Sequestered ((Solo))

[DarkDelights]

She carried no torch as she approached the half ring of mint-green ghost-light. One hand was cupped with a handful of oval candies that matched the lights in hue. The other hand raised them to her mouth a few at a time, and she sucked on them noisily for minutes at a time.

Just staring through the archway.

My feelings towards Ist are complicated. I hate It the most. I resent Its presence in my dreams and I would cast It out in a flutter of my heart if I knew how. But the great-surging-thing is sealed away, one of the Nether-Five, and so I do my best to endure. I have no other choice. Yet, I confess, that from Ist I draw a wealth of artistic creativity and any talent I could possibly boast, I probably owe to Its alien inspiration.

Quiet as a mouse, the Witch padded down the tunnel, comprised entirely - walls, ceiling, and floor - of living tissue that pulsed meekly and emitted a barely audible gurgle. She made no sound, save the obnoxious sucking of the candies. Their mild sweetness alone was not enough of a charm to keep her grounded in that corner of her mind, and the savoury sucking sound produced a comforting and shielding obliviousness that allowed her nerve to steel.

I'll tell you a secret. Its been almost a year since the last time Ist visited me in dream. The last time it happened, when I woke up, I found I had wet my bed. I'm not ashamed to admit that the prospect of the world being assimilated by the Envoy-of-Madness chills me to my very core. But I obey without question when Its summons come. If you experienced that depth of unbridled rage bearing down on your prostrate soul, you'd probably obey too. Come, I'll give you a taste.

A single one of the mint candies spilled over from her cupped hand, and fell to the membranous ground. A sphincter with needle-like teeth opened just wide enough to use its inch-long teeth to draw the candy into itself. It gave a minty burp, and melded back into the organic walkway.

Like the previous paths, the tunnel ended with a great shift of setting and time, but unlike the others, there was no level ground to continue. A ledge of the fleshy material that comprised the tunnel overlooked an alien landscape of barren cosmic rock, cratered with impacts from asteroids and debris. The great void of space opened for an eternity.

The stars are wrong here. The constellations are different. I made sure to make note of that. But look, the moons!

Four identical white moons shone a disorienting radiation on the landscape, orbitting in concentric rings. The heavenly bodies seemed to be nearing alignment, the farthest just peaking out from the one before it. The white glow was nauseating, and seemed to penetrate the skin and vibrate the innards. The Witch lowered to one knee on the flesh-ledge, and locked her sparkling green eyes on a single crater the size of one of the mountains of Salvar. The impact that created it must have been immense.

Like tiny ants at that distance, small, white bipedal forms, climbed over the lip of the enormous crater, and broke into a run down the slope. Some made good distance, others seemed to struggle with the oppressive gravity of the place. The forerunners had no sooner made it near the bottom of the slope when something else began to stir in the crater. As if the mountain were some sort of lunar volcano, it belched forth rivers of glittering black, in which if one looked close enough, they could see every colour of the spectrum.

All things that creep and crawl are in great-surging-thing's domain.

The avalanches of skittering myriapods; centipedes, millipedes, and other more bizarre multi-legged creatures, more poured than crawled, clearing distance between the straggling humanoids.

The poor, wretched souls that were assimilated by Ist's madness before It was sealed away. Their consciousness is broken down and mixed in a great melting-pot of chaos, twisted and sculpted into something rotten. Then, over time, as the bits of soul come into contact with their familiar parts, they gather, until they once again form enough of a consciousness to bubble to the surface and escape while the thing is sleeping. It takes moments for flesh to be stripped back down to bone in the wave of things that crawl. They're the lucky ones. Their bones will remain on the slopes of the Great Crater until the next cycle. It is but a reprieve.

The river of vermin stymied, and there came a sound somewhere between an air-raid siren, and a fog horn. It defied the laws of space, and pervaded out into the silent cosmos itself. The reverberation knocked those midway down the mountain off their feet, and wide fissures marred the face of the crater. Long, ropy pseudopods, sickly pinks and purples, snatched the prone creatures in the blink of an eye, and vanished back into the fissures with their prey. The maddening drone came again, and the cosmic volcano vomited a globular mass of organic tissue which hovered in mid space, the same diameter of the crater mouth. It hovered there and emit its alien song, but did not cease this time. The drone went on and on, and the four moons of the alien world were blotted out by the cosmic horror. Impossibly long tentacles of the flesh orb reached from the sky, plucking up any remaining humanoids, then disappearing with them inside of folds in its form. The sphere of flesh, formless in the vacuum of space, had a halo of sickening white radiation like the moon during an eclipse, and all on that bleak landscape was, for a moment, both living and dead at the same time.

The Woman popped another handful of mints into her mouth, then hurled the remaining handful into the void, where they were swept up and drawn away into the infinite abyss. She wiped her sticky hand on her bare hip and watched them go, refusing to look even for a moment longer at the Envoy-of-Madness. She was certain it would open its one-thousand eyes, and meet her gaze. She looked at her small, delicate hand, and it flickered for a moment, out of reality. She sucked noisily on the last of her candies and closed her eyes to the horror.

***