11: Submission

The passage is long, as long as any that I have yet taken, and twice I stop for sleep. My dreams are fitful, and no consistent theme threads them. When I wake, I continue onwards, fully aware that my stomach has ceased to growl at me. I can remember now, the face of someone, a friend I believe, a thin smile and an outstretched hand, looking down at me. He seems troubled, in this memory, but his eyes seem hopeful, encouraging. He grasps my arm and tells me something I feel sure must be of great importance. I can feel that I did not take him seriously, but that I should’ve, that it mattered very much to him. I remember seeing him walk away, and laying back in my seat, watching the light overhead sway from side to side.

This memory stays with me as I traverse the passage, sometimes crawling on my stomach at a very steep downward incline, other times walking upright with plenty of room. The air is stale, but bearable, and the walls are of a dark stone that I can see clearly in the red light my eyes now cast. My thinking and remembering is eventually broken as I shuffle through another narrow pass into a round chamber whose walls are adorned with skulls with open mouths, as if they find my arrival humorous. The floor is a mosaic of femurs and shin bones, and fingerbones point down from the ceiling as stalactites. I hear the echo of dripping water nearby, and see an inscription in the same jagged language over the door out of the chamber. The knob to the narrow wooden door is a clenched skeletal fist encased in amber.

The creak of the door hinges announces my passage to the next chamber. I enter a tremendous knave from the left side and look out across a cathedral made from iron and stone, with tapestries instead of stained glass windows. In every pew sits a skeleton, jaw agape or even missing, every head tilted to face the door from which I have entered, as though I am expected. I walk up the aisle to the crossing, and regard the altar with apprehension. Upon it, behind the podium, stands a figure in a long black robe with a golden circle floating freely behind his head. His face is a skull without eye sockets, and his neck is a bundle of hay. The altar itself is an obsidian chunk with a wooden carving of a man pierced through the chest resting atop it. The man’s face is contorted in pain, and the implement piercing him appears to be a spear wrapped in thorns. I withdraw, and hear cracking as the sermon giver’s head turns to follow my movement. His jaw opens, and a sound like the rushing of wind is produced. Similar sounds rise from all over the knave, and I begin to run back up the aisle towards the main door. The gruesome tapestries bordering the door catch my eye and I glance over my shoulder to see the congregation has disappeared, including the priest. I shudder, and return my attention to the tapestries. I have clearly begun to succumb to stress.

On the left is an image of what I take the altar to be glorifying; a man spreads his arms out to a crowd under a blue sky, and is run through by the thorny spear from behind, by a strange figure wreathed in dark threading and signified with many silver and gold rings about their head, all before a metropolis of skyscrapers. On the right is an image of the same dark figure holding their hands up to the sky, where green clouds have gathered. All around, horrors rise from the ground. I recognize in the second tapestry a cluster of individuals standing off on either side of the border- one is the scientist called Tower; one is Pathogen, the porcelain queen; one is the tall machine that directed me onward. Others I do not recognize are with them, each with grisly countenances. Shepherding the clouds is a pair of creatures with red halos: white winged humanoids with white bodies lined with red, their faces sporting open mouths with sharp teeth. In their hands are long cruel scythes. The background is a series of bodies impaled over a field, their blood watering a familiar marshland.

Disturbed enough, I elect to no longer study the image, and instead pass through the double door. I find that I am standing at the end of a cobbled road, which leads through an otherwise impassable forest of rusted iron spikes, some of the barbs reaching well over the height of the chapel, which is set against a sheer cliff face on its left. A stout figure covered with a thready blanket and holding an iron staff hobbles eagerly toward me, and despite my repulsion, I allow her to come close enough for me to smell her rancid odor. A face like that of an elderly woman’s stretched over the skull of a farm animal leers out at me from under the blanket, and gnaws at its teeth, drooling heavily.

“Been waiting, I have. Tell you to go onward. Oh yes, oh yes.”

I look down the path to which she points, and grit my teeth. My left hand clicks and taps as I flex it into and out of a fist. The hag thing speaks again, shaking her staff vigorously.

“Hurry on now, hurry on! Pathogen has sent her angels, she has. They’ll not catch you in the forest, and they’ll let you be once you blend with the masses, but Tower, oh yes, he’ll send his snatchers for you, they’ll be on you right quick. Hurry on!”

Though I do not see him, or hear him, I look over my shoulder, expecting to see that surgeon standing nearby, holding some motorized tool and grunting. I begin to walk again, and leave the hag standing on the steps of the church, muttering to herself about royalty and hunting. The sky is black, but a yellow moon hangs overhead like the lure of some anglerfish fit to swallow a world. This celestial orb seems to me far too close, as though it is instead the hole in the roof of some great cavern, through which the sun is emanating. Small specks drift occasionally down in front of its luminous face as I walk, and I wonder if they are the angels which the hag mentioned. I recall the red-ringed toothy faces from the tapestry, and begin to jog.

Through the thick metal trunks of the spikes, I sometimes glimpse a surge of movement like small horizontal waves, the flank of some great serpent, I imagine. The road curves and snakes unpredictably through the forest, and a rain begins to fall, the air smelling of a foul chemical. At first, I hear only the spattering of the rain, but soon I begin to hear moaning and sobbing. It seems to come from above me, but when I look up, all I see are the tips of the spikes backdropped by that ponderous moon. I increase my pace further, beginning to trudge down a moderate hill. I imagine that I hear the grunts and pleasured groans of the surgeon amid the sobbing, but soon realize I am not imagining things. Ahead of me is a slow moving cluster of people in robes and blankets. Some are like the surgeon, lead spheres and ovals for heads with empty holes around the eye area with shoddy bleeding mouths; some are like the maids, porcelain and silicone threaded with blood-filled tubes; others are like the surface dweller in the city, assorted bits and pieces fitted together without rhyme or reason, with life-supporting machines strapped and wired to them, giving them an uneven gait. At the head of this group is a clergyman in a black robe with a silver disk behind his head held aloft by a golden collar at his neck. From behind he looks like a peculiar friar or perhaps a monk, but the front of his face is a sheer iron slab ending just above his lower jaw.

Recalling the hag’s instructions, I cling to this group, blending in well enough with my porcelain hand and red robe, though I know not how my face looks from the outside. We leave the forest behind for a sort of obelisk garden, with flat black stones rising haphazardly all around us, scenes of sacrifice and torment etched into their surfaces. It takes a moment, but I soon hear that our guide is murmuring in a low drone, speaking in the language I heard Julia speaking to her companion. With a start, I realize that I can understand it, as though coming this far has attuned me to the meaning of each syllable, each harsh hiss and clattering consonant. From time to time, members of the group chant in assent with a certain phrase.

“Once the darkness was all, was less than any. And from the blessed dark came light, sickly and impure. Worlds did come then, and one of these was peopled by lowly worms that groveled in the dirt, and one was peopled by hungry lizards in deep cold, and one was peopled by beetles that scrounged and whimpered, and one was full of fish things in murk. We are but worms. We are but beetles. And the worlds and the peoples sought greatness, sought might, sought glory. So the worms fought. And the lizards, and the beetles fought. We are but lizards. We are but beetles. And the worms, and the lizards, and the beetles, and the fish things too, all fought, and sought glory. And then the wretched worms, remembering what they did not know, sought the blessed dark. Praise the dark, oh, praise the dark. From the dark they drew the less, and they gave the less form. The wretches touched the divinity, sought to soil it with their wants. But the mighty Least withstood their scrabbling, and won their nothing wars, and learned of the light the less had never known. And when the worms sought to return him to the dark, the Least brought the dark to them. Oh holy dark, oh magnificent Least. The Least then vowed unto the worms, the lizards, the fish things, and the beetles that he would make them again, and that he would make the light holy as the dark was. Oh blessed be we worms, blessed be we fish things, oh bless us, bless us all.”

So goes the sermon and the chant, and when he reaches the end, the pastor begins again.

The monument garden ends, and we begin shuffling into a town of hovels and leaning shacks, in which I can see all manner of strange creatures, some stitched together from many species, some little more than puddles with a trio of holes for a face. All seem to sport installations of metal or porcelain, or both, and others are completely transfigured into cybernetic organisms, looking like they have spent much time under the hands of the surgeons. Looking up, I see that barbed spires rise in all directions, atop each is a squirming, writhing thing, some looking nearly human, others masses of unrecognizable limbs, all pierced by the tip of the temple below them. And clinging to some of these spires are warped angels.

The tapestry did not do them justice. Their bodies are sleek in white steel armor, full breastplates and greaves and gauntlets. Red tabards hang from them, swaying in the wet wind, and most have four arms, two of which clutch long staves topped in cruelly spiked circles or cross spears. Their wings are equally majestic and unnatural, boasting spans longer than they are tall, with silvery feathers and sharp talons, folding as the wings of moths rather than birds. Their heads are shaped blocks of the white steel, which causes me to realize that their armor is embedded in their flesh. None have eyes set in their heads, only mouths, but all have glowing red halos, from which emits a radial shimmer suggesting great heat. Behind their sharp teeth slither long pointed tongues. Some have horns like rams boasting from their metal skulls, others have twisted pastorals engraved in the front. These malevolent shepherds watch over the growing crowd that I am a part of, approving of our collection towards what I assume to be the center of town. This assumption is based on the increasing density of the torturous spires, the mounting grisly spectacle.

We flow like water across the streets and down steps like the edge of a basin, until we are a mass at least a mile across in a tremendous square dominated by a cathedral with at least a dozen pinnacles, each decorated with a writhing figure pierced from behind. Atop this monument is a whole flock of the angelic creatures, chittering like dolphins and snapping at each other with aggression.

At uneven intervals in the crowd, taller monsters stand, broad chested flayed creatures with iron horns surrounding their faces, hooked swords in their hands. Many boast rusted protrusions of metal from their back and shoulders, and their four eyes glow orange like flame. Their mouths are crowded with tusk-like teeth, and their chests are decked with spiked piercings. I watch as one is pushed into by the crowd’s shoving, and he brutishly picks up the individual that was pushed into him. He laughs gutturally and squeezes the porcelain woman’s head till it shatters, then drops her to the ground where the masses swarm over her, to what purpose I cannot see, though I can hear screaming and giddy laughter.

Ahead, I see the doors of the chapel swing open with a thunderous groan, and from them emerges a towering cyborg with flaming eyes, whose face appears stretched thin over his skull. His hair is long and stringy, and his lips have been peeled away over his metal teeth. His body is swarmed with flies, and it seems what little flesh he still has is writhing with maggots. He seems familiar. Until now I was shuffling through the crowd to get closer to the church, but I stop short and watch as he wades in, every figure reaching up in supplication to him, chanting.

“Nect’rus, Nect’rus, Nect’rus…”

He stops but a few feet from me, and what remains of my sense of smell urges me to move the other way of the jostling, as the stench that rolls off him is fetid and rank. He holds out his arms over those around him and grins, or at least seems to. His voice is grating, a gravelly cough supported by synthesizers and organ pipes.

“Come! Come all you filth! Let go of your hope and fear!”

The masses shake and jump, and shout with raucous fervor, surging with the want to get closer to this cybernetic carcass. I move counter to them, inching my way towards the church, each body I pass eagerly using my passage to slink closer.

“Our glorious crusade nears! Word comes from below, through me, unto you! Another great battlefield, a world that revels in the stench of light!”

The jeering seems to increase tenfold, and many of the creatures raise crude weapons. I duck my head down to avoid being unintentionally stabbed or burnt by the improvised instruments of those nearest to me. I am so close to the open doors of the cathedral, I can see candlelight behind them, and hooded figures moving around within. I hesitate and look up to where one of the angels hangs above me, its hand clutching the head of a statue depicting a man being pierced by eleven spears. Other statues over the doors hold these spears, each recognizable to me as the important figures in the tapestry, including the tall form of the rotted thing that emerged from within the church. The man looks down in sorrow, and the rain seems to become his tears as it trails along his face. I feel that I recognize him, though I know not from where. The cyborg continues his message.

“The time comes soon, wretches. Whet your appetites, and offer yourselves wholly! Serve the dark as it will ever serve you!”

A frenzy breaks out, and the crowd begins attacking each other at random, to the glee of the angels and monsters, who soon join the fray, gorging themselves on the easy prey below them. I manage to hide in the shadow of one of the saint statues on either side of the door, and watch as the crowd is nearly halved before the violence ceases. Those that have died are collected up by those around them, and dismantled. I fail to look away as arms are torn from the dead and added to the bodies of the living with no difficulty, returned to life as flesh knits itself unbidden. The angels and brutish things simply feast on their winnings. The goliaths seem to increase in size from this measure, and develop their horns further, sometimes sprouting additional arms. The Angels are granted more concentric halos, and their armor becomes more ornate.

Finding myself more than sated for sight, I slip into the cathedral, and pull up the hood of my robe to match the other denizens.