Book 4: Chapter 57

Blood Shaper

Kay’s brain literally could not understand everything that was happening to him in that moment. The part of him that had anything resembling rational thought left wondered if he was processing even a millionth of what was happening. The human body wasn’t designed to interact with every piece of existence, even if those moments were happening every moment of every day. There was a limit to the wavelengths of light he could see, but ultraviolet light still passed through his eyes every second he had them open. What parts of this hellish experience was he missing because he was incapable of detecting them? What was happening truly was hellish. He’d read some cosmic horror books and even tried a few of the TTRPGs of that nature with his friends back on Earth, and he’d never been able to understand the characters that went crazy just by experiencing something they couldn’t understand. He got the theory of how it worked, but it still rang false with him.

Until that moment. It wasn’t experiencing something that one didn’t understand, it was surviving a direct attack on one’s existence. Up till that point he’d only experienced the fringes of eldritch corruption, the outer layers of a terrible and unwanted onion. Twisted cultists, scales that let you see every inch of them at once, nausea inducing sensations, and disgusting looking giant legs were nothing. They hadn’t been enough to make him understand the true horror of an antithetical existence. He could not be here. Everything he was, everything he had been, everything that he could be and the reality that allowed all of that, his past, his present, and his future, could not exist in this place, and all of it was pushing in on him. It was unmaking him, destroying him, changing him, creating him; all at once.

Pleasure, pain, disgust, joy, hope, ticklishness, anger, the rough texture of sandpaper, the smell of trash, stepping off a train into a storm, the experience of learning to play an instrument, the bite of a spicy pepper on his tongue, the feeling of a giraffe biting his kidney, opening a bag of chartreuse, stepping inside a poker chip, becoming a waffle maker, undoing the scent of a waterfall, downloading a cat, speaking of sonder to a mobius loop, the tune of a simulated forklift, watching a burp of a dying star, smoke whispering colorful secrets, and uncountable experiences and not experiences that were outside of his ability to speak of them, think of them, or have them happen to him, there was too much and too little and too late.

The pieces of him that came together and became a stitched together whole that could have a thought wondered why he still was. He had protection against eldritch corruption instilled into his being by the System, but the little bit of protection that could come with his existence wasn’t enough to protect him from this, right? A nanosecond that lasted into three eternities passed slow enough when Kay had eyes for him too see a screen appear in front of his eyes while he still had them, before it dissolved into nonsense rhymes about the essence of the hunt and the lyrical smells of pudding being eaten by lightning with calcium. The pieces of a person named Kenneth realized that he might be getting a little help, and anti-clockwise decided to try and do something.

Doing anything was hard, because doing didn’t work the same way here, but Kay tried to fight back against the world inside the leg anyway. Not that it was a world, and it never was a leg. It had only looked like a leg from the outside, which was actually the inside because the whole thing was actually inside out to the way Kay had thought it had been. It couldn’t be a leg either, it was something else that was incomprehensible to the human mind, but the closest thing was maybe a proboscis, something that got shoved somewhere else and took something out. Because they had been inside the proboscis the things they’d thought were scales were actually some kind of immune system, or pieces of one. Comparable to white blood cells, they attacked the small things that tried to hurt the proboscis from the inside.

Kay had no weapons to fight back against a reality, but just trying to understand the other was an attack against it. The realities that Kay could exist in, and there were probably more than two given that he had evidence of more than two realities existing in total, included the ability to understand them, to know the laws of physics and magic and work with them. This reality didn’t have that, at least nothing that Kay could see as that, and thus even trying to understand what was going on through comparison was a strike that drove back the other pressing against him and allowed Kay to stabilize his being.

Stabilizing his own existence allowed him to continue to stabilize because the idea of stable was not from here, and thus here was pushed back. Pushing back here stabbed deep into here, because here did not have pushing or directions as Kay understood them, and thus here was repelled. It wasn’t enough to defeat here, the other that was all around, but it was enough to give Kay a bubble of peace where he could be without the risk of not being. The bubble was not anywhere, it was only a space where the outside here was not, but it had flavors of Earth and Torotia, the places that Kay brought with him through his will and existence.

Kay looked around in his bubble of not there and tried to find an exit. He’d come in, so he must be able to get out. But that wasn’t how this reality worked, and he didn’t have the power to push back all of there enough for that to change. Using the human traits of anthropomorphism, denial, and misunderstanding, he looked and did his best to understand the world around him enough to move through it and seek somewhere that did have something close enough to an exit, all the while holding back any level of true understanding. It wasn’t the inability to understand an experience that made characters go mad, it was the experience they understood changing something about them, but not finishing the process. A person and something outside could not be together like that, and the madness was just the human body’s reaction to having something other inside of it. Or the human mind, or the human existence, or perhaps one’s soul struggling against whatever divergence had been left behind by the other.

If Kay understood too deeply, he wouldn’t truly understand, he would just be allowing here to slip inside him. He couldn’t fight there from both inside himself and outside himself at once, not if he wanted to continue being.

The direction he forced there to be through his will and painted over understanding that covered the outside reality was above him, and in that direction was the broken pieces of the barrier between worlds. It was getting closer, and Kay knew that the proboscis was being pulled back through the hole. Forcing direction on there was manageable, but time was hard. He hadn’t quite gotten time down correctly, but Kay knew there would be an existence where he would go through the whole and end up in the truth of here, not just the slightly reduced mirror of it inside the inside out proboscis. Once that happened, he would cease to be. The full power of an antithetical universe would bear down on him, and he would either be snuffed out or turned into something so different that it wouldn’t be him or anything that could even be called an approximation of him by the most generous being ever, and wasn’t that the same thing?

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The hole drew some acceptable version of closer, and Kay continued to search for a way out. He’d completely what he’d set out to do of making the eldritch horror go away, whether that was through the wound he’d inflicted or whatever this entire debacle of creating a bubble of not here and not there was doing to here that was there inside of outside of a proboscis that wasn’t a proboscis but dammit it was close enough thank you was doing to here that was here but there and not there. Whatever the cause, the scaled limb was retreating, and Kay needed to leave so he could live through this.

The concept of a direction to go in was foreign here, so Kay just started moving. His bubble of safety pushed back the foreign reality as he moved and it flowed in behind him, ever present and just waiting for him to tire enough for it to swoop in and end him. As he traveled, hoping it was toward a way out of this, he felt the edges of this eldritch space and understood it in a false, completely useless, and desperately necessary way. This realm was to space and time, to movement and directions, like the other eldritch energies he’d experienced were to hunger and rot, to sharp teeth and untimely ends, so, so similar as to draw the thought to mind, and so very different as to be the farthest thing from the truth. This wasn’t a realm of pure thought that Kay could shape with his will, he was actively fighting for each moment of his existence, and the shattered gap was getting closer.

There was no wound to escape from, no gash to dash through, and no cut to serve as his door. There was just endless other, and his bubble. Moment by year, step by dive, the broken open hole in the barrier between worlds grew closer and closer. There was no time left, because there was no time here, and the hole was billions of miles away, which was too close to get away from. Kay’s formless, shapeless being snarled at the coming end, fighting to the finish against a doom he couldn’t stop as his bubble of not here and not anywhere grew larger. The edges of the bubble that wasn’t there slammed into the hole that shouldn’t be and stopped, for a time. But the movement to some other place was too strong, and Kay and his bubble were taken through.

In an instant that had never been, his bubble slammed into his existence, reduced to a tiny shell that trembled against him and threatened to break at any time. The pressure of █████, ████████ ████, and █████████ pushed and squeezed and compressed him, and even trying to understand the action of the occurrence wasn’t enough to protect him from it. “Kay” was reduced to a tiny kernel of something on the edge of a gap between realities. That kernel could taste the haunting feel of an energy it recognized, hungry and cruel, which had broken the way open. The existence from “here” that “Kay” had thought of as a proboscis had merely taken advantage of the opportunity.

The kernel felt the proboscis detach from it, and it did its best to fight its way back to the way between. Even as it struggled it could feel the tangy edges of effort stapling the pieces of broken reality back together with indulgence and shiny rocks, driven by duty and an overwhelming need to achieve something specific. The sound of the repairs faintly reminded the kernel of screens and the sounds tasted like the faintest of regrets. The kernel pushed more and tried to move faster as the repairs continued at pace.

By the time the kernel instinctively managed some form of locomotion, which was alarming since it meant becoming closer to “here” which was so very dangerous, it was too late. The hole was patched and there was no where to go. Only the tiniest gap remained, held open by a luminescent string, and the kernel couldn’t become that small or it would cease to be. Holding on to the idea of size was the only thing letting it still exist, and letting the concept become flexible would mean that “here” would snatch it away and replace it with something different.

The kernel sat still, and waited to end.

Sharp edges erupted from the minuscule gap that contained the thread, bringing with them concepts that didn’t belong “here”. Sharpness, cutting, piercing, weapons, damage, injuries, the ideas of war and death and battle, ideas from another reality tore through the space between cutting open a hole large enough for the kernel to pass through. But the kernel was done. It had already accepted its end. There was no movement toward the hole hat was slowly widening before being patched up again, and then cut open once more. There was merely a wait for the end, where waiting and ending would both be irrelevant, because they didn’t exist “here”.

The taste of boxes of light that conveyed information pushed from the same side as the weapons, trying to close the whole even as the weapons fought to keep it open. The weapons were more present and concentrated, but the scent of numbers that grew larger with effort was more powerful. Moments that weren’t passed, and the kernel merely floated there in the “here” a witness to the conflict.

A tug on the string pulled the kernel closer to the hole, and for the first time the kernel noticed that the string was connected to it. A spark of curiosity lit, and the kernel tried to figure out what the string was. By trying to understand it, it observed it, in observing it, it learned about it, in learning about it it grew to know more. In knowing more, it understood. The string was a tie of blood. Blood didn’t exist “here”, it was a place of the there before “here”. Understanding that blood was something wasn’t enough to push back against the overwhelming oppression of “here”, but it was enough for the kernel to remember it had once been “Kay” and for it to reach out, grab the string, and pull itself across the infinitesimal infinity between himself and the hole between.

The space between was also the space that was all places, and Kay saw and knew all things. That was what his existence was trying to tell him, but he could feel something at the edges of was holding back an infinite tide of knowing and doing, which meant he was only experiencing and learning too much. A vast endless majority of it flew past him and was not retained. As he passed through the unnoticeable gap between the eldritch world he was leaving and his arrival back into Torotia over the course of seven infinities, he only saw or knew five things, four tight strings of of love, care, and friendship drawing him to most of them, and one small string of chance and destiny letting him keep the last.

A rock that contained sparkling possibilities crossed a barrier, seeking the knowledge needed to grow.

A winged beast speaking in riddles that it hated, waiting for them to be solved.

A red ball talking to a ghost about deaths that didn’t matter and lives that that did.

A hand that meant death to all, but only sometimes.

A turtle that stretched across a world, the top of it’s shell covered in stars.

The turtle’s eye met his as the edges of his being hit the edge of Torotia, and Kay suddenly was Kay, and had a body again. It looked him over, and spoke to him. The words were so loud they shook the nothing that never moved at all, even in the force of its words. The sheer contradiction of that was overwhelming on Kay’s reexisting mind, and he blacked out.