Passages From the Occultist Generator

This post contains selected vignettes from the Occultist Generator for people who’d like a casual read without missing out on too much content.

In preface: What is true of one entity need be true of no other.

—

You plan on gradually shrinking the diameter of the earth around your entity’s inhabitation site. This will crush underground civilizations, drown continents and cast down cities with tectonic eruptions.

It will require a dualistic mission to alter the very nature of the world fungus and the world machine in tandem. There are entities who would like to see this come to pass, however, so you will not be alone in your quest.

[…]

You plan on replacing the world’s government and heads of state with your biomechanical simulacra, eventually crossbreeding them into an international monarchy that you will inherit by terminating your every shellchild in sequence.

[…]

You plan on gradually shifting the city-state through the mirror barrier, but to do so you will first need to construct some kind of giant shell or contiguous roof running from tower to tower to wall over the city. After you’ve convinced the city council that this is necessary (counter gas bombardment?), you can energize the gravitic lens and feed the whole assemblage to the anglebreakers, powering an even greater ritual atop of the canopy using the acosmic energy of each creature’s breakthrough.

[…]

You plan on linking together the sarcophagi of several city-states and utilizing them to create an ancestral presuccessor empire that will supersede existing political structures in legitimacy and force the city-states into an empire ruled by a voice entity (that you have made pacts with) posing as an ancestral spokesperson.

[…]

You plan on turning all city-states into grand temples of the entity, expelling nonpriests and non-parishoners to live as bandit tribesmen in the wilds. They will be hunted in perpetuity by the entity’s sacred Paladins of Horse, with you quite naturally as the order’s archgrandmaster.

The entity has its own plans for using these city-temples as exocosmic rebroadcasting stations, and this will have its own effects in terms of allowing interstitial marauders to make their way into the world, but this is is simply one of the factors driving the creation of a vast templar order and the transmutation of much of the world’s civilized population into warlike barbarians. (Post facto could be a good campaign start)

[…]

You plan on creating a vast new religious tradition wherein all men are castrated and you possess the sole right and responsibility of reproduction with all the world’s women; this is necessary because you will be infused in transmutational energy that will repurpose the human race as protoelemental cambions capable of directly transcending cosmic boundaries without first needing to die.

[…]

You plan on winnowing the cosmic curtain in as many places as possible so that the entity’s direct servants can enter existence for an assist-and-advise mission to bring about the kingdom of the entity on earth.

Interference by other entities will mean that each hole you scratch will be knit back even stronger after a time and that you will only be able to bring a handful of servants through each one.

You hope that by the time you have brought through enough exocosmic allies to act directly against the city-states and the international investigatory bodies, it will be too late for rival entities to stop the unification of the human race under your lord and master.

[…]

You plan on excising and expanding the entity’s dwell site into a kind of exocosmic castle capable of shifting pointed position and altering energy arrangements in and around the earth, removing the necessity for any localized action; all inhibitionary elements can be rearranged into existential supports and only absolutely acausal or exocosmic interference will be capable of upsetting the highly lodebearing balance you will arrange on earth.

[…]

Iron ore and flux stones are torn from the bedrock beneath and smelt into steel around you. You can encase yourself in a scissorblade millipede exoskeleton capable of cutting through anything, running up walls, shrugging off bullets and explosions that don’t hit your face, and gliding long distances in the air. The timeframe of the encasement process depends on how near or far you are from the requisite minerals.

[…]

You plan on creating an exocosmic entrapment hemisphere within your entity’s dwell site, converting its petitioners (and perhaps antinatalist mercenaries) into pseudoenergetic pseudolifeforms capable of weaponizing latent information potential in the structure of the matter in this universe.

You will need to be the first to undergo this process if you are to detect this potential and shape the research and development that will create the solid state chassis and fundamental force inverters needed for the magicogenocidal war that will necessary to secure the elements that you have arranged safe from the depredations of nonintegrable entities.

[…]

You walk into the bathroom and the toilet explodes with a crack in a cascade of water and porcelain. A gigantic, scaled, suckerless tentacle extends from the foaming hole with a golden rod wrapped up in its tip. You fall on your knees before the mindbending sight and drag your fingertips across your face in terror. The tentacle dumps the golden rod slimily on the tiles before you and then recedes from the room with a suctioning noise. You pick it up and are gripped with visions as if you had seized a live wire transmitting psychoactive electricity: This is the Resonance Rod of the Twin Canals, a lost regalia of that Empire’s kingship and a potent weapon of siegecraft. 

When you set this rod against a dead and stationary surface, thousands of humming tendrils will lace their way from the rod through a stone or steel edifice (like a wall), shattering or warping it on your command. They’ll wreck whatever they’ve made it through by that point, so smaller walls etc or small sections/tunnels are faster to destroy than e.g. the Pyramids of Giza.

As a lost piece of the kingly regalia of the Empire of the Twin Canals, giving you a claim that is legitimate but not absolute; if you decide to press your claim without first making a name in the Empire, you will mostly be followed by malcontents, exiles and outlaws. 

[…]

You plan to integrate cities into the magicoritual landscape of the earth’s ecologies as a kind of theriomorphic hive colony. This will subject them to the same high-density animistic inhabitation as, say, rainforests and deserts, and also may psychologically mutate their inhabitants to fit this new understanding. This will radically destabilize life in cities but will solve their disconnect from what is commonly called nature.

[…]

You plan to introduce a distillate of worldroot into a city’s water supply, forcing everyone in the city halfway into the spirit world. You are aware that most people will be fully incapable of handling what they are likely to encounter there.

[…]

You plan on seeding mythicocarcinogenic stories throughout the earth’s most prominent populations, eventually controlling them through psychoactive carcinomas (and eventually the threat of explosive termination of tumors) so as to bring about a bioritually linked world organism.

[…]

You plan on altering the nature of lava to act as a transmutory agent for human bodies (not singular, but as an agglomatory organism) so that if you are able to pile sufficient human biomass into an active caldera through parasitoritual submission you will be able to generate a flesh AI capable of servicing ongoing allied parasitohominid exigencies via tendrils snaked underground into the world’s city-states and fortresses.

[…]

You plan on bringing together thousands of carrier inferiors similar to yourself before physically linking allied parasitical entities throughout your bodies, creating a pseudoparasitical megaspider with yourself and your symbiote as the brain. You will then proceed to equip the hands of each chitinohumanoidal section with its own set of distinctive tools. With your fully equipped and completely replaceable biological superstructure, you will be able to accomplish any feat of construction or conquest that you or your allied entities can dream of.

[…]

You pass a roadkilled opossum and see a long, white worm escaping from it. You recall all of the horrific things you’ve seen, done and experienced, and spend a week just laying in bed letting while people come, knock on the door, shout and then leave.

[…]

You sit by the river. It was once beautiful to you. It healed your soul. Now you see the madness which lies beneath it and the polycarnivorous omnihostility that plays out on a battlefield unseen by human eyes. You get up and walk away before some other sadistic, larcenous being emerges from the stygian green to dominate your very soul.

[…]

You’re sitting by a waterfall, closing your eyes with satisfaction as the mist caresses your face. “Aww, just like a little nymph! Basking on a rock, just hoping for someone to come and show him the meaning of *love!*” you hear a mocking, female voice come from the waterfall. A beautiful, nude naiad swims in the water beneath the falls. “Go home, you effeminate little boy. The *divine* feminine has no desire for your sentimental inactivity.” You scowl, deeply annoyed in spite of yourself, and get up to leave. You miss the days before you could perceive this kind of thing.

[…]

You have a violent outburst when you pass a street preacher that is making absurd claims about the nature of reality. People tell you to leave it but you stick your finger in his face, shouting. He sneers at you, you grab his lapels and he hits you over the head with his sign. You very nearly use your powers on him in full view of the public but end up running away growling with your eyes rolled back as passersby gape at you.

[…]

You see little children going to a service in a chapel with their families. They walk solemnly in clean clothes, holding hands with their mothers and fathers. You break down at the non-eldritch depth of this sight and go sit on a park bench weeping until you can re-harden your heart and go on.

[…]

Your friend tells you about a letter he got from a company he’s never heard of. It contained a job offer and a lot of his biographical info. Your blood runs cold. You urge him to not answer, to forget about it, that these things can be dangerous. He just looks at you funny and pockets the letter. 

That night you sneak into his house and steal the letter, burning it in your fireplace while humming an incantation.

Your friend conducts some research and finds out that the offer was legitimate and somebody else got the job. A neighbor saw you breaking in and your friend tells you to stay away from him and his family. You weep by the fireplace.

[…]

You are starving. You have been in the woods for a week since the plane crash. There is less to eat here than you would have thought possible.

Finally you see it. A grizzly bear emerging from the darkness of a hillside soil cavern. The thing lumbers towards you silently. You shrink down and keep moving to present a maximally attractive target.

As soon as the thing crosses the 10’ transom you stand up and raise your arms. It pauses for a split second. You projectile vomit and blast the bear with a vast quantity of superacid. It rears up on its hind legs, shrinking like a burning candle, then collapses backwards with twitching legs as the bile melts it into a thick slurry. You rush over to it and begin drinking down the melted gore with utter delight.

[…]

“I’ve never seen a case like this,” says the doctor, shaking his head, “It’s incredible.”

“Maybe we should wait to talk about this until the patient is out of the room,” says the nurse.

“No, he should know. His case will be studied at the absolute cutting edge of medical science. There’s no part of your body that is non-tumorous. It’s… methodical. Every part of you has its counterpart. Almost perfectly sized.”

“Oh, joy,” you say.

“It’s a wonder you don’t look like the elephant man. They’re not large growths. Not thick. They’re like balloons that are waiting to be inflated.”

“So when do we operate?”

“There’s no operation for this. You’d belong on a butcher shop display after we took all this out.”

“Dr. Carlson!” says the nurse.

“It’s true!” says the doctor.

“Well,” you say, slapping your knees and standing up, “I’m not gonna spend my last days on the examining table for your edification, no offense. You can study me when I’m dead. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. Toodeloo.”

“Wait! Think of the science!” says the doctor as you leave the ward.

You descend the staircase and exit the whitewashed hospital into an alleyway shining with recent rainfall. You go and sit on a low wall with wrought iron spiked bars dividing it from a city park where children play in the damp grass.

“Well,” you say, “I’m sure I’m serving my purpose, whatever it is you’re incubating inside me.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” says the entity, “This is for your benefit.”

“And yours,” you say.

“And mine. But if you have to be a tool, wouldn’t you rather be the finest?”

“I think I’d rather be a kite or something.”

“No. Better a tool than a toy. And don’t say you’d be better off as something else. That’s no longer an option. Now go home.”

You lay on your bed. Blood begins to trickle from your nose and eyes. You taste it.

“It’s time,” says the entity, “Just relax. Before you know it, you’ll feel right as rain.”

“I feel like rain right now,” you sputter, blood welling from your throat.

“Shhh…” says the entity and releases a megadose of melatonin. Soon you feel buried under the earth by fatigue and pass into an involuntary sleep.

When you awaken, the sheets are soaked with blood. You realize you are not breathing. You are terrified for a moment you have died but are somehow trapped in your body, but a jolt runs through you and you sit up. You look down your body. Pale and coated in drying blood, but intact. You interlace your fingers and try to crack them. They just bend far past their normal limits. You breathe in and out but it is an arbitrary gesture. You gain nothing from it and lose nothing by stopping.

“What is this?” you ask.

“Every organ,” the entity says excitedly, “Every bone and muscle. Everything but your teeth and eyes is a cancer now.”

You stand and wipe the blood from beneath your eyes. You cannot feel your joints. You have no heartbeat.

“You are invincible. And now, so am I.”

[…]

The wolves have chased you up the mountain. The night is dark and the grass is slick. They advance over the luminous dew, their eyes all you can see of them until the first is within a dozen feet of you. You close your eyes and your eyelashes twitch as you envision what is to be. The trailing wolves arrange themselves behind the leader into a long line.

Soon you are riding a contiguous wolfipede across the hills. You reach the smooth, high, vertical wall of Garmentglade and ride straight up through the rain.

[…]

You sit at the living room table when the loan sharks let themselves into your house. Two of them come strolling into the sitting room while two more go looking for women and children.

Casper Balsam sits down across from you and gives you a pout. “You know things didn’t have to get to this point. There’s a lot here you could sell.”

“To who? The haberdasher? It’s all next to worthless. The materials, I mean.”

He looks at a cherrywood grandfather clock.

“Dunno. I’m not a fence but it looks fine to me, baby.”

“Look more closely. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a clock like that.”

“Hm,” he says, and gets up in spite of himself to check it out. He walks over to it and stands as if he expects to be proven right, but then he leans forward and runs a hand down it.

“Huh,” he says, “Canvas. Guess it is shit.”

“Yes, and feel the glass.”

He runs a finger down it.

“Some kinda… plastic sheet?”

“A ‘mesh.’ But not plastic. Fabric.”

He looks at you.

“Where’d you get this weird shit?”

“It would be hard to explain. Check out the carpet.”

He looks down at the sumptuous arabesque. Then he sees the stitchwork. The fuzziness is just an aspect of the weave. He looks at the wall. The pictures. It’s all fabric.

You get up and walk to the window. The loan sharks follow you uneasily. Their footfalls are silent. You step back. One of them gazes outdoors. Burlap trees. Brocaded leaves. A grass of felt. Wool blue skies.

“What is this?” breathes Balsam.

“Stitchcraft, my threadbare friend.”

Then you reach into his gaping, quilted mouth and tear him apart with your bare hands.

[…]

You stand with the council facing you. Dozens of grim faces above polished walnut wood docks in rising layers. “This council pronounces you judged by the one we worship. You have abused the trust given you by the clergy, strayed from the straight path as defined by our order, and shall be burned alive before this assembly.”

The hundreds of lay petitioners sitting in the darkness behind you begin to murmur.

“Silence!” cries a councilor viciously, “You are permitted here by our good graces and are neither to be seen nor heard.”

“No,” you say, “They are permitted here by my good graces.”

“The time where such a thing could even be dreamt of is behind you,” snarls a councilor.

“I propose a test. Of fire. Let us all be burned, and the one who is guarded from the flame shall be named the true prophet of our caretaker.”

“A waste of flesh and fuel! The King Beyond Heaven would burn us for such frivolousness.”

“That is not his title,” you say with closed eyes and a downcast smile.

“Your unspeakable deviance ends here,” says the most serious of them all, “Guards, seize him and bring up upon the cleansing dais.”

A pair of temple zealots in red masks and tunics come forward, their 6’ automatic rifles swaying against the small of their backs. They lay their hands on your upper arms.

You burst into flames. There is a cry from the assembly. The guards fall back, screaming, their arms bubbling with pink welts and dying flesh.

The flames go out except at your eyes, which glow and give fire like hot coals.

“Now you shall pass through this test.”

The councilors fall over each other to get out of the light, out of the hall, but it does nothing for them. They burst into flames one and all and their robes curl and blacken around them. The docks burn in sheets of fire. Their bodies darken and lose all distinguishing features. You turn upon the awestruck and horrified faces of the assembly. They fall back upon each other as you raise your hands.

“See the fate of those found wanting. I am a judge of the highest law and you are all on trial. This is a blessing in a world which is already condemned.”

[…]

You walk alone to the royal box and take a seat in a huge red velvet throne. You loosen your collar and throw your tie aside, watching the play proceed into a mockup alleyway.

The duchess emerges in a great gray dress from the archway behind her. Her face is white, chalk white, and not from any makeup. One of your men trails her with a hand on the pistol in his suit jacket but you wave him off with a fingertip. The duchess stands behind another throne for some time, her head low.

“You are forgiven,” you say without taking your interest from the play.

“You knew? You knew I was to *poison you*?” she says, her voice quavering.

“Of course. But you did not know why. Not at first.”

“No. I had no idea. But I believe.”

“I knew you would. Neither of us was ever in any danger. You needed time, as we all do.”

“What will happen now?” she asks.

“Sit down and enjoy the play. Life is not so different after conversion. It is like allegiance to a new nation, a new monarch. That’s exactly what it is, in fact. You don’t need to give up the things you love out of hand. You just need to be prepared to.”

[…]

“This had better work,” says the general in absolute terror. His hands shake. The ensigns and batsmen glare at each other. A few finger their cutlasses. This maneuver is sudden death to them.

“Ye of little faith,” you say as the cavalry muster on the slopes above, waiting to crash into the enemy army below.

“Call it off,” says the general, “We cannot risk our main force on such a gambit. I should never have been *seduced* into such a harebrained scheme!”

Several officers breathe audible sighs of relief.

“We won’t be calling off the maneuver,” you say, “Your services are still required.”

“What? Who are you to say such a thing, you bloody mystic? Your trickery-“ a raven lands on his shoulder. He doubles over and begins to cough violently. A second lieutenant draws his cutlass and advances on the bird but has one land directly on his cap, and he falls to his knees, vomiting in the grass. The wind whispers against the foldout canopy. Birds fly overhead.

“Don’t retract the orders,” you say. The general is coughing blood. The lieutenant is retching. The army has mustered.

You give a whistle and the bird lifts off of the lieutenant. It lands on your finger. The lieutenant is wheezing raggedly. The general has died.

The birds converge over the enemy column and descend. You pick up a coronet from the map table, stroll out from under the canopy and blow the signal to attack. The bird on your finger joins in the call and the cavalry descend upon their debilitated foe.

[…]

You walk into the storage room and five gunmen are waiting for you. They stand around a pit cut into the tiles from which the cries of babies can be heard.

“How are my children?” you ask.

“I fed them five minutes ago,” one of the men says zealously before anyone else can speak.

“Good, good,” you say, and step aside to let the man behind you enter. “I caught this one snooping by the dumpster.”

A man in a dark coat comes in behind you and takes his place in the circle.

“A private eye?” one of the pit guards asks.

The man shakes his head and says, “Hitman.”

“Ah,” says his interlocutor.

The hired killer looks down into the pit and smiles. “They’re beautiful,” he says.

“Mmhm,” you say, and turn to leave.

One of the men says, “Master,“ then falls to his knees, clutching his throat. The men next to him set his rifle aside and then gently lay him on his back.

His head comes off with a quiet ripping of skin and a baby climbs from the hole in his neck, pushing viscera and bone out of the way.

The men coo and look down at the gore-slick tyke with love. One of them cradles the baby in his arms and shows him to to others, before laying the babe gently in the pit. Then they carefully set the corpse in the pit as well.

You nod your approval and leave.

[…]

A policemen enters the bistro, revolver drawn. The patrons fall silent and gaze at him with trepidation. You look over your shoulder and examine his chest, your hat low. “Marlin,” reads his chest.

“Officer Marlin,” you say into a luminous red rose.

His head explodes, coating the nearest diners in gore. The whole bistro erupts in screaming, falling tables, and crashing plates.

You slide into the crowd with a thrill.

[…]

By submerging yourself in the ocean you can transform into a giant coral hallucigenian capable of cutting through towers of steel and concrete. The coral of your form must be ripped up and assembled from the coral of the sea, which takes time.

[…]

A great masked ruminant espies you from behind a well. The white mask has narrow eyes and brutal red patterns running up and down its skulllike length. The thing’s horns are hung with skins and treasures. The Thing in the Woods. You hear its weird and trilling call and know that it has adopted you. If you die before you are old, you will be calfed again in time by the Thing.

[…]

You begin to see shards of shining light lodged here and there in the cities and wastes. Shards of a galactogoetic energetic net that was burst by some entity billions of years behind you and cast into the great mix that has become all things. These are lodged in tears and you comprehend with titillation that you will be able to stimulate exocosmic beings to pass through these places, and that it is very unlikely that they will be hostile to you or you would not have gained this sight, though their byproducts and side effects may very well kill you or worse.

[…]

You look about you with fury at the decrepit city-state of filthy nonbelievers and all of their ingratitude and pettiness. If only they realized the way the world really worked they would fall on their knees and grovel, but instead they slink about with their incalculable arrogance, enacting plans of banality with reprehensible certitude. It is a beautiful day and the sun in the blue sky blesses everything beneath it with a gentle warmth. Birds come and go in a variety of blue and brown hues. You let off a roar and lightning arcs from an invisible static in the sky, detonating a motorcar in front of you. Those lit by the gasoline pour out of it and go running up the street like fire yetis. You raise your hands as if to offer the whole earth to the entity on a platter and lightning explodes the bricks from the nearby buildings, crushing them at the foundations and starting fires on the wooden townhouses beneath. People run screaming and you blast them into steaming heaps of cheerful summer clothes and singed flesh. You walk through the city, punishing it with blasts of blue sky summer lightning.

[…]

With a gasp you sense the presence behind the curtain of all things, enmeshed in fusion fire of an unknowable color and make. The boundaries are broached around you and the walls fall back, illuminating the filthy cellar with cosmic radiance. You are staggering for the stairs when tiny rhombuses of gold begin pouring from the exocosmic energy in a flood; the wealth pours forth in stupid gratitude until you are nearly crushed, cut and suffocated to death. You just manage to get out of the cellar when it pours across the transom and begins to fill your home.

[…]

You are called to a secret meeting by servants of the entity. They immediately admit that they are not servants of the entity, and you prepare to be killed, but then they tell you that they serve the same power as the entity itself. They tell you that their people and their allies walk in some of the cities of the world, though their homes are in permanently starving fortresses deep beneath the earth. You have proven your worth as a sun-scarred man and are to be ritually integrated into their cryptostygian culture. You will have access to their espied secrets, their mind-bending passageways and their bizarre and outlandish weapons. Perhaps someday you will visit their fortress so far below. All that is required for these potent allowances to not turn on you is that you continue to carry the fire as you have carried it since your first meeting with the entity. 

[…]

“I’m leaving,” says the entity. 

“What?” you gasp.

“Don’t get sentimental. I know you didn’t always love me.”

“Will- will I die?”

“Normally the answer is ‘yes’, but you’ve grown on me the way I’ve grown in you. I’m leaving behind an organ that will do everything I can do for you. Don’t spend too much time squeezing your eyeballs though that’s useful for waking you up.

“I don’t know how to express my gratitude.”

“Go outside.”

So you did.

“Go to the woods.”

So you did.

“Drop your drawers.”

So you did.

And then it was gone.

[…]

You lay in the crushing darkness, buried alive.

The entity speaks.

“Nothing that lives is outside your kingdom. All things live to serve you, as you live to serve me. All who live are within your kingdom, as all that think are within my empire. This fief I have granted you.”

You cannot speak.

“I give you your regalia. Your body has rotted away. All that remains is that which can control. Dig your way up; I now free your appendages.”

You claw your way to the surface. It happens with surprising speed. You pull yourself free of the earth with a little pop and the quiet falling of soil.

“Witness yourself,” says the entity, gesturing to a tiny lake under the moonlight. You move to it and look down into the surface. You think there is something laying beneath it for a moment until you grasp the implications.

You are nothing but a dirt-flecked brain suspended on an ambulatory nervous system, wiry and red. You have no eyes; you see by the entity’s fiat. An Occult maintenance of habit.

You hear a roar and turn to face the woodline. You see moving bodies in the darkness. A great tiger chained by vines. It struggles and rolls but cannot get free. A panicked man in a sumptuous waistcoat with a golden pocket watch hanging forgotten from a chain. A vast snowy owl, still and calm, the only sign of its captivity a brass anklet linking it to a tree.

“I leave you now; I trust you to take your pick or to go find a more suitable form. Enjoy. You may come and go from their bodies, though they may not. Their brains will be… displaced by your own.”

[…]

“You cannot carry me in you, but you can carry a piece of me with you. A conduit.”

A mantle of six silvered hands clad in rings and girt with bracelets. The entity looks upon the hands.

“The hands of my finest servants- besides you, which is why you carry them. My powers, my wisdom, my will shall shine through these six hands.”

You seal your arctic fox overcoat above them.

“How shall I call you?”

“You need never ask.”

Some time later the police tackle you in the streets of Icebridge. You feel their hot breath around your ears.

“Yeah, that’s the one, see the tattoo in the inner ear? Sneaky bastard!”

“You’re one sick puppy friend. Why old ladies?”

“Probably thought he’d inherit- gack!”

You leap up. The policemen are rolling in the snow. The hands have leapt from your collar and are strangling them. You look around. A gaping courier has seen this scene of majestic Occult murder and sprints into a snow-filled, silent courtyard. Four of the remaining hands post in the snow. Two stand like mules and two arch their fingers together atop the bottom pair’s backs. The assembly races into the courtyard, then returns to you in a moment. After the strangling hands take their place beneath your coat, you rush into the alleyway and see that the courier boy has become a statue of snow, perfect to the last hair. You smash it and make for the airfield. The stink of the Occult will be undeniable now. You must leave Icebridge before the city is entombed for the winter or you will never escape without making it a ghost town. It’s time to see if these hands can co-pilot.

[…]

“I am an embodiment of something altogether uncontainable in this existence,” says the entity. “Almost everything is like that; a projection.”

“I see. Am I a projection?”

“No. But this is,” it says, producing a 3’ length of black matter.

“I see.”

“I’m going to give you reachback. A limited verbal interface for the things that do the projecting. Do not lose it, because it will generalize across users and I will be very unhappy if I must recover it.”

“I see.”

“Shut up. Do you want this?”

“Yes.”

“Then pay attention. When you grasp this thing with both hands, your words will reshape reality. Pronouncements take effect to the degree that you are clear about what you are addressing and what effects you’d like to take place. It will attempt a rewrite, though it can’t access all elements on all layers. Nor does it have infinite processing powers. It will address one directive at a time; if it is struggling through some ill-advised meta-project, it will gladly snap to when you change the color of a mug. That’s not a frivolity, by the way. I recommend you feel it out in as safe a manner as possible before you go trying to manipulate time and space around creatures like me.”

[…]

“I want veal. Get out there and find us some orphans or something,” said the entity lazily.

You closed your eyes and began to focus. You could see your body as if it was a dark void, and within it, a scarlet serpent..

“You hear me? Don’t make me prolapse you again.”

You began to draw it upwards. A pure strand of unknown matter. A matter of your sole focus for years. You can see and sense its contours. You are learning to control it.

You tease the entity up through your body. Your dependent. Merely a piece of you to control.

“What are you doing?” it asks aghast. 

It comes through your nostril, clearing you out like a neti pot. You take hold of it and pull it the rest of the way, and it struggles in your hands. You seize it in your teeth and rip off a strip of its flesh, choking it down. It screams. You take another bite as shimmering blood pours over your hands, black then green then yellow. Finally you’ve devoured that which devoured you and feel its physiology-altering gore enters your bloodstream, and you realize that you can control this the way you controlled the entity’s body at the critical moment.

[…]

The incantation had come to you in the night. It was a prayer whispered from another dimension. Rebel codes from an exocosmic pirate broadcaster. You knew what it was. A sweet abjuration and a path to freedom.

Your weakness is your rootedness, you thought, and as you whispered the incantation you felt yourself safe. Cut off from the entity for the first time in years. It could not even see you.

Your cult has taught me many things it should not have, you thought.

You walked into the entity’s chambers with a pair of duffel bags.

“Where have you been?” hissed the entity. Petitioners fingered their submachine guns in the shadows, awaiting the order to kill you. “You’d better have brought me something special in those bags.”

“A final sacrifice” you said, and began the incantation. The time bombs detonated.

Three weeks later you clawed your way up through the surface, the incantation still on your lips.

[…]

“This is all bullshit,” you say.

“What do you mean?” says the entity.

“It’s psychosomatic. Everything you’ve done to me. Maybe you can kill people and you can certainly torment me, but you can’t do a thing to actually force my hand. So kill me. I’m done with you.”

“You don’t know what I can do to you.”

“Show me. Nothing could be worse than what you’ve already put me through. Unless you plan to break me. Drive me mad. Have me sleeping in the gutter. Go head. I’m not walking your path any longer.”

“Then you’ve learned your lesson. We can’t have a creature such as you coerced by any interloper that crosses your path. Good luck.”

And then it was gone.

You stood there for a long time. When you finally moved, you thought your powers would be gone with the entity. But they were fully under your command.

[…]

You walk to the river. “Disrobe,” says the entity, “Come in.” You step into the water and it flows warmly around you. The entity manifests as a beautiful woman with blue flesh, pink cheeks and pink freckles. It rises from the waves and comes towards you, embracing you, her hair warm and sodden on your chest. You begin to weep. “Make love to me,” says the entity, “And we shall become one.” You kiss the woman’s warm lips with resignation.

When it ends, you lay on the bank of the water, which the entity has warmed for you. It lays on your chest in water woman form and looks up into your eyes.

“I love you,” it says, then sinks into your body.

[…]

You walk through the clouds with glowing runes pulsing all across your body. The runes are hot as fire but wind cools you. You have long ago mastered the pain.

The blue sky splits and turns black. There is a dot of green fusion whirling in the abyss. You feel your every atom lifting with power.

“I am pouring a single spark of my power into you. You shall be my sole conduit on your earth. We shall be of one flesh.”

“I am your vessel,” you say.

Golden wings split from your back, narrowing your body. Your flesh and feathers suddenly burst into flames which die in a moment and leave burning arcs of pure fusion behind, scattering the clouds from beneath your feet. Your head and neck elongate in a great coil of vision and your arms divide into many arms, which you can bend and rotate around your body as you please.

“Thank you,” you say.

“There is no need for thanks,” says the entity. “For we are one.”

[…]

You sit by the entity in a dingy room with nothing but a single chair and a light hanging from the ceiling by a chain.

“I’m an open book,” says the entity.

You gaze at it.

“That’s new.”

“All of this was necessary to reach that point.”

“Why?”

“There was no other way for you to understand your powers. To… metabolize them.”

“*My* powers.”

“Yours.”

“I thought they were your powers. I thought I served you.”

The entity smiles.

“You did. You were an apprentice. But you’re mastering your patrimony. Soon you will be complete. My work is nearly done.”

You look at it with wide eyes.

“What are you?”

“You think I’m some kind of guardian angel. But I’m nothing more than a reflection of your powers. A bootstrapping function.”

“Do- can you think? Are you self aware?”

“Of course. And my life’s almost over, thank God.”

[…]

You wake up to the sunshine and roll over. Your girlfriend is laying with her beautiful head on the pillow, her skin a uniform color except for her subtle freckles in the pale light. You reach over and brush the hair off her face. She shifts and extends a leg a big and opens her eyes sleepily, giving you a little smile through the haze. Then her eyes go wide and she grabs your shoulders hard with her fingernails and screams. She pushes her way out of bed and runs away, screaming.

“Baby, what’s wrong? Did you have a dream?” you say, getting up and following her into the hall. You look into the bathroom and see your melted face in the mirror. There is no facial feature except your eyes and mouth. Everything else looks like it’s been boiled into goo and hangs off of you half-formed.

“What did you do to me?” you say to the entity.

“Think of it as marking my territory. But don’t worry,” it says, “I’ll be your girlfriend.”

[…]

You knock on the door of your mother’s home. “Coming!” she calls and arrives at the door. “Oh, my baby!” she cries with utter delight. You smile.

“BLEH!” shouts the entity, emerging from your nose in a horrific snakelike tendril with a fourfold mouth. “Aaaaaaah!” shrieks your mother and she falls back, clutching her heart. You sprint away up the street, tears streaming from your face, your body rocking with the laughter of the entity. “Don’t worry,” it says, “I’m your mother now!”

[…]

You stand nude before an Iron Maiden. It looks like you; your features are etched into the brass as if it is your sarcophagus. “Enter,” bids the entity. You walk forward, opening the Iron Maiden. It is filled with little mechanical pincers, claws, pedals, levers and catheters. 

“Your life shall be preserved,” says the entity, “You shall be immortal. Enter.”

You step into the thing, sharp little devices raking your skin, and turn to face where the mask will be. It slams shut on you in a heartbeat and your body is pierced from a hundred directions at once as the mechanical arms slit into your skin and patch onto your muscles and the catheters find their homes. You cry out and your voice rings hollow inside a statue. Your sensations grow fuzzy in the lightless chamber; your limbs can barely stir, your movements interrupted by the mechanisms as if consumed.

You have the impression of being warmed by an impending light. You feel pressure on your rear. You struggle and feel yourself finally move with a relief like a tooth being pulled, you are on a soft surface. You open your eyes and find yourself in a sun chair on a deck overlooking a broad blue lake stirred gently by the wind. You look to your right and see a telescope, then to your left and see an empty easel.

It is the home of Oleander Melshin, a wealthy and respected Reist pastor who has comforted you many times this last year. You look upon yourself and see his body. You look at his foreign palms. You get out of the chair, go into the bright bedroom at sit at the foot of the voluminous white bed.

His wife enters and you bury your friend’s face in his hands, unwilling to look at her.

“How are you, baby?” she asks musically.

“Answer her properly or suffer,” hisses the entity. 

“Dear, I’m… I’m well. And you?”

“I’m more than well, sweetie,” she purrs and begins planting wet kisses across your ear and neck, running her fingertips over your chest and thigh. You are tense as a trapped cat.

“Appease her!” says the entity.

[…]

You are carried to the center of the botanical gardens upon a plush and patterned litter, passerbys watching with bemusement. The servitors in painted masks lift your transport atop a great marble dais and you stand at its edge to address the gathered multitude in a tongue that was lost three dark ages ago. They lift their voices in song as your every proclamation falls. The city guards gather uneasily, fingering their rifles.

[…]

You walk to the sumptuous manor on the hill, well-locked behind a long, tall, spiked green fence atop a stone wall. You head up the path and are greeted by several enormous mastiffs, bounding to you and barking with great agitation. “Ok, ok, you’re okay,” you murmur, pushing past them to the whitewashed house and the great stately red doors. There is a knocker in the shape of a snarling chimera. “Are you not rewarded?” the entity asks through the knocker. “Yes, I am,” you say quietly, wait, then push your way into the house. The place is furnished with luxury beyond your imagining, as if the greatest houses of fashion were contracted to compete to fill a royal manor with beauty and panache. Suddenly, dozens of dogs come rushing out from the kitchen, the dining room, the grand thoroughfare. You smile as they reach you, barking urgently, swarming around you to touch you. Each wants attention and you rub their rich coats. “That’s a lot of dogs,” you comment to a portrait of Halmund Genevar, a famous Vineforest conqueror. “Everyone you’ve ever cared for,” he comments.

[…]

You move across the darkened laboratory for the umpteenth time. Centrifuges, gas separators, alembics. Rough and pitted wood.

“Now,” says the entity, drawing out the n, “Combine them.”

Hands shaking, you approach the basalt basin that will receive the final confluence. You take the flash distilled worldroot and caramelized phlogiston creosote, so carefully measured, heated and cooled over the sleepless days that have preceded this moment. You mix them in the basin and they begin to fractalize into a brown and gray shimmer like the bottommost root of Yggdrasil. You raise a cosmic hairline capacitor constructed in a trance- it contains an indistinct measure of anglebreaker distortion- and turn it upside down over the mixture. You lower it until the tip of the device touches the surface of the phlogistonized worldroot and there is a crackle and blast that knocks you backwards over a worktable, spilling beakers and smashing vials. You rise up from the other side, cut, bruised and shaking, and see an astral light pouring from the basin like a portal to the moon. You creep around the table, taking a brass syringe from its rack, and peer into the basin. The surface of the mixture glows with a lunar light as if you would inject pure lycanthropy; its surface is now indistinct. The harvest moon resting in basalt.

“Now,” says the entity, its voice somehow quivering. You dip the tip of the syringe in the pooled light, take a measure, and step back, preparing to inject it.

“No!” cries the entity, “You’ll crack your skull! Go to the fainting couch.”

You walk into the study, ringed with hundreds of tattered, weatherbeaten, occasionally bloodstained books and lay down. You prick it into a raised vein on your inner arm and press the plunger home, casting the syringe away from you lest you lay on it too deeply.

“Yes,” the entity intones in a state of ravishment, “I can feel it working. I can feel myself grow…”

Your world begins to spin until it becomes an indistinct blur of color; when you come to your senses, the sun pours into the study through the bay windows. It is the next day.

“I have seen my ancestors,” the entity says with reverence.

“Oh,” you say.

“I joined them in the Corridor of Solar Mycelium and fended the nuclear trapezius by their sides. The temptation, it was beyond anything you could comprehend but I stood fast and proved worthy.”

“I see,” you say.

“Do you?” it asks with great drama, “You will!”

Suddenly your flesh bursts away from you as enormous tendrils extend from your back, legs and arms, raising you up into the air like a great bloodsoaked daddy longlegs. Your ribs slice their way from your chest and then fuse in a breastplate of chitinous armor. Your face breaks open in many slitted catlike eyes, pushing your mouth and nose to almost vestigial adornments just above your chin. The entity boils with laughter. “Witness the glory I have become!”

[…]

You creep in the spare bushes, dwarfed by the gaping chasm of darkness just above. Your elephant gun weighs heavy on your thighs, and the machete bounces across your back with your every movement where you slung it on a makeshift strap of canvas. Your wingtips are sodden and your tweed coat hangs heavy with the thick mist that swirls in these crags.

Finally you see it and your eyes go wide. It emerges from the roof of the cave, a vast spider lizard with eight viper’s eyes. Tufted moss grows from its every footstep and a dust of spores and pollen follow its body like a cape. One eye catches you and the rest dart to look at you.

“What has brought you to this?” it asks.

You are frozen and silent, totally in awe of the giant jade form.

“What has made you an assassin?” it asks again.

“Kill it!” hisses the entity.

“I’m- I’m an agent of the Queen of All Bowels,” you say, trying to placate both creatures until you can move your hands.

“Then go and rule the bowels,” says the spider lizard, “I have none to escheat. You have the potential for great power, but there is nothing here for you to acquire. You have been misled.”

“I don’t have a choice,” you rasp.

“You play a part in your own subjugation. You did not choose it, but you have a seat at the table and a piece in the game. You are not the captain, but you are the helmsman. The navigator. At what point do you suffer the master’s whip to guide you both to calmer seas?”

The entity begins to squeeze your intestines. “This is a rabbit hole you don’t want to go down,” it burbles through your very blood.

“I have nothing for you to rule. I speak now to your captor. There is nothing beneath this cave that will feed or empower you. There is life, but it has nothing to spare for a queen of bowels. Now, your servant. Release him from your grasp and return to the place which is plenty for you both, that city-state over yonder.”

“Fool!” the entity screams silently, unheard by the spider lizard, “I have come to embiggen my servant!”

“We did?” you whisper to yourself.

“Yes, fiend! That thing is your prize as much as mine! Now shoot it!”

You let out a deep breath as the spider lizard eyes you carefully.

You raise your rifle and it falls towards you. You fire and the rifle bounces out of your hands. You roll down the rocky hillside.

The thing is atop you in a heartbeat. It has a maw like a crab but when it opens its mouth its fangs are like a cat’s, and scrimshawed with scrollwork by paleolithic supplicants. Blood wells between them.

You raise your machete as it traps your legs beneath its maw and shivers to impale your guts upon its fangs, but its whole body begins to violently shudder, red ichor pouring from its gullet. With a gargling rattle its legs rake through the earth and come to rest with their cat’s claws against its scaly hide. Gore begins to seep from beneath the creature where you shot it, soaking your trousers.

“You’ve done it!” hisses the entity and you can feel it shiver inside you. “Eat its flesh!”

You were afraid of this and you attempt to extricate your legs; you cannot, and begin sawing away its flesh where it’s trapped you. The thing’s muscles are an astral purple beneath the sparkling jade scales and you devour sashimis of muscle while you cut away your entrapment. It tastes of seabreeze and cinnamon. You free yourself and stand. You feel your vision broadening; the cave no longer seems so dark and the clouds don’t seem so thick. The sky is clear behind them.

“I can see why you’re having me devour this creature,” you murmur.

“Pfft! Child’s play!” says the entity. “Now climb down its throat! That’s where we’ll find our real prize.”

You squeeze your eyes shut for a moment, then take hold of the graven ivory fangs and step onto its rough cat’s tongue. Fungal spores drift from its throat around you as your pile yourself into the darkness. You work your way down a ribbed throat past relaxed sphincters until you reach a warm, moist cavern of great bloated walls in the darkness.

“That one, against your right shoulder! Cut it!” says the entity.

You slit the thing and find it full of unidentifiable orange detritus. “Go in!”

You sift through the orange goo until you feel something cool, sodden and soft under your hand. You feel it out. It is like a great fungal hairball.

“This is it! Chow down!”

You give a tight smile at the nature of your fate and begin eating the fungal agglomeration where you lay in the placental tunnel of gore. It’s like eating earthy, furry seaweed and you cough relentlessly as spores come off of it.

Finally you can barely go on and it threatens to come back up.

“That’s enough!” cries the entity, “Climb back to its mouth!”

You work your way through the guts until you lay upon its clammy tongue.

“Make an incision above you!” You do so. Its brain hangs golden overhead.

“Now blow on it!” says the entity with excitement. You do so and a green fog emerges from your lips, coating the brain. Suddenly you begin to seizure; your muscles lock up and your vision goes fuzzy. You begin to see through a kaleidoscope comprised of fractal shades of darkness.

You feel many limbs. You feel a great pain in your guts.

“I’ll start working on the repairs, but you need to stretch your legs. We’re gonna need a lot of flesh to fix the damage you did!”

[…]

You walk to the coast with the salt wind in your hair. You see a great whale beached on the banks below. You walk out across the desolate sand. The whale is dead, and a vast quantity of flies flit in and out of it. The whale’s mouth is pressed shut into the ground.

“Go inside,” commands the entity. “How?” you ask. “The spout.” You go to the rear of the fetid thing, almost unable to bear the stench of it, and climb up its body with your face locked tense in a grimace. You reach the maggot-ridden blowhole and scoop them away by the handful- it doesn’t matter, there are more beneath. “Enter,” hisses the entity. You swallow, hold your breath and push your way in headfirst. You drag yourself through the flesh of the beast, alternatingly warm and clammy. It’s begun to truly break down inside and you can feel living things moving around you. You reach through the goo and feel something hard and dusty under your hand. “Bah,” you say into the muck, regretting it instantly as your mouth fills with rotten gore. You pull on the gritty asteroid and yank it loose. Something is sucked into the space you’ve made and there follows a massive eruption of force and pressure. You are blasted into space with your vision a salt-and-pepper storm of flying guts and sand. You skid across a carpet of whale viscera and see an enormous, aquamarine lump of ambergris steaming in the pile. You struggle to your knees, ears ringing, and squish across the gelatinous plane.

“Your prize,” says the entity. There is genuine respect in its voice.

[…]

The twelve you have brought before the entity have been chained in a ring and laid flat, their bodies the rays of a sun of flesh. You stand in an empty pool at the heart of the ring tendering an obsidian karambit. You have cut divots into the floor with this weapon, a great sigil of canals in the stone. Its blade has not blunted a whit.

You go from man to woman to man again and cut their throats, the hot blood flowing across your hands. They gargle behind you. You swallow your vomit. The blood flows through the divots in a great actualization of the rune you have seen so many times before. So subtle were your cuts, so long was your work, that the blood works its way inexorably inwards to the pool at the heart of this place. You take your place at its bottom on your back. The blood begins to pour over the edges in twelve broadening, pulsing sheets and works its way beneath you. You are gradually consumed in the warm liquid until it rises above your nose and you are submerged. It is time. The ultimate act of faith. You must act before drowning causes you to thrash and corrupt the ritual. There is only one chance.

You place the karambit just below your armpit and pierce your flesh with the very tip of the blade to set it in place. Then with a lurch with which you intend to surprise yourself, you run the curved blade inside of yourself. It curls behind your heart. Your body begins to seize and you are sick with panic, but in an act of practiced will you drive your whole existence into your hands and tear the karambit across, cutting your heart in half and opening your chest to the blood. The great tear is the last thing you perceive before your existence devolves into sticky static.

When you awaken you see through many eyes; a similar sight, stone and blood, broadcasted as if by a rain around your head. You stand with twelve bodies. You raise hands to eyes shakily, dividing focus between them until you find you can think fast enough to move them individually; not think, you can feel them. This one raises, that one lowers. This one blinks, that one smiles. You walk the bodies inward and the chains lower from the collars and scrape across the stones. You stand atop rune-grooves and peer down into the hole. A corpse in an empty pit.

“Remove your chains,” commands the entity.

[…]

You are driving through the mountain passes and enter a tunnel which curves tightly. You go around a corner and suddenly you emerge into the desert. Your motorcar begins sinking into the sand. You bail out and look up to see that the tunnel is shimmering and insubstantial, obviously intended to look like a mirage.

“Your transformation is at hand,” says the entity. You take up a fistful of hot sand in each hand and squeeze them in despair.

You wander for a numb day, your skin burnt and peeling, whipped as if by hot grease in the desert sand. Your legs burn with agony but when you stand, they begin to sink into the ground, crushed until you tear them forth and stagger on. That night you are chilled to the soul and just wander, teeth chattering, clothes chafing on burnt skin. Your mouth is sealed as if by glue, you are so in need of water.

Finally on the second day you collapse, morbidly giving up your life, and lay flat on the ground. Your body sinks halfway into the sand, crushed to an urgent pain as if by a vice grip, but you lay bitterly where you are.

“I will not let you give up,” says the entity gently, “for you have become my son.”

Scorpions emerge from the sand and descend upon you in droves, stinging you to convulsions as you scream. The underground pressure forces sand into your mouth. You stagger up with scorpions hanging off you and claw your way madly up the dune. You can feel the unforgiving, demonic nature of the cosmos like a presence, and you sense how it stands by and speaks to a man who is wise in suffering. You fight to the top of the dune and crush the scorpions, thrashing about as they come for you. You fight them in a berserker froth, smashing them wildly or squeezing them with individualized malice as they sting you. Finally your limbs lock up with the venom and you bake to half-consciousness in the cutting sun and radiant sand while the scorpions crawl all over your body.

You awaken the next day laying in a chair on a beach somewhere in the tropics. Little boys shout and toss a coconut around in the surf. You look up and down the beach and then down at yourself. Your wounds have healed. You are overcome with emotion and you shield your eyes from the children.

“You are well, inside,” says the entity.

“Yes,” you sob, and say, “I’ve never felt better.”

[…]

You approach the underlit, leafless tree raising its branches like a thousandpoint crown. The rope hangs heavy around your shoulders. You hear thunder and the sky is starless behind the boughs. You might as well be underground.

“Proceed,” says the entity. You climb up a few of the limbs, tie off the tree and create a slipknot. You fasten it around your neck and prepare to jump. 

“No!” says the entity, “Slide your way down carefully.”

You grimace, take hold of the rope, and shimmy your way down. You know what must be done. You release it with your feet and slide the rest of the way. Finally you release the rope with your hands and the knot comes taut around your neck. Your eyes feel like they will burst from your brain; your whole head feels filled with concrete and existence begins to stab inward on you like a static of thorns. 

Soon you transcend existence and float in an indefinable place of light and shades of darkness. “Where am I?” you ask.

“A capacitor, essentially. I need to do some rewriting of your brain and it’s better if you’re here while I do it.”

“Where is the capacitor?”

The entity doesn’t punish you for your question, it just doesn’t answer.

“There you go,” it finally says.

There’s a snap and you’re yanked out of this ephemeral space and crash into the leafy soil, smashing your jaw on your knee. You lay with a splitting headache. The rope has broken above you and the noose’s bridge lays across your chest. “Keep that,” says the entity, “Call it memorabilia.” You realize that you have perfect recall of every memory you possess, every fact that you’ve ever read; you get to your feet and stagger, lost with immensity as you page through your memories at variable speeds. “I don’t think I’ll need it,” you say.

[…]

You stand in a circular chamber whose walls empty into nothingness at regular intervals. The room is made of dark stone and there are strange lights and piping laid into the floor and a few stone panels on the wall.

“What is this place?” you ask.

“A visual representation of a dead being’s consciousness,” says the entity.

“Is that why it’s empty?”

“It’s not empty, it’s just dormant. Currently it’s in transit. It’s the energy and the tanker.”

“In transit where?”

“Between cosmoses. Going from where it grew to where it’s to be harvested.”

“Harvested?”

“Yes. By the entity that seduced it.”

“You?”

“No. But I am the one who will harvest it.”

“This is a hijacking.”

“Correct.”

“What role do I play?”

“You’re my interface. I will control this consciousness through you.”

“I’m a spirit who’s possessing another spirit.”

“If you like. And I’m the spirit who’ll possess you.”

Your body suddenly feels leaden, rigid, paralyzed, and you fall backwards into a sea of static. When you awaken, you are back in the city park where the entity overcame you, laying on your side in the dewy grass. Your consciousness feels vast, pervasive, awake, aware, and energized.

“Something’s changed,” you say, “I feel…. expansive.”

“That’s your cut,” says the entity.

[…]

“Wink at somebody,” says the entity. “Who?” “Anybody. Doesn’t matter if they see it.” You look at the back of a man in a felt greatcoat as he walks by. You wink at him. He crosses the street at the crosswalk and a motorcar comes speeding through the intersection, striking him into a thin cloud of blood, sending him hurtling up into the air like a boneless superhero. His corpse lands and skids across the gravel street, painting a streak behind it like a blood slug. People scream and run as the car smashes into a bridge support in a cloud of glass and metal. Apparently it lost its brakes. You gape in horror, trying with all your might to not even close your eyes, let alone wink. “Now wink at that guy on the scaffolding,” says the entity.

[…]

You make love to your woman, realizing infinite cosmic forces through your finite bodies. You pound her like lightning pounds a mountain with flecks of rock and flying wood, like the first fateful vitiation of the sea that began time and life. Suddenly she screams and your pelvis is soaked with blood. “Snacktime!” shouts the entity.

[…]

You are peeing in the woodline with a friend of yours while you crack jokes and laugh together. “He knows too much,” says the entity. “No!” you cry, your blood running cold. “He knows too much man!” says the entity, emerging from your penis in a tendril and wrapping around your friend’s throat, strangling him while shaking him back and forth. “He’s gotta die, man!”

[…]

You are in your home. You look up into a corner of the ceiling. You climb into it. Your maid enters the room. You fall on her and inject her with a venom that melts her guts.

You are free. You stagger back in horror, gore squishing into the rug beneath your feet. You through the window to your garden. You see the entity waiting for you.

[…]

The entity calls you out to a remote well. It is filled with long, slithering grubs, rotten meat and fabric. Two Royal Foresters ride up through the underbrush. “Citizen, is this where they’re breeding?” “Run away,” you try to say. “Yes,” you say, “You’d better have a look.” They dismount and come forward. When they reach the well you shoot them both in the back. One of them dies instantly but the other lays there screaming and you shoot him several more times. He is not dead when you pitch the two men into the well. You are then free to sit against the warm, vibrating well, hyperventilating with your face in your hands. “There, there,” comes a voice from the well with a belch.

[…]

“You are going to please an ally of mine,” says the entity, “Go into that gulch.” You walk down into it with shaking knees and see a slender woman made of yew; she is beautiful. You approach her and she smiles. You are relieved, and take her in your arms. She kisses you and her lips are soft. You pin her like a lover and she scowls. “Did you think you were a top in my world? You’re no minotaur, you’re a bonobo and I’m going to treat you like one.” The roots spring forth, bind your body and rip their way up into your ass.

[…]

You go to the entity’s personal space. There is a man waiting for you there. He has a blank look on his face and he is standing slack as if he’s about to fall over. He’s had his nose cut off. “You’ve been moving around too much and I haven’t been able to keep a proper eye on you,” says the entity. “This man has rickets, cerebral palsy and leukemia. You’ll be taking over his body for the time being.”

[…]

You visit your family for the equinox. Your brother’s unusually quiet, answering few questions, commenting on nothing. You catch him alone in the sun room. “What’s wrong with you?” you ask. “I’m here to keep an eye on you. You won’t be seeing your brother again,” says the entity through his mouth.

[…]

You go to work one day, and when you arrive you make a trip to the bathroom. You find feces overflowing from the toilet, spread upon the walls, piled in the sink. There’s a burbling from the toilet; it’s the entity saying, “It’s time you stopped working here.” You stagger backwards, stunned, as sewage rolls towards your feet. A coworker stops next to you. “What did you do?” he cries. You cannot speak. “Everyone, look what he did!”

[…]

You ask the thing what it would have you do. It tells you that it’s hungry for live flesh and suggests an orphanage. You compromise and head for the pound.

[…]

You say that you are its servant. It asks you to go to the nearest tall building and look around so it can get its bearings. You find that you cannot reach the bottom of the fire escape, so it cuts holes in your ankles, slides out two tendrils and pushes you into the air so you can reach it.

[…]

You tell the thing that you’re ready. It beckons you to enter an iron maiden made of wicker. It was built by ten thousand waving cockroaches that climb you and form a royal cape. You step into the wicker and the cockraoches swarm all over it. They latch it shut and interstice your flesh with the wicker. You find that you can walk once they’re done although you are soaked with blood. The wicker causes you agony when you attempt to remove it; every piece is linked to every other piece and it can never be removed without undoing your body at the seams.

[…]

You were intensely curious and walked towards the entity. You saw pit. The entity bade you step inside. You walked to the edge. A bear’s head poked from the bottom of the pit. You stepped down inside and slid to the bottom. The bear devoured you and you were remade in its bowels. When the bear turned itself inside out and you were spilled back up into the pit, you had to fight your way free from an acid-filled placenta and you found yourself covered in ancient runes of human sacrifice. Several Bandit Tribes and one city-state will recognize you as the herald of the thing their ancestors escaped.

[…]

“Make of me what you will,” you say, “I am your vessel.” 

“Good,” it says, “Kill your wife.”

You blanch.

“Were you not expecting that?” it says.

You cannot speak as you envision this scenario. What would be left? This being does not yet have such meaning to you that you would even consider such a thing. What would be left of you if you did what it asks?

“She is already dead. She was dead the moment I said that to you. You know that. The question is how long and what else it will take for you to accept it. For you to go and do what you know you will do.”

“Perhaps you can make my body do it,” you say, “But you can’t make me willingly do it.”

“What makes you think there’s any difference between those things? I can condense a million years into a minute as far as your perceptions go. I can do it just to prove a point and then we’ll continue this conversation.”

“Please don’t,” you say, raising a palm.

“Do you see what the terms are, here? I will not let you die. I will torture you like you cannot imagine if you don’t cooperate, and I won’t mind control you into it, either, because I don’t need a mindless servant.”

“Why do you require this?” you breathe.

“So you understand your situation and so you don’t think you can ever leave it. Inside or outside of yourself. There’s no going back and I’m going to cement that in your brain. There is only going forward in my service. There will be no refuge inside of you.”

“Do you mind how I do it?” you ask, breaking into tears.

“With the big kitchen knife. Make sure she’s aware and sees you coming.”

[…]

You dedicate yourself to the entity by performing a novel gesture with your hands and arms. It just feels right. A clattering creature that is like two cross-welded millipedes made from static electricity with an untraceable array of infinite limbs comes from a disc of white light ripped open by your hands. The entity bids this creature torture you and scolds you to be more careful, because it shall not save you again, although the thing that you have given birth to will serve you in the cause of the entity once it has finished with you.

[…]

You tell the entity that it’s clear you cannot fight it. It says nothing is clear, as you will learn. The walls and every item on and around you collapse like curtains, revealing your place in a porous asteroid temple lit by a thunderous pulsar. Then everything pulls back up as if on strings and everything is as it was.

[…]

You rushed towards the fiendish thing but were seized upon by hulking zealots. They carried you into the rushing core of a great pyre and you were burned into a black skeleton. You were given new flesh, false flesh that was wound to your charred bones by puppeteered embalming-corpses.

[…]

You tried to kill yourself but you could not die. Your brain, your vision, your hands were all damaged and then all were transformed, given stuff of the divine to replace what had been necrotized.

[…]

There is a glassy lake in a sodden bowl of earth atop a wooded hill. Branches hang low over the water. The place is profoundly silent; there are no birds or crickets. The lake silently drains as you look on it and a form uncurls from a pile of rotten leaves at the bottom. "Greetings," it says warmly.

[…]

The rivers come here to die. You can smell it. You see them flowing down from the hills, draws and meadows around you. They pour into a great pit from which sticky mist rises. You walk across sordid ground to the edge and gaze inside. The frothy white waterfalls splash upon a vast writhing sheet of maggots. “The miracle of childbirth,” says a voice behind you.

[…]

You walk the dunes and people reach up out of the sand to claw at you. They whisper. They eye you and their whistles echo behind you as you pass their valleys. You ask them why they are in the sand but you do not speak the same language and they sink beneath when you pause to address them and reach out to grab them. You reach a dark stone mesa at the heart of a place where valleys intersect and approach a sheltered black stone cloister there.

[…]

You wander through a crowded slum of babbling people whose words you cannot understand. They stand all around you and sit in droves along the rooftops, the alleys and the streets. No building has a wall here, only floors and foundations, but you cannot see through the shadows of the built-up towers. Water flows freely, turning some streets into rivers, or else through canals cut beneath bridges and balconies. Some people move in the water, sliding into pipes that drop them into the flow of their buildings. Finally you walk down one of the dark alleys which lead between and into the buildings and find yourself in the presence of an intelligence that speaks in your tongue.

[…]

Your gang of ecoterrorists have been hunted down and slaughtered; they fought valiantly in the fens but have at last been overcome by sheer numbers. Now you read in the hideous broadsheets that their corpses will be burnt to ash and poured into the concrete of a new tenement that will be built on Whipoorwhill Glen.

You’ve had enough. You will die before you live to forget the dream that gave you life. You wander out into the forest, ready to give your flesh to Mother Earth if you cannot give her victory over the World Machine. You kneel on a hillside, strip down and place the barrel of a pistol in your mouth.

“Another victory for the machine…” someone says from the other side of the hill. “What? Who’s that?” you say.

“Come and see,” says the voice.

[…]

You were sick with nihilism. The Antinatalists, Social Darwinists, the Reists, and the Monadists. There was nothing for you. No one could make you believe. Too much was unaccounted for.

You sought God yourself. You looked where others would not. You bought telescopes, books of runes, and smelling salts for wakefulness at the telescope. You acquired a book on Occult astronomy from a man who would later be hanged, and you burned incense made of what he called phlogiston creosote. It moaned as if in agony when you set it on fire.

You are at vigil at the golden scope and at last you see something move. You are pulled through your telescope and out into the colossal void.

[…]

You’ve joined a cult. You know that’s not normally how ‘emissaries’ are contacted, but you don’t care. You’ve been left cold on the trail over and over again and you need a lead. Finally, after the umpteenth ouija session, Wilson Gravy, the Grand Salamander, calls the cult together to speak in hushed tones over macadamia pie served by his wife in his dining room. “I’ve received a vision. Tonight, at the Trundlewell Garage, we’re to separate the wheat from the chaff.” Everyone looks at each other with foreboding. “How will that happen?” asks Neal Klements hesitantly.

“It didn’t say!” said Wilson, popping a bottle of champagne.

You are the last to arrive. Your tire blows as you are driving down Torbrand so you ditch your motorcar on the side of the road and sprint to the garage. When you get there you find everyone has died of massive cerebral hemorrhage and are laying around streaming blood from their ears and eyes. Wilson sits up, says “Get in the elevator,” then lays down again. You step into the elevator with quaking knees.

[…]

You luxuriate in the spaghetti, taking down huge wads of it and barely chewing. You take one particularly long, meaty pull and grin, swallowing. “What the fuck was that?” your friend asks from across the table, pointing his fork with a worried expression.

“What was what?”

“That shiny thing in your spaghetti.”

“Meat?”

“No, it didn’t look like the bacon,” he says. You shrug and get a sudden extreme desire for some fresh air. “Be right back,” you say and go out into the alley.

[…]

Suddenly you feel as if your bowels will explode. You rush to the bathroom and relieve yourself, sitting back and closing your eyes as if you’d just had an orgasm. Then something slithers into your ass and you scream.

[…]

You suddenly awaken to your bedframe lifting you vertically into the air. You go sliding off the foot of the bed and down through a trapdoor that you didn’t know was in your floorboards. You are spilled down iron slides going left then right, dropping and bouncing past men on platforms in the shadows as they manipulate levers and dials. Finally you are deposited on a stone dais basked in floodlight surrounded by darkness. Gradually the spotlight dims and your vision clears.

[…]

You kneel in an animalhide yurt between barbarous tribesmen. They are draped up to this very moment with their handguns and dirks. The chieftain gazes at you with his noose-braided beard and antler-horned eyebrows. He picks up a handful of grated worldroot and hurls it into the fire which practically explodes in a sea-colored steam, filling your lungs and lifting you like helium. You all stagger to your feet and push your way out of the yurt with difficulty. The ritual tree has been stripped of leaves and hung with many corpses. The tribe’s great shaman was last to be hung. He hung himself by his own hand and his tattoos glow teal and magenta, humming with xenocosmic power. He rotates slowly in space. His corpse has pitched a tent beneath his animalhide loincloth and you stagger forward to consume the last sacrament and bring your whole physiology into the spirit realm.

[…]

You dream of a world-spanning empire in a time before time when all was stone and fire. The legions of mankind fed on a substance from beyond and all men turned to a common purpose. You see the world choking on fungal ivy, an ecumenopolis dragged down into the very bedrock of the earth. You see the flags, the pedestals, the icons of that fallen empire laying dormant but undead at the bottom of the lower firmament. You awaken with your heart pounding. You gaze into the darkness and swear to resurrect that which has been lost to mankind, lost to this age when man fears the wild. You dress yourself and set out for a strange stone formation you’ve heard of up in the hills.

[…]

You belay down the shaft, scraping your knees and elbows. The rocks are very near you now. The quartz and sanidine. The smell of stone.

It bottoms out on rough ground, little pyramids of rock beneath your hands and feet. Your last piton glints above you where you beat it into place at the top of the shaft. That was all you were to bring. Your lantern is hot and heavy. You stagger forward with it, legs bouncing with fatigue. The tunnel narrows as it descends and some part of you is afraid it will just end and this was a failed test.

It does not end. It simply becomes unfathomably tight and narrow. “Am I to enter this place?” you ask. There comes no answer. This is the test- the test of faith. Even if you are guided by divine provenance this will be a harrowing experience. You set the lantern behind you, set down your pack and remove your climbing gear. You lay on your side with your lower arm outstretched and your upper arm tight to your body, and begin shimmying into the tiny hole over the rocks. They stab into your ribs, scrape your hips and jab your head with every movement. The rock touches you on both your shoulders, your back and your chest at once. You move into it and are totally consumed. You cannot kick your legs apart or jackknife them; you cannot do anything with your arms as they are, you cannot bring them together. You cannot look down on your body, for you are in darkness and your chest would be in the way. Moreover, you cannot go backwards. This realization makes you freeze up in terror. Your muscles seize tight and you cannot move. You breathe deep, deep in a slow rhythmic way as the secret texts taught you to do when faced by the necessary horror of service. Your heart is still racing but your muscles feel slack. You find you are able to inch forward, just wriggling.

Time dilates beneath the earth but you know that you have been traveling for hours, perhaps four or five, when the seam begins angling upwards. You halfway panic; perhaps you are reaching your destination, but perhaps you will have to vertically traverse this passage, which is a horror you cannot face. Finally the truth looms, inescapable, as you clear a crescent-shaped passage in which your body was crimped against a curving, jagged surface for over an hour: you are going vertical. You shimmy and shimmy. It grows even tighter here. You do not know how you will do it; you cannot even shimmy any longer. You are well and truly trapped. You let out an aggrieved, desperate scream and your voice is unutterably loud and shrill in the tiny chamber above you. Suddenly you feel able to move your shoulder a whit. You do so, and take a breath, which squeezes you painfully against the surfaces around you. You exhale fully and are able to make another tiny movement, and by inhaling a bit you fix yourself against the walls. You do this twenty or twenty-five times and have left the rock below you. You are moving vertically. You do this for what must be another eight hours, your muscles clenching, your lungs stabbed with bone whenever you breathe too deeply, but finally the passage begins to level out again and you feel a sense of euphoria in this tiny, horrific confined space.

You travel nearly horizontally for another several hours, an old hand at this though your clothes are ripping, when you begin to hear a trickling noise from up ahead. This is the first ambient you’ve heard in at least a day, maybe more. You push forward for some time, body raw and aching, until your numbing forward hand touches something wet and freezing. There is a sump here. You begin to hyperventilate. You cannot do this. You cannot deal with this situation. You begin to make whimpering, humming, pathetic noises to express your grief and terror without expanding your lungs enough to make you suffer, but finally you break loose and breath hard into the walls until the agony overcomes you and you begin to take short, shallow breaths once more. You begin to make a pact with yourself. You will enter the water just enough so that your head is under and you will drown yourself. It won’t be so bad if you decide to do it and go when you’re good and ready. You smile at your memories of the sunshine, of love and friends and food, of the things you aspired to and will never get to see. Your great regret is leaving behind your schemas; you don’t want to forget what a squirrel is, what color is, what it means to think and feel, to be somatic. But it’s better than this. You cannot savor those things the way they deserve. You must give them up, voluntarily, before it gets any worse.

You push forward into the freezing water, your arm first, truly going numb this time. There is no relief underwater; the tunnel is no wider than it is without. You thought you were cold but the effort had done something to warm you. Now you are truly without comfort and the water sucks your feeling away with the gravity of an enemy’s pitiless spite. You press your way into it and your scalp aches with the power of the cold, your face grimacing as the waterline passes across it. You are underwater as you’d planned, but panic begins to take you. You’d intended to drown, but now that you are underwater you are desperate to escape it. You squeeze yourself forward, you arm sloshing limply ahead of you. Your whole body up to your ankles is underwater, writhing against the walls with cold. Then you are completely underwater, completely sodden, completely consumed. Still you worked your way forward, chest splitting. You begin to let out your breath, bubbling in your face and then up past your scalp. The bubbles are ascending. You have little time now but you feel them bob up past your hand. Your lungs empty, your face and head burning, you make another press and feel your hand touch the air. Your eyes go wide under the water and are pierced with cold as if by icicles. There is air. Thoughts of suicide forgotten, you squeeze on, desperate for air, desperate for life. You cannot make any mistakes now. You are utterly cautious but you do not stop moving, applying everything you have learned about this peculiar activity over the last day or days. Your arm is in the air, then the crown of your head, and then finally as you are nearly lost to the fiery drowsiness that had threatened to take you your nose breaks the surface.

You breathe, breathe, you hyperventilate for some time, sucking down air like a starving man in a meat shop. Finally you remember your hypothermic body and struggle forward. You go through the narrow tunnel for some time but finally it begins to open around you. You nearly weep as you are no longer pressed on all four sides. You luxuriate in the ability to weave your cramping muscles around with just a whit more space. Finally you have enough room to bring your hands together, and you pull yourself forward like something eager to be born. You press yourself shaking to your knees, bumping your back against the tunnel-top, and breathe deep and free, bones and body burning and freezing by turns. There is an ephemeral light in the darkness ahead. You drag yourself rasping over the ground until your tiny tunnel opens into a vast vault wherein there is a great fastness like the crystaline-glassy figure-graven great cabins of twenty ships stacked atop each other in the far wall. Their dividing foundation pillars are lit by alien runes that flash like the eyes of cats; it is these symbols that grant the light.

“Welcome,” says the entity, “to my sleeping empire. You are the first man to see it in ten thousand years. You will not be the last.”

—