor of nerves. “Do what? What’s wrong with you, Matty? Zimmer?”
What was wrong with him, him, who was Matty? Was that him, was… yes! Yes it was, he knew who he was. He did. He… he was…
He…
They’ve taken my name, he thought and immediately forgot why.
What have you done to me?
His eyes, weak from the light, turned to the lovers beside him, desperate for answers. The lovers, the Lovers, VI, Arcana Majora, the amorous ones, desire, doubt, temptation, blood sex choice fire, the paired ones, what they were doing wasn’t born of love but something else, something more and beautifully, horrifically worse. Their teeth were locked on each other’s throats and their nails were claws tearing their bodies apart, rending flesh and bone apart in bleeding scarlet ribbons. But now they shifted and everything had changed: each was a serpent wound around the other, each was a bird pinned wing to wing, each was an ocean boiling under the sun, each was an Oracle and an Eye and they were drowning deep inside themselves. They moved like warring dancers, body to body, somehow intersecting but never touching, miles away from the waves collapsing on them both. He watched them sink holding each other and wondered, why?
The others, the shadows, were now speaking to him with fear-thickened tongues. He said something back that he didn’t understand and couldn’t have repeated once it was said. Nameless and faceless. What’s going to come of you now? He felt sick, down past his stomach and into the ground that surely he was a part of, so firm was it under his hands. His head no longer hurt, and maybe that was because he didn’t have one anymore. It wasn’t needed, none of this was, his body was only earth and all things above and below must die in their time.
All things…
He felt the Oracle’s face turn to him, her smile painted on and hiding the oceans of blood. He tried to grin back but he was tired, and this face wasn’t his to wear.
“Do you know who I am?”
He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know how.
She came towards him and laid a hand on his face, his not-self, and it was a spear of ice through the fire that consumed him. He lay on the ground and tried to force his lungs to breathe; looking upward, he saw that she was laughing. Her teeth glittered like knives.
“I am the Oracle,” she said, and he knew beyond all doubt that there was no such thing as death when your life is without worth.
![[Image: theywerealllikethis.png]](https://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e348/EndlessClockwork/theywerealllikethis.png)