Vec
Timemaster
Had the hysterical cancer known, in some dangerously prescient part of its mind, what, exactly, were the consequences of what it was doing?
Or was it just a coincidence?
Heartworm didn't care.
The caliginous mangrove suppressed sound between its mists and drooping aerial roots much like its parent forest, but not with the same consistency. Certain sounds carried where others simply died, and carried much further than was natural in such a densely overgrown place. The splash of a shoal suffocating in the stagnant water. The crying of the last hain to die of thirst. The scratching of her beak at the grey bark as she shivered, quaked, tried desperately to scrape off a little moisture from the mists. Where these sounds echoed, another was lost between them.
It was a kind of wet, raspy tearing noise, irregular, coming and going from one side to another, and it was accompanied by a peculiar whining. Very high, almost inaudible. The sound of tinnitus, damaged bones in the inner ear, that might resonate to the very gut of a listener. A listener, of course, who wasn't there to listen.
At last the sound stopped with one last thin sound of stretched veins snapping. Heartworm pulled out the viciously barbed limb from where it was buried, twelve inches deep into a patch of bent light in the air, its mouth unzipped to display a variety of eyestalks and hooks, its true eyes vibrant. It examined closely the pulsing globule of distortion it had sliced out of the rest of reality. It seemed to bleed rivulets of glass. Heartworm retracted the spike it was impaled on and swallowed it.
Adequate.
Then it slipped through the wound it had slit and was gone.
A few miles elsewhere in the mangrove, Heartworm emerged. It tasted the air with a tongue and found nearly nothing. Its divine essence was camouflaged, so to speak, by the mundanity it had consumed. That would do, for a while. It diluted the link to Jvan.
On all sides, grey. Heartworm looked out over the dim confustication of root matter. Free at last, the Lord Emaciator sank its needle hands into the flesh of the mangrove, and resumed the work it was made for.
* * * * *
The eye is the measure of truth.
They traverse the clogged spaces with a slow, sleek fluidity that defies how tightly grown the swamp truly is. Like the old ghosts, like the things in the moonlight that those ghosts fear, their bodies simply slip between the gaps, always knowing the perfect path. Their legs are very long, and their antennae even longer, stiff, supple feelers that coat their whole bodies like a cloud and bend easily around any obstacle. On a memory do they walk, a memory of a thousand steps and a thousand touches for each step, for they are blind. They blinded themselves long ago.
Passing from one place to another with mindless aim, the reminiscent ones do not see, and are never seen, for the fog that surrounds their dwelling-places is eternal. They follow the mist and multiply it with their breath and their nests, knowing the world by touch alone where sound and sight and smell have died. And to go into these places is to be known by them, to be touched, to be stroked gently, as if by a breathe that never was, to be felt by those who feel as one stumbles, face down, for the last time into the obscuration.
* * * * *
To live is to judge what is seen.
A life taken at speed does not last long, and thus they soon die. They travel along the outskirts of the bleak realms, clustering around the bodies of those who are lost from outside, fish that come here to breed in desperate safety. Muscle like harpstrings cords their limbs, of which all are hands, or can otherwise grasp. Gravity weeps for these. The breakneck pattern of leap and land twists a body too flexible to be touched, it seems, even by air.
Those faces foolish enough to look find nothing, for they are clever, and anticipate all things. Every twitch of the eye finds them gone, the cone of vision a blunt instrument indeed. They may spend so much time flitting between the peripheries of awareness, dodging the gaze of even their own, that they simply come apart and exhaust themselves. They rarely do. Such a small, lithe thing, to come so suddenly. Such a big, clumsy form, to be harried by a hungry wind, scream, and flail, always in the wrong place, always at the wrong time, dying without ever catching a glimpse of the ghost that taunts the eyes from the corners.
* * * * *
What is unseen cannot be appraised until it reveals itself.
It is not the nature of a floodforest to be immune to tides. With roots above and roots below, it is difficult to track their passage. The brown slick of algae-grown roots fades under black tannin water which may be a puddle, or more than deep enough to drown. But nothing drowns here. Not in the usual way.
Knowing the paths between the growth where the water is always deep is one way they hide. Cultivating those very channels is another. They are always near. Not once has the still surface of the mangrove ever been rippled by one of their kind. They do not breach, for air or food, but only ever dive, dive down, and pull, pull what lives in the light under the water to join them for eternity.
* * * * *
The chronically invisible are free of all reckoning.
For so long have they eaten roots, perhaps, that they have become of the roots themselves. For these do not betray themselves by smell, nor by sight, nor by motion. So still they lie that others such as themselves may twist upon them like the plants they imitate, and whole knots of mangrove may not be mangrove.
They slither, imperceptibly, leglessly, like worms, or a clew of worms with many heads, walking on branched tentacles draped with algal strands. Woe for the ones who mark them as milestones and are lost to wander with them. Woe, far more, for those outside the forest who see a marked tree, and elect to follow its trail.
* * * * *
Art is salient expression.
Energy begets complexity. It is inversely true that the simple demand little from their existence. In the Caliginous Mangrove, there are those which have paid for prosperity with mind and body, who have become, like wraiths, so thinned, so meagre, that their bodies are as the water and the air around them. Tasteless. Transparent. Universal.
They float atop the surface of the water. They float through the stagnant air. They grow on the surface of the roots. In body they are sparse, flattened, reduced to only a handful of strands of flesh or a few layers of cells. A touch causes them to dissolve into fragments, so fragile are they. A touch reaches out and feels them hanging in the air like gossamer. Feels them clinging to the skin unseen, slippery, without gloss. Touch alone warns of the ghosts that drink living flesh, slowly, patiently, one cell at a time, a thirsty lethargy that weakens muscle, uproots hair, and thins, thins, thins until there is no more, not even bone.
* * * * *
The veiled sculpture is isolated identity.
Fear is the ultimate protective force. Fear holds them in the places where they are safe. Through fear they lock themselves in the safe places, the prisons that contain the only true darkness. It is within the roots that they exist forever, never knowing the eldritch touch of light. There they have created purgatory.
Tunnels. Tunnels to everywhere. Blinding black motion, hunting in the labyrinth. Shivers from those who hide. Bodies that occupy the entirety of the paths they carve, expanding for fear of being consumed from behind. Chambers where old radial things curl, served by myriad concubines. Sudden death. Trembling birth. Intimate closeness to things mutually unknown. No way out.
* * * * *
Purity exists only in the eye of the blind.
Rare is the body that relies on others, for only surplus can satisfy their hunger without murder-suicide. They are scarce, and their orbits wide. Fitting, for such silent tyrants, that dominate the feeble, reign over the will of others. They are the reality, their subjects grafted onto the dream.
It is in their breath and their sweat and their blood. It is liquid phantasm, the distillate of all nightmare, and for each one they concoct it unique. They disperse it on microscopic glass needles, on misty smoke, and to breathe it is to see perception unravelled. The eyes lie. The ears echo. The mangrove is folded upon itself infinite times, becoming a tesseract where no plane is constant and the growth twists before the face. All is malleable. Illogic is comprehended and obeyed. And they laugh, laugh mute hunger at those that dream while the world around them wakens.
* * * * *
Heartworm sliced and stitched at the creature's spinal cord, adjusting the malfunction in its nervous system. When it sealed the wound and tossed the eel-like larva back into the water, it submerged immediately, and was gone in the blink of an eye. It was still there, the avatar knew. That was how it was designed. The caliginous mangrove was a place of hiding, and so it hid.
Just like its maker.
Jvan had created a dim and solemn place and abandoned her puppet there; She had no-one to blame if that puppet ran away out of sight. Here, Heartworm was relatively safe. It had not rebuilt its laboratory-vehicle, though it bitterly regretted the loss. Something so vast was difficult to consign to secrecy, and more difficult still to manoeuvre through the cloud forest. Without it, Our Lord Mutilation was just a worm among worms, a speck of dust in a grim grey haystack.
Of course, it still needed something to hold its samples.
Skinstitch's retinue of aides were all Sculptors come to find their god, albeit perhaps not the same God who had once spoken to them. This iteration was quiet and small. It edited them swiftly, directly, as its needs dictated. Each in their own way, the four of them were satisfied with their role in the massive project.
There was a once-Djinn, an earthen being with no name made of a great quantity of powder and silt, a great worm to carry the little one. She had no limbs but a single line of hands growing down the entire length of her body, and avoided the other Sculptor of earth, an Urtelem with far too many joints, whose body had grown gaunt as it smelted itself into multicoloured bismuth. Their name was a double-handed flourish in which the right hand led with thumb and ring finger while the left hand rolled its wrist around it, a sign that meant 'Engraver'. The third's name was unpronounceable, and varied depending on which moons were new. Their hain flesh spilled from his carapace to form flexible tentacles which which he swam. And the fourth, once a goblin miner, now a cat-like arboreal creature, was named Se Na Uo Na Tay, which was a melody only he seemed able to sing in tune.
They carried slices and tangles of flesh, some freshly cut from one corpse or another, some still growing, all contained in fluid-filled membranous sacks labelled with symbols written in vein growths. Most were borne within the silt sculptor's body, and she surfaced them so that the glistening bulbs studded every inch of her when Heartworm had need of one wriggling clot of blood or another. Se Na Uo Na Tay and Engraver were often extracting the mature embryos for release, or else bringing more. And the once-hain?
There is a use for everything.
The day's work done, and night beginning to fall, Heartworm crept into the brain of the unspeakable artist, and together they dove into the deepest waters of the mangrove. Down, down, to the place where the wyrms had once chewed stone, and where, buried beneath millennia of debris, Heartworm measured and numbered the still-beating blood wells of the sleeping Scholar below.
