[CW: Body horror, teef, altered consciousness, extensive death/gore, capitalism – The Māl, Final Day Percy Hype]
“i don’t want a future
i just wanna fucking stop
i don’t want identity
…
this is nothing “
Percival stood in the lab on their airship, lolled their neck, and leaned back as far as they could, body cracking in awful sloshing fungus, more the Grave than a person sometimes in a grotesque limbo of ascended body. They waveringly stood back up straight, faintly aware they hadn’t slept properly in a few days. They had been in the main cabin room, and now they were standing over a captured zed, the undead flayed open with surgical flair.
“Huh,” Percival said quietly and looked around for Dream G., their assistant. A shadow passed in the lab that looked like her, a Tainted in a tattered lab coat wearing boots with spikes stomping through the lab’s corridors, chain-smoking through a mask of infectious material and barbed wire was pretty recognizable, but Percival felt the dream feeling of Someone Who Was Someone But Also Not The Person, Maybe A Different Person, and struggled for a name, names had power, to call out, only to find their mouth binding itself in its own fungal flesh and its razor miniature Abyssal ascension of a tooth hell biting into itself, eating their own face.
It was pretty par for the course, as Percival recognized they might, or might not, be dreaming, wasn’t that how it always was, to never know anymore?
[Art by Vergvoktre.]
“this kind of slow death
nameless sickness
really screws up your definition of alive”
They felt their body pulled forward into an invisible, freezing cold, embrace, and deposited right next to the “vivisected” zed. Percival wondered idly in the dream logic of things if an undead thing of unlife could be vivisected or if it was always a dissection. Their feet were promptly pinned down by wrought iron chains that wrapped tight, sprouting from the floor with dark fungal blooms. The lights flickered down to almost nothing, emergency lighting, a spare gas lamp, Percival’s Helscape suit letting off ambient lighting from glowing blue liquid flowing through its wires. The colors and tones swirled together in the darkness. In their hands were strange, pierced through palm flesh and bone, manifestations of cutting and slicing and sawing twisting gnarled serrated awful blades, dangling ready to be grasped and used for dread deeds.
They knew what to do. They were going to a place built on a morgue soon. Their nightmaring mind, the Nightmare itself, was giving them a revelation - the way to open the Gate was through embracing the Gate. The Static Veil could only be truly navigated by the Psychopomps of the Dreaming Eyes if they made themselves into static to pass through it unseen, naturally, giving no notice to the devils of the Grave and the Lie Called “I” of the Self.
The way through this nightmare was to carve open the zed, the fuzzy logic of the whole thing piecing together in the lucid Dreamer’s mind. They started with the eyes, the window to the soul, the top of the pyramid, that which made the world, the architect’s tool. They carved and carved and carved, losing themselves along the way. Become the Architect of the new Hell, kill the Architect in your mind, they would say.
As they carved, they felt their body go cold, the rigor mortis set in, they saw their hands pale and mottle and blush fungus and rot. They rotted away, consumed, consuming, intertwining, and as the zed was split open and apart, they climbed on in, leading with their face and upper body first in through the disconnected rib cage. They were swallowed, falling, they felt themselves in a starry void, and out, within a blink of an eye that could have been eternities, who was to say? They could only hear the awful cosmic cackling of the Nightmare as they passed through, and found themselves standing in an undead body.
They looked at their hazy, distorted form in the glass roof of the lower level of the lab, in the darkness, and knew that whatever they would do, death would never stop, and they were here to go from life to death and back, a guide. They had heard there was a place for useless eyes, and they had found it, they had found purpose, and they knew it would kill them in the end, take away their precious power, but that it was raging against it, raging against this inevitable fate as a zed, that meant everything in the world.
They woke up, or ‘woke up’, standing atop a railing of the airship, looking down at their sleek capitalist destination, an edifice and antique throne to the dead gods of the old world’s Mammon. Death and hell awaited, and that was all that mattered to them, in the ruins of avarice and excess that had brought this fallen world about.
Ready to do their duty, they stepped down from the railing, keeping in mind their oath: the living alive, the dead dead. The living alive. No one was dying if they could help it, not this time, not with who they were now, damn it all.
“i just want to be so sweet and kind to every living thing on earth
in all the whole wide world.