Chapter Text
A hush silence pregnant with anticipation that intermingled with the scent of antiseptic fell upon the moon-drenched room, a prolonged task that had taken for so long finnaly finishing with no fanfare.
The miracle of birth. A chorus of exultation and pain that seems to never end until a new soul, at last, unfurls its fragile influence in the world, silencing the laborious song of labor as it shatters into a dance of blossoming hope and thousand glittering shards of joy, all bowing their heads to a new innocent song born for all the world to see.
Yet, in this case, the very air in the chamber hung heavy with no new song to lighten its inhabitants.
The fresh fragrance of a nascent life was replaced by the metallic tang of fear, through which, like noxious blood coursing through rotting arteries, pulsed the anodyne hum of old machinery. Here, life clung not to the tender seedling that parents must tend to for it to blossom into something beautiful, but to a tangle of tubes and wires that mutate its physiology.
In this sterile confines of the incubator, Kris clung to a threadbare existence.
Skin that should have been bathed in the soft blush of innocence was replaced by one that was almost translucent with how thin it was, stretching taut over bones that pushed from beneath like burden mountains, between them blue tracery of veins still fighting against the inevitable were clearly visible, no diffirent than rivulets rushing through a fading land.
Inside, internal organs defied the end in the same uphill battle, from tiny lungs no bigger than fledgling birds wheezing against the uninterrupted current of the running ventilator, to the heart, whose dimming determination protested its inescapable conclusion.
A deplorable state of existence, where death would be a mercy to receive.
Peering through the slightly stained glass, a young child furrowed her brows in perplexed sorrow that she didn't internalize, not understanding why a frail miniature doll, swaddled in stark yellow, stood where her little sibling should have been, a strange crown of wires crowning its head.
"Why doesn't Kris move, Papa?" Innocent was the voice that infected the room like a tumor stripping the family from their minds torment, in a way asking the unspoken question no adult would ever put to words.
' Why is it broken?' A cruel inquiry to anyone who had overcome the innocence and brashness of youth, yet one that, for a child, became a mystery too vast for their mind to grasp.
A broken whimper sundered through the silence like a bullet exploding into the night before the room was reclaimed by the voracious teeth of stillness.
Moving reluctantly forward, a large hand grasped the top of the sister's head, startling the girl as she looked up at her father, whose once unyielding visage was now bowed beneath the almost visible weight of despair. The solitary lighthouse she pitted herself against when her world was consumed by storm now lacked his imposing and calming aura that always drew her near in times of need.
Nonetheless, the older man offered her a smile, a grotesque contortion of his lips, no diffirent than a desperate attempt to paint hope onto a canvas of utter desolation.
"Kris is only sleeping my dear starlight. Once they awaken, all will be alright. "
Once was spoken like a gravelly whisper against the roaring silence.
If ever was the right word.
A great mistake they didn't and would never know. Death would have been mercy.
He strengthened his cracking façade of optimism, the last pathetic semblance of a shield to protect his child from life's cruelty. At least this one.
But words came hard, stuck in his gullet like rusted nails digging into the tender flesh, unconsciously making him run calloused fingers over the glass where his baby's impossibly small hand rested, the imprint of the fingertips smearing the glass even further, joining the many other that had stained this machinery.
"All will be alright, right, my dear? "
But the love of his life did not respond.
A Madonna of sorrow kneeling on the porcelain tiles even when her flesh ached with discomfort, face engraved with grief and belief so profound it hung in the air like a cold blanket.
Rosary beads slipped through her trembling fingers like shards of grass that cut into her spirit, held in place only because of how many times they had been curled around her hands that they had already imprinted themself on the flesh like tattoos.
"Oh, benevolent Angel." She didn't even acknowledge his words, eyes clenched shut, unable to block the streams of tears that had long run dry. "Lord of wings, save our child from the darkness's reach. May you light up our path. "
He knew she had always been a very religious woman, and where he didn't believe in the monsters religion, he didn't shame her for it, especially when considering her childhood were she had lived more closely among monster kind. Yet still, not receiving a response still hurt, not that he will ever show it.
Similarly, were her silence hurt the man, the crushing silence from the Angel twisted something vital within the grieving mother. So, despite the blasphemous nature of her next act, her prayers at last turned elsewhere, to anything that could possible delay what was the inevitable.
"Any deity, grace, or whisper of the divine, please help our child!"
And perhaps, if she had received no answers back, then this tragedy would have never been foretold.
If the Angel, or any divine grace the residents of this world believed in, had offered true salvation, they might have been spared. And if nothing had responded, to begin with, death would have claimed only Kris .
Madness would have been something only lurking in the back of their minds.
For as she prayed, hoping any traces of the divine was out there, her wish was granted, something indeed hearing her call that echo down, down below.
Into the Madness lurking beneath all they have ever known.
Despite the impossibility – not the pedestrian one found in advance math equations or the ultimate technique of a immortal swordmaster through the eyes of his disciples, but the mind-dissolving impossibility that gnaws at even the concept of naming it.
Despite the incomprehensible gulf between this feeble world upholstered in reason and rationality they inhabit and the lowest ring of the Abyss, her hope, her desperate prayer sunk past places where life loses its mnemonic grammar that shapes it as it ceases to remember itself.
Against all logic, it glids through a battlefield where cause and effect had been murdered long ago, where light and darkness had been swallowed by endless shadows, and matter curdled into absurd philosophy, becoming naught but a a self-eating dialectic that tries and fails to annul its own right to have begun.
Yet it dove deeper still, to somewhere beyond ancient, beyond age, where universes were demoted to toys, play-lattices, and idle instruments to be used by Elder Devils, Leviathans of the End, Abhorrent Gods, and other depraved monsters lurking in the deepest of the Madness Below.
Until it reaches the metaphorical ears of one of these monsters.
There was no proper way to put into words its true form, but what it represented wasn't not so incomprehensible to describe. A cosmic blight born of festering starvation, shaped by aberrant divine.
A sprawl of maws within maws nested infinitely into one another like an absurd memetic nightmare given sinew and knotted together by interminable limbs of putrescent flesh perpetually distending and retracting, with each mouth gorging onto whole worlds incessantly in a fruitless endeavor of satisfying their owner.
It was an affront to morality, and one held together by swollen tendons cataracted with sickly ulcers that bled no ichor but depraved snapshots forever frozen in time, from which endless legions of godlings and daemons were birthed.
And of course, such thing could not understand the words spoken, no more than humans could grasp the speech of an amoeba, yet the raw intent of devotion, the desperate need for any heaven-send miracle, perturbed it enough to notice.
A prayer arriving not from it's devote worshippers, never offering galaxies flayed alive, peeled like ripe fruits, and hung on hooks that burned in cathedrals forged from the bones of its servants' 'old gods'.
Nor the sacrifice of entire species bred to believe in their own importance, civilization turned utopia untouched by wars or hunger, nurtured across eons only to be violently gutted at their peak, their despair offered elegantly before it.
This prayer? Less than a whisper unworthy of even a lesser creature of the Abyss's attention, powered up by no altar of despair and intensified by no heart-wrenching sacrifice.
And yet, it listens.
And yet, it reaches back. Even if with less than a glimmer, less than an atom of its true self.
From its throne of endless gullet wombs, which breads innumerable pantheons of sardonic monstrosities, nothing more than the shadow of its intent ascended from a place of no return and eventually crepts into the world, crawling into the child's soul.
For despite the unimportance of the plea, some latent part of it began to hunger for this new strange lore it had absentmindely brush against, pushing its fragmented yet somewhat determined form to fastened itself like a parasite to the human core.
And in this fragile vessel it had garnered, it would begin to whisper, stir, and fill the growing void where the soul falters, not with hope, but with a cold, relentless resolve .
The resolve to see this new experiment to its end.
You are filled with determination.