webnovel

Straid Questenbaum: The 34 Sons

After the return, changes are inevitable. In the grips of death, enlightenment was found, and from it sprouted a buried wish and a far-reaching journey. In this installment of the curse eater saga, June and Straid truly enter the hidden world.

MidnightEgg · Terror
Classificações insuficientes
19 Chs

Well of flesh

Cadavers half-buried in the permafrost surrounding me, I must stop to think, how could I have gotten here? Where is this? I was attacked by that abominable "thing" everything went black then I woke by this sun cross of maimed bodies, within this chilling grave in the middle of nowhere, was it something I did perhaps without even knowing? Did someone step in and save me at the last moment? Or is this just another stage of that creature's plan to devourer me? Or was it just simply a divine intervention beyond the sense of knowledge and reason? No, nothing can be completely beyond reason and the scope of knowledge, even if the very event seems random or without any reason at all. Everything serves some purpose, known or not.

What do I see? Miles and miles of snow, a sky changing in a seemingly rapid manner adhering to the unavoidable cycle of night and day. I should search for the reason for this somehow, I will search until nothings left to do nor to search for, I will only stop when I reach the point where I'm truly gone, and at that point, I will be truly dead, someone that could not work trough the promises he made to himself and others, something I can never make peace with. The chill of the snow have leaked into my shoes, sending its prickling signals up through my body grazing the quiet emptiness from whats been taken from me, that hole in my abdominal side, my fingers graze the blue crust around the black hole, it is stubby and swollen, a sight that would have made me throw up if my situation weren't this grim.

The sky must have cycled at least six times since I started this seemingly nonsensical march through this icy grave. Is this all it will be, a seemingly endless march under a constantly changing sky? Time, is it passing quicker, or is it just an illusion brought onto me by my own grave condition? I should know by now, I won't find anything here that could ever be presented as reasonable or under the realm of common knowledge, that incomplete fact that we've all been fed since the time we were born unless we could somehow be born into the other realm completing the missing pieces life had presented you with. A smell? What is it? Sickening, I've never smelt something like this before, something thick and sour assaulting your very sense of smell sticking to your throat and tastebuds constricting your airflow with its vile presence. Something's there, in the snow and ice in front of me a darkness, stretching out, coloring the terrain in its thick and oppressive visage, a grim shadow with no noticeable end to its vision, but a bit farther out ahead there's a hole, a pit stretching at least 400 meters in diameter, and down within its depths somethings... moving, writhing, something incomprehensibly massive, maybe if I... *Rumble*, the pull, the harsh hand of gravity, why?

It's wet, soft, and slimy, the putrid fumes of its stench are making my eyes water, to a point where everything is twisted, damn, it is like watching through a window being hosed down by a storm from clear skies. What is this? The ground I'm on is some sort of fleshy pink, bare and naked, like something skinned, yet still, breathing? The ground itself is rising and sinking, not rapid in any sense, just a slow and steady rhythm, and with it, conflation and inflation of whatever mass this was, residing within this dark well. Geez, something touched my hand, what else is here? The light of the ever-shifting sky barely illuminates the colors of the substance down here at certain selective spots while the rest is shrouded in shadows, just like those spots at the times where the light above dies, before its short rebirth sweeps down again, almost touching this wells bottom. There's definitely something else here, writhing and squirming around in this space of flesh.

I believe sixteen cycles have passed since I started this, ten since that rumble sent me tumbling down into this putrid space, one that might become my resting place. I've discovered the things resting within the dark corners of this place, worms creating large and tiny bumps as they're burrowing in the very flesh stretching from one icy wall to the next. Maybe worms isn't an accurate description for whatever's squirming beneath, what I know for certain is that the largest squirming bump is ten meters thick and at least forthy meter's long, squirming only around in the center of this place like its searching for something just beyond its reach, while hundreds of upon hundreds of tinier bumps ranging from two to six meters in length while being way slimmer, perhaps sixty centimeters at most. It is so putrid and fetid, yet it is fascinating in all of its vile glory. Watching these things squirming about, such a statement of misery yet I can almost forget my own watching their display. But still, there's something, that gnawing feeling of foreboding again, latched to the very core of my spine, something will happen.

*Rumble* This is it, this quake again, this earthly shaking, and "!" holy hell what the fuck!? The flesh, the flesh is splitting open at its center, unveiling the unholy grotesques resting beneath, a luminescent dark blue pond stretching from the end of this cave to its beginning. the wet dark was consuming and within this abyssal pond swam hundreds of deformed eel-like creatures, colored in the same shade of the pond, bumpy and unnaturally long with their tail ends disappearing down into the darkness, fronts with absolutely no eyes or facial features to tell except for their oval mouths, filled to the brim with hook-like teeth with countless neon blue tendrils protruding from the depth of their bowels, and in the darkest center an absolute monster squirmed, there's no other way of describing it, slick and blank mirroring the very darkness of the depths itself, ten meters thick and at the very least forthy meters long, and from its head protruding like strands of hair, glowing white tendrils around a dark reflective mass. It, its an eye.