I am the guide, I am the beacon, I am the font - Navigator short story
I kneel before the altar, I clasp a rosary in one hand and a censer in the other. Sweat greases my palms as tendons flex and lock, I concentrate, surrounded by a half a dozen others. We mutter litanies and prayers of safe voyage, though I lead the flock in our fervent whispers, for I am the shepherd to this herd.
A woman beside me keens as she bears the brunt of a psychic onslaught. Our task commences. Before me, visions of colours that should not be and creatures that never were whip and tumble. I am assaulted in every sense of the word. I feel my bones crack, my organs rupture, my soul wail in agony. I know this to be a falsehood.
I cannot discern the mundane from the abstract any longer, the keening woman has transmogrified in ways I cannot describe, her being bulging and morphing into shapes unrealised by the human mind and sounds echoed by the Urr-song of the Dark Gods.
My soul flares bright. My flock sees me, they swarm my soul, a warm, bright shroud against the lapping darkness of the unmaking waves. My soul burns with the heat of ten thousand suns, the pain of the unreal caught ablaze in the rapturous sense of communion I have with my fellow clandestine guides.
And then darkness devours us whole. I can see but two lights in this shroud of confusion, dampened like cascades of incandescence strangled by a thick-woven bag of burlap. Where am I? Where are the flock? Their radiance had blinded and captivated me so that I have been disoriented. Where is the Astronomicon? Where is my beacon? I call for my congregation to converge, but my throat is caught and sealed with cloying tar, burning it shut as I am forced to make a judgement.
I scream in frustration and fear. The tar sloughs down my throat like a slug and the sack tightens around my throat. I must decide. And so I do.
Energy surges through my body, it is as if my spirit is swollen and bloated. I feel my veins and innards bellowing and ballooning in my physical self. I cry out, the burlap is removed from my skull and I am face to face with a horror I can hardly describe. The tar melts away, yet my throat is still raw from screaming, bloating to impossibly broad proportions as the being grins at me sadistically.
I understand now. I am the font. This thing, it molests my very essence, it defiles my soul and uses me as nothing more than a portal. I am bursting apart as it uses me to infiltrate my flock, my ship, my charges.
I do not want to die like this. For this anathema of a creature to use me in such a heinous way. I lash out, I beg for death, for release, to be stopped. I am plagued with visions of the beginning and the end, I become a mouth-piece for this being to espouse scornful truths of what is to come.
It warps my voice, I warble and gurgle each word simultaneously; several voices erupt from my throat at once as other cretins see to use my flesh as a means of breaching the realm of the real.
But no righteous fate shall befall me, none of honour, none of peace. I bloat, I choke, I distend, I burst.
Luminescent rays explode from my body as I finally rupture, and from them cascades the remnants of my very being. I shatter marble and crack armaglass, bisecting one of the flock who was knelt beside me. I have failed them. My consciousness fades as the soul dissipates, all I can do is watch in silent disgrace as the daemons tear through the room, razing all in their wake.
