Vestiges ➂

Content Warning: This story includes extreme themes and intense imagery that may be disturbing to some readers. It explores unsettling dark and graphic content involving physical and emotional distress, as well as challenging and provocative scenarios. Reader discretion is advised.

Festation ▲▼

As Grumselde emerged from the stairway hatch, covered in creamy-yellow fungal spores from the stairwell's powdery interior, she carried her stick pointy-end out. Her steps were silent enough as she approached the figure near the gelatine exuders. Her slug had gone dormant and was no longer pumping hormones  into her neckvein. 

She felt sure the man had seen her, but determined to approach as if he hadn't. It was a determination, and each one of these fixed plots on the lifechart was needed to sustain the next moment until the one after that came along. 

At a given instant he looked up, and this made it clear that now they were in the same now. She hoped that some type of decision would be made, either by her or by this unknown man

Like a manifestation of his desires, Heck now faced this tentative yet unsettling creature with awe. His mouth open, he couldn’t find the words. She was magnificent, and an endless scroll of future stories, adventures and descendants spooled from his head. Though he didn’t like the look of the pointy side of her stick, he also carried an equally pointy thing fashioned from reclaimed steel rebar. He gave it a little wave. Partly to say Hi and partly to say Hey. He smiled his crooked flirty smile, showing a few of his good teeth and held out his hand.

Grumselde matched indecision with indecision. Time passed twitchily in the space beside the gelatine exuders as the vile corrupted moon rose over them, giving the scene a soft isomorphic light of scarred yellow-silver. 

At last, she decided to break the silence.

"Wannahelp takeout theslug frommaneck?"

He stepped a little closer, still cautious, still conspicuously wobbling his sharpened rod and squinted at the fleshy plug in her neck. Reflexively, he reached up to pet the raised neck-scar under his jawbone and whispered, mi babosa. The daydreams suddenly obscured by the haunting dreadmares he’d long since vanquished, Heck took a step back again, now in a posture of suspicion and defense. 

“I can take it out - done it before in fact - but I want you to chuck your stick away. I ain’t gonna be a fool for a slavechick like you.”

He motioned up at the cackling lunar orb, pushing its dumb reflection down in chunks of dull light. Not looking at it directly, who could?

“We’re gonna have to move soon, night Is no friend for me, you and yours”

Grumselde was now clear of all distorting slugjuices and back to her baseline apathy. The thought that this stranger might skewer her with his own spiky worktool was no worse or no better than most other outcomes now available. All scenarios of horror and degradation had already been played out between herself and the Master. If there was worse she was prepared to experience it just for the novelty. 

And it was true what this grotesque but somehow oddly charming stranger had said. Time was passing and the night was not their friend. Though he was scarred and his ears torn and ragged, his hair thinning and wispy flaxen, there was a certain... something... in the way he carried himself. 

"Gonnaneeda handfulla thatgunktheer taplugthahole" she said, and let the stick fall to the ground. 

“Good gorgon, got gunk right here!” said Heck patting his pouches that hung from his shoulders, “but first we’re gonna find some cover, before we get to doing the nasty”

He took her hand and led Grumselde along a rock ledge to a crevasse that opened up into a small enclosure. She smelled like vomit but her skin was cool and soft like an earthworm. They sat on the cave floor where he extruded some gel from a pack valve into two small aluminum lids. He lit one up with a flint rock. 

The flame light bounced off the shine of her greasy hair and Heck felt the warming tingles zing along his nerve endings. 

“Let’s have a look now, shall we,” he said brandishing his ravioli punch and leaning in for some field surgery.

It was over quite fast, the burn and the pulling and the sharp smart done, over and done like a swift kick and running away. She found this new intimacy interesting. The man was foul-smelling but so was everything else. Beyond that there was a... touch... that was involving.

Heck, at her nape, couldn't resist the dank perfume of her pits and dermal folds. It was blood in the water. She seemed hesitant but curious so he resigned to take it slow, if he could,  instead of barrelling ahead with the blunt and unbridged passion he might usually do. So, with  one hand entwined around her midsection, he held up the limp neck grub in the flickering glow and suggested, "Shall we?"

Without hesitation, Grumselde leaned forward and bit the creature in half. Chewing contentedly, she motioned, with her head, to the remnants in Heck's fist.

"thatsyourbit"

Heck leaned in for a chomp but stopped just short and gave the half-thing a playful lick, then opened slow, hairy lips wide, and enveloped the slug piece and her fingers, slurping and sucking, leaving her digits sticky and stinking. 

Grumselde flashed then pseudopods and polyps, tentacles and wormfingers, slithering and pushing the jellisome jiggling into and around her. The Master her possessor the father of all her... 

She shrieked then and fell to the ground shaking and jigglesome herself, but sobbing too and openmouthed yawping distressed. 

"nonono themlegs and themthings, nottha pushin antha squirm no," she called up to Heck. 

For a moment, Heck considered abandoning this female. Clearly she was damaged goods. He observed her writhing at his feet. Somewhat detached, and tasting his moustache, he thought: it was good while it lasted. He was about to leave her, when the echoes of an ancient and terrible voice stabbed at his brain. This felt like slug-speak, an ecto-transmission from a forgotten time. At least forgotten until now.

Grumselde trailed snot like the trails of a hundred slugs to the ground. There it pooled with the gelatine gunk, the jully, that had been used to ease the extraction of her neckslug. 

She looked up at him. He seemed hesitant, thoughtful. And she could look straight at him without dipping her brain into a million stinging ants, so he was clearly not like the Masters.

"you wanttha jigglin and the babymakin juicesquirt?" she asked. 

The salacious solicitation snapped Heck out of his dreadbound trance, "I figured you'd come around love". And with consent sorted and the gloopy bed of gore glistening on the ground, he threw off his burlap kilt and knelt over her.

"nononono younotgon nahurtme doin’it?" Grumselde looked up to him for reassurance. "allthe othertimes? they hurt... They made me... Do things with them!"

She knelt up to face him, hands gripping his shoulders.

"They made me feel them in me! Breed their babies! You understand me?”

She shook him hard, spittle-flecking: “Do you understand me, happyman?"

Normally the traumatic display might have choked his libido, but Heck felt like they were sharing something special, something important, they were in too deep for this moment to not comprehend its romantic conclusion. 

And in one swift swing he scooped up his rough hewn garment and bagged her head, saying, "You won't feel a thing".

Pointy End △▼

The strained and suffering sun rises over the space where pools the slick jully, all glistening, next to the exudation outlet. It’s a pretty nice day all told. The dawn is coming in bright and orange, streaked with the streaks of turquoise and vermillion that portend a dry day, free of acid drizzle or hackfog. 

Grumselde peers out of the cave towards where the oozewall stretches over this hollowed-out space beyond the Periphery. She’s grateful to have found such a safe spot, so pleasant and so cozy. 

But it lacks a little something to make it homey. Something to mark it out as her new space. A token of territory gained.

She digs in with the pointy end of the rebar weapon, making a pit in the ground. Turns the stick over and plants it in the hole, spiky side up.

Then sets a new watcher to watch over the doorway and the day beyond.

His blank unseeing eyes see nothing of this fine morning, but maybe they never had.

Now, as seismic probe, Heck-On-Spike senses the vibrations of the world. it throbs up the rebar and into his hypothalamus, where it sizzles with the fry of life.

Unseeing, but now all-knowing, omnipresent, and unchanging. 

The relentless thrum of the city adjacent, the piezoelectric pulses of buried crystals and the patter of her feet ripple busy atoms up the steel into the skull ball. Its notthoughts a scramble of frequencies adrift in a halo of energy. 

It emits a vague field of arcane knowledge. She will need the vim, vitality, and raw urgency to survive out here. Heck might help, or might not. We’ll see. 

Now talisman and guardian of Grumselde the Masterless, Heck-On-Spike sags in the dawn. A putrid wind whistles into the stone enclave dislodging wafers of dandruff from its head and chin. They float and swirl at Grumselde’s feet like ashes from a fire.