Rusty Fears 6 - Hades Bay by Jubilee Finnegan

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Hades Bay by Jubilee Finnegan

July is the best tasting month by far.

You think it's something about the crispness of the air.

It feels like the wind boils in your throat, going down with a tickling sensation.

The breeze squirms against your cheeks while the sun beats down with merciless hammering.

Yes, you do believe July is the best month, as it is when the world fights against you.

Very rarely does Mother Earth put up a fight, but here she is all fists, blood, and spittle against every living creature on the surface.

Normally this would be bothersome, having this unilateral assault on the senses.

But for you, it gets your prey angry.

The scorching rays get their hormones flowing, their bodies sweating, their minds racing.

This combustion of chemical stimuli does fascinating things.

July is certainly the best tasting month.

Days like this seem to beckon them from their houses.

The early months are far too cold, and the later ones are packed to the brim with celebrations.

Now, though, the autoclave of familial tensions and heat festers within them, pushing them to your shores in search of some sort of reprieve.

Like a hand coaxing them from their comfortable beds into the wilds of nature.

It is your hand.

A firm, calloused hand.

You are first awoken early in the morning.

Young ones clad in tight suits, full of bravado and hubris, ready to take to the waves.

There is this prevailing sense of power in them.

They fear you, but not in the way you've come to know.

These infants truly believe you're taunting them.

That your jagged cliffs and salt-thick waves are not fair warnings, but instead an invitation to combat.

As they dash across the shores to take on the ocean waves, you cannot help but pity them.

Do they recognise the gravity of their actions?

To tell a primal force that you truly believe you can best them?

If you were capable of such a thing, you would pity them.

One of them hears clicking beneath the rippling waves.

Now,

a basic understanding of the relation to sound and water would lead a normal person to recognise that something is amiss.

They might respond to this by alerting their companions, or simply exiting the situation altogether.

But these are not scholarly types.

The swimmy one floats above the water, running their hands through your thick currents.

More clicking.

At this point, you've given the young one a fair enough warning.

If this creature isn't able to recognise a basic statement of threat, then it's only a matter of time before someone else consumes it.

Better you than something else.

At least you have the capacity to make it quick.

There's always been part of you that wonders if the creatures feel it when you mark them.

For you, the act is disturbingly simple.

The young one dips its hand into the water.

It's shockingly cold.

A chill crawling across their skin, skittering through the nerves nerves like a virus.

The bristling cold makes its way to their nape, burrowing into the flesh, then bone, until the mark finds its home in marrow.

Seeping through the body, the young one flinches in place.

You wonder what sensations it must be feeling now, to be plucked from the boughs of normalcy and targeted as oh-so worthy of your indication.

It must be absolutely ravishing.

But your experience falls so beyond their minds.

As the youngling flails its way back to shore, seemingly unaware of its newfound importance,

you allow yourself to take in the world.

The watery tombs around you shift as one unified mass.

Hundreds of many-eyed, many-souled bricks of flesh drift in untethered space.

Each one speaks in a distinct voice, formed by the artifice of consumption, subsuming more and more from the surface into these bundles of being, creating creations unfathomable.

For the lesser creatures, their inoculation should come as an honor.

Your gift of glory, to be accepted into something more vast than they could comprehend, should create cries of ecstatic joy, euphoric bliss.

But sadly, they do not go kindly into the consumption.

The marked youngling stands on the beach now.

Grains of sand seep their way between its feet.

It is panting.

Exhausted beats of breath punctuate conversation.

It speaks to its companions.

Other ones of its ilk, all of a similar age.

The youngling feels sick.

It believes it should go home.

Its flesh goes stark white like crackling sea foam.

The others laugh in asynchronous tones, all offering up reason for it to stay.

Their disorderly nature disgusts you.

So many beating organs, brittle bodies that rely on a flimsy language to communicate.

Such an unartistic mode of being.

By the time the sun reaches the apex of the sky, the youngling is vomiting into the sand.

You see that their skin now goes from pale white to a sickly green, a gradient indicative of the continuation of inoculation.

Its heart beats louder now.

loud enough that you can hear it beneath the waves.

The companions gather around it, offering shade in the form of their panicked bodies, but none of them choose to leave.

At this point in the process, if just one of them picked up the marked one and took it away, you would miss your chance.

But you're better at this by now.

You know how to seize hold of the ones disconnected enough from their station to remain near you.

In its bile, you can now see pieces of flesh and organ.

The bits seem to squirm deeper into the sand, catching bits of crushed stone and rock in their sickening viscera.

The companions force water down the marked one's throat.

You know this is futile.

Its body has already begun to unspool.

The water trickles out throat and onto the sand.

You drink it in.

Water intermingled with this creature's essence.

On your tongue, you taste the creature's name.

One of the creatures wishes to pick up the marked one, carry them to shade in some sort of last-itch effort to seek refuge.

Part of you wishes to warn them at this point.

Such an act will only make the process more painful for the marked.

But you never get the chance.

The creature hefts its companion over its shoulder and feels the bone and skin snap on their back.

An arm falls to the ground in a heap of bubbling sinew.

The marked creature sees its own body distant from itself.

You wonder at what point a dismembered limb becomes distinct from its former owner.

To call the former limb that now disintegrates into nothing on your beach an arm would seem foolish.

But it would also be foolish to say it is still part of the now screaming creature that lies next to it.

Ah,

the screaming.

That certainly won't help.

The marked one can feel itself sinking deeper into the mass of sand.

Grains dig into the skin, leaving jagged marks of burning scratches.

The companions have given up now.

They dash to the perceived safety of the banks.

You wonder if you can feel the last bits of comprehension fall from the marked one's screams.

The point in which pleas for assistance become distorted into a mass of gurgling pleas and sand, indistinguishable from your sprawling beaches.

Beneath the sands, a transformation occurs.

You unspool muscle fibre from bone, like strands of a woven blanket.

The mind of the marked one fades into several blistering sounds spread across the length of the shore.

Its body becomes an expanse in its own right.

You have turned it into a thin line of being.

A fleshy strand of a mind that vibrates beneath the sand, ready to be plucked

or reformed.

Over the course of ages, you knot and twist their form.

Its body goes from a warped strand into a twisting path beneath your beach's surface.

An agonizing mind, removed from its former existence, is buried beneath both sand and subjugation.

You feel the last flecks of its consciousness exit this reality.

Slowly now, you reforge them.

Twist them from flesh to concentrated mass of being.

Being in the sense of existence.

A floating mass that exists only as an expression of the fact that something is there.

A black hole of reformation.

Such an exquisite creation.

Formed from the most impersonal of parts.

It becomes worthy of your assimilation, to be grasped by your hands, lifted above your jaws, and shredded by molars of pure nothing.

The mass fades into your being as you consume the last remnants of the human who once lurked above the surface.

Its body drifts in your waves, another floating coffin of flesh.

And And you begin to search

for your next feast.

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Thanks for listening.

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It's Billy Hindle, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol.

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