4

I unwrapped the spear in a flash of Reed and wood then brandished the jagged edge at the world around me.

I had heard the crying. It pierced through the gentle wind and the oceans wet frothing like a knife through melted butter. Didn't recognize the source of that shrill voice with its inflated scraggly undertone of corporeal terror, but I understood the implications of sounds without explanation. So what is it now. Is the sand going to sob like a child and snap open its maw underneath my feet? Or is it the wind, slowly wailing louder until the volume ravages through my brain and pops my eardrums like inflated bubblegum. But my questions were answered when I realized it was coming from me. No, not me. The spear.

I looked downwards with a creeping sense of ireful apprehension, down at the spear gripped tightly in my hand. It was the same spear, with the same pole and the same dull wood with the same fish corpses impaled on its brutal sawtooth head. But wedged between a bright pink salmon and some twitching haddock was a tiny grey Mackerel. Just from looks alone, the thing was probably only a fry. Its young body was skewered through its midsection by the jagged spear, its watery innards and thinned blood sloughing down the wood and onto the corpse below it. But while the other fish were deathly silent, this one wasn't dead, or silent. It was crying loudly. Tears dripped senselessly down its tapered cheek. Its entire body quivered weakly, that gaping mouth hung open in a loud, pathetic wail. The fish had to be young, barely beyond a couple months. Probably only recently left whatever shoal it was once apart of, and now look at it. A fish that cried. Another lovely little miracle of the Antumbricane. But it was no threat. It was just the death throes of some aquatic animal. Atleast it isn't too severe, today. I thought something was finally here to break the lucky streak of not being attacked.

Or even worse, the Corpse had come back.

But no. It was just some fish. Some sobbing, mewing, dying little thing. I felt almost relieved, despite the sudden gnawing of guilt on my subconscious. I wasn't a monster — didn't care that it was violating everything ancient scientists once knew about biology. I didn't want it to suffer. So I looked down at the fish, regarded its bulbous eyes wide with powerless terror, watched how it spasmed around the spear that impaled it. Then, I looked deeper. My mind stretched, then reached out to touch the fishes primitive psyche. It didn't understand what I was doing, it wasn't even aware, so I faced no resistance. I sifted through the things mind like I was reading a letter, scrolling a metaphorical finger over intermittent emotions, half-baked notions of the taste of kelp, or ephemeral chemical Impulses and neuronic pulsations. I focused my attention on those emotions and Impulses and that frantic terror, reaching for its fears and doubts and terrors. Then, very calmly, I told it to calm down.

Its wails began to soften, then it became weak moans and sniffling, and finally came to a stop. The fish lay on its side, gills choking on air and bulbous eyes wide with ragged terror, but now it just stared at me. I met its gaze, saw those glazed eyes and shining scales colored a stringy crimson, and for the briefest of moments we saw and understood each-other clearly and deeply. Then I softly ordered its heart to stop. The intricate ventricles and veins jarred, then the pumped blood began to slow. The fish shuddered, its final vestiges of nerves failing to even twitch in insane abandon, then it died in silence.

I withdrew from its dead mind, wrapped the spear back up in its reed cord, and left the beach.

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The Antumbricane has raped the universe. Abolished every notion of coherent physics. Tore humankind into gory ribbons and fed us to its screaming young. Left me alone with the screaming, quivering thing that only resembled what I knew to further spite me. But, simultaneously, it has gifted me.

I don't know when I was able to do these things. Didn't understand why or how I had lived so long. It wasn't something I expected answers to. I suppose somewhere along the line, the Antumbricane corrupted me. Tore into my psyche and run rampage, twisting cells and rewiring nerves and repurposing organs until it had changed me into a pale image of itself. Or maybe it was buried in us all. The potential of mind dominating the material, always there, buried underneath sparkling neurons and pulsing veins, deep within the subconscious of humankind. Now with the obstacle of coherent reality removed, impossible has been pushed to the sidelines.

In the ages of Apollonian normalcy, there was once human civilization. It numbered in the billions, but we were soft, loping animals that feared and scuttled and screamed in the night. We couldn't fly, so we used great metal birds called planes. We couldn't defend ourselves, so we used metal sticks called guns, which spat balls of lead at thousands of miles a second or belched screaming spears that exploded into fire on their target. We could think and create, and we did, but eventually our creations became too complex to understand on our own. So we made thinking machines of silicon and gold called Computers to help us and maybe one day do the thinking for us. But that was long, long ago. Now in the swirling Dionysian lunacy, there is only me left. There's no point in even trying to find any others. It's been countless millennia. They're all dead now. Those who are left are either evolved beyond imagining or locked away in some far corner of the Antumbricane, probably being eaten and digested and consumed in an endless cycle by thousands of chittering teeth. None had the same luck as I did.

I guess it's not even worth thinking about, isn't it. So I forced it from my memory, burying it deep, then deeper, until I could no longer remember it any longer.

When I got back to my little home I sat down in the kitchen, placing the Reed wrapping deep within the cellar. Then I went back upstairs, sitting onto the counter and listened for a few cursory moments to the world around me. All I heard was the whistling of wind and the gentle repetitive twittering of young birds. So for a while I just sat there listening to it all, until nearby on the counter I noticed the bowl I had left this morning, piled with stringy yellow wheat stalks. Memory trickled back into my mind like I was being drip-fed, and I remembered that dinner was still uncooked.

I moved up to the counter, drawing up the process of baking bread out from memory. Thresh, winnow, grind, mould the flour, bake. With the sun glaring my back I got to work. I picked the stringy wheat heads up, then I separated the heads from the stalk with fluid, experienced motions. Then I ran the severed heads through my fingers, over and over, until pale wheat berries began to tumble into the bowl. But the chaff remained. So I bent down, then inhaled, then blew into the bowl. The chaff was winnowed away, pushed out from the bowl in a great blizzard twirled in the air around me. I blew them away, until the chaff covered the floor like snow and only the tiny wheat berries were left.

I swept the chaff out the way for later salvaging and stared down at the wheat seeds now filling the bowl. The normal method would be to smash the berries with a rock, or grind them with a mill, but I haven't built a mill yet nor do I have the patience to grind them to dust by hand. So I cheated. I waved a hand and the berries lifted up from the bowl as one, shuddering irefully as they floated infront of me. I turned my hand and gravity began to constrict around them like they were in a vice grip. I clenched into a fist and they violently folded in on themselves. Once, twice, thrice, until a steady pale white flour dusted the bottom of the bowl. Then it swelled up, spreading out like spider-webbing as a pile began to form. I reached a hand into the bowl and felt the flour; coarse and powdery, but it will do.

I fetched another bowl, dusted it with sea salt and lemon juice, then I poured in the newly made flour with a jug of water. The water thickened, then the flour slowly coalesced and mixed into stringy dough, which I painstakingly pressed and formed into new shapes. I hummed a tune as I worked. Recited my favorite poem. One I learned thousands of years ago. It was the same poem I etched onto the monument in titanic letters of engraved stone, line after line about charges and the booming of cannons, of blind bravery and lunatic fanaticism.

For a moment I stopped, listening to the twittering of the distant birds outside the open shutters. I cast a glance over my shoulder at the valley and saw that the sun was beginning to creep slowly down the northern horizon. The sky was still a gentle blue but that was going to change; I'd give it an hour or two. Only more motivation to get this done before sunset. I continued to work, kneading and molding the dough with thin hands, and when I figured it was moulded enough I took it in my hand in two great clumps, then made my way over to the furnace and pressed it into a clay platter, spreading it out over its surface until the copper surface was covered in brown stringy dough. Figuring I was done, I slid it into the furnace. My stare focused on the firewood, then intensified, and then embers were seeded in the dull bark. They glared at me with ireful crackling, then they flickered, then eventually roared with harsh flames that licked the bottom of the plate and bathed the room in enticing orange light.

I figured that it'll take around two hours to bake. So I crossed my legs, deciding to spend some time just watching the flames as they lapped at the plate, the temperature causing the dough to contract and the edges become the foundations of pale crusts. They'll harden eventually, the dough will thicken, and eventually it will turn into bread. All it will need is patience. Just what I excel at.

I watched, but after a while I found my mind trailing back to focus on that poem, and visualising the brave men on horseback as they charged into the valley of death. Sometimes I fantasized about being apart of the poem. One of the brave Soldiers, Riding on horseback across a wide, wide valley. Just not the killing other people part. I think that was the only part I actively, really, truly despised. Just the notion of it; hacking and slashing at other people, to meet an actual living breathing human and to end that life with a cold sabre; that made me uncomfortable. I would have left those lines of the poem off the monument, if not for it being so culturally priceless.

If I could, I'd make it loop. Make it only us, galloping and charging across the valley, the cannons booming at our arrival not to murder us but in welcoming, so that great explosions lined the valley with every step we took. Then time would forever loop and relapse and repeat in that singular beautiful few moments. We would be brave and mighty and together and that's all that mattered to me.

I was wrong. The bread took an hour to cook.

I spent the time daydreaming aimlessly, until I think I almost fell asleep while watching the bread cook. My body went lax and my eyelids became suddenly too cumbersome of a weight to support around the halfway mark, but I managed to remain awake. Wasn't even paying much attention until the warmth of the flames reminded me I was cooking in the first place. Thankfully, it wasn't too burnt. Still edible. I took it out from the furnace, ordering my fingertips to ignore the burning sensation of the heated clay, and slid the plate on the counter. I waited a while for it to cool. Took almost five minutes until I could even half-nibble on the thing. When I did, it tasted like lemon and strenuous effort. It crumbled in my mouth as I chewed on it softly.

I ate my bread in silence, staring aimlessly out the window at the setting sun. I didn't even notice it until now, but the sun had almost set, with only its intense edges ebbing out from the edges of the North mountain. With its decline the sky had taken a violent orange and emulsified yellow. For a few moments I just thought about the monotonous, featureless march of existence. The daily ritual adhered to on a religious basis. But dull solace was always better than what lay just a few solar miles away, I remembered with sour dissapointment. Then I remembered what was upstairs, and my newest pest problem invading the mirror. It was relatively safe in the Valley. Peaceful, too. But sometimes, every once in a few decades, what lay beyond managed to seep through into my little prelapsarian refuge, forcing its way through the unnoticeable faults. Today, the mirror was one of those faults.

I was halfway through my dinner until the tension became unbearable, almost palpable to the point where the sound of my heartbeat began to overtake the wilderness outside, taking a steady drum against my ears. But I forced myself to continue, and didn't dare allow myself to move until I had finished. Eventually I did, and when I got up it felt like a great weight was lifted off my chest, right before it was about to cave in my brittle ribcage and smash my heart into paste. I began to move, turning apprehensively to the stairs leading upwards. Only one thing left to do.

Every step up the stairs was suspenseful. My hand gripped the banister until it cracked underneath it and my heart palpitated faster in my brittle chest and my mind etched up stronger fortifications in preparation for whatever I'll find. The world seemed to fade away with every step, and I felt the inklings of fear arise, then ruthlessly be purged from existence. But the stairs were eventually scaled, and I inched my way into the bathroom. It was the same room, with the same boxy appearance and the same crude toilet and the same tiny shutters for windows, with bright yellow sunlight breaking through the wooden slits. The mirror was still smashed from this morning. Cracks festooned across the broken glass, looking like a shining parody of veins on flesh and tissue. Glassy fragments littered the floor, turning it into a glittering minefield. I cleared the bespangled floor with a wide step, balancing precariously on a singular foot for a moment until I stabilized myself.

I looked up and between the cracks and shattered glass, I could see my reflection in the mirror. It moved as I moved. But when I was within arms reach my reflection stopped moving and just stared at me, all eyes. I met the stare and a few seconds later it shuddered and began to melt.

It was waiting for me. The thing in the mirror that wore my skin. Like it hadn't even stopped paying attention, not even stopping thinking about me for a moment. I felt something knock on my mind. The thing had melted entirely, the skin taking the pigment of vile yellow wax, the clothes slouging off and melting into the newly formed slop, which rapidly spread across the room in the mirror but left my view into it untouched, like it was some dismembodied viewpoint that can't be interacted with. Or maybe it wanted me to see how it could twist my body apart.

I felt the mirror pulsate, then grow clearer. Immediately I understood what it wanted me to do. It wanted me to enter and meet it in person. Like before, a creeping sense of ireful, primordial terror returned to my heart. Like before, I squashed it down.

I closed my eyes, then I stepped through.

I had been taken to a world of bubbling. The bathroom had gone, and now there was a wide field that stretched infinitely in every direction, and the sky was like Sackcloth. I looked down and saw the same silky yellow wax, and it bubbled around my feet weakly. Instinctively I began to move, already drawing up new plans on how to handle it all. The wax squealed and hissed like a feral animal underneath my feet, then when I tried to walk further I felt something dig into my ankles. Didn't need to look down to know that the wax had solidified around my feet and immobilised me. I had expected the move from a mile away. Instead of reacting, I went perfectly silent. Perfectly still.

From only a few steps away the floor began to bulge, split open like a burst fungi blossom with a audible hiss of escaping stale air. Then more of the wax sloughed out, forming protruding bubbles, growing larger and larger. Like before it grew eyes, and like before it began to hiss at the sight of me, spreading out across the ground and sludging towards my feet. The biggest bubbling puddle hissed and flickered, then its frothy skin peeled apart and a human Embryo surfaced. The Embryo turned its fleshy red skull and raised an unformed hand and smiled at me with tiny little teeth. I would have scoffed. How quaint.

I asked if this was all it was here for; it pulsated; I mocked it for being so pathetic; it shuddered and split on itself. Then the Embryos little jaw unhinged and it began to speak in a deep, deep voice, that caused the wax around it to ripple and each rolling vowel leaving in a slurred animalistic growl.

You worthless coward let me in let me in let me in Please.

Then it shuddered.

Please Please Please Let me in Let me in Let me in.

I felt myself grow angry, my body flaring with the sort of indignant unnacepting anger that only the final member of a dead species could feel towards one of the things responsible for its death. I didn't show it, instead I gave it an impassive stare, letting the wax-thing have its moments of satisfaction and delusions of victory. Interpreting my silence as the admittance of defeat, it began to slough forward with more haste than before, filthy wax sludging up my legs to further immobilise me. A thick globlet of wax curled up to my ear and formed into a smiling yellow mouth, which whispered gently into my ear.

Let it. Let. LET. Let me in.

It was finished spewing its nonsense. Then it began to laugh, wet and hacking and victorious. The wax solidified, then began to burn softly at my feet and spread across my body as if I was in a great stomach slowly dissolving me into nutrient slop. I wasn't going to allow this to continue any longer. So silently my mind reached forward from its cage of bone, and gripped the waxy things psyche with a vice grip. Its stupid little smile vanished like it was never there, and then it began to melt again, absorbed back into the wax. It realised the trap I had spring, and began to scream, desperately trying to melt back into the floor. But I didn't let it. I paralysed it, held it in place.

I walked through its mind, taking strolls along decentralised nerve systems and searching through impossible biology, until somewhere within some clump of waxy neurons I found what I wanted to. The thing had come across my little home a few decades ago, saw me from behind the barrier, so it spent every waking moment, dedicating it all to finding a way inside to kill me, or eat me, or torture me, or whatever. Doesn't matter. With what I got now obtained, I saw no reason to keep the thing alive. So I tore it apart from the inside, until bubbling wax oozed out of gaping wounds and it screamed and cried with burst lips. The wax around me began to recede, then melt into the darkness. Until all that was left was me and it. Between the sobs and wails it choked something to do with betrayal, then smiled with slimy teeth. They want to see you. How about you go to them.

I stared down at it with every ounce of hatred, every xenophobic primitive urge, every cruelty to ever be felt by humankind.

"No." I spoke. Then I waved a hand and it ceased to exist.

The Sun had drowned below the horizon. Throughout the day it had crawled across the skies, aad darkened. The Sun bobbed precariously then like a ball too heavy to support its own density it drooped down under the stretching mountains and expansive mossy forests. With its departure the sky went from an emulsified deep blue, to gentle darkness.

Night has come to the Valley.

It was a while since my little victory over the invader. An hour or two. I climbed my way from the world within the mirror just as it collapsed, without any invasive parasite from beyond the antumbricane to sustain it. I had cleaned, tried to forget about the battle, cleaned some more, failed to forget, and now I was supposed to be asleep. But I rolled around in the sheets and my mind refused to subside. So I had conceded, and for now I had taken to sitting on the roof of my house. I wasn't sure what I was doing here. All I did was just sit there like something carved from unliving stone, head angled up rigidly to glare at the stars as they passed and barreled through space. With the darkness and the sun drowned beneath the horizon, the stars so far away burned in awesome comparison, the night sky obscured by the thousands of glittering, blinking stars. whether they were all in some grand apsis around me or the opposite, I didn't care much. Most didn't move at all. Others shot across the cosmos like meteors, barreling through solar systems at trillions of miles an hour, smashing orbits and eating lesser stars like a celestial parody of predatory Bacteria in Agar.

As I watched I half-remembered constellations I studied in my ancient youth, before the Antumbricane. Before it all. I visualised tracing them over yellowed astronomy papers in the lamplight, staying up late to study for some meaningless test... Don't know for what. The memory was hazy and shuddered like a corrupted video file, the finer details evading me. But I recalled that watching the stars was always important to human culture, and how the ancient men in their caves and huts once looked to the stars and found their heros in the patterns among them. So tonight, I spent an hour combing for their namesakes in the sky. After searching for soup-ladles and Greek hunters I gave up and accepted that just like the Antumbricane the Human Brain was an insane thing that sees whatever it desires in anything it chooses.

So begrudgingly I got up off the sloping rooftop and climbed my way back into my room. There in the darkness I nestled into my warm bed, draped myself with the flowing covers and ordered my mind to fall asleep, just like before. Now it had been relaxed, so it conceded to my demands and drifted into a slumber. My muscles began to finally untense after such a laborious day. I closed my eyes and allowed my psyche to wander, drawing up half-baked notions of coarse crumbling bread and valiant charges across exploding Valleys and the thing that was in the mirror.

Sleep took me quickly and quietly.

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