a vision
The sensation of light fades. I am disoriented. Someone spoke, but I can’t remember the words.
Solidity returns and I’m slumped against a wall in a house, feeling motion-sick. The decor is alien, three walls sloping up to a high ceiling and a fourth, transparent, giving a stunning view over no city on earth. Two children sit among a collection of soft furnishings here, looking up at the intruder with curiosity and no fear.
Are they children? They seem small and slender but their eyes are old. The slate-like devices they are playing with are opaque to me. One speaks in a language I don’t recognise. Perhaps a question.
A taller person bursts into the room, speaking urgently and decisively. In another part of the dwelling there is a shout, and then a high-pitched vocalisation, which cuts off with a gurgle.
The people in the room with me thrill with horror. The tall newcomer runs towards the two maybe-children and then jerks to a halt, staring wide-eyed.
A shaft of something like black leather has sprung from the entranceway and impaled them through the middle. These creatures bleed red, though the speed of the strike was such that only a misting of crimson stains the obsidian-coated tip that protrudes.
They cough reflexively as if trying to clear their lungs. The shaft, about as thick around as a thigh, softens from its steely rigidity. The way it curls and undulates seems almost sensual.
There is no gushing blood from the wound. The reason becomes clear. Little feeder tendrils blossom out from everywhere they touch flesh and where they touch, blood is wicked away. Black spreads beneath the pale creature’s skin as those tendrils chase their way through the vessels beneath. I can see one find a deeper vessel: it fattens and pulses as it begins to gorge.
The tall creature would surely topple if they weren’t being held up as they were sucked dry.
The children scream. One staggers towards the impaled caregiver—parent?—and one seemed to spot something deeper in the corridor. That one runs, huge self-composure in their motions, towards the window and its balcony.
I look to see what was observed and find… My God, it’s you.
Not wholly. You look different. Your skin bears a reddish tint and pale fire crowns your still-raven locks, but your lips, your hypnotic eyes… It’s definitely you.
You don’t seem to see me as you stride past the tall person being drunk dry. The thick tendril responds with shivering pleasure to your caress, although perhaps it’s just the glut being sucked down its length.
The child running towards the parent hesitates and you fall upon it. Your strength is… I realise something is deeply wrong, as you lift them with physics-breaking ease. The child is lifted by their thigh, groaning in pain as your grip bites deep into their flesh, and then manipulated as easily as a rag doll till they’re dangling from the forearms you’ve seized. I realise they’re dangling against a stomach that is immense and kicking, but scarcely have time to process what I’m seeing before your fanged mouth closed hard around their hands. They scream as you bite to hold them in place, adjust your grip lower, and physically feed more of them into your mouth. You’re so strong… When you swallow I can hear bones splintering, your throat grinding them into dust.
“Rey?”
The word feels odd leaving my mouth. You whip around to see where the sound came from but don’t seem to see me standing basically in front of you. Instead, with a rolling, sucking swallow, you trap the child’s head in your throat. No cracking sound follows. You’re being gentler with their vital organs. Apparently you want them inside you alive.
An explosion outside somehow manages to draw my attention from the heart-stopping spectacle of you mid feast. I stagger to the window. Smoke plumes up in two great columns in the distance, two buildings coming apart to engulf whole districts in grey ash.
Dizzy and disoriented as I am with a sense of panic, even that sight isn’t enough to keep my attention. There are two hands gripping into the balcony railing for dear life. I run over, impelled by some residual impulse to rescue, and grip on to the wrists.
Over the edge I see… you again. Below the dangling self-possessed child you silently scale the smooth stone building on spider legs formed of your tendrils. They erupt from your shoulder blades and bear you gracefully up. I see your eyes fixed on your quarry and the way your lips shine. Those lips pull back over fangs as you approach…
I could save them, I think. The wrists are right there in my hands. I could pull them up, give them a few more moments of life.
I hold them in place while your spider’s legs draw you up and behind them. Your teeth sink into their side, in the large muscle behind and below the arm. You don’t scissor away the flesh but instead tear it out, causing the child to pendulum where I hold them.
God, the scream. It’s so loud but weirdly beautiful: a single, pure note meaning “agony”. The child looks up at me, any trace of control or maturity gone. Reduced to no more than flesh—flesh which you swallow in chunks, not bothering to chew, sucking down whole muscles into a slack throat with ~ga-luuuhnk, aaaah~, and then another torn-out plug of young flesh.
I see the moment the flesh yields and the creature dies. Whip-fast you bind the body in tendrils then crush it against the stone wall with your bulk.
Blue and silver light streams out of the body and is contained in the prison made by your tendrils. Why can I see it so clearly? Your mouth is already clamped onto a bleeding wound and a slight adjustment means you go from sucking down just blood to taking great, gulping draughts of blood and spirit. I watch the light pulse and fight the current but it can’t get free. Your throat is a vortex it cannot escape.
There’s so much of it. Are our souls like this? You told me once you didn’t know why our souls would submit to experience corporeal life, being so much greater than we are aware. I believe you now that they are magnificent as I watch you drink, and drink, and drink. Sentience and power and wisdom pours out of the body and is funneled down your gullet like any other meat.
The last dregs play across your lips like an insubstantial caress and then they’re gone. You consign the great soul to darkness and destruction with a final wet gulp, then roll back your chin to the skies and announce your victory with a roaring ~bwoooouAAUrp~
Then you lower your fangs to the empty body and recommence tearing it apart.
I release the wrists and let you have the body. Dizzy, I wheel about. The tall one is a mass of writhing black, utterly consumed. You, the one inside, have swallowed the other child entirely and are ruttishly gripping your own swollen belly. Blue luminescence shades under your ribs, and along the core of the twisting root-tendril.
Another explosion, much closer. Like a man dazed I turn to look over the city.
The plume of ash is too young to hide your form. You tower over the street, looking twenty-storey buildings in the eye. A clawed hand rakes a line of dwellings and retrieves a family of struggling beings. You swallow each in turn with obscene enjoyment. Your stomach is already distended, already bears the blue glow of dozens of spirits trapped in a furnace. Hundreds?
A grating series of earthquake-like cracks sounds from the side of the building I can’t see. You must be there, too. And look, two more avatars of you, sixty feet tall, sweeping the streets with tendrils and the constructions with hands and… the whole city is your plaything. As smoke and dust darkens the sky I wonder, is it just the city? I watch your spider-incarnation scent the air and find another balcony to empty. You’re here, and here, and here. Why not everywhere? A whole planet, its whole populace, every culture and nation and family and individual on it, rooted out and mercilessly consumed. Flesh and fat for you to revel in a million times over. Souls enough to grant godhood. A lake of blood to quench a thirst that can never be quenched.
The ground beneath my feet shifts as thick, curling tendrils begin to tear the building apart. I reach for a broad length as it curls around the balcony but my hand passes right through it. I feel insubstantial and distant from the destruction around me; distant, too, from you. You don’t know me here. I am an intruder in whatever vision is being shown to be.
A sensation of light builds. I stagger with disorientation until orientation dissolves. Someone speaks, but I won’t remember the words.
I don’t jerk awake. The magnitude of what I have seen is too great for a reaction like that. Instead I’m frozen.
You’re here in my arms, warmer than usual as your sleeping body works its way through the body of a gamer chick. Your breathing is smooth and even.
No red skin. No pale-fire crown. Just my wonderful Rey.
My Rey. Would you really do those things? Even as I ask the question I know the answer. You think perhaps you already have, and you long to do them again. You said you thought maybe you had been sent here to learn some sort of lesson?
I smile with my face buried in your hair. God knows what lesson. We feed you everything and everyone we can. I would… would I feed you the whole world?
You seem so… human. Even glutted on a meal of living flesh you have your challenges and difficulties. You do things you don’t want to do; you have fought, lost things, submitted, been challenged. I know you value these experiences but I want to spare you from all pain. The conflict between that and the pain you would inflict on your prey is not lost on me, and I wonder about the meaning of it.
You stir, then bring your hand to your shoulder. You crane your neck to see me, which I know you can do despite the 3am darkness. “Are you crying?”
“Nightmare,” I say, grinning as I often do when I cry. You pull away and turn to face me, your knees touching mine, your quietly churning belly squeezed in between us. “Dream. Dream, I think. But… very frightening.” I think back to the three deaths I witnessed up close, hundreds I saw at a distance, billions that may have happened before whoever it was stopped you. Did they stop you in time?
I hope they didn’t.
“Shhhh, come here,” you say, stroking my hair and encouraging me to curl up with my cheek atop your belly. You stroke my back idly and I trace little patterns on AliceGG’s charnel house. “It’ll be okay. Want to talk about it?”
I shake my head against your fragrant skin. “No. Except… I’ll help,” I say, hugging your belly suddenly with fervour. “I’ll help you get free, live as you were meant to be.”
You smile in the darkness, slightly puzzled, but cuddling back all the same. “What did you see?”
A fresh batch of hot tears stings at my eyes and I cuddle in close to hide them. “You were happy.”