harukawaism

26 ascended to soraP godhood

[orpheuslament]

friendships end. relationships end. fictional man whos doing even worse than you is forever

[rotworld]

23: Wetwork

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

you begrudgingly work for a task force that neutralizes breach lifeforms, dangerous interdimensional predators with a habit of fixating on specific prey. the most dangerous thing you have to deal with isn't your targets but your own partner.

->original work. explicit; contains non-con, graphic descriptions of violence, surreal gore, workplace harassment/degrading language, gun violence, tentacles, terato, hard vore/cannibalism.

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The support team didn’t read the briefing. 

Skimmed it, maybe, glanced down for the keywords confirming they’re playing second fiddle to somebody else today and tossed the rest in annoyance. You can tell because the perimeter they’re supposed to be holding has devolved into a gossip circle. They’re at their posts, sure, strategically placed around the cavernous interior of an empty factory complex with a clear view of the gaping abyss taking up most of the concrete floor, pacing the proper patrol routes, but they’re too relaxed. The comms channel is clogged up with useless bullshit and questions they should know the answers to. They’re giving you a hard time because you’re an easy target, the only part of the insertion team left behind to set up a stabilizing field. Obvious egghead in a room of mercenaries. Blood in the water.

They wouldn’t do that if they’d read the briefing. They’d stay as far away as physically possible and try to pretend you weren’t there.

“You must be a pretty big deal,” the guy next to you says. Somebody called him Talbot earlier. You don’t learn names because you don’t want to be here and you hope you never see these people again, but it’s best to keep track of potential problems. Talbot looks the same as everyone else, an imposing silhouette of black tactical gear, featureless and near faceless with just his eyes visible through a balaclava. The patch on his shoulder is a green rectangle with a golden keyhole. Epsilon-Green—colloquially, “Locksmiths.” Being relegated to lookout duty must be frying what little patience he had to begin with. 

You ignore him. The stabilizing field generator is a finicky piece of equipment that needs constant attention if you don’t want the breach opening any wider. Talbot seems to take this personally.

“Don’t think I’ve even heard of you guys before today. Theta-Ultraviolet?” He slaps the patch on your shoulder just a little too hard for the gesture to be friendly. It bears the silhouette of a ship stitched with silver thread on a dark purple background.

“We’re specialists,” you say. 

“So are we,” Talbot says. Utterly disinterested in a dick-measuring contest, you go back to turning knobs on the generator. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around back at base, either. Must be new.”

“Looks nervous,” somebody else says. It’s one of the guys up on the catwalk, arms crossed over the railing. Leering at you. “Probably should be. Your whole team violated protocol and jumped right in before we even got here. They’re in deep shit if they get out alive.” 

Your team did not, in fact, violate protocol, not that they’d know without reading the briefing. “Do you need something?” you ask.

“Just making conversation. Not much else to do.”

The generator lets out a chime and a green light comes on when you’ve got everything configured right. There’s a burst of static on the comms as physics realign and the bottomless darkness in the floor rejoins reality, no longer stranded on the other side of a schism in some impossible un-place. It makes the floor shake and the factory groan all around you. It also brings the insertion team back into comms range. You hear the click of reconnection and then the sounds of a nightmare.

There’s something viscerally upsetting about breach lifeform vocalizations. Before they’ve fully coalesced and mastered the imitation of other species, the noises they produce are something you hear with your whole body rather than just your ears. It’s the stomach-churning chills of nails on a chalkboard without the shrillness, fight-or-flight given a voice. It doesn’t quite sound like shrieking or wailing or laughing, but it feels like all of those things; loud, distressing and mocking. It dances just at the edge of what your ears are capable of detecting but it completely fills your head. 

The operatives of Epsilon-Green visibly recoil. You hear some quiet curses and prayers over the comms. More comprehensible but no less worrisome are the sounds of carnage—the crunch of blunt force pulverization, flesh ripping and tearing. Bone creaks, cracks, snaps loud and ugly. Gunshots are rare—solitary, precise, a muffled bang before the squelch of organic unmaking becomes unbearably loud again. It sounds like mastication; like the abyss is a hungry maw churning everything inside into meaty paste.

“Holy shit,” Talbot says. He leans forward just a bit to peer into the pit. “Your guys alright?” 

You wouldn’t check unless you were required to. “Come in, Theseus,” you say.

Static. More disgusting, sticky noise. A gunshot. Then a deep, gravelly voice. “Still alive. Aw, were you worried?” 

You frown tightly. “Sitrep?” 

“Twelve total, mostly concentrated in the lowest chamber. They’re partially coalesced. A bit hard to kill.” Something scream-cry-snickers, abruptly cut off with a sound like a hammer tenderizing meat. “I’m expecting a reward when I climb out of here.” The words are ambiguous but his tone is oozing innuendo. 

“You’re on shared comms,” you remind him, but the damage is already done. Epsilon-Green’s operatives are eyeing you with a combination of interest and amusement. 

“So that’s how Theta-UV does it, huh?” Talbot asks. “Guess I’d be more efficient, too, if I had something nice waiting for me. How many on your team, Theseus? You feel like sharing?” 

No answer. You listen to something die painfully, a squeal that becomes a squelch. Epsilon-Green adopts something resembling professionalism, alert and attentive. Chatter continues but focused now, the possibility of combat putting all of those strict warnings from their training at the front of their minds. Maintain at least one meter of distance from the edge of the abyss. If something crawls up, hold fire until it’s finished aligning; waste of bullets otherwise. Keep faces concealed—scarf, balaclava, dark glasses, visors, more is better than less but something is always better than nothing. 

“You need a mask?” Talbot asks. He’s your best friend now that he thinks there’s a chance he could get laid. 

You shake your head. “I’m good.”

“No, you’re not. If one of those things sees your face, it imprints.” 

“I know,” you say.

“It gets obsessed,” he insists. “It follows you around until it's fully coalesced. Looks mostly human, sounds mostly human, but the face gives it away.”

“Yeah, I know.” 

“You’ll be the first thing it eats.” Understanding dawns on his face after a moment. He looks you up and down with something close to morbid fascination. “Shit. Are you—?” 

“Yep,” you say, turning your back to him and hoping he’ll get the hint. Cat’s out of the bag now, though, and you hear them wondering aloud in the hopes of baiting a reaction. Wasn’t that a thing not long ago, where Breach Response and Neutralization teams were going around looking for imprint victims? Using them as bait, basically, right? Not a bad strategy, they muse. Why go digging around for weak spots in reality when you can make them come to you? 

“Your team got some skeletons in the closet, Theta-UV?” Talbot asks. “Guess you have to be good if you don’t wanna keep tracking down new bait.” Again, no answer. The death rattles of creatures caught between forms of matter and states of being make your head hurt. He returns his attention to you. “No wonder you look so wet behind the ears, you’re a fucking civvie. How long have they had you?” 

“Don’t see how that’s relevant,” you say. “How many left, Theseus?”

“Hmm. Eight?” You wish he wouldn’t purr in your ear like that. “You sound testy. Promise I’ll pick up the pace if you let me fuck your mouth before we leave.” 

“Just hurry the fuck up,” you hiss, hot in the face and humiliated. Someone whistles over the comms. The sounds coming from the abyss are bloodcurdling. Something shreds and splats. 

“Theta-UV, all good down there?” someone says. “Sounds rough. Should we expect trouble?” 

Of course, Theseus doesn’t respond. You see Talbot scowling in your periphery. “You only talk to your cocksleeve, Theseus?” he snaps. “Or are you using a private channel down there? UV thinks it’s too good for the rest of us?”

“Sorry, who is this?” Theseus asks. He sounds faintly amused. 

“This is Epsilon-Green, your fucking support team. Do you have it under control or not?” 

“Epsilon-Green, that’s…Locksmiths, right? You’re supposed to be pretty good.” There’s a long, considering pause. You can just picture him, standing there with his head cocked, something reckless and dangerous and potentially fatal forming in his mind. 

“Theseus,” you say, your tone warning. 

Too late. You hear a shrill, warbling howl, and the ground quakes beneath your feet. “Oh no,” Theseus says, the smile audible in his voice. “Looks like a couple of them slipped past me, heading your way fast. Real sorry about that. Try to keep it contained and I’ll be there in a second.” 

You abandon the generator and run for cover. Talbot yells at you, demanding to know what the fuck is going on, but he gets his answer soon enough. It’s a skittering sound at first. Swift, spidery movements echoing down a long tunnel. Epsilon-Green has only moments to react before three breach lifeforms come surging out of the chasm in the floor. 

The things are hard to look at. Like the noises they make, your brain can’t parse the information you’re getting. Light bends around them strangely. Their shapes don’t make sense. They move in jerky snapshots, sudden and seemingly nonsensical lurches. They hunt like a pack of wolves, herding and harrying their prey into the proper position to be ambushed from every side. To their credit, Epsilon-Green doesn’t start to panic until someone gets yanked by the ankle into a whirlwind of constantly shifting forms. 

They eat him alive. Pinning him down with sometimes-claws and gnashing almost-teeth, it looks like he’s drawn and quartered in infinite directions, flesh and muscle and sinew unraveling, peeling apart, drawn into the breach creatures who become even more real, tangible and dangerous. One of them grows sharp with protruding human bone. Another has his face and his voice, screaming the way he screamed as he died. The thunderous rattle of gunfire becomes constant, bullets shredding through fresh, growing membranes of human flesh and tufts of hair. 

“Sitrep?” Theseus asks coyly. Epsilon-Green is nothing but chaos. Mindless, primal screams of terror fill the comms. One of the breach lifeforms takes a shot through what was slowly becoming a human head and shifts its body, concentrating its vital organs elsewhere. Another one clamors up the catwalk and soon there’s blood raining down from above. 

“You’re going to get in trouble for this,” you say. Your voice is terse and quiet, your throat constricted in terror, but he hears you anyway. He always does. 

“I’m doing this for you,” he coos. “The coordinator told me we’ll get upgraded to a bigger room if we both prove we’re effective—”

“You’re doing this because you want to.” 

Theseus chuckles. “I’m doing my job. Time for you to do yours.” 

There’s a sharp click; disconnection. Theseus turned off his comms. You watch the fight unfold in front of you with a sinking feeling, waiting for what comes next. Epsilon-Green should be thinking about it, too. They should be watching the chasm more closely. They’ve had plenty of warnings. The breach lifeforms have been reckless, lashing out too eagerly and failing to protect their backs. If anyone but you was paying attention, they’d realize it was because they were fearful. They didn’t rush up here out of hunger but out of the simple instinctual drive to flee a larger, more dangerous predator.

You wonder how many other briefings they haven’t read. That bait experiment wasn’t about neutralization. They wanted to see if they could catch a breach lifeform alive, train it somehow—use imprinting as a means of control. The governing body that oversees the work of all breach response operations would say they succeeded. You would beg to differ.

Theseus emerges from the chasm with a bestial screech. You can tell him apart from the other breach lifeforms easily. He’s much larger. He moves like a wave or a fog bank, an unstoppable force of nature that spills across the factory floor. Epsilon-Green tries to kill him but he’s fully coalesced, his control of his own form so precise that he can decide when and where he is real and physical. He engulfs his prey like an eclipse and everything inside him turns to liquid gore. The other creatures shriek and whimper. One of them tries to run but Theseus is faster, spearing it through the side and dragging it back into his all-encompassing maw. 

It’s over in moments. The last breach lifeform twists itself into knots trying to crawl away but it’s impaled through its nearly flesh form, consumed like all the others. Someone in Epsilon-Green has managed to establish order again and a repeated command to hold fire is finally heeded. 

They watch in mute horror and fascination as the thing in front of them constricts and shrinks and shapes itself into something closer to human. A man in tactical gear. He looks just like they do but is unmistakably taller and larger, black clothes straining around his bulk and bulging muscle. His face is completely covered by a helmet with a mask and reflective visor—an absolute necessity to prevent the thing underneath from appearing in their nightmares. The patch on his shoulder is Theta-Ultraviolet’s symbol.

“Mission complete,” Theseus says. He surveys the crowd with an exaggerated back and forth glance as if he doesn’t know your exact location. “Hm. But where’s my handler? I hope they didn’t just leave me here. Not when I’m still so hungry.” 

The nearest operatives scramble to get away from you. Reluctantly, you walk down the path opening in the crowd until you’re right in front of him. You spot Talbot, his eyes wide and his balaclava drenched in sweat. 

It doesn’t matter that Theseus keeps his face covered. He’s not human. His emotions aren’t an arrangement of features but something he radiates, an ambient feeling in the air. He doesn’t just stand up straighter when he sees you. The factory suddenly feels claustrophobic, the air hot and oppressive. “There you are,” he purrs. “Now come here.” You don’t want to, but you’ll be reprimanded for denying him post-mission requests. You might lose some of your privileges at base, just enough to make life unpleasant and difficult. 

“Can’t you wait until we get back?” you ask, glancing pointedly at Epsilon-Green who are still standing there gawking.

You can feel that he would be smiling, if he decided to give himself a mouth. “No. I have to prove a point.”

He unravels in the blink of an eye, his form engulfing you. Your mind goes blank with terror being trapped in this cramped space of shadows and redness, everything soft, squishy and damp. Theseus could kill you if he wanted. He could squeeze until you were nothing but sticky red dust.  He could suffocate you. He could start eating at any moment, pulling you apart like the man from Epsilon-Green, claiming everything you are for himself. You’re still not sure that he won’t someday. They say he’s tame but they’re not here, watching him sabotage missions on a whim. They don’t have to sit in the tight, pulsating chamber of his body reshaped for ensnarement. 

“You’re shaking,” he purrs, delighted. “It doesn’t matter how many times we do this. You’re always so afraid.”

Theseus knows you better than anyone. He imprinted on you. He hunted you for years before the agency stepped in. He knows what you’re afraid of and what you like. He knows exactly how to torment you. You feel him shift and change around you, peeling off parts of himself to form tendrils. Long snaking ones circle around your limbs to hold you still while smaller frilled growths tease you. They dissolve your clothes and start to suckle on your skin. You can’t help the whimper that slips out, a noise of interwoven fear and pleasure. A thick tentacle pushes past your lips.

“Your mouth is so perfect. Just the right size. So warm and wet. You were made for me. Only me. And I’ve made myself for you.” Theseus quivers all around you, babbling like he always does. The things he says are a frightening reminder of exactly what he is and what he’s capable of. He changes the tentacle as he pushes it deeper, making the tip bulbous and the length veined like a cock, desperate to prove that he can be human if he tries. The smaller tendrils become hands—hands that are strange and lopsided with too many fingers or too few, all touching at once, all caressing and fondling. He gropes your chest and flicks your nipples. He traces your spine and strokes your cheek. 

It’s only a matter of time before he gets hungry for more. Disembodied hands hold your hips still as another tentacle nudges inside your entrance. Theseus alters it with almost frustrating frequency, never allowing you to get used to the shape or texture. He keeps it small at first and then expands it in gradual, rhythmic pulses, stretching you between slow, prodding thrusts. He’s teasing you. He doesn’t need to search for the places that will make this truly humiliating. He waits until you’re trembling and whimpering, so frightened you strain and twist in his grasp. Just when you’re on the cusp of sobbing around the girth fucking your throat, the tentacle curves slightly and sinks deep, pounding right into the spot that makes your eyes roll back in your head. 

It feels so good it starts to hurt. This is your other greatest fear: that Theseus will keep you here. He won’t kill you, won’t pluck off your limbs or shred you to gristle, but he’ll never let you leave. He’ll keep teasing you, stroking you, and fucking you forever. Your mind goes blank and you become the perfect thing his instincts crave—his center, his anchor, his first love, his reason for being, his. He can fill you and taste you and hold you close, and nothing can take you away from him. 

Mercifully, it does end. Does someone contact him through Epsilon-Green? Does he simply grow bored, or change his mind? You don’t know why. Theseus savors you as he begrudgingly slows his movements. He whispers about your sweetness and softness, how no one will ever know you like he does. Your throat is raw and your jaw is sore when he pulls the tentacle out of your mouth, your saliva sliding slowly down the length. The other one stays longer. He’s not satisfied until he’s made you cum. It excites him to see how hard you fight against the pleasure and his precise, merciless thrusts until he forces you over the edge. The tentacle withdraws only when your thighs are shaking and you’re limp in his grasp. 

Theseus shifts again, rippling open. His form cradles you and drapes over your body, concealing everything below the shoulders. He shapes the upper half of his human disguise, hunched over you with an arm wrapped tightly and possessively around you. You don’t know how much Epsilon-Green saw or heard but some of them are, thankfully gone. The ones who linger flinch when Theseus’ helmet turns towards them.

“Do you need something?” he says wryly. “I guess I could still eat.” That’s all it takes to clear the factory. Theseus turns his attention back to you and you feel that familiar warm vibration of happiness and desire. 

Being this close to a breach lifeform is inherently dangerous, but there’s no one who knows Theseus better. For now—until the next mission, the next frenzy, the next reward that might be your last—there’s nowhere safer you could be.

[rotworld]

21: Fellow Traveler

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

a visit to a remote haven for scoundrels on the fringes of the imperium leads to a fateful meeting with a kindred spirit.

->warhammer 40k. original aeldari outcast character/reader. contains graphic descriptions of violence, gun violence/combat situation, murder.

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The scrap metal sign hanging in the entrance corridor doesn’t say anything helpful like which way to the marketplace, nor does it even give a perfunctory greeting like “WELCOME TO SINISTRA STATION.” The collage of old pipes, ship wreckage and station detritus all stuck together shape the words “LOST AND FOUND” in Low Gothic. That’s how a lot of people come to know this place. Sinistra is a galactic dumping ground, the shore where vanished things wash up again. Deserter Capital of the Sector, some call it. If you can’t find it, it might be here. Some things came here by being stolen, traded, lost in a bet, sold to some unscrupulous sort. Some came because they had to.

If the bar has a name, only the locals know it. It’s an unmarked blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hole in the wall. There’s a fire hazard of a bootleg augmetics shop with more whirring, overheating machinery and sparking cables than a crashed voidship, and a self-service booth advertising forged ID chips, and a rickety flight of steps up to the next eye-burning level of humming neon and contraband. The bar is right there, tucked under the stairs. Awash in shadows and flickering light in burnt orange, it’s dimmer and moodier than what’s right outside. People come here for discretion. To find what they’re looking for and be left alone.

It’s a dangerous crowd tonight. You see a lot of weapons, holstered but clearly displayed in a wordless threat, a lot of tense shoulders and suspicious glances. You make guesses for every pinched, scowling face; a smuggler? An Inquisitor in disguise? Ex-Administratum with sunken, despairing eyes? Another deserter from another hopeless frontline meat grinder? You order something at the bar just to blend in. While you’re leaning against the counter watching cloudy swill pour into a glass, you see him.

There, standing in the shadows at the far end of the bar—someone different. Someone you can’t quite place. He’s wearing a long cloak with the hood up, like just about everyone else here, but he’s unusually, eye-catchingly tall. Positioned in the corner with his back to the wall, it’s clear he’s being cautious but he doesn’t look worried, either. Expecting trouble? About to start some? Both of his hands are concealed beneath his cloak. 

His head turns slightly and you feel like you’ve been spotted by some slinking, prowling thing in the underbrush of a forest, moments from feeling bestial fangs in your throat. Your breath hitches. You wait for something to happen, but it never does. His head lowers like he’s lost interest but you can still feel him watching. He turns again, feigning a glance to the side and a cough. His index finger lifts, making a subtle but pointed motion at you, and then at the seat closest to him at the bar. 

You’re not sure why you don’t leave. You don’t know him, but you feel like you could. Something about his self-imposed isolation, noticeably distrustful and distant in a room full of people feeling the same way, calm rather than bristling with fearful energy. Hiding in plain sight. Maybe you relate, or maybe you admire him.

You’ve barely sat down when he asks, “Where are you from?” 

“Ursalis-III,” you say. 

“No, you’re not.” 

You watch him come slightly closer, leaning against the bar and looming over you. You can just barely make out a few details beneath the shadow of his hood—smudges of black greasepaint around dark green eyes, the hard edges of a mask covering his mouth. “I’m not?” you echo. 

“Ursalis-III is gone. Consigned to oblivion for treachery most foul against the Emperor’s holy design—that is to say, centuries of skipped tithes culminating in an attempted uprising. The entire populace was conscripted or shipped off to labor camps. A fresh batch of loyal colonists was lost in transit.” He has an accent you can’t place, something subtle and only noticeable on a few words. 

“I’m well aware,” you say wryly, plucking a pair of jangling dog tags out of your shirt. 

“Those aren’t yours,” he says. “You traded for them when you got here. Some rations for an easy ID.” 

“Have you been following me? For how long?” 

“Off and on since you landed at the starport.” The admission comes easily and without shame. He doesn’t feel like a threat.

“And what did you think when you saw me?” 

“I was curious, mostly. Your ship is very distinctive. I’ve never seen one like it.” He studies your expression for a moment, head tilting in interest. “You look disappointed,” he notes. “Were those codewords? I’m sorry I’m not whoever you’re looking for.” 

“I’m not looking for anyone,” you say. You don’t like how intently he’s looking at you. If he can tell you’re lying again, he doesn’t mention it. “So where are you from?” 

“Nowhere you’ve heard of.”

The bar shakes slightly, a gentle quake rattling the bottles in the back and tipping some glasses over. There’s a moment of tense, breathless silence before the lights stabilize and everything settles back in place. The stranger is watching you when your gaze returns to his. “Frequent visitor?” he asks. “You don’t look alarmed.” Neither does he.

“I know about the star,” you say. Sinistra orbits dangerously close to an unusually active stellar body infamous for its frequent and violent stellar flares. Most of them fizzle out harmlessly against a state-of-the-art atmospheric shield, a precious and poorly-understood relic that tech-priests travel from across the galaxy to observe, but a big one sneaks through every now and then. “Have you lost someone recently?” you ask him.

You’ve caught him completely off guard. He straightens out of his casual lean and narrows his eyes. “What a strange question,” he says. 

You shrug, taking a testing sip of your drink and deciding immediately that you’ve had enough. “I won’t push. I was just trying to figure out why you looked so familiar when I know we’ve never met.” He’s grieving. That must be it. It’s the numb kind, past the stage of open-wound rawness, the empty feeling that comes when you finish weeping. Maybe it was a recent death. Maybe a distant one that casts a long shadow, or something even more difficult to explain. He looks at you like he’s only just started to see you for the first time.

“Would you walk with me?” he asks. 

You push your glass around absently, looking down at the bar counter. “Your turn to ask strange questions, huh?”

He nudges your glass out of reach, laying his hand on top of yours. He’s wearing gloves; some kind of soft, flexible leather, his fingers long and spindly. You can just faintly feel warmth through the material. “I’d like to speak with you more. Elsewhere.” He closes his hand around yours, threading your fingers together. It really seems like he’s propositioning you—or planning to kill you—but he sounds so solemn and urgent that you aren’t sure what to think. Nobody pays you more than a passing glance when you stand up and follow him out of the bar.

Back on the bright, busy streets of Sinistra’s labyrinthine markets, he draws far less attention than you expect. Everyone is suspicious here, you suppose, rushing around and concealing their faces, but your stranger towers above both you and the crowd. He walks in a practiced graceful manner that reminds you of trained dancers or extremely skilled soldiers—no movement wasted, everything precise. 

“This station doesn’t have much time left,” he murmurs, so quiet you barely hear him over the rattle of machinery and exuberant voices. “Imperial authorities have swarmed the system in increasing numbers, preparing to seize Sinistra from the current administration. Many of them are here now, biding their time for a signal. They mean to take the station by force and care little about how many fall along the wall.”

“How do you know?” you ask him.

“It’s my gift. I see what will come. I advise you leave as soon as you’re able.” 

“Thank you for the warning. Are you going to be alright? Do you have a way off the station?” 

He’s quiet for a while. You look up and find him staring at you again, his gaze softened. “You’re from out here, aren’t you?” he asks.

“Out here?”

He hunches slightly, lowering his voice even further. “Far from the Emperor’s light. So far, perhaps, it has never touched you.” 

“There isn’t a world in the galaxy untouched by the Emperor’s light,” you say carefully. The station shudders again, buffeted by harsh solar winds. Steel creaks and rumbles. You stumble but the stranger catches you by the forearm. 

“If I could have one honest answer from you, it would be how you came into possession of your ship,” he says. “But I think I already know.” 

“Why?” you ask warily. “It’s nothing special. A few mods, sure, but—”

The next tremor is stronger and far louder. There’s a flash in your peripheral vision and then the acrid smell of smoke floods your nose. Not a flare, you think. An explosion. The stranger moves while your mind is still reeling, dragging you down behind the protective bulk of a forgery kiosk and crouching beside you, a hand on your shoulder tugging and urging you to keep your head down. Bolterfire scours the street where you were standing mere moments ago, blowing holes through rusted walkways. Someone is shooting; someone else is shooting back. You hear alarms and shrill, mindless panic.

“You need to breathe,” he says. 

You didn’t realize you’d stopped until you inhale shakily, one of your hands tangled in his cloak. You’re frozen, remembering all the stories that had been passed down, generation after generation, to you: of the steady, constant advance of inhuman soldiers who feared and felt nothing, and the deafening roar of weaponry in cramped corridors, and the end of everything come with swift, bloody cruelness. You were taught to run. Always run. If you can run, you can survive. If you can get to the safety of your ship, you can slip away into the vast dark. 

“Breathe,” the stranger urges. He cups your face in his hands and you realize you’re trembling. “Listen to me. You are alive. Your heart still beats. And you must keep living. You must, no matter what happens. Do you understand?” 

You nod weakly. It suddenly occurs to you that you’re seeing him clearly, no hood or shadows in the way. His brows are furrowed. He has dark hair and he wears it in a low ponytail. His ears are elongated, pointed at the ends. The dawning confusion on your face makes his eyes arch in amusement. 

“Do you have a weapon?” he asks. 

Breathe, you remind yourself. You feel for the small pistol holstered at your waist. A last resort; you can’t recall the last time you’ve had to use it. “Yes,” you say. 

“Do you remember the way to the starport?” 

“Yes, but—” 

He shrugs, his cloak parting to reveal strange, carapace-like armor underneath. The smooth, flexible plates clinging to his body are a startlingly bright, sunny yellow. He was concealing a rifle, a slender, long-barreled weapon, strangely elegant and studded with small, circular crystals. “You’re going to run. Take advantage of the chaos and stay out of sight,” he says. He speaks quietly and calmly, even as he turns and raises the rifle, lifting the scope to his eye. “I’ll provide cover.”

“But I—” 

“Don’t say you can’t. You can. You’ve survived this long. You will keep surviving.”

You hear pounding footsteps and the shriek of lasfire. “What’s your name?” you ask him.

Someone comes around the corner—soldier, Imperial, heavily armored, finger on the trigger. He dies in an instant, head and helmet blooming apart like the unraveling of a scarlet flower. The stranger’s weapon makes no more noise than the soft hiss of wind when it fires. He looks at you only briefly before he returns his full attention to the rifle, waiting for something else to stray into his line of sight. 

“Murai’ethlienne,” he says with quiet surprise, as though the sound of his own name has become unfamiliar. 

Sinistra is falling apart. Every district you run through flickers red with dying neon and raging fire, combustible ammunition igniting chemical pools and faulty electronics. Shredded metal grates and missing floor panels open into bottomless chasms and an alarm somewhere is warning that the gravitational stabilizer is losing power. The dead and dying are everywhere. The Imperials have superior numbers but Sinistra’s resistance knows the station better. You see the grisly aftermath of firefights and explosive traps. Bodies lie bleeding from hundreds of shrapnel wounds and unidentifiable lumps of flesh litter the narrow lanes between market stalls. 

Sometimes, you’ll hear a soft sound—the rush of waves up a beach, or the long breath of a sigh—and something in your path will collapse in a burst of red mist and splattered flesh. You can’t see him but he keeps reminding you he’s there.

There were stories like this, too. Not just of the end but of the wonderful beginning; a world that was not a world. A galaxy that was not so lonely. 

The “LOST AND FOUND” still hangs where it always has, clattering ominously as another blast rocks the station. The starport is carnage. Hundreds have already fled this way and the floor is slick with blood. The air is thin and your movements are sluggish as the shielding and stabilizer arrays separating you from the void of space falter. A blockade of Imperial warships lurks in orbit, surrounded by a glittering ring of splintered metal—all that remains of those who tried to escape. Sinistra’s star is a blinding behemoth in the sky, surface churning with arcs and ripples of stellar plasma.

Your ship is still here. The shields are rippling like a heat haze, a telltale sign that they’re about to fail, but that means it’s still undamaged. The electric thrum of fight-of-flight adrenaline surges through your veins, overshadowing your fear. 

“I’m a fool.” You didn’t hear anyone approach but Murai’ethlienne is mere steps behind you, rifle clutched in one hand. His shoulders are heaving with labored breaths but he looks uninjured. He looks up at the dark, imposing shapes in orbit with jutting prows and enough artillery to obliterate a planet. “Of course they’d blockade the station,” he mutters. “And after everything I said to you before…”

“I can get through,” you tell him. The certainty in your voice visibly startles him. “Do you have a ship? You can come with me.” He hesitates, glancing up again. “Murai’ethlienne,” you say. It’s a slightly clumsy attempt at the sounds he made before, consonants bumbling into each other. He looks at you with a bittersweet expression, something like misty-eyed acceptance. “Come with me,” you insist. “You saved me. Now I save you. We’ll figure out the rest later.” 

“What have I done?” he says hoarsely. “This galaxy will tear you apart someday.” 

You take his hand. He looks down and watches as you lace your fingers with his. “Look at me,” you urge him. “My heart is still beating, isn’t it? I’m alive right now, and so are you.” You squeeze his hand. “And we have to live.” 

You see calm wash over him. Not slowly but all at once, like a flipped switch. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, he’s just as composed as he was when he pulled you to safety in the marketplace. He nods curtly and squeezes your hand back. 

Once, there were many ships like yours. Sleek and beautiful with gentle, organic-looking curves and a flexible surface of interlocking, membranous protective plates. There were large ones drifting through the cosmos with the slow, majestic grace of ocean giants, whole fleets of city-ships were children were born and hybrid plants from a thousand worlds blossomed. There were small ones, narrow and minnow-like beside the slow-moving giants, stinger-sharp guardians and mandible-prowed scanner-gatherers and—just like yours—winged explorers. 

You know this ship better than you know any planet you’ve ever landed on. You slide your fingers over the pilot interface with precise, muscle-memory movements, activating emergency takeoff protocols. Murai’ethlienne is visibly startled by the sight of a chair beside yours, sharing space and even a swath of controls. You direct him to sit down and hold onto something. The engine hums to life. The navigation program comes online with a warble and proposes several different launch trajectories. You study them briefly before making a decision.

You can feel Murai’ethlienne watching in silent fascination. “This is a family ship,” you explain. “All the ones that are left are like this.” 

He does not ask the obvious question—why is it empty, then, if it is meant for a family? “Is it old?” he asks. 

“Very. It was my mother and father’s. They inherited it from their parents, and so on.” 

You think he’s smiling under his mask. 

Takeoff is smooth. You ease into a rapid acceleration that makes Murai’ethlienne inhale sharply and rocket straight for the Imperial blockade. Their tight formation is jostled by the stirring of Sinistra’s star. It’s slight, nothing like the quakes that affected the station, but the subtle drift will affect their aim on a small, fast-moving target. The ship’s wings—solar sails, veined membranes that pulse and shimmer as they soak up electromagnetic bursts—unfurl. Murai’ethlienne clutches the armrests of his seat as you veer straight for the largest ship in the formation. He mutters something that might be a prayer or a curse, but not in a language you recognize. Defensive systems warn you that the ship is being targeted. You see enormous turrets and void cannons swiveling towards you.

You’re sure the naval captains staring you down have had a fair amount of training and practical experience in the Imperium’s constant wars, but their ships are a means to an end. Yours is everything. They don’t know the arrhythmic pulse of stars. Their gargantuan beasts could never hopscotch between gravitational wells like yours can. The opening volleys, spears of sizzling light, miss you entirely. By the time the next shots are fired, you’ve spun into the narrow, thorn-lined gap between warships, voidshields crackling so close you can feel them like turbulence. Smaller Interceptor vessels briefly give chase but they turn to small silver dots in the void behind you.

Murai’ethlienne hunches over in his seat. You dispense a sick bag from the ceiling for him and set the ship to autopilot, setting course for another active star. You don’t need any more fuel, but the shields need to be recharged. “I’m from here,” you tell him, nodding to the serene, glittering darkness beyond the window. “That’s what my parents told me. I asked them once if we were from nowhere, and they said it wasn’t true. We’re from everywhere. To the Diasporex, all of this is home.” You relax in your seat, suddenly fatigued now that the danger has passed. You look over and find him staring again. 

He’s taken his mask off and set it in his lap. You see his lips for the

“Is that where you want to go?” you ask.

“No,” he says. He doesn’t even think about it. “I’m going wherever you’re going.” 

“You are?”

“Is that not the way of your people? Unity, or something like that?” 

His smile is pretty, you think. “It was,” you say. “But that’s how we were found in the first place. The fleets were too big. Now we have to stay away from each other.” 

He nods. “I understand. If you’d rather be left alone—”

“I didn’t say that.” You extend your arm into the space between your seats, palm up and waiting. Murai’ethlienne looks at it with surprise and amusement. His hand is so much larger than yours, easily engulfing it. It feels nice. Warm, you think, and safe. After everything, you finally give him your name. The sound of it on his tongue, the way he stops to savor it, makes your eyes fill with tears.

Alarmed, Murai’ethlienne asks if you were injured on the station. He’s even more confused when you smile and laugh through the tears and when you insist that, for the first time in a long time, everything is fine.

[rotworld]

17: Perfect Fit

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

the ivarii are complex plant-like aliens that require hosts for mobility and proper sustenance. humans haven't been as eager as they'd hoped to share their bodies, so significant stipends are offered to encourage greater cooperation. you sit in a waiting room, considering how desperate and adventurous you really are.

->original work. basically explicit; contains dub-con, parasites, body horror, discussion of medical procedures.

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MEET YOUR NEW ROOMMATE, says the pamphlet in a bold, friendly font with rounded edges. Under the text, a woman with a dazzling smile holds a polaroid-sized image beside her face. It’s eerie blue monochrome-on-black like a medical scan, smears and swirls of soft tissue of a human face in profile. Strings of something firmer thread up the spinal column and into the brain, a forking starburst like a giant dendrite. LIVING TOGETHER IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK, it claims with a curling arrow urging you to turn the page.

You glance around the waiting room nervously. It’s soothing like a therapist’s office, deliberate and almost cloying; speckled gray carpet, baby blue walls, a small collection of cushioned chairs and sofas arranged in not-too-close, not-too-far clusters. Landscape photos of shrub-speckled Martian canyons and clouds drifting over Europan oceans hang on the walls in wooden frames. A circular speaker on a coffee table plays wind sounds and birdsong at a whispering volume. There’s no one here but you and the receptionist who tears open a package of white, powdery Nutrisweet mix to pour into her coffee mug. When she lifts it to her lips, something in her neck twitches and squirms slightly.

The pamphlet opens into a four-page spread of bright colors, bullet point fun facts and upbeat testimonials. The “ROOMMATE OF THE YEAR” section says implantation is PERFECT whether you want company or like your space. One bedroom, one bathroom? NO PROBLEM! An ivarius only takes up as much space as you do. No need to drastically change your eating habits when you can just supplement your beverage of choice with NUTRIENT-RICH FERTILIZER MIX (and with so many flavors to choose from, it goes with EVERYTHING)! Did you know that ivarii can achieve PERFECT SYMBIOSIS with any sufficiently advanced, terrestrial lifeform? You have a FRIEND FOR LIFE when you sign up for implantation—

A door opens and a man calls your name. He’s wearing mossy green scrubs with the Office of Cooperation’s looping flower and stem crest stitched onto the shirt pocket. You must look ready to bolt because he gives you a wry smile like he gets it and comes to you instead, sinking into the chair beside yours. “Nervous?” he asks. “That’s pretty normal.”

You nod, staring at the back cover of the pamphlet. A man holds one of the medical scan pictures over his heart. Thin tendrils loop through his ribs and infest his organs. “Do you, uh…” You glance at him sheepishly. “Do you have…?” 

“Yes. I can show you, if you want.” He waits until you nod reluctantly to unwrap what you thought was a bandage around his wrist, a length of thin, gauze-like material with a yellowish sap stain seeping through. There’s a small bump growing out of his skin—the earliest, sproutling stages of a flower bud. The sepals are flesh-colored, overlapping flaps of thin, vein-filled skin. It’ll bloom on top of his wrist like a corsage. 

“Does it hurt?” you ask. 

“Not at all.”

“And that’s…I mean, is that typical? I’ve seen some people who bloom from their spine, or their eye…” 

“It’s up to you,” he says. “From the very start, it’s up to you. If either one of you decides it isn’t going to work, then nothing happens. Symbiosis takes two.”

That’s the slogan for the Cooperation Initiative. “Symbiosis Takes Two,” pasted on billboards and subway tunnels with smiling people tenderly holding vine-covered flower pots like they’re newborn babies. The brochure stand at the waiting room door has every possible approach covered: the humanitarian, the scientific, the pragmatic. Help a species in need; contribute to ongoing research; never worry about money again.

“Okay,” you say quietly. “Okay. I’ll try.”

The matchmaking rooms line either side of a long, quiet hallway. Each door has a small electronic screen beside it with a schedule displayed. You find yours at the very end, a time slot for your meeting grayed out. There’s a vertical line down the middle. Your name is on the left; the name “Sifril” is on the right. The door is open. Like the waiting room, the decor is purposefully unobtrusive and calming with muted colors and soft surfaces. The curtains are sheer to let in some natural light. Two armchairs sit facing each other on a floral rug, a round wooden table between them. 

On the table, there’s a slim black speaker next to a strange vase. It’s not glass or ceramic but a shimmery material with a moving surface like foam drifting across water. Long vines spill out from the top and slink down the sides, tapping and poking at the table in searching, licking motions. A thick cluster of tangled stems and leafy growths sticks straight up, covered in alien flowers with colorful, curling tendrils atop spotted petals. Each blossom turns towards the door when you walk in, quivering slightly. 

“Oh, hello!” 

You look up in surprise. You were so distracted by the sight of an ivarius that you didn’t even notice one of the chairs was occupied. It’s a man—young, clean-shaven, a short, choppy haircut and a bright smile. He’s wearing a sweater with brown and beige stripes, long sleeves covering most of his hands. His jeans are rolled up to his ankles and his socks have little mushrooms on them. You know what the door says, but you start backing up to check the time table again. 

“Oh, hey, no, come back!” he says, laughing. “You’re Sifril’s match, right? You’re in the right place. I’m here because your case is sort of special. Here, why don’t you get comfortable?” Reluctantly, you sit down across from him. He offers a reassuring smile. “I’m Andrei,” he says, placing a hand on his chest. “My co-inhabitor is Olanash. It’s nice to meet you.” He gives you his full attention, his eye contact intense and unwavering. “How much do you know about ivarii?” 

“A little,” you say, sheepish. “I read the pamphlets.” 

“Why did you decide to apply?” 

You avert your gaze. “Well, I’m…I saw a poster that said, uh…” 

Andrei leans over suddenly like he’s about to grab your hand. He stops halfway there, blinking like he’s just as surprised as you. “Sorry,” he says, settling back in his seat. “Force of habit. You’re giving off distress hormones and…look, I’m not trying to shame you. I signed up because I needed the money, too. But there are lots of ways to make money. This is a lifelong commitment and it takes a lot of trust. What I’m asking is why this, instead of something else? Is there anything else about it that appeals to you?” 

You look down at the vase and the ivarius coiled inside of it. “I like the idea of never being alone,” you admit. “I was still on the fence about it, but then I got matched with Sifril and we talked back and forth a bit, and…” Now you’re wondering about that. How, exactly, does an ivarius message someone? Do they dictate to someone else? You really hope not. Your face heats at the thought of anyone else seeing those messages.

Andrei chuckles. “And now you’re here. Sifril’s definitely a smooth-talker, huh? That’s three for three now.”

“Three for three?” you ask, wary. 

“Right, we need to talk about that. Do you want to say it, Sifril, or should I?” 

A warbling, bassy sound flutters from the speaker on the table. You flinch when you hear a very clear, very human-sounding, “Go ahead, Andrei.” That definitely sounded like a person, but you struggle to identify pitch or tone, masculine or feminine, any particular cadence or lilt. That doesn’t make sense, unless you’re not really hearing a voice at all but something your brain interprets as one. “My apologies. I didn't mean to startle you,” you hear. It seems to echo, like you’re hearing it in a big, empty room. 

“Sifril?” you ask.

“Yes,” says the voice. The ivarius in the vase rustles their leaves. “It’s wonderful to finally be in the same room. You’re even lovelier in person.” 

“Can you see me?” you ask, suddenly self-conscious. 

The speaker rumbles. The sound isn’t loud but it makes your ears tingle. “Hm. In a way. My senses aren’t the same as yours, but I know you’re there and I know you are lovely.” 

“Sifril,” Andrei says, chiding. “Stop teasing them. You can tell they’re embarrassed.” 

“I can tell no such thing,” Sifril says. For the first time, the voice has a distinctive feature you can identify: a purr of flirtation. 

“You mentioned that you read the pamphlets?” Andrei smiles when you nod. “So you’ve seen the whole ‘roommate’ thing. It’s a useful comparison, but not wholly accurate. Symbiosis is very…intimate. Ivarii love their hosts.” He reaches out, holding his hand over the vase. Sifril’s vines move in slow motion, a shaky upward crawl, until they touch skin. Suddenly they become graceful, curling around Andrei’s wrist and palm. When he spreads his fingers, they thread through the space between and wrap around them in grasping, undulating motions that look distinctly sensual. You feel flustered when Andrei glances up and sees you staring intently, even more when he winks. “They love one another, too. It’s not uncommon for them to pursue courtship and even mate while co-inhabiting.” 

“Mate? Like…” You’re sure you’re not imagining it. Andrei’s smile and wandering, half-lidded gaze are definitely showing interest. “While they’re…?”

“So shy,” Sifril says, their flowers swaying.

“Yes,” Andrei says, clearly amused. “While they’re inside us. Sharing sensory information means everything is a shared experience, including attraction and sex. They call that a ‘rebal pair’ when a human and co-inhabitor mate with another human and co-inhabitor. In Sifril’s case, though, they mated before being assigned a host. Their mate, on the other hand, got one sooner.” You glance between Andrei and the vines caressing his hand. Andrei sees you put the pieces together and smiles. “Yes. Olanash is Sifril’s mate. So whoever becomes Sifril’s host will be my partner, and together, we’ll be a rebal pair.”

None of the promotional material ever mentioned something like this. You’re not sure what to think. “That seems tough,” you say. “So all three of you have to agree on the same partner.”

“We’re in agreement right now,” Sifril purrs. 

“I know it’s a lot,” Andrei assures you. “And you don’t have to decide right now. We’re supposed to have at least two more meetings to really get a good feel for each other. If you have any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them.” You nod, not quite meeting his eyes. “Is there something specific you’re worried about?” 

“Well…kind of the whole thing,” you admit. You watch Sifril’s vines uncoil from Andrei’s hand. They move like snakes, flexible and slippery as they sprawl across the table again. You can’t help but notice they’ve all gathered on the side closest to you, curled into grasping spirals. “What does it feel like?” 

Andrei considers the question for a moment with a thoughtful frown. Then he smiles again, wide and serene. “Comforting,” he says. “You just know somebody else is there, even if they’re not moving. And when they do move around, it’s like…someone touching you. You feel it on your skin. Like a gentle tap, or a caress.” 

“And the surgery, is that, um…”

His eyes light up. “Oh, I can tell you exactly what that’s like. Here.” He gets up and gestures for you to stand next to him. You hesitate for a moment before you follow and he beams at you. Sifril’s flowers lean forward in the vase. “First of all, they knock you out. You won’t feel anything. Second…” Andrei slips behind you, a hand landing on your shoulder when you start trying to turn around. “There are several possible methods of implantation,” he tells you. He’s standing way too close, practically pressed against your back. He speaks softly, close to your ear. “One is through the chest. The first incision is made here.” He touches his fingertips to your sternum and slowly, suggestively, slides his hand down the center of your body. “Alllllllll the way down,” he murmurs. “Some of them like to anchor to the ribs. Some don’t. You’d talk that over with Sifril beforehand.” 

“The ribs,” Sifril muses. “I would like to feel your ribs. To fill them.” 

“Another option is here.” Andrei’s fingers brush against the underside of your jaw in a soft caress. His thumb strokes the side of your neck. He chuckles at your slight shudder. “The neck,” he says, almost whispering. “It’s a really popular spot. Tight. Sensitive. Much closer to the brain. I’ve heard it feels good.” His palms smooth up and down your back, squeezing your shoulders. “Another option. From behind. Olanash and I picked this one. I can feel them right there all the time. Their warmth. The weight of their presence. Like they’re holding me.” His hands slide down your sides and then there’s no space between you anymore. Andrei’s hips rest against your ass and you can feel that he’s hard through his jeans. 

You’re frozen, completely unprepared. Is this allowed? Are they supposed to do this? 

Andrei’s lips graze the shell of your ear. “No matter what,” he says, “they end up here.” He presses two fingers to the nape of your neck. “All the way up. And all the way in.” He rocks his hips gently, grinding against you. His hand slides higher and he digs his fingers into your scalp. “And that feels so, so good. It’s hard to explain, because you don’t feel it exactly. But you feel what they feel, surrounded by you. And you know they’re there. Squirming…and slithering…like they’re fucking your brain.”

“Olanash told you to say that,” Sifril says, playfully accusing. “They like that sort of thing.” 

Andrei chuckles. Emboldened by the little gasps you let out, he holds your hips tighter and starts grinding harder and faster. “So do you,” he says. “I know you whisper all the same filth. I can hear you both when you’re mating.” He pulls you against him, urging you to grind back and enjoy the friction. You let out a shaky breath when he kisses your neck. “It’s kind of exciting to think about, right?” he whispers. “Having someone where you’re most vulnerable. Fucking all the thoughts out of your head. I wish I could show you. Sifril could give you a taste, if you let them. It’s not quite the same as if they were implanted, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before.” 

Andrei moans when you start to move with him, pushing back into his humping thrusts. He rewards you with wandering hands and more hungry kisses, his fingers teasing your nipples through your shirt with light pinches and circular motions. His tongue traces the shell of your ear and he licks and nips at it, his hot breath making you shiver. Heats throbs between your legs and you want more than this frantic teasing.

Then it all stops. Andrei suddenly lets go of you, stepping back and leaving you shuddering in the middle of the room. You hear him casually sink back into his chair like he didn’t just try to make you cum in pants. He’s smiling when you look back at him, an elbow on the armrest, cheek resting against his fist. 

“But you’ve probably got more questions, right? Don’t let me distract you if there’s more you wnat to ask.” he says. He sits with his legs spread, one hand tapping his thigh in a way that looks teasing. Inviting. He’s moved his chair slightly closer to the table and Sifril’s vase. You think about just how far you saw Sifril’s vines spread. If you sat there, you would be caught between both of them. Easily within reach. “You can ask me anything,” Andrei says, licking his lips. “Anything at all.”

The speaker shudders and rumbles. “You can do more than ask,” Sifril purrs.

This stops when you want it to. You can leave whenever you want. You can tell them you’ve changed your mind, that you’re calling the whole thing off. You can walk out of here and never come back. You have time, you tell yourself. Two whole meetings more before you have to choose. “When, um…” You swallow hard. They wait patiently, both of them—all three, you think—watching you intently. “When am I going to meet Olanash?” 

Andrei’s smile widens when you take a timid step closer. He spreads his legs a little wider, leaving plenty of room for you on his lap. “If you want,” he says, “how about right now?” 

[rotworld]

7: Night Shift

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

you work in one of the tourist traps along a popular beach pier known for its party scene. it's a night like any other. you have no idea about the unusual party crashers who are about to show up and ruin everything.

->original work. explicit; contains non-con, graphic descriptions of violence, feral behavior, hard vore, mind control, terato, non-human genitalia.

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Last week, it was “Greek Gods of the Sea.” Togas and tridents, mostly, some seashell bikinis, a few fake beards stuffed with plastic starfish. They drank too much and cranked the music too loud, but that’s nothing new. Everyone knows what to expect from the Lucky Rock Pier Party People Association (“Lurpppa” to the local news, “Trouble at Ten O’Clock” to your fellow boardwalk employees, “Those Fucking Kids” to beachfront property owners). 

You wear headphones most nights anyway, desperate to keep the shrill, repetitive carnival songs of the pier funhouse from being seared into your brain. They don’t bother you much because the sign at the front says there’s no bathroom and all the hot dogs and funnel cakes are further down the boardwalk, but a few will trickle in just for something to do. If they spot the freezer, they’ll huddle around the glass and stare like the Mona Lisa’s in there, agonizing over a choice between an ice cream sandwich or fruit pops. 

Tonight, it’s a glow party. Neon beach balls and glow stick arches. You can’t hear the noise they’re making through your headphones but you can feel the bass throbbing through your feet. Someone’s probably going to call the cops again. The tourist family population retreats this time of night so it’s just you, the handful of shops still open this late, and Trouble at Ten O’Clock. This one’s more fun to watch, at least, bright and colorful like the spill of noctiluca. They’re vivid in glow-in-the-dark body paint, covered in luminescent stripes, swirls and splatters. 

A few of them come stumbling up the pier earlier than usual. Three women in different halter tops, painted with matching curly cues and butterflies on their faces. One of them wanders off to look at the tote bags. Another, much more inebriated, leans heavily against her friend. The designated driver, you assume, who drags her to the freezer to pick out something to eat. You glance down at the beach and see one of them sitting on Lucky Rock, the jagged chunk of stone sticking out of the water not far from shore. You’re not sure how he climbed up the slippery, steep sides but he’s definitely not supposed to be up there. The people on the beach are way too excited about it, gathered around cheering and hollering. 

Three ice cream sandwiches are dropped on the counter in front of you. You lift one side of your headphones and shrieking noise rushes in, the glow party just as raucous as you expected. “Will that be all?” you ask. The woman nods. Her friend starts to fall over and she has to support her weight against her shoulder. You ring up the total and she groans. Everything on the boardwalk is three times the price it should be, but she adds a tote bag when the other woman wanders back with one and tosses their ice cream inside. “Thanks, come again,” you call, sliding your headphones back on.

Ten minutes until closing time. Not much to do but sweep out the sand gathered in the doorway and tidy up the disaster zone a horde of children made of the stuffed animal section. Sharks and dolphins on the top shelf, turtles on the second, fish and starfish on the third—

Something moves in the corner of your eye. Startled, you turn and find a man ambling slowly through the store. A stray from the glow party, you think at first. Then you look again, paying attention this time. He looks like all the partygoers down on the beach, a silhouette with luminescent edges, but he shouldn’t. Not under the store lights. He’s midnight blue from head to toe beneath intricate glowing patterns, chest and shoulders speckled with small dots like cyan freckles with larger spots along his sides. Thin stripes trace the outlines of muscle beneath the skin, turning into a spiral pattern at his hips. 

Which you can see, you realize, because he’s naked. No swim trunks. No speedo. He’s wet and dripping all over the floor like he just crawled out of the water, a puddle slowly growing beneath his feet, and you can follow the course of every droplet as they roll slowly down curves and valleys of lithe swimmer’s muscles. Some of the lines on his torso are moving, you realize. Horizontal squiggles on either side of his abdomen flinch and pulsate. 

Gills, you realize. The pieces come together all at once in your mind. Despite working the boardwalk as long as you have, you’ve never seen a sea muse before. Most people haven’t. They’re skittish, you’ve heard. They prefer quiet coves and grottos, places humans have a harder time reaching. Safer that way if they decide to shed their tail and sun themselves for a while. This one certainly doesn’t seem bothered by the commotion down at the beach, poking through the t-shirt rack with long, clawed fingers. He doesn’t look much like the pictures you’ve seen, either, but all the pictures are of muses lurking in tropical reefs, big-finned and colorful like bettas. Beautiful like him, but not bioluminescent and not quite so large. He must come from deeper, colder waters. 

You set down a stuffed octopus as gently as you can but he hears it, turning swiftly to face you. Your heart races. He has the large, eerie eyes of an abyssal creature, glowing half-moons gleaming underneath wide silver irises and black sclera. Nobody prepared you for what to do in this situation. Do you play dead? Raise your arms and make noise to scare him off? What you mistook for slicked back hair is some kind of shimmery membrane. It flares out like the neck flap of a cobra in a threat display, but it starts to sag and flatten the longer you stare at each other. His eyes move slightly in their wide sockets, looking you over head to toe. 

An uncannily human smile spreads across his face. He makes some odd gestures towards you. His mouth moves. He’s talking, you realize, trying to communicate. You almost lift your headphones off but your brain catches up at the last second. You don’t know a lot about sea muses but you know enough to keep your ears covered. 

He blinks, staring at you in almost comical wide-eyed confusion. Then he smirks, his gills fluttering with laughter. He starts pacing back and forth, slowly inching closer like a shark circling prey in the water. He’s between you and the door so you inch towards the register counter instead. Maybe you can slip out the back? 

He stops suddenly, leaving some distance between you. He speaks again, tapping the side of his head and pointing at you. You shake your head and he frowns, but he doesn’t give up. You watch, morbid curiosity overpowering your fear, as he starts to move in a slow, seductive manner. It’s some kind of dance, you think, arching his back and extending the membrane on his head again, bioluminescence glittering on thin, translucent flesh. He holds your gaze as he runs a hand down the center of his chest, over his stomach, down to his pelvis and—

You’re not entirely sure what you expected to see between his legs, but it’s still a bit of a shock. The thick, jutting member is deep indigo at the base and a lighter aquamarine down the length. It barely resembles a human cock except in its vaguely phallic silhouette, oozing from an engorged sheath that dribbles cloudy slime. The shaft is smooth with a gentle upward curve, thick and shuddering with unnatural flexibility. It narrows to a soft triangular tip. Two additional appendages unfold from his hips. They remind you of crustacean legs, rigid and insectoid. They bend along two joints, pawing at the air with their sharp claw tips. 

The sea muse makes a thrusting motion. The tentacle-cock wraps around his hand, drooling like a tongue. His bioluminescent patches flash and dim like a flickering candle. You’re no marine biologist but it feels safe to assume this is a mating display.

“Uh. No? No thanks,” you say.

He grins. You see a row of daggers for teeth. He speaks slowly and your heart skips a beat when you clearly read the words, Are you sure? on his lips. 

“I’m sure. Thanks anyway.” Maybe you should be flattered. You’ve never heard of anyone getting hit on by a sea muse. He lets out a big, disappointed sigh, extra dramatic so you can’t miss it, and gives himself one last stroke before he moves on. You half-expect the cock to slither back into its sheath, but it stays obscenely hard and straining upright between his legs.

To your dismay, he doesn’t leave but instead pokes around the shop some more. He wanders to the left, examining surfboard keychains and hibiscus shot glasses. He wanders to the right, squinting at the postcards. Eventually, he makes his way to the freezer and slides it open with some difficulty. His head membrane flares out wider than you’ve ever seen it the first time he sticks his hand inside. You wonder if he hissed. He tries again, pinching a fruit pop in its colorful package between his claws. He rips the plastic open.

“Hey!” you say. “You can’t just—”

He looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes narrowed and membrane spread in warning. You turn away and continue to mind your own business. 

The glow party seems to be winding down. The beach balls are all sitting in a pile. Some of the glow stick arches have toppled over. The pounding bass isn’t shaking the pier anymore. You see a lot of people lounging in the sand, rolling around, stretched out together, a bunch of them writhing—

Oh, you think. That’s bold, even for Trouble at Ten O’Clock. There’s no mistaking those thrusting, grinding, back and forth movements for anything else. There are a few couples scattered around but most of them have settled into a spot worryingly close to the water, seafoam rushing around them whenever the waves come surging up the beach. They tangle together in passionate motion, kissing and caressing and fucking like it’s the last night of their lives.

Something about it unsettles you. They’re being so rough with each other. This isn’t a slow, sensual orgy but a frenzy. Mindless, animalistic rutting and forceful movements. You see mouths open in silent screams. Some of them aren’t moving. Some of them are trying to crawl away but they’re being dragged back by the ankle, the hair, the arm, pulled through the dark sand. Why is the sand so dark? And wet, glistening where the tide hasn’t risen yet. 

The horrific realization grips you slowly. You’re in denial. You must be having a nightmare. A man tries to claw his way up the beach but someone else pins him down, straddles his back. You don’t see what happens, can’t make it out in the dark, but the paint on his body stretches and splits, and the sand darkens in a liquid motion under him. A woman arches her back in the throes of ecstasy, surrounded on all sides by eager, thrusting bodies. They’re biting her, you realize. Their heads lower and blood splashes the sand. Through all of it, she squirms and rakes her fingers through the sound as though she’s never felt pleasure like this before. Someone crawls between her legs and she opens them eagerly, loops them around the waist of something that is not human, you realize. None of the ones surrounding her are. They glow more brightly in more precise patterns, membranes pulsating, gills fluttering.

Your headphones are ripped away, clattering uselessly to the floor. You hear an awful cacophony of moaning, screaming, begging, and weeping. You think, for just a second, about running. Your muscles tense and your heart races. Where? For how long? You don’t know but you’re willing to try. 

“Where are you going?” says the sea muse and you can’t move a muscle. His voice is low and melodic. You hear the ocean when he speaks; the hiss and splash of the shallows, the heavy drone of the deep. “Hm? Do you want to join them?” You hear the wet slap of his footsteps for the first time as he comes closer. His hand grasps your chin lightly, barely applying any pressure, but you feel compelled to turn around. To look up at his sharp-toothed smile and the gentle pulse of his bioluminescence. “My shiver is down there. Frenzying,” he says. He turns your head to the side, just far enough to glimpse the gruesome scene on the beach, then returns your gaze to him. 

“Please don’t,” you say hoarsely, your throat constricted. “Don’t make me, don’t—” 

“It’s been so long,” he says, and your mouth snaps shut. “Since I last came ashore.” He walks backwards, his fingers still ghosting against your chin, and you follow. You don’t want to but your legs move on their own. His voice is addictive. You hang on every word and you hope he never stops talking. The silence between makes you tremble. “Even longer since I last mated. You can see it. You can tell how long I’ve waited, if you look.” 

You don’t want to look but your eyes betray you, gaze lowering to the slithering thing between his legs. It curls around itself impatiently like a snake. Another glob of slime slides slowly from its sheath and dribbles on the floor. The way it moves frightens you, the base twitching and undulating, slug-like. 

“You want this,” he says. He takes another step back and you rush forward. He strokes beneath your chin. 

You shake your head desperately. Your mouth is trying to shape the word “yes.”

“You do. You want this.” His back hits the register counter and he leans against it, spreading his legs wide. “You want to taste me,” he says, his voice dipping lower. 

You drop to your knees so fast it hurts, feeling the blooming sting of new bruises. It doesn’t matter that you’re terrified. It doesn’t matter that the thing bobbing in your face is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You open your mouth and suck the strange, pointed head without hesitation. The sea muse moans and your thighs quiver, inner muscles clenching on nothing. You have to hear it again. 

“You need it,” he purrs, thrusting shallowly. You bob your head, taking him deeper every time. He hits the back of your throat quickly, his cock eager and probing at the inside of your mouth. “You need me to spill inside you. You need everything I have to give.” You moan and choke around his length. His hand rests on the back of your head, forcing you down further. His thrusts get harder and faster, crushing your nose against his slick abdomen. 

Some part of you is screaming at the alien movements of his cock, how it nudges and prods and tries to snake down your throat, but you can’t focus on that. He doesn’t let you. Every grunt and moan, every hiss of praise, makes the fear even more distant. 

“You need—oh, yes,” he groans, clutching your head with both hands as he pounds into your mouth. “You need to mate with me. You need—mm, suck on me, suck on the tip—fuck, you need my milt. I have so much and you need all of it.” 

You make a humiliating, needy sound when he suddenly pulls you off of his cock. It slips out of your mouth reluctantly, the tip sliding back and forth against your lips. He drags you to your feet by the forearm, shoving you against the register counter. He bends you over it, tearing at your clothes with his claws. You cum when he blows softly against your ear. You’re still shivering, clawing mindlessly at the counter when he kisses and licks the shell, sliding his tongue into every little dip and groove. 

“Do you want me?” he whispers. You hear a slick sound, a grunt, and then his hand is at your entrance. He uses the pads of his fingers but he’s not very careful. His claws prick your thighs as ass while he smears thick, warm globs between your legs. “Hm? Do you want me?” 

“Yes,” you sob. You arch your back and try to press your hips back against him. He makes a growling sound against your ear that makes your knees buckle, nipping the lobe playfully. 

“You want to be fucked?” One hand reaches around and roughly works your sex, spreading a warm, tingling sensation. “Want to be filled with milt?” 

“Yes!” 

His cock slides along the curve of your ass, teasing you. Then it slithers down, sliding into just the right angle with the tip pushed against your entrance. “Good human,” he purrs, and your eyes roll back in your head. His tip presses inside and then he’s thrusting hard and fast without warning. More slime drips from his sheath and slides down his length, the tingling slickness easing his punishing rhythm. It wouldn’t matter if the lubrication wasn’t there. You can’t do anything but lay there and gasp and meet his thrusts, needing his cock inside you more than you need to breathe. 

Those sharp, grasping appendages hook around your thighs. You feel them lock into place, their grip tightening until you’re right up against the sea muse’s body. His thrusts don’t slow at all. If anything, he’s even rougher and faster, deep humping thrusts that make you tremble and scream. He keeps talking through all of it no matter how winded and breathless he gets, keeping you right on the precipice of orgasm after orgasm with filthy whispers and wet, open-mouthed kisses against your ear. 

“So tight,” he hisses. “You feel so good, squeezing me like that. You want it so much. I’m going to give you everything. You’re going to be so fucking full.” His hips stutter, losing rhythm. You cum again just as a rush of warm wetness pulses inside you, spurting every time the sea muse thrusts. Thick, creamy liquid churns and foams at your entrance, a trickle dribbling down your thigh. You hear a few drops hit the floor under you. The sea muse rides out his orgasm with long, loud moans that send you over the edge again and again. He crushes you against the counter, hips rolling. One last, slow thrust fills you with another hot gush of his strange cum. 

He breathes heavily. His hips sway while he’s still sheathed inside you and his cock curls just the right way to make you sob for mercy. “Hm? You think we’re done?” he murmurs. “I told you. It’s been a long time. I still have so much more to give you. And you want it, don’t you? You need it?” 

“Yes,” you say, your voice quivering and broken. The sea muse starts to fuck you again and all you can do is let him.

You don’t know when it ends. It could be minutes, or hours, or days. The passage of time is measured in breaths and heartbeats and orgasm after orgasm. The floor is slick and sticky under you, a white puddle of milt steadily growing. You think he bites you but you don’t know. It all feels good, especially when he tells you how perfect you are, how sweet and submissive, how well you’re milking his cock of everything he’s saved for this moment. He makes you ride him once, seated on the counter while he bounces you in his lap. He digs his claws into the meat of your ass and leaves marks. 

You don’t know who finds you. Someone else who works the pier, probably, too horrified and embarrassed for both of you to stick around. The Coast Guard sweeps the water but the sea muses are long gone, leaving nothing behind but the mangled leftovers of their frenzy. The bodies glisten in the sand, torn to shreds like a burst whale carcass. By sunrise, the flies and the seagulls are swarming. You’re escorted to an ambulance with a blanket over your shoulders. The first person to look you in the eyes tells you, very quietly, that you might want to quit your job and consider moving inland. 

“Those are mating marks,” he says. You don’t know how he can possibly tell, given that they’re everywhere. Jagged, oozing circles dot your shoulders, arms, thighs and back. “Because they’re at a very precise depth. Meant to scar, not to kill. That means it’s going to come back.” They tell you not to look at the water but you do, one last time, before you leave. You don’t see anything. That doesn’t mean anything. The water’s deep and it seems to go on forever.

That night, in a hospital bed, you have a dream of someone singing to you. It sounds like the ocean filling your ears.

[when-they-meow]

"why isn't there any good LGBT rep in games??" because you don't use itch io and don't believe art made by smaller teams is worth anything or you think nsfw art is an inherent moral failing. Go play a 20 minute porn game made by a depressed transfem lesbian and then maybe you'll calm down

[onemillionfurries]

"want to learn more about this project? join our discord!" explode. "want to download this game? join our discord!" explode. "want to play this mod? join our discord!" explode. "need questions answered? join our discord!" EXPLODE.

[saintmachina]

Shipping fictional characters isn’t representative of your moral values. It’s representative of your particular psychic damage and the themes and motifs that haunt you. Hope this helps.

[elephantlovemedleys]

[g5-iguazu-deactivated20240408]

Hard at work at the yaoi factory

[g5-iguazu-deactivated20240408]

They fucking called fujOSHA on us

[ystrike1]

Third Ending - By Cho Bom (9/10)

A good and realistic modern yandere. Now that's a dangerous combination. The only weak point in this story was how pointless the "conflicts" at the end felt. This couple is well established and mutually in love. The yandere part stems from being repressed, which is a realistic source for abnormal behavior. Being openly gay can be hard, but of course true love is worth it!

Suh Yoonseul doesn't think anything is wrong. He's hot. He's got a great job. He's got money. People admire him. He's dated around five women seriously. He's no cheater. The relationships just fizzled out after a couple years, because he's not passionate enough. Suh Yoonseul is a kind, chill guy. The kind of guy that lets the girl go when her eyes start drifting. The kind of guy that goes with the flow, because life is good. He's got lots of friends. He's a green flag.

Life is...

Sometimes he has bad dreams about a guy who confessed to him back in high school. These dreams ruin his day. When he has them his perfect life is marred by tripping, bumbling, stumbling and no sleep.

His occasional nightmares about Kang Jun don't let him sleep a wink.

Kang Jun was an aspiring young baker who just so happened to be gay. Kang Jun was quiet. Suh Yoonseul did not know him. They weren't friends. Kang Jun decided to confess because high school was about to end. He had to tell Suh Yoonseul. Why?

Well.

His crush on Suh Yoonseul lasted from middle school ALL THE WAY THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL.

Kang Jun recognized that his pining was unhealthy, and he decided to confess so he could let Suh Yoonseul go.

He chose the wrong day. His confession happened right when Suh Yoonseul was having a bad day, so he ruined Kang Jun's sweet crush.

I'm going to paraphrase, because it's crushing:

"I don't know you. This is weird. You made me special lemon cookies but whatever. I'm not eating them because they could be laced with something. You’re a creep."

His harsh rejection almost destroyed Kang Jun. He almost gave up on his pastry chef dream because of it.

They meet. Kang Jun works at his sisters bakery. Suh Yoonseul feels sorry and he feels....funny? He wants Kang Jun to forgive him. His feelings are oddly complicated. He's such a chill guy.....until he remembers Kang Jun.

Kang Jun was never, ever a creep. He's a very pure guy who isn't very sexual. His crush on Suh Yoonseul often feels very Demisexual. Sure, he likes Suh Yoonseul's face BUT he never tried to date afterwards. He seems to have little interest in sex and relationships. Suh Yoonseul was the exception.

Suh Yoonseul is most likely closet bi with a preference for women. Kang Jun just wins out because well...he's a great guy!

Suh Yoonseul gets jealous for the first time because of Kang Jun. He doesn't even notice that he's turning into a bit of a monster. He thinks he wants to be friends with Kang Jun. He starts going to the bakery literally every day. Even if it's a waste of money or he doesn't want bread. When he remembers Kang Jun he can't focus.

It grows slowly.

He starts using his looks.

He goes to a fancy hairdresser to impress the baker he rejected before.

At this point he still thinks he just wants friendship....but his friends begin to suspect he's gay.

It grows a little more.

Suh Yoonseul starts being more selfish.

Kang Jun starts to hope for love...because Suh Yoonseul is being so persistent....so weirdly persistent its almost crazy.

Kang Jun thinks it's normal love.

The question comes up, and Suh Yoonseul REJECTS HIM AGAIN BECAUSE HE DOESN'T WANT TO LOSE KANG JUN.

They quickly became best friends and Kang Jun makes him super happy. He's not sure if he wants to give love a chance.

Kang Jun decides to cut him off.

Suh Yoonseul is too weird. Too affectionate. Too cold. Unwilling to commit and yet always stalking him at the same time. Kang Jun attempts to cut him off for the sake of his own mental health.

There's a drunken kiss. Kang Jun realizes he just can't be friends with his crush. It's too painful.

Kang Jun is a really soft guy, but at this point Suh Yoonseul has rejected him painfully twice.

The bakery is moving. His sister bought a bigger building.

Kang Jun doesn't tell Suh Yoonseul about the move.

Kang Jun also lies and says he will hang out with Suh Yoonseul on his birthday. Suh Yoonseul cancels all of his other plans, and he plans a big date. A big expensive one. He even gets his car washed, and Kang Jun stands him up.

He stands in front of the abandoned bakery for hours, until he hears someone screaming his name.

Kang Jun is just too nice.

They start dating right when Suh Yoonseul becomes noticeably obsessed.

....

Season two is mostly pointless fluff. Kind of a boring read. Season 1 is an absolute banger though, and you have to read part two if you want to see them happy.

[just-another-weeb-blog]

Your problematic fav loves you too actually <3

"He killed people!" Yes and he's very sexy for that

[examorhca]

thank you for the sanrio collab

[rotworld]

31: Dead End

(previous)

even after everything that's happened, you are still a child of the road.

->contains brief body horror/parasite appearance.

.

.

.

You don’t dream, but you don’t feel awake. Everything is soft. Hazy. You’re falling, or maybe you’re floating, and everything is dark. There’s a voice somewhere far away, muffled wailing. Something stirs the water around you. A hand finds your arm and another joins it, pulling you to the surface. There’s light, bright and blinding. You squint and try to cover your eyes but your limbs are weak and heavy. You feel yourself draped against someone, your arm slung over their shoulder. You can’t walk. They drag you slowly across the floor and up a flight of stairs, one step at a time. 

Then there’s another hand. Another voice. Someone else slides against your other side and you’re moving faster now, your feet knocking against the steps. You smell blood. Death. You hear footsteps. Shadows pass overhead like clouds. Someone touches your face and you lean into the warmth of their palm. Your vision is still blurry. Your head feels like it’s full of water. One of the steps crumbles away and you’re shifted, moved around a hole in the floor. 

You smell fresh air. Sea breeze. The salt of the ocean. Home. There’s a fullness in your heart you’ve never felt before, a bone-deep certainty. This is home. You’ve finally made it, after all this time. Stairs turn to carpet and carpet to tile, and finally you feel the scrape of concrete. You’re outside and there are people all around you, laying you down in something soft and grainy. Sand? It feels nice. 

“...shift shock, probably. Must’ve been right at the center…”

“...still breathing, it’s just shallow…”

“...things on their neck? Are those…”

You open your eyes again and the world is still a gray smear, but you see a cloudy sky. Drift fog. People crowding around, talking quietly. You groan, struggling to sit up. There are hands on your back, your shoulder, the back of your head, cradling you gently and helping you sit up. Jamie is closest, wide-eyed and weeping, Iridesce keeping them steady with a hand on their shoulder. Malachi is on your other side, letting out a long, relieved breath, and Glenn is right beside him with a grin on his face. The Singer kneels in front of you, his pearlescent mandibles lifting slightly in happiness. They’re all worn and ragged, covered in blood, but they’re here with you, alive.

“Where—?” You can’t quite get the words out, your throat feeling raw.

“We’re still in Anchor,” Iridesce says, smiling wryly. “It has a stunning coastline, believe it or not. For all their talk of normalcy, half the anchorware in the city was only there to maintain all the construction they put over the natural landscape.” 

“That last shift split the city apart. Half of it fell into the ocean. Good riddance, honestly,” Glenn mutters.

At the mention of the ocean, you glance at the water. The tide is coming in, each wave caressing the beach climbing slowly higher, closer to your toes. Something stirs not far from shore, a ripple emanating from a growing shadow. Something colossal breaks the surface, sprinkling water across the beach like rain. You stare up in shock. The thing—your kin—smiles down at you, no longer in the dark. 

“Finally,” he whispers. His voice is just the way you remember it from your dreams but even sweeter now, low and velvety. “I get to see you here, where you came from.” Like John Doe, his body is complex and always moving, tendrils and bristle-like hairs all swaying slightly, as though following the motions of a current. He only has one visible eye, the other half of his face concealed by a draping, curtain-like membrane, curling and colorful like part of a jellyfish bell. He drops slightly, bringing his face closer to you. A ribbon-like tentacle extends towards you, curling out of the water. You reach out and it curls around your fingers gently, a suckling kiss to your palm.

“I remembered how to breathe,” you tell him.

“I know,” he says proudly. 

“Am I going to change?” 

“You have always been what you are. Now, you will see what I have always seen.”

You’re aware of the others behind you; the Singer and Glenn on the shore. Malachi and Iridesce standing in the wet sand. Jamie, wading in deeper, splashing behind you. They stop just short of touching you. The air is tense with words they want to say. “Would it be hard?” you ask. “If I kept going…”

“You will need to be careful. Diving too far, too fast will still harm you until you have fully adjusted. Shall I stay in the shallows with you for now?” 

You lower your hand. The tendril follows like an affectionate animal, still seeking your touch. “No, I mean…if I kept going here. On land. Will I stop being able to breathe the air?” 

He tilts his head, his gaze softening. “No. You will need to keep your gills damp, but…” You expect him to be angry, but he chuckles. “Truly? You are leaving? Lorne will be disappointed.”

“I’ll come back,” you promise him. You’ve never meant it more than before. “I want to. Maybe I’ll even stay, someday. But right now, I…”

“You are the closest thing I have to kin in this world. I understand. You must go where the current takes you. This is also our way.” The tentacle slips away with one last affectionate squeeze of your fingers, vanishing beneath the surface. He makes a rumbling sound—a song you remember from the ferry, calling out to you. Before, it was a slow, mournful noise. Now, you hear joy. “I will eagerly await your return. Whenever it is. However long it lasts. I will be here, always, to welcome you.” He sinks slowly, vanishing beneath seafoam and the rising tide, swallowed up by the blue, shimmery depths. You feel tears wet your cheeks; tears of happiness. Of relief. 

You turn around and Jamie collapses into your arms, sobbing against your chest. You hold them, swaying back and forth as the ocean flows around you like a comforting embrace. You walk back to shore with them and they cling to you the whole way, as though afraid you’ll drift out of reach if they let go.

You sit together at the top of a sandy hill, watching the water. People trickle by to see you, offering gratitude and heartfelt embraces. There’s a lot left to salvage of Anchor, sensor arrays and stabilizers, things that could make the roads much safer. Malachi and the people of Nelton have already begun going through the labs, cataloging and organizing anything of use. The Verlindans are heading straight for the University, having found files that suggest a cure for the sickness Anchor inflicted on them. Iridesce kisses your cheek before she leaves. She has a funeral to prepare for, but much more to look forward to. The Singer is returning to Compass Hill and he invites you to stay, as he always does, though doesn’t look quite so worried when you gently decline.

“So,” Jamie says.

You laugh. “So?”

They lean their head against your shoulder and take one of your hands, toying with the joints of your fingers. “Now what?” 

You hum thoughtfully. “Should probably get you to a hospital.” 

“Eh, I’ll live. The Verlindans aren’t too shabby at field surgery.” 

“The University, then. Somebody needs to explain what happened here. When Compass Hill changed, there was all kinds of legal stuff we had to go through, but ultimately, they gave the town to the weavers.” You smile sadly, thinking about that now. “I wonder what’ll happen this time. There aren’t many of us. Seems like a waste to have a whole town for two or three people.” 

“If they wanna give you the whole town, take it,” Jamie says, shrugging. “Seems like the least they could do.”

It almost feels strange to get back in your car now. It’s right where you left it, the windshield still cracked. It feels like a relic of a different time. The engine stutters but starts up. You’ve never felt this way at the start of a journey. This isn’t a chore or just another job. There’s no urgency. You could take the scenic route. Stop in Prismville or Compass Hill, maybe visit Glenn’s neck of the woods of Nelton. “I’d want the fences to come down,” you say thoughtfully. “The gates, too. The lab should be torn down once we’ve stripped everything useful. I think it all needs to go.” 

“Where would the courier house go?” Jamie asks, sounding almost cautious.

“Hm. Maybe where the lab used to be? I don’t know. It could go anywhere.” 

“Anywhere?”

“Yeah, anywhere. Where would you want it?” 

Jamie looks at you with wide, watery eyes and a trembling smile. “Come on. That shouldn’t be up to me.”

“It’s at least half up to you. How am I going to run a courier bed and breakfast if the in-house barista doesn’t like the view?”

You have to slam on the brakes when Jamie tugs you over by the collar of your shirt, kissing you breathless. “We need to stop in Prismville,” they say breathlessly. “We’re gonna book the nicest suite in that huge, fancy hotel and we’re gonna fuck like it’s our honeymoon.” You shiver at the pleasant sensation of their fingertips teasing your gills. “And then we’ll deal with the serious stuff. Go back to the University, file whatever reports we need to file. Then we’ll come back here and you’ll finally have your proper homecoming—” 

“Too late,” you say between hungry, nipping kisses, the fluke darting out to taste your tongue. “Already had it. You missed it.” 

“What do you mean I missed it?” 

“I mean you missed it. Sorry. I’ve been home for a while now.” You pull back far enough to look Jamie in the eye, sharing a soft smile and savoring this new pull at your heart. 

[NOW PLAYING ON THE RADIO: MY DAY BY BLUE FOUNDATION]

[rotworld]

30: Exquisite Corpse

(previous)

you face the horrors lurking in anchor's depths.

->contains gore.

.

.

.

There’s a pervasive dampness in the air, a sticky feeling that clings to your skin. It becomes more noticeable the deeper you go. Unlike the fresh feeling of ocean spray or the pleasant scent of wind off the river, the stench here is must and mildew. There’s water somewhere, stagnant and fetid, the rotten musk of a body in a bog.

You keep going. There’s nothing else you can do now. Emergency lights dot the edges of the staircase, illuminating just far enough ahead to see you’re not near the bottom yet. Even the empty halls above still carried the sounds of fighting from far away, but there’s only deathly silence down here. A shift comes and you have to clutch the wooden handrail to keep from toppling down the stairs. Everything flickers. You smell petrichor. You taste spite. 

You come to a landing, a welcome break in the endless descent. There’s a doorway to your left, the room beyond dark and running hot with humming electronics. You see metal towers aglow with rows of light, cables snaking across the floor. A server room? Your curiosity is rewarded by the discovery of several thick cords gathered in the corner like a pile of snakes, crisscrossing white lines that plug into ports on the wall.

These power the lab’s anchorware. You grab them by the fistful, ripping them out of the wall. For each one that disconnects, you feel the air around you shift. Pressure bears down on your shoulders. The walls seem to throb and breathe. Jamie said it wasn’t dangerous to do this, but you wonder just how stable the basement could really be with the constant shifts happening down here. It’s a risk you’re willing to take.

Slow, plodding footsteps, uneven with recent injury, come down the steps. You hear the squelching drag of tentacles, the soft, fleshy sound of one wrapping around the doorway.

“Courier.” 

You don’t stop. You keep ripping the cords out. 

“Courier. That’s enough.” 

You ignore him. You’re almost done. They’re all tangled together and you don’t care, you aren’t slow or gentle, you feel the old, fraying covers strain under your fingers as you yank the plugs free. 

“You shouldn’t be doing that—”

“Then stop me,” you mutter. He doesn’t. You can feel his gaze burning into your back. “How was this supposed to go?” 

“Pardon?” John Doe says.

“This. Me, coming back to Anchor?”

You hear a soft chuckle. “I wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that it would go smoothly. You’re strong. Willful. Everything went about as expected until our conversation was interrupted. But even that is reassuring, I think. I know I’m right about you. You inspire people.” 

“I just gave directions,” you insist. “They would’ve come with or without me. You’ve made a lot of enemies.” 

He moves out of the doorway, further into the room. “You should really thank me. The Ripper wasn’t easy to kill.” You hear the slow, steady drip of blood across the floor. 

The last cable comes out of the wall without fanfare. There’s no alarm whining, no sudden, catastrophic reality failure that rips you limb from limb. The pressure dissipates. The air feels clearer. You swear you can hear the whisper of the tide rolling in, somewhere just out of sight. You move before John Doe can corner you, slipping between towering server racks and humming machinery. His silhouette lurches after you.

“You don’t want to go any further,” he assures you. “The administrators don’t take kindly to being interrupted.”

“What are they doing down here?” you ask.

“That’s not for us to know—”

You shove something over as hard as you can and the sudden movement and explosion of noise pulls him to the other side of the room while you dart for the open door. He realizes his mistake before you’re gone but he’s slower with the wounds he’s sustained. A tentacle just grazes your shoulder but it can’t get a grip before you’re taking the stairs three at a time, leaping into the dark. 

You hit the bottom sooner than you expect. The stairs end, your feet landing on solid tile floor. The staircase widens into a circular chamber, lit by harsh fluorescent lights. A handful of men in lab coats, looking more perturbed than startled by your sudden appearance, stand at the far end of the room. Between you, occupying most of the floor space, is something like a pool. You don’t know how deep it is. The liquid inside is black like tar and utterly still, an oil-like shimmer glinting across the glassy surface. The air is humid, sweltering and damp, the bog stench overpowering.

The only man you recognize is Dr. Gallagher, his eyes flicking over you briefly with disinterest. The others are busy muttering amongst themselves, adjusting something on a monitor at the edge of the pool, but he breaks away to approach you. “You know better. This isn’t proper protocol,” he says. “Harvested material goes through processing first. We can’t risk contamination.” 

Something crashes into you from behind, pinning you face-down on the floor. John Doe restrains you quickly, settling on your back, keeping your legs pinned and your wrists pinned on either side of your body. His shielding tech has finally died. His gloves are gone, maybe lost in the struggle against the Ripper. The hands holding your wrists down are larger, clawed, webbed in the spaces between his fingers. His skin is coarse like a shark’s. “My apologies for interrupting. I do know proper protocol,” he says. “They’re not for harvest. This is my chosen candidate—”

“What happened to your shielding?” 

You feel John Doe flinch as though struck. “Damaged, sir. I need to repair it.” 

“See that you do, this is unsightly.” 

Tendrils curl nervously around you on the floor. “This is my candidate, sir. They have potential. They respond well to training—” 

Gallagher waves him off, turning his attention to the clipboard in his hands. “That won’t be necessary. We’re going in a different direction for future candidates. You can take that one to processing.” There’s silence. You feel John Doe’s weight shift slightly, easing up to let you breathe without fully letting you go. Gallagher lets out a sigh, returning his attention to the two of you. “That one is too old,” he tells John Doe with the slightest, most strained kindness you’ve ever heard. “It led an insurrection. That’s unacceptable. No matter how well you train it, we can’t ever be certain that it’s not harboring seditious intentions. The God of Anchor must be a god of order. The next one will be raised here and educated here. They’ll be much closer to you, except they’ll have been born here, too.” 

There’s a prickling sensation in the air like a coming storm. The people chattering beside the monitor adjust the dials, key in some commands. They’re about to cause another shift. They have no idea what you’ve done, you realize. They don’t know they’re completely unprotected. John Doe must suspect you’ve done something. He saw you rip those cables out of the wall.

He doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t make any moves to stop them. “I would like this one,” he says quietly. “You told me that I—I could be involved in the selection process. This is the only one I’ve chosen. This is the one I want.” 

“You can’t have that one. It’s dangerous.” 

John Doe’s weight disappears from your back. He sits up slowly, kneeling on the floor behind you. He looks despondent. He makes no move to stop you from sitting up. Gallagher walks away, heading to the monitor where he inputs one last command. There’s a humming sound that vibrates the walls and floor. The liquid in the pool starts to hiss and churn. 

Material, you think. John Doe mentioned material before; collecting it from the Singer. Is that old, congealed blood? Remains? Is that what happened to all the children of the road who came before you? Your stomach twists at the realization. This is how people like you happen in the first place, isn’t it? A shift, right at the moment of your birth. They’re trying to make their own god.

Shadows twist unnaturally. The liquid bubbles and seethes. The walls start to melt and the floor cracks apart in narrow fissures, and you see other worlds rushing in to fill the gaps in reality. Gallagher leans over the pool, shouting over the roar of existence splintering and snapping back together. “Your name is Aldebaran! I am your father and this is your home!” 

You struggle to your feet to stop him but a tentacle wraps around your ankle. It’s only now that you see John Doe as he truly is, and the sight makes your breath catch in your throat. He’s transparent. You can see through him like he’s made of glass, his chest a transparent membrane that reveals curling bones and delicate insides. Round, pearl-like points of bioluminescence hang like string lights from fine, hair-like tendrils. He looks like the thing in the dark, you realize, the same auroras shimmering along his limbs, the same bunches of tendrils forming wavering nebula-like clouds, a colorful haze all around his body.

He reaches out, stroking the back of his hand against the side of your neck. The touch is painfully tender, just barely firm enough to make you shiver. You hear the ocean in your ears.

WIth the suddenness of a flipped switch, your surroundings wink into total darkness out and return unrecognizable. You’re not in the humid basement anymore. You’re not in the lab. You’re not even in Anchor, or the Drift. A rocky landscape of indigo stone stretches as far as the eye can see. Mountains hang from the sky like massive stalactites, their roots obscured by fast-moving clouds. Strange plants or fungi grow in twisting helix spirals. The air is acrid and metallic-smelling. Squirming, predatory shapes with tooth-lined maws and fast-moving centipede limbs lurch closer, scenting prey.

You’ve never seen something like this before. Shifts are usually a brief intersection, two or more planes overlapping, but you’ve been completely displaced, transported to another world entirely. The only thing that remains the same is the circular tile flooring and the pool in the center—empty now, because the liquid inside has thrust itself upward and congealed into a gigantic, monstrous shape. It’s the thing in the dark. It’s Lorne. It’s John Doe. It’s all the things you glimpse in your dreams, spines and fins and tentacles and fluttering gills, everything all at once. Its watery flesh squirms with blinking, abyssal eyes, each one like a small, silver moon. 

It lunges for you. Not even John Doe can stop it from engulfing you, taking you into the depths of itself. You try to scream and inhale water. Terror pricks your heart. Aldebaran retreats back into the pool, crouched there with all of its limbs and tendrils and dripping membranes wrapped tightly around itself. Whenever you try to move yourself, to swim through its body for the edge, its internal currents push you back to its center. Your lungs burn and your vision blurs. You can just barely make out the shapes of Gallagher and the others standing before it.

The slithering creatures, worm-like and serpentine, squeal as they barrel closer.

“Protect us, Aldebaran!” Gallagher says. It doesn’t. It stares at them, uncomprehending or uncaring. “I gave you an order, Aldebaran!” He tries to approach, clutching the edge of the pool. Aldebaran shoves him away with a wave of sludge, sending him stumbling back. One of the other men goes screaming into the maw of one of the creatures, blood squelching around its teeth as it mangles his legs. Another tries to fight them off and loses a hand in the process, dragged down by his bleeding wrist into a meatgrinder of teeth. More horrific beasts, some the same and some different, tendriled creatures without recognizable mouths of races, come burrowing out of the ground, drawn by the frenzy. 

You clutch your throat. The world blurs and darkens. Your feet stop kicking and you simply float, taking more water into your lungs. 

“Deep breaths. Don’t thrash and panic.” 

That’s Lorne’s voice. You swear you can hear him now, whispering in your ear. You think you can feel his rough hands on your shoulders, keeping you steady. 

“You’re alright. You know how to breathe. You’ve always known.”

You don’t. You want to cry out but there’s no air here, only more water, more darkness, the crushing pressure and cold of the abyss. Lorne’s hands smooth up to your neck. He presses his fingers into the sides too hard, edging out the pleasure with pain. You whimper, bubbles flooding out of your mouth, but he doesn’t let up. 

“Look at me. Deep breaths. You can do this.” 

You can’t. You’re drowning. Lorne keeps repeating those words, insisting you can, he knows you can, they all know it. You open your eyes and see that you’re not alone. The thing in the dark looms like a great shadow behind him, silver eye arched in sympathy. And there are others, their fins splayed and their tendrils reaching for you, their auroral glow filling the dark. They take turns coming closer, grazing your neck with their hands, making you feel the flutter of something just beneath thin flaps of you skin.

“Breathe,” the thing in the dark urges you. “Like a newborn, gasping for the first time. Breathe. Let us hear your voice.” 

You don’t have any other choice, so you do. You open your mouth. You let the water rush in and crush your lungs, your throat full and stinging. You wail soundlessly, a croak caught somewhere in your chest. You feel yourself stretched taut like you’re about to burst. And then something rips.

It’s not a wound opening. It doesn’t hurt. There is an ache but it’s satisfying, like a limb that’s been bound up and constricted finally relaxing. You gasp. You wheeze and you sputter, the sensation confusing, but you’re breathing somehow. You inhale and your head clears, the ringing in your ears dying away. Your lungs feel heavy but they no longer hurt.

Your neck tickles. You brush your fingers over the fluttering sensation and find what feels like holes in your skin, ragged wounds where your flesh has ripped open. But it’s not a wound. The tears are clean, as though opening along seams that have always been there, waiting. You breathe and your gills shift, water passing easily over and through them. 

Lorne presses a kiss to your lips. When you blink, he’s gone but you can still feel him. You can feel all of them, the song of the deep reverberating through the water. A creature with human gore slicking its maw wriggles closer and Aldebaran crushes it with one enormous limb, leaving a flattened smear of flesh and green blood. It retreats again, curling protectively around you.

“You’ll have to kill it,” you hear Gallagher say. He’s hunched beside John Doe, tugging insistently at his arm. “Get up and kill it! It won’t let us back into the stabilization zone, and we can’t be stuck out here when the shift ends.” 

John Doe glances up at you in the body of Aldebaran. He’s crying silently, tears streaming down his face. “No,” he says.

Gallagher blinks. “Did you hear what I said? You need to kill that thing—” 

“No.” He gets to his feet. You see the colorful flesh of his true face, translucent blue curtained by prismatic fringe and glowing tendrils. He’s smiling through his tears and it’s not the same as every carefully human smile you’ve seen before, not cautious and contained, not pretending to be something else. He smiles widely with his sharp teeth showing, bright and full of childlike delight. “No,” he repeats, savoring the word on his tongue.

The creatures rip into his tentacles with their teeth. He bats them away absently, uncaring of the blood gushing from his new wounds, the mangled ends of his tendrils dragging behind him. He approaches Gallager slowly, appreciating the horror dawning on his face. There’s nowhere for either of them to go, but Gallagher still tries to run. John Doe lets him. The sudden movement draws the creatures and he goes down screaming, limbs flailing, trying to wriggle free. John Doe watches. He wraps a tentacle around one of Gallagher’s hands as though he means to pull him free, and squeezes instead, constricting until his skin rips and the bones beneath snap like twigs and his hand twists right off. Then he reaches for the other one. 

He looks back at you just once more, as the lavender sky begins to twist itself apart. Anchor’s basement pushes against the cracks, the world trying to stabilize itself. John Doe smiles, even as the creatures turn on him, gnawing and clawing and biting, eating him alive. It’s the same smile the Singer gave you all those years ago, fresh out of his cocoon with human blood caked in his fur, knowing that he was finally free.

The shift ends. The worlds rip back apart. The last thing you’re aware of is Aldebaran dripping like black rain, form sloughing away into shapeless water once again, and the sensation, the certainty, that you are dearly loved.

[rotworld]

29: A Thousand Papercuts

(previous)

anchor is under siege. you fight for your life.

->contains gore, torture, non-consensual touching, gun violence, mentions of child abuse.

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There is a part of you that revels in this mayhem. Clean, pretty, perfect Anchor falling to the chaos of the Drift and the laws it tried to usurp—there’s poetry there, something that soothes the emotional wounds you suffered the first time you came here. You wish it hadn’t come to this. You wish this could’ve been your home. But as you run through the ruined corridors of the laboratory, surrounded by blood and bodies and terrified screams, there is an undeniable quiver of sadistic glee in your heart. 

This place took things from you that you didn’t even know you had. You hope it rots. 

“Stop running, courier. You’re just making this worse for yourself.”

John Doe’s voice is a haunting echo, a chill down the back of your neck. It doesn’t seem to matter how fast you run or how far you go, weaving through the maze of hallways, dodging rampaging Verlindans and stray bullets from an utterly overwhelmed private security force—he’s always there. Close enough that you can still hear him calling out to you with barely-restrained anger, his tentacles sliding wetly across the walls to propel him forward even faster. You don’t look back. You don’t want to know how close he is, how little distance you’ve managed to put between the two of you. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will break you if I have to. If that’s what it takes for you to understand.”

You nearly stumble into a firefight, the thunderous crack of gunfire filling a room on your right. Anchor’s security isn’t accustomed to an adversary it can’t just threaten into submission, much less one as frighteningly devoted as everything that’s followed you here. A few bullets might kill a Verlindan, but not until they’ve rampaged through a makeshift barricade, ripping throats open and spilling human entrails across the floor. It’s here in the thick of the violence that you think you finally lose him, ducking into bloodbaths and skirting around the bodies of the dead and dying.

The jagged limb of a querrow slices across the hall, wrenching a woman’s head from her shoulders. A small group from Nelton has fought their way to the lab with weapons and body armor scavenged from the fallen. You’ve never held a gun before but they insist on giving you one, a small, slate gray chunk of metal that feels unwieldy and uncomfortable in your hands.

With the lockdown lifted and the shutters rolled back, you can see the blizzard raging outside. You find yourself flanked by windows as you sprint down a long, narrow hallway, the sky dark and blanketed in a gray, snowy haze. He’s out there in the howling wind and sheets of ice, as still as a statue. Patient. Waiting. Your hands tremble. Nearly all the feeling is gone from your fingers. It’s a battle with your own uncooperative body to aim and pull the trigger, puncturing the glass with several shots. The wind grows from a muffled howl to a scream as snow and frigid air pile against the windows, pressing against the glass like a hateful, living thing hungry to taste you. 

“Come and get me,” you tell him. You hear the walls groan and the glass creak and shatter behind you, the full force of winter crashing into the laboratory while you run. 

Anchor’s labs are a sprawling complex of connected buildings, but the endless corridors still feel impossible, an aberration of reality. You’ll slip through what looks like a familiar doorway and end up somewhere new, or run for what feels like miles in one direction and find yourself back to the place you just left. After one disorienting loop, you stumble into a lab room just in time to see Iridesce plant her foot in the middle of a man’s back and rip his arm out of the socket, flesh tearing, bone giving out with a sickening crack, oozing blood already hardening into crystal. 

You stumble as the building trembles all around you. In the split second it takes you to blink, you see dazzling light, strange colors, spirals and fractals and shuddering darkness. You swear you can hear something about to break; the strain before the crack, a brittle wheeze. It couldn’t have been a shift—not this close, not without ripping a hole through reality. But it smelled like new air and it felt like vertigo, like something stumbled into you, through you, and kept moving. 

You hear a gunshot. A bullet strikes the wall right beside your head. Someone rushes at you out of the shadows, striking you hard across the face. Your head knocks back against the wall and you crumple.

For a split second, your eyes fluttering, consciousness wavering, you see the abyss. Marine snow. The glitter of life. The thing in the dark whispers that you can’t falter now and dozens of hands are pushing you, guiding you swiftly back up to break through the surface of sleep.

“What the fuck are you doing?” someone hisses. “Are you trying to get us killed? He wants it alive—”

“You taking orders from Gallager or from that thing?” 

“Gallagher isn’t even here, he locked himself in the fucking bunker. That thing is probably right down the hall and I don’t wanna be on his shit list.” 

You’re lying on your side, your cheek squished against soft carpet. You see the thick black soles and laces of boots all around you. Black fatigues. Angry, frantic hand gestures. There are five—six of them? Your vision is still blurry. You’re cornered and outnumbered but they don’t know what to do with you. 

“Get the fuck out of my way. I’m putting it down before it kills us.” 

“And let you get the rest of us killed for insubordination? You have no idea what he’ll fucking do to us. You remember that guy on guard duty? He’s missing half his fucking face because he gave them a hard time at the gate once!”

“You hit it so hard you gave it a goddamn concussion! We’re fucked either way!” 

Through the pounding your heart in your ears, you hear the skittering scrape of something under the floor for only a moment before the floor erupts. Enormous spider legs surge up as the carpet gives way like a pile of leaves over a pitfall trap. The security team has enough time to fire once, twice, a panicked third shot that hits the ceiling, before fear turns to agony. Flesh rips and squelches apart, blood spattering the walls and floor. Something crunches unpleasantly. The querrow turns its attention to you only once the last body has been silenced, a corpse writhing against the wall and gurgling its own blood finally falling into merciful stillness. 

“Ahhhhh, yes. I have you. Once again.”

You know this querrow. You couldn’t see him properly before, but here is illuminated in dim, red light. Two large eyes and numerous smaller ones, bulging from his cheeks and brow, dagger-like chelicerae framing a maw of carnivore teeth. A long, lithe torso and three sets of arms, the fingers progressively longer and sharper the further down the body they go. One is missing, a lump of scar tissue halfway down the waist. The arm on the other side is injured but still intact, the hand a single hooked claw rather than human fingers. 

“Do not tremble. It is not you I hunt.” You’re gathered up with unbelievable gentleness, hands carefully cradling the back of your head, your shoulders, your legs, positioning you in his arms as he begins moving quickly through the hall. You notice his front legs are kept splayed, knocking lightly against the walls as though feeling for his way around. “I know now. The beasts have shown me. You are not the destroyer. But your scent…you must be kin. When I smelled you above the ruins of my warren, all my beloved ones I had just finished burying, I could not think beyond my grief and anger. My yearning for my young.” 

You relax in his hold. The querrow strokes your back soothingly. “I’m so sorry,” you tell him. “He’s taken a lot from all of us.” 

A low, melodic purr rumbles throughout his body, the curving hooks of his mandibles quivering around his mouth. It sounds mournful. “He will take no more.” 

The querrow is swift and nimble, clutching you protectively against his chest as he maneuvers easily through piles of rubble and corpses. He kills everything in his path with brutal efficiency, skewering through protective armor with the decisive stab of his sharpened legs and carving a bloody path forward. The limb with a claw must be how he delivers venom. You see him stab the pointed end into the soft, unprotected throat of a man fleeing for cover and he stumbles, convulsing, foaming at the mouth. 

Your surroundings gradually quiet, the chaos fading into the distance. You’re deep in the labs now where the fighting hasn’t reached, the carpet unbloodied and the wallpaper intact. The querrow navigates around a corner and into a room that more closely resembles the harshness of the laboratory’s lobby, metal walls and floor, harsh white light glowing from enormous monitors on the walls. You hear the hum of electronics and the whirr of fans, a tangled web of wires crisscrossing the floor. Someone is standing in the middle of the room, up to their ankles in cords and computer parts, fingers clacking rapidly across a keyboard.

“Your precious one,” the querrow purrs, a hint of mischief in his voice. The figure silhouetted against one of the screens turns suddenly and your heart clenches. 

“Courier!” Jamie sobs. They rush to help you down, their arms around you before the querrow has finished letting you go. For a moment, you forget everything but how warm it is in their arms. You feel them trembling, unable to find the right words. They kiss you and let out a long, relieved sigh. “It’s too early to celebrate, huh?” they say, laughing tiredly. “Come on. We’re not done yet.” 

The querrow taps your shoulder with one hand and holds out the pistol with the other. You take it—and immediately drop it on the floor. Your fingers are stiff. They can’t curl or grasp. The frostbite is halfway through your hands now, completely engulfing your fingers. You inhale shakily. The querrow strokes your side with the small, hooked legs at the top of his abdomen, likely a gesture of comfort. He picks up the weapon and hands it to Jamie instead, who takes it wordlessly. 

“I was able to stop the second wave of detonations,” Jamie tells you, guiding you over to the monitor they were standing at before. “It’s a two-step process. They prime the anchorware remotely, sending it into overdrive. Someone has to manually set it off. John Doe can’t be the only tech they had doing it, but it doesn’t matter now. Nobody else is going through this.” You don’t fully understand the maps or symbols scrolling across the screen but Jamie seems to know what they’re doing, navigating menus and complex data. “All this advanced tech,” they murmur. “All these resources. And this is what they do with it.”

You take Jamie’s hand and they squeeze your fingers. You can barely feel it. The querrow’s heavy, clattering steps echo restlessly in the room behind you, reminding you he’s still there. “Tell me what to break,” he says wryly. 

“I want most of this intact,” Jamie admits. “Someone with scruples could make good use of it. But you see these?” They hold up a thick, white cable with a blue stripe running along its side. “These need to go. Find as many as you can and rip them apart.” 

The querrow bows his head in acknowledgement. He gives you both an expression you struggle to identify—not quite a smile, but not a frown. Pride, you think. Maybe hope. He has to duck and squeeze his legs together to fit back through the doorway.

“What do these cables go to?” you ask.

“The local anchorware,” Jamie says nonchalantly. “I’ve been trying to disable it remotely but there’s five levels of failsafes in place, of course.” 

“Isn’t it dangerous to mess with that?” 

“I’m shutting it off, not forcing a malfunction. We might be in trouble if a shift hits, but not as much as you might think.” Jamie glances around the room. “This place is strangely stable. A lot of the lab records mention it. They run artificial shift experiments here all the time without much problem, just like we do at the University but with a fraction of the precautions. Something’s dampening the intensity of superposition events and making them less destructive.” 

“Did you feel that earlier? I thought a shift might’ve happened.” 

“It did. It came from under us.” Jamie flicks their fingers across the keyboard, bringing up what looks like a map of the facility. Layers merge and intersect in confusing ways. Somehow, you’ve been going up and down floors without noticing a change in elevation. “We’ve been chewing through lab staff for a while now but nobody’s seen Gallagher or the rest of the top brass. They’re probably hiding out somewhere. Looks like there’s a basement level.”

As if on cue, another shift sizzles in the air around you. Jamie’s right—you feel it like a shockwave traveling up through your feet. The room spins. You see double for just a moment. Glimpses of other places dart past the corner of your vision; indigo mist. Rocky highlands and plains of tinkling glass. Forests with flesh for bark and fields that crawl upon their tangled roots.

“What are they doing?” Jamie mutters, more to themselves than to you. “Why force shifts like that? Are they trying to make a break for it? They have no idea where they’ll end up.” 

You can’t imagine what they could possibly be doing, but it worries you. They must be desperate, willing to try everything. If Anchor is too stable for a series of forced shifts to blow the building apart with everyone still in it, then they’re planning something else. “We have to find the basement,” you say.

Jamie nods, studying the map for another moment. They look just as uneasy with the gun as you felt, but they clutch it carefully with both hands, nodding for you to follow them into the hall. “It should be this way. Once we know where it is, we’ll wait. A few of the querrow are around here and I wouldn’t mind an extra set of arms and legs.” They glance back over your shoulder, frowning. “How was our old buddy, by the way? Did he apologize?” 

“More or less. He thought I was John Doe.” 

“Why?” 

It happens too quickly for either of you to react. The wall bursts, wood, metal and plaster splintering around a roiling shape. You’re knocked aside by slithering tendrils as John Doe surges forward. Jamie fires twice before you hear a strangled gurgle, a body slammed against the wall. 

His shielding is on the brink of failure. What you see now blinks and flickers, man then creature, flesh then slippery, scaled hide. You see him hold Jamie against the wall with a thick tentacle wrapped around their middle. Another, smaller tendril plucks the gun off the floor. You don’t think before you throw yourself at him, screaming as he keeps you out of reach with a tentacle around each of your wrists. 

“I told you not to run from me,” he says calmly, passing the gun from his tendril to his hand. Jamie fights and scratches but the tentacle squeezes and you swear you hear their ribs crack. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to protect you from, courier. You think I’m cruel and unreasonable, but I could be much, much worse. You’re pushing me to do things I don’t want to do. Do you understand? This is happening because you’ve made it happen. There are consequences for your selfish actions.” 

“Don’t—” 

The word isn’t all the way out of your mouth when he shoots Jamie in the thigh. The sound they make is like a stake through your heart, a shriek that dies into a pained, helpless wail. He doesn’t even look at them, turning to watch tears spill from your eyes with a disappointed frown. “You’ll learn to do what you’re told,” he says condescendingly, as though scolding a disobedient child. “I don’t like to do this, courier, but I will. I’ll teach you when it’s right and appropriate to question orders, and when you simply need to obey.” 

“Let them go,” you beg him. “You want me, right? I’m right here. You can do whatever you want, I don’t care, just—” 

Your voice rises to a hysterical pitch when he raises his aim. You scream and you struggle, you fight as hard as you can, but he holds you back like it’s nothing. Just as you rip away from one tentacle, another takes its place to restrain you. He makes you watch as he lines up another shot, a bullet tearing through Jamie’s shoulder. Blood splatters on the wall behind them and drips steadily into the carpet. They sag miserably in his hold, trying not to look at you.

“You’re the same as me!” you scream. His gaze travels back to you. You can’t tell what he’s thinking. “You’re the same,” you insist. “This is your home, isn’t it? You—you have dreams about the ocean, about the abyss, don’t you?” 

He doesn’t answer. His face is expressionless but his tentacles give him away. They’re squirming in place, restless. Anxious. The one around Jamie loosens very slightly and they suck in a shaky, wheezing breath. 

“You were a…a candidate, weren’t you? They found you and brought you here. They raised you. They told you that all of this is normal, it’s justified somehow.” 

“The Drift is hostile to mankind, and so mankind has the right to return that hostility.” The words are stiff and practiced, like something he’s heard a thousand times. “Yes, I was raised here. I’m living evidence of Anchor’s mercy. Your perspective is limited, but I know the good of this place. I understand the necessity of change—” 

“They didn’t raise you, they tortured you. Didn’t they? That’s what you think you’re ‘protecting’ me from, right? Because you know what they’ll do to me.” You aren’t certain until you spot that small twitch in his eye. Annoyance, but more than that, denial. You don’t need to know everything about Anchor to know how this goes. Compass Hill, the University, Nelton—you’ve seen and heard this story a dozen times. 

“They wouldn’t lay a finger on you,” he says vehemently. He turns towards you, away from Jamie. The tentacle slips away and Jamie sinks to the floor, clutching their oozing shoulder. You take a step back, trying to draw him closer to you. “You were promised to me. My father gave his word. When we found the right candidate, you would be mine to teach. To train, and punish, and correct, and make into a god. The god I couldn’t be.” 

“Why?” you press. Another step back, small, barely noticeable. Another, and his tendrils are reaching out to you. “Tell me why you couldn’t become a god.” 

“Because it’s…it’s difficult. There’s a very particular process, certain milestones that have to be reached in the correct order. I came very, very close and I’m useful, too useful to simply cast aside, and—”

“That’s wrong,” you tell him, looking him in the eye. You wipe the tears clinging to your chin. Despite everything, you’re crying for him, too. “What happened to you was wrong. What they did to us, all of us, was wrong.” He moves closer and you take another step back. “Do you know about Compass Hill? How it became the way it is now?” 

“Negligence,” he says. “All factory weavers had their silk harvested immediately upon production to prevent them from forming cocoons. Someone wasn’t doing their job properly one day.” 

You shake your head, smiling a little. “It was just a couple of kids,” you tell him. “Teenagers, just barely. One of them was Dewitt’s prized grudgesilk weaver, and the other was a courier. They’d planned it for months. The courier was going to sneak the weaver out during the night shift change. They climbed out a fourth story window—the weaver had started stashing little bits of his silk, just enough to make a rope. Then they ran. They didn’t get very far before the weaver felt sick and sluggish, and they had to stop.” 

He looks like he doesn’t believe you. It doesn’t matter. You know the truth better than anyone.

“So they stopped. They were in a mulberry grove behind the factory. The weaver was starving, so the courier picked a bunch of leaves for him to eat. He started making silk and suddenly he was rolling it up, sticking it on all the trees. He had no idea what he was doing. It’s like his hands knew something his brain didn’t. He kept eating and weaving and eating and weaving, and eventually, he’d spun himself into a giant cocoon. The courier didn’t want to leave without him, so they laid in the grass and stayed there all night.” 

You see Jamie struggle to sit upright against the wall. They’re watching you, listening intently. They’re crying. 

“In the morning, the factory staff figured out what happened. They went out and they found the courier and the big cocoon. They beat the courier bruised and bloody and started dragging them back to the factory, but they didn’t get very far. Because that’s when the cocoon ripped open, and the thing that came out wasn’t a weaver anymore. It was a giant, beautiful silk moth, bigger and stronger than all of them. And it was angry.” 

You take a deep breath. John Doe studies you with narrowed eyes and a clenched jaw. He doesn’t say anything. The tentacle closest to you snakes slowly closer, hovering at eye-level. You reach out, letting it press against your palm. 

“You were alone here, weren’t you? Whenever someone like you came, they didn’t last long. You felt weak and afraid and isolated. You didn’t feel like you could fight back.” The tentacle curls around your fingers. You squeeze the best you can with your numb, dying hand. “But you’re not a child anymore. You can say no,” you tell him. “When they tell you what to do or be, you can say no.” 

The tentacle around your hand tugs lightly, pulling you into his chest. John Doe wraps his arms around you. The embrace is tight and desperate, his face buried against your neck. He breathes deeply. You can smell the sea on his skin. 

“It would be wonderful if the world worked that way,” he whispers. His grip around you tightens. A tendril slips around your neck and constricts, cutting off your air. You pull against it uselessly as he trails his lips across your cheek, kissing the corner of your mouth. You bite him and he makes a soft, startled sound. Blood dribbles from his torn lip when he pulls away. He licks it with heat in his eyes. “I’m sorry, courier. Anchor isn’t Compass Hill. You have no idea what would happen to you if you tried something like that here. You’re my responsibility now. I won’t fail you. I will be useful, but you’ll be vital. That’s how things like us get to be happy.” 

Your vision blurs and darkens. You kick your legs and lash out with your arms, scraping against John Doe’s chest. He lets you, cooing softly. He tells you to close your eyes and let yourself slip under so he can take you somewhere you won’t get into trouble. You see Jamie, weeping as they try to push themselves onto shaky knees, collapsing again when their bleeding leg gives out under them. 

You feel cold. Frigid wind kisses the back of your neck and a snowflake lands in your lashes. John Doe stiffens suddenly and you’re being moved, passed from his arms to his tentacles, reluctantly deposited on the floor behind him. You touch your bruised neck, breathing deeply. You never thought you’d be happy to see the Ripper. He’s brought the storm with him. Snow and razor winds fill the corridor all around him. Fresh blood drips from the end of the iron iron clutches in his gloved hand. John Doe’s tentacles flare aggressively, filling the hallway as though to hide you from the threat. 

“I’ll take care of this. Don’t run, courier,” he begs you. “Don’t make me do something that will make you hate me.” 

You’re moving before he’s even finished talking, kneeling to drape Jamie’s arm over your shoulder and help them to their feet. They can barely walk. Every step makes them whimper and lean heavily against you, their shoulder gushing blood. “I’m okay,” they insist weakly. “I’m fine. We’re…dealing with it. Should be able to—to stop the bleeding. If I can sit down.”

You duck into the nearest room. It’s another computer lab like the last, black and gray and luminescent. You help Jamie settle in the corner against the wall. You scavenge through your backpack for something to use as a tourniquet, settling on a spare shirt and a pen. Your breathing goes ragged with frustration. You can’t tie it. Your fingers are slick with blood and they won’t bend right. Jamie gives your shoulder a gentle squeeze and takes over, wrapping the shirt around their leg. 

“Can you lock this room from the inside?” you ask. 

Jamie nods, gesturing to a table beneath a wall of screens. There’s a pile of odds and ends scattered across it, but you notice some kind of PDA screen prompting for login credentials. You bring it to Jamie and they thank you somewhat breathlessly. You use another shirt to soak some of the blood from their shoulder, but the flow is already slowing. The fluke, you assume. Something squirms beneath the skin around the wound, clear, pus-like fluid leaking out. 

“Don’t lock it yet,” you tell them. “Wait until I leave.” 

Jamie’s face falls. “Courier.” 

“If i don’t see these people die, I’ll never sleep again. I’ll always wonder if they’re still out there somewhere.” 

Jamie lets out a shuddering breath. They know they can’t go with you. They shake their head, reaching out to stroke your cheek with one shaking, blood-covered hand. “I’m so sick of your bullshit,” they say, managing a hoarse chuckle. “All these stupid fucking…life-threatening situations. You’re some kind of lightning rod for horrible things.” 

You hold their hand against your face, nuzzling against it. “I dunno. You showed up, didn’t you? Can’t be all bad.” 

They let out a sad, weepy laugh. “You’re going to come back. And we’re going to get our…our little courier bed and breakfast. We’re going to build it right fucking here, on top of all this awful shit. Make them roll over in their graves with how happy we are.” They kiss you like it might be the last time. You shrug off your jacket, draping it over their body. They pull the fabric up to their face and breathe your scent, fresh tears beading in their eyes. They tell you where the basement should be, their voice choked.

You watch each other for a moment in silence—Jamie, trembling with silent sobs, you in the hallway trying to keep it together—and then the door shuts between you. 

You feel like you’re sleepwalking. Sound and sensation are all distant, far beyond the pounding of your heart. The hallways all start to blur together. You’re tired. You want to sit down and rest but you have to keep moving. Your journey isn’t over yet. 

You find it at a dead end. A sharp turn, a long walk, and there it is at the very end—an open doorway. A dark maw, waiting for you. You see a descending staircase and thick shadows, blinking red lights lining the passage down. Another shift comes and goes in the space of a heartbeat, a disorienting lurch of the world all around you. You glimpse yellow skies; strange creatures; waves frozen solid. A warm feeling suddenly blooms in your chest and travels slowly outward, trickling into your limbs. 

Your hands prickle with sensation. You look down and the frostbite is fading, gnarled necrosis smoothing away like it was never there. The feeling is bittersweet; relief, and emptiness. You’re alone again, nothing connecting you to anyone. You know it won’t be long before John Doe finds you again. 

So you steel yourself. You take the first step, and then the next. You go into that darkness like a Verlindan, your need for vengeance stronger than anything else.

[rotworld]

27: Nobody Home

(previous)

despite its best efforts, anchor, too, has changed.

->contains gore, graphic description of corpses, mentions of child abuse

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The road to Anchor is not the impossible maze you remember. It has been corrected, its kinks and wrinkles ironed out into perfect, smooth normalcy. You drive west out of Prismville and the rocky, steep hills turn to level streets, pockmarks and potholes to smooth, new asphalt. Is this arrogance? Are they so confident in the destruction they’ve caused, so certain that there is no one in the whole splintered wreckage of the Drift still able and willing to bring retribution? Is it an invitation? A trap?

It doesn’t matter. You’ve come a long way to get here and there’s no turning back. 

You see the iron fence, the freshly cut grass, the picturesque shopping avenues and cookie cutter suburbs, uniform rows of American Craftsman houses. You see the gate shut tight between stone pillars, Anchor’s name embossed on steel. It’s colder than you remember. A layer of frost blankets everything. There is no one at the security checkpoint to greet you. There’s not even anyone gawking from the end of their driveway, no passersby watching you with disapproval. In fact, Anchor looks strangely abandoned. You roll down your window and don’t hear anything. No talking. No footsteps. No signs of human habitation. You shiver. You can see your breath.

There’s no one, but there is a car parked right at the gates haphazardly, crumpled front end and bent iron bars suggesting a high-speed collision. 

You know that car, you realize; a bulky, silver SUV with snow tires. The fact that there’s no one inside, the driver side door left ajar, keys still in the ignition, doesn’t quell your rising dread. Your fingers tingle with dull, prickling sensations. The frostbite has reached your knuckles. Soon, you won’t have any feeling left in your hands. 

[NOW PLAYING ON THE RADIO: BLINDNESS BY METRIC]

For now, you stick to the plan. You pass the front gate for the courier entrance, a smaller, less grandiose gate on Anchor’s far side. You left in such a hurry before that you never got a good look at the place. No security outpost, no one waiting around to interrogate you, but there is an intercom system and some kind of scanner. Jamie rummages through your backpack for the chameleite Iridesce gave you. When you hold it up to the scanner, it beeps and a green light flashes. The gate rattles open. 

Iridesce was right; it’s fully automated, and it accepts the same piece of chameleite no matter how many times you scan it. Still, it seems odd that you manage to get the entire Nelton convoy and the Verlindans inside this way. Someone should have come down to investigate by now. But as you scan the chameleite a final time and drive through the gate, you find only drifting fog and empty streets. 

There’s no one here. No one driving downtown, no one strolling down the sidewalk, no one in the shops or the offices. The deeper you go into Anchor, the colder it gets and the more the sky darkens. You pass through a suburb as silent as a cemetery and catch a whiff of blood on the wind. There are subtle hints of something terrible happening here, ghosts of fear and violence. Doors left wide open in haste; a crimson handprint smeared across a patio door. The only definitive sign of carnage is a corpse with red slush for a head lying in a driveway. 

Bloody footprints splatter down the sidewalk and trek through the snow. He hunted here, but not in earnest. He was flushing out his prey, watching where they went. Following them back to the nest.

A knock on your window startles you. It’s Glenn, brushing a fine layer of snow from his shoulders. “I don’t like this,” he says. 

Jamie shakes their head. “We need to keep going. The labs can’t be far. Let’s stick to the plan for now, see what’s going on inside.” 

“I’m not saying we need to back out, I just don’t want us getting taken by surprise. This reeks of an ambush. A few of us should go ahead, do some reconnaissance.”

“I really don’t think this is the time to split up. But fine. Courier, what do you think?” Jamie asks. You don’t answer. Your attention is fixed on the suburban yard to your left. “Courier?” 

There’s a human arm lying there. There might be a body attached but you can’t tell, stiff fingers and blood-speckled wrist the only things poking out from behind a trimmed hedge. Looming there, just peeking around frost-glazed leaves, you see the very edge of a winter coat’s fur-lined hood; a glove clutching a gore-soaked tire iron. 

He doesn’t run at you. He doesn’t move at all. You watch him and he watches you, and then he retreats out of sight. You would wonder if you’d seen him at all if not for the arm still lying there, the blood sprayed across the front porch. What do you know about the Road Ripper? You’re marked. It’s you he wants but he’ll pick off anyone he comes across in pursuit of the hunt, waiting until his bloodlust reaches its peak. He can find you no matter where you go.

As long as the snow can get in, so can he.

“We keep going,” you say. “We stick to the plan for now.”

The labs are just as you remember them, the architecture drab and aggressively modern, everything unfriendly gray and harsh, clinical white. The convoy parks up and down the street, reconvening for one last discussion before you proceed. The last time you were here, you walked through the front doors. That isn’t an option today; there’s a metal shutter just past the glass, a wall of immovable steel. The windows are blocked with the same heavy shielding. You hadn’t expected everything to go smoothly but you didn’t think you’d get locked out so soon, either. 

“Have a little faith, courier,” Malachi says, offering a smile. “This doesn’t change much. We knew we’d need to talk our way inside.” Iridesce, too large to fit in anyone’s car, unfolds herself from the back of Malachi’s truck. He helps her out with a hand to steady her, the back of his car dipping momentarily beneath her shifting weight. “Jamie, you mentioned there are cameras at the door. You, Iridesce and the courier should stay out of sight until they start letting us in. Keep your heads down. Garvan, what will your people do?”

The Verlindans looks strangely unbothered by the cold. Even Garvan and the rest of the Stag’s allies, unabashedly nude, show little more than the occasional twitch of the nose in discomfort, sometimes shaking snow from their heads. Most of them have already started to walk away, ambling further down the block to another building connected to the main lab. 

“We wait here,” Garvan says. “We’ve got reinforcements coming and we’ll be taking our own way in.” He turns to you, his nostrils flaring. He smiles, baring his sharp teeth. “I can smell them, courier. They’re afraid in there, as they should be. Good hunting. We’ll see you on the other side.”

It makes you uneasy to separate but you nod. This is the smarter decision; splitting your forces, keeping Anchor on their toes. Malachi and the others approach the lab doors while you and Jamie huddle together in the cold. Something blocks the wind suddenly; Iridesce stands at your back, wrapping her arms around you both. 

You hear an intercom crackle. The voice coming from the speaker is muffled, barely audible over the howling wind. It sounds familiar, you think. A woman’s voice, brusque and standoffish. “Wh—what the fuck? Hello?” 

“Why are we locked out?” Malachi snaps. You’re startled by just how harsh he sounds. His tone is always so soft and cheerful. Iridesce squeezes you gently, mistaking your stiffness for cold or maybe worry. This is part of the plan. He has to speak with a particular sort of arrogant authority, snide and certain. He has to sound like he belongs here. He went out of his way to change before you reached Anchor, trading his cossack for a white button up, blue sweater vest and slacks. You have no idea how well he looks the part of an Anchor resident, but you can’t imagine the camera can make out much of anything through the blowing snow.

“Why are you—are you kidding me? We’re on lockdown! What are you even doing outside? You’re supposed to shelter in place until the alert’s lifted.”

“That’s ridiculous! You’re telling me we’re all just supposed to stay in our homes and die? That thing is still out here!” Malachi manages to both look and sound enraged, talking over the woman’s sheepish stammering. “You can’t do this to us. It’s inhumane. This place is supposed to be safe, it’s supposed to keep things out. You can tell Gallagher he’ll need to get himself a new goddamn research assistant, I’m finished with this.”

“Hold on, you’re staff?” the woman says quickly. “You should’ve been here hours ago. They already sealed the bunker. Look, maybe—if you scan your ID card—”

“My ID?” Malachi says, laughing sharply. “You want to see my ID? I ran here with nothing but the clothes on my back because some maniac broke my door down and not a single fucking security officer is answering my calls. You think I have my ID right now? You think I thought to myself, ‘Gee I better grab my whole briefcase in case some bitch at the lab decides now’s the time to play Rules and Regulations?” What else do you want, my birth certificate? My fucking resume? That lying son of a bitch Gallagher’s letter of recommendation? What a great fucking place Anchor turned out to be—”

“Jesus, alright!” 

There’s a shrill electronic noise, a warning chime, and then the metal shutters at the front door rattle open. Malachi doesn’t waste any time, propping a door open with his shoulder and rushing everyone inside. You and Jamie could duck into the crowd easily enough but Iridesce stops you. “You two behind me, dears,” she murmurs. You understand why immediately. The moment the three of you get within range of the camera, that brief alarm rings again and the protective shutter starts to fall. 

Iridesce catches it with one hand, steel creaking and bending from the unyielding force of her stone palm. She gives the camera a cold smile and nods sharply at the doorway for you and Jamie to scurry inside. 

Inside, the stench of blood is overpowering. The violence you saw in Anchor’s suburbs looks tasteful compared to this carnage. Bodies are strewn all across the lobby floor. The floor is slippery with gore and melted ice, blood and brain matter sprayed and splattered on every surface. You see the Ripper’s preferred blunt force manner of execution amplified to new sickening levels. Some of the corpses are barely recognizable as human anymore, so brutalized that all you see is meat in red-soaked clothing. The dead are frozen mid-crawl in search of safety; several lay behind a welcome desk. Others are clustered hopelessly by the metal coverings on the windows, hands still outstretched for corridors they never reached. 

You move cautiously at first, your group sticking close together, nervously peeking around corners before you proceed, but it soon becomes apparent that there are no survivors. Not here, at least. Anyone still alive has fled deeper into the labs. All that’s left is eerie silence, the faint echo of an alarm in another hallway. 

A creak in an open breakroom makes you flinch, stepping back in anticipation of an ambush. Before anything can move, Iridesce surges past you. You hear a scuffle; a table and chair crashing against the wall, a scream cut off. Iridesce lurches back out of the room dragging someone behind her—a woman in a labcoat, nacre fingers squeezing her throat. You recognize her, you realize, her auburn hair and sharp, watchful eyes. 

“Meryl Underhill,” Iridesce murmurs, tossing her to the floor. Meryl scurries back, trying to get to her feet, but Iridesce slams a hand on the wall beside her head and cages her in. “Where are you off to in such a rush, hm? I’ve got some questions for you.” 

“It wasn’t me,” Meryl says hurriedly, hands up in a pacifying gesture. “You—you were there, courier! You saw me, you saw, I was just passing through—”

The wall cracks under Iridesce’s fingers. Stone dust and plaster trickle to the floor. “You’re an opportunistic little snake is what you are. I know you requested access to the mines, Underhill, I keep very meticulous records. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t rip out your spine.”

“Because it wasn’t me! It wasn’t, I swear! That’s all Dr. Gallagher. He coordinates everything. He has a repair technician set off the anchorware, I don’t even know how it works!”

“A repair technician,” Iridesce echoes, scowling. “Like our John Doe, I suppose.” 

You’ve all seen him before; the man who could be anyone. Forgettable, unremarkable, a face that slips your mind the moment you stop looking at him. Even now, you struggle to remember him beyond his sharp, professional style and black gloves. In Nelton, he introduced himself as Bachman. Jamie knew him as Tiptree. Iridesce told you before you left Prismville that he was in the city’s records as Lange. 

“You lied to me,” you say. Iridesce glances back. She moves slightly, giving you space to look at Meryl, who stares up at you wordlessly. “You said you were from the University. You said you didn’t know what happened to New Ridgeway.” 

What kind of apocalypse works that way? she’d said, knowing full well it was Anchor.

Meryl’s shoulders sink. “I didn’t agree with that, you know,” she says. “I didn’t think it was right. And I know that doesn’t matter, and you don’t believe me. Of course you think I’m a monster. I don’t think you’d understand it even if I tried to explain. The Drift doesn’t bother people like you, courier, but the rest of us? Normal humans? We don’t want to live like this. I know it’s—it looks ugly from the outside, but we’re trying to make the Drift better, safer, for everyone—” 

A twinge of anger stings your heart. “I’m the one who wouldn’t get it?” you say, your voice rising. “What do you mean the Drift doesn’t bother me? How could you possibly know that? How could you know anything about me or what I’ve been through? It’s normal humans who hurt us more than anything. Not because it’s in your instincts, not because you’re hungry or even scared. You think we’re too different. That our suffering isn’t the same as yours.”

You’re thinking of Compass Hill and its factory and its cruelty, a town full of children robbed of childhood. You’re thinking of Jamie’s mother—exploitation disguised as outreach, a child lying on a cold exam table and a wet, wriggling thing slowly brought closer. You’re thinking of Nelton and all the memories shared with you in brief, surreal flashes. Two boys in a church and one who’s bleeding because his father says he’s sick and unholy. 

Jamie grabs your hand and you realize your face is wet with tears. You swallow hard and turn away from Meryl. You cling tightly to their hand, only vaguely aware of Iridesce’s calm, quiet voice asking questions and Meryl’s terse answers. The labs are completely locked down. No one is getting in or out anymore. The Ripper was here and Meryl’s only alive because she hid in a janitor’s closet and listened to everyone else die.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” she insists, her voice cracking. “I didn’t think so many people would die. I thought Nelton was a mistake, that something went wrong—” 

“You’re detonating extremely sensitive, extremely reactive reality-anchoring equipment,” Iridesce says coolly. “Did you honestly think the damage would be negligible? Easily contained? It doesn’t matter, I don’t want to hear your excuses. You’re going to get us into the rest of the facility.” 

“I…I can’t.” 

“You can,” Iridesce insists. “And you will.”

“I don’t have access, I can’t disable the lockdown protocols!”

There’s a burst of static, the droning tone of an intercom announcement echoing down the empty halls. “Courier. I can see over the surveillance feed that you’ve arrived safely. That’s a relief. I was starting to worry, given the conditions outside. Have you given my offer any thought?” 

Your throat tightens and your chest burns with fury. He sounds so calm and polite, no different than he did when you met in Prismville, or Nelton, or at the rest stop. 

“I’m willing to unlock a few doors, but you’ll have to come alone. We need to talk and I’d prefer a private conversation.”

“Fuck you!” Jamie snarls. “They’re not going alone.”

John Doe hums in amusement. “Let me rephrase. The courier, and only the courier, is welcome. If it helps, Dr. Higgs, consider this less of an invitation and more of an exchange.” 

There’s a sinking feeling in your chest. “What do you mean exchange?” you ask.

There’s a brief pause. You can’t remember his face, but you can imagine the feeling you get from his tranquil expression, the unnerving emptiness to his smiles. It felt like he was wearing a mask, always keeping his true thoughts and feelings tucked away. “An exchange,” he says gently. “You, for the Singer of Compass Hill.”

[rotworld]

25: Roadside Attraction

(previous)

the road to anchor takes you to stranger and stranger places. but here, at least, you will find some answers.

->sexually explicit. contains terato, non-human genitalia.

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The convoy stops at nightfall, filling the parking lot where a rest stop used to be. Only the ghost of a building remains, an inverted mirage surrounded by scorched grass. A pair of vending machines flicker like dying bulbs, translucent, their contents changing each time they wink in and out of existence; snack crackers. Carbonated drinks. Dead butterflies. Jamie warns everyone to keep their distance. The Verlindans pace restlessly. Malachi comes over to check on you as you stretch your legs, leaning against the crumpled hood of your car. 

“How is everyone?” Jamie asks him.

“Anxious,” he says, “but morale is high.” 

You study the frostbite on your fingers. They’re almost completely numb now, dried and dead to the second joint. “We’re not going to make it to Anchor tonight,” you say quietly. “We’ll be in trouble if a shift hits.” 

“Could try sheltering on the Verlindan backroads,” Jamie suggests. “I’m sure they won’t love us driving back there, but given the circumstances, maybe they’ll make an exception.” You nod, unconvinced. Even if you survive the shift, you might be spat back out on the other end of the Drift. Even if you aren’t, you still have to get through Anchor’s gates. It feels more and more hopeless the further you get.

But you look across the parking lot. The people of Nelton gather in small conversational circles, talking and laughing, singing songs. The Verlindans are restless but their eyes are on the horizon. Hopeful—that’s the feeling you get. Everyone is here, following your lead, because they believe it’s worth trying. So you stow your worries and think about tomorrow instead; a house for couriers. A place with fresh eggs, warm beds, and homemade tea.

You’re on the road again soon. An hour more, the convoy agreed. If you don’t find a town, the Verlindans will begrudgingly allow you to use their paths as campgrounds for the night. It’s still dangerous, but better than being caught out on the open road during a shift. Curiosity keeps your mind occupied for a while—you’ve never seen the Verlindan backroads before, and you’ve always wondered how a place stays in one piece without anchorware—but something else captures your attention soon enough.

The salty smell you remember from Aliquando Island suddenly pricks your senses. That’s brine, you know now, a whisper of ocean. But this isn’t the narrow isthmus road. Jamie suddenly stiffens, warning you that a shift’s coming, but you don’t stop. Anchor is still far away, but something else—something familiar—is very close. The road curves. Your headlights glance over dark, churning water. A river? A lake? Through the fog and the dark, you can’t glimpse the far shore or gauge its size, but you never find a bridge to get across.

What do you find is an old wooden sign pitched at the roadside, three painted planks stacked one atop the other reading, “FERRY AHEAD.” The road curves once more, veering off over the water. It’s not a bridge but a fenced ramp, asphalt transitioning to a metal loading dock. The ferry is old and precarious-looking, a steamboat with twin chimneys and a worn, barnacle-peppered hull. Its glittering, golden light ripples on the surface of the water like drowning stars. You’ve never seen such a thing before. There is no ferry service in the Drift, no body of water large enough to warrant it.

And yet, here it sits. A man sits hunched on the ramp’s brittle fencing, standing slowly when your headlights reach him. He saunters over to your window, hands buried in the pockets of a black peacoat. His eyes are hidden in the shadows cast by the black brim of a vintage captain’s hat. You see him tilt his head, glancing through the window at you. His smile is small and bemused, like he’s seen something pleasant he didn’t expect to see. “Evening,” he says, his voice low and rough like gravel. “Headed west?”

“Is there another way across?” you ask. “We’d like to stick together and I don’t think you can take all of us in one trip.” 

He chuckles. “Nah, you’ll fit just fine. The Proteus is bigger than she looks. There might be a bridge if you keep going, but there might not be. Depends on the Drift’s mood. Either way, it’s safer to go by boat. Shift’ll pass right over us on the water, you won’t get displaced.”

You can feel Jamie staring in disbelief. They must be thinking the same thing; you’ve found a place that shouldn’t exist and this sounds too good to be true. “How much?” you ask.

The man’s smile widens. You think at first he has a Verlindan’s teeth, curved and wolf-like, but where the Verlindan’s have a pair of prominent canines, he has a mouthful of daggers. “Not a thing. It’s free for kith and kin.” 

It takes some coordination, a few insistent reassurances, but you’re moving again soon. You slowly ascend the ramp, your car rattling over the metal loading bay and into a darkened lower deck. The man was right; it’s much larger on the inside, cavernous and echoing like a parking garage.

“Are you sure about this?” Jamie mutters. 

You are. Maybe you shouldn’t be. Maybe you should be wary and afraid. But this is your best bet to reach Anchor, and more importantly, it feels right. The hint of sea salt in the air soothes you. You get a feeling you haven’t had since Aliquando Island—that you know this place in a distant way. 

The man had grinned at you with his monstrous teeth and you didn’t even feel a twinge of fear, only a sense of muted recognition.

[NOW PLAYING ON THE RADIO: THE DEEP BY PHILDEL]

There’s a trembling sensation as the metal loading bay slides away from the asphalt ramp and shutters closed. The ferry blares its horn and then you’re moving. Water churns and laps at the hull. Those who came from Nelton have started settling in for the night, sharing blankets and pillows, reclining across their seats. Jamie is restless, eager to go above deck where they can at least keep an eye on the captain. You’re inclined to follow, though not out of suspicion. 

The Verlindans are unsettled. They pace the length of the lower deck back and forth, whispering to one another. There’s a curving walkway with a gentle slope that carries the smell of salt and soft night wind from above. They stand guard there, as though expecting trouble, but they let you and Jamie through without a few cautious glances to one another.

“Want some fresh air?” you ask them.

“Rather not,” Glenn says. The worried expression on your face makes him chuckle and shake his head. “We’re alright, courier. Just out of our element. Not used to being on someone else’s territory.” 

Jamie frowns. “What does that mean? Whose territory is this?” 

“I’m not sure. Just know it’s not ours.” He looks you up and down with a contemplative expression, smiling gently as though confirming something he long suspected. “Free for kith and kin, he said? I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

You take the curved walkway above deck and a cold breeze skims the water, kissing your cheeks. It doesn’t look like the same vessel. It’s too small, too tightly compact, no room beneath your feet for half a town to park. There’s little to see—guard rails, unmarked cargo boxes stacked haphazardly, fog as far as the eye can see. The captain is sequestered away in the bridge, a silhouette behind the darkened windows. The lights are off inside, you notice, and dimmed along the sides of the ferry. Jamie walks back and forth across the deck several times before returning to you, looking perturbed.

“No anchorware,” they say. “There’s some kind of spatial anomaly at work here, but it seems stable.” 

They join you at the railing, resting their arms over it. You can’t be too far from the shore you just left, but you can’t see it anymore. The water is black like ink and rippling in the ferry’s wake, dyed a dim, sunset shade of orange by the lights. It’s easy to see things in the strange, liquid motion, shapes that aren’t really there. It’s quiet; nothing but wind and waves. The smell of brine is stronger now.

“You look happy,” they note.

You shrug. “I like how the water sounds. It’s easy to relax.” 

“You liked Aliquando Island, too. So…how about that beach house?” Jamie grins when they manage to get a smile out of you, draping an arm around your shoulder. 

“I don’t think the Drift has all that many beaches.” 

“Fine, be evasive again. I didn’t think the Drift had islands, or a ferry,” they say, gesturing at the glassy shimmer of cresting waves. “But here we are. And here you are, looking all misty-eyed and nostalgic. You should always hang onto the things that make you happy, courier.” You nod. You’re going to try. Jamie leans their head against your shoulder and you spend a long, comfortable moment like that, standing on the deck in tranquil silence. Eventually, your eyelids start to droop and you go back below deck together, Jamie’s fingers laced with yours.

Gentle snores echo on the parking level. Jamie tilts their seat back and curls up with a sweatshirt balled up under their head as a pillow. They offer you a spare, soft knit and cream-colored, as a blanket. You drift off watching them stubbornly try to stay awake longer, lashes fluttering, nuzzling against the touch of your hand to their cheek like an affectionate cat.

Someone is singing.

You jolt awake, disoriented. You can’t remember falling asleep and don’t know how long you’ve been out. A fog of exhaustion gives everything a surreal, slightly muted feeling. Jamie is still fast asleep, shoulders rising and falling with soft breaths. The Verlindans have fallen asleep in a heap of bodies, nestled close to each other over each other with what looks like a crumpled mess of picnic blankets piled beneath them. Everything is silence and stillness around you, not a soul awake except for you. 

And someone is singing. You don’t know how you recognize it as song—it’s deeper than a human voice could go, lower than guttural, slow and powerful like the grinding of glaciers. But there’s a clear melody, a gradual rising and falling. There’s a message trying to be heard. You’re getting out of the car before you’re fully aware of yourself moving, drawn to the walkway that takes you above deck.

The sound is neither clearer nor closer. You pace in frustration, trying to locate the source, but nothing helps. Gripping the railing, you peer into the waves and ripples. You think you see a phantom shape in the motion, a wave that is softer, more rounded, breaching the surface before it slips beneath again. Water mists across your face. Your neck feels strange. Those sensitive patches along the sides are throbbing.

“Can you hear it?” 

You didn’t notice the captain standing there, leaning with his back against the railing not far away. He’s watching you. You can feel it, even if you can’t make out his face or much of anything in the weak dusk-light of the dimmed ferry lights. His silhouette is large and intimidating, filling out his coat with a wide chest and broad shoulders, and he easily towers over you. His hands are in his pockets again.

“What is that?” you ask.

“What, indeed.” You can hear the smile in his voice. “Something old and lonely.” He pushes away from the railing and starts to walk away. You follow without hesitation, falling into step with his brisk, heavy pace. “I should ask you, shouldn’t I? Where you’re from, where you’re going. Feels redundant at this stage.” 

Your heart races. Your lungs burn. There’s so much you want to ask him but you can’t get the words past a lump in your throat, a suffocating pressure like a choking hand.

“Deep breaths. Don’t thrash and panic. You know how to breathe.” He pushes a door open. You expect an ascending staircase up to the bridge, but the steps go down in a winding spiral. There are no lights lining the cramped, dizzying corridor. You can’t see how far down it goes. The captain steps past you and begins descending. He pauses when he sees you aren’t following, half-swallowed by darkness. 

The song is coming from below. It echoes up from the darkened staircase, low and haunting. The captain holds out his hand and it’s much larger than yours, ridges of tendon prominent beneath the skin. Thin, translucent membranes stretch across the space between his fingers. When you touch him, his skin feels slightly damp.

He leads you down. The air gets colder. The steps shriek and clatter beneath your combined weight. Eventually, you can’t even see that far ahead, the dark too deep and the surface too far away. You should have reached the bottom by now, you think, should have found yourself on the lower deck ages ago. The song grows steadily closer, louder, more defined, notes that ebb and flow with the steady slowness of the tide. You can hear the captain humming the same melody, his voice dipping into the same rumbling pitch.

“He was stranded here by a shift a very, very long time ago,” the captain says. “Where he comes from, the water is endless. It helps to have a voice that carries. That’s why our dreams are what they are, you understand? We speak while we sleep.” 

Shimmering light curls at the edge of your vision. It’s gone when you turn to look at it properly. Another comes, closer this time, a luminous body that wriggles by like a floating serpent. Your eyes are adjusting. You start to notice the dark moving; flitting shapes and rippling silhouettes. Bulbous, undulating things that drift along soundlessly, tapered cones of flesh with bulging eyes and tendril-curtained mouths, gently swaying things pulsing gently with colorful light. Is this an aquarium? Some kind of submerged observation deck? The thought is dispelled as a small, darting thing flits right in front of your face and you feel it moving, the wake of its rapid escape like wind on your face.

No. Not wind. Water, you think. It’s all around you. You’re not descending a staircase but sinking slowly. That smattering of white specks like a congested night sky—those aren’t stars. It’s marine snow. The auroras are bioluminescence. All this time, you were looking in the wrong direction, thinking of an alien place impossibly far away. The captain’s coat and hat drift by and you look back to the hand gently holding yours. 

He is a glimmering silhouette, twinkling dots outlining a humanoid shape. He takes your hands and presses them to his chest, urging you to touch, to feel and explore. You feel the rough, bumpy texture of his skin and powerful muscle rippling just underneath. You feel fins, both soft, short ruffles and firm, trailing flaps like sails. Sharp spines protrude from his hips like jutting bone. What you initially mistake for a wound—ripped, fluttering flesh—are actually gills, a row of them along his sides. When your fingertips graze over them, he shudders.

“Be careful where you touch,” he says. You don’t think his mouth moves, but you hear him in your head, an echoing, velvet purr. “It’s sensitive. You’re showing interest. You’re very much wanted, I assure you, but do you want?”

He lifts one of his webbed hands to your neck, stroking his thumb along the side, and heat fills your body. You press against the touch more insistently and that rumbling purr grows louder. Suddenly his hands are on your hips and he’s between your legs, giving a slow grind that makes you aware of something unusual. He’s hard, you can feel it—you’re naked and can’t remember when you got undressed, but you feel him, engorged and twitching against your inner thigh.

And he has two, you realize. 

“You move too quickly, Lorne. You have only just spoken.”

That’s not his voice. That’s a whisper so powerful it fills your head, all you can hear. The song has stopped, you realize, and the darkness beside you is stirring.

Seeing the thing in the dark is dizzying and difficult to comprehend now. He is not a beast of the cosmos but of deep waters. An abyssal giant of staggering, nearly incomprehensible size, you are smaller than the one silver eye staring down at you. When he moves, you move with him, stirred by the water swirling in his wake. He is trailing fins and floating tendrils, aglow in brilliant gemstone hues. You have never seen him properly because he is glassy and delicate like a cnidarian polyp, great swaths of flesh and flowing membranes partially translucent. You can see winding internal structures, serpents of intestines and descending coils of bone.

“You move too slow,” the captain, Lorne, shoots back. He brings your legs up to wrap around his waist and rocks against you, rumbling in approval at the shiver it draws out of you. “It isn’t fair, the way you’ve been keeping them all to yourself lately. If the rest of us did courtship at your pace, we’d die of old age before we got anywhere.” He tilts your chin and mouths at the sensitive spots on your neck, the scrape of his teeth making you dig your nails into his shoulders. He sucks on a spot that pries a whimper from your throat and you’re embarrassed, painfully aware of how intently you’re being watched. 

But the thing in the dark encourages you with the press of a soft tendril, pushing you further into Lorne’s embrace. “This is true. I have been selfish. And they have been hurting and afraid.”

“Not tonight,” Lorne says. He drags you back and forth over the heads of his cocks, teasing you with quick, hard rutting against your sex. “Tonight you’re safe. Nothing will hurt you.” 

You want more than he gives you. The friction is good, mind-numbing, easy to lose yourself to. His cocks rub against your sex and you can feel just how large they are nestled against your stomach like that, full, throbbing lengths giving off milky puffs of milt into the water. His grip shifts and he’s clutching your ass, kneading your flesh as he pulls you into the harsh, breathtaking rhythm of his grinding, and you’re imagining how it’d feel for him to fuck you like this. Hard and merciless, pounding your insides with one or both of his cocks, feeling the slap of full balls slapping against your ass. 

“God, I will,” he moans, nipping at your neck again. “Come back to me and I will. Get you nice and stretched so you can take all of me, stuff you with so much fucking cum I’ll be dripping out of you for days.” You want it now but he hushes you, cuts off your desperate, choked sounds with his lips on yours. The kiss is razor sharp and you cut your lip on his teeth but it just makes you hotter, raking your nails down his back until you’re sure you feel blood bubbling up around your fingers. It makes him groan into your mouth and grind even harder, every thrust a jerking, violent motion that oozes a cloud of milt. 

“Lorne,” the thing in the dark whispers, chiding.

“No.” Lorne sinks his claws into the meat of your ass possessively. You barely notice the sting, too focused on how good it feels to be here, sharing body heat in the cold of the abyss, nearly mating. “No, I don’t—don’t wanna let go.” 

There’s a fluttering sensation; warmth and comfort, a blanket against your back. The thing in the dark’s shimmering, auroral appendages throb faintly, filled with a slow heartbeat. “We cannot follow where you are going. But we will do all that we can.” 

You shake your head. You don’t want to go. You cling tightly to Lorne but the thing is insistent. It tugs you apart. 

“Wake,” it whispers. You feel the weight of its sadness bearing down on you, an ocean of grief—and the smallest, most hesitant spark of hope. “And…return to us safely.”

Your eyes open. It’s dark, but not the way you remember. This is soft darkness; simple shadows. The parking lot of the ferry. Jamie is sitting next to you, trying and failing to conceal a smile. “Good dream, huh?” they say, leering at you. You have no idea how to answer. Your indecision must come across as embarrassment because they laugh and give you a quick kiss, rubbing your shoulder. “It’s morning. I just poked my head out above deck. Captain says we’ll be there soon.”

“Oh. Good,” you say, sounding about as groggy and confused as you feel. You rub your eyes and stretch your legs the best you can. 

“Shift was just about over when I woke up. Was he right about that? We didn’t get shoved halfway across the Drift, did we?” 

You shake your head. You’re right where you should be. Anchor is west and the gap is smaller now. There’s just enough space for a town on the way but you’ll be there by tonight easily, likely sooner. “We’re really going to reach it,” you say, quietly awed. Fear creeps in soon after, followed by doubt. You’ll be there soon, and then what? Do you really stand a chance? 

Some time later, the ferry docks. Metal shrieks and rattles as the ramp lowers and you’re greeted by foggy daylight, the road stretching onward. The Verlindans are the first to leave, rushing for solid ground. Lorne ambles down to shore, bidding you farewell with a curt nod. He looks fully human, you think, no sign of his bioluminescent patches. “Safe travels,” he says. “And sweet dreams.” 

It’s only as you’re driving away that you see him move in the rearview mirror, lifting a webbed hand out of his pocket. He lifts his head and waves briefly. Then he touches his thumb and fingers to the sides of his neck in a gesture that looks innocent if not vaguely threatening, not nearly as obscene as it makes you feel. His smile is sharp and jagged. His eyes are the same stark, metallic shade as any other animal adapted to darkness.