Chapter Text
A hush silence pregnant with anticipation and the scent of antiseptic fell upon the moon-drenched room, the prolonged task that had taken for so long since finished.
The miracle of birth is a chorus of exultation and pain that seems to never end, never-ending until a new soul, at last, unfurls its fragile influence in the world, putting an end to the laborious song of labor as it shatters into a dance of blossoming hope and thousand glittering shards of joy, bowing their heads to a new innocent song born for all the world to see.
Yet, in this case, the very air in the sterile 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 the progenitors must tend to for it to blossom into something beautiful, but to a tangle of tubes and wires that mutated its physiology.
In the 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, rushing between them like rivulets through a fading land being the blue tracery of veins still fighting against the inevitable. 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 ventilators 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?" An innocent voice infecting the room like a tumor stripping the family from their mind 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.
A large hand grasped the top of the sister's head, startling the girl as he 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 the world was consumed by storm now lacks his imposing and calming aura that she could always count on.
Nonetheless, the older man offers her a smile, a grotesque contortion of his lips, a desperate attempt to paint hope onto the canvas of utter desolation. "Kris is only sleeping, daughter. Once they awaken, all will be alright. "
Once was spoken like a gravelly whisper against the roaring silence.
If ever was the right word.
It would have been better if it was never. 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 curling 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 the 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 monster's religion, he didn't shame her for it, considering her childhood living more closely among monster kind. Yet still, not receiving a response still hurts, not that he will ever show it.
Not at this moment of great turmoil.
Just as the crushing silence from the Angel twisted something vital within his wife. So, her prayers turned elsewhere in a blasphemous act beyond anything she would normally do.
"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.
But as she prayed, hoping something was out there, something else heard her, called from down, down below.
From the Madness lurking beneath all they have ever known.
For despite the impossibility, despite the incomprehensible length between this feeble world built on rationality they inhabit and the lowest ring of the Abyss, her hope, her desperate prayer sunk past places where life ceases to remember itself, gliding through a place where laws and causality had been misplaced long ago, where light and darkness had been swallowed by endless shadows, and matter curdled into absurd philosophy. Yet it dove deeper still, to a place beyond ancient, beyond age, where universes were relegated to be playthings of the Elder Devils, Leviathans of the End, Abhorrent Gods, and other depraved monsters lurking in the Madness Below.
Until it reaches the metaphorical ears of one of these monsters.
A cosmic blight born of hunger, shaped by aberrant divine. A sprawl of maws within maws that gorged onto words incessantly and were nested infinitely into one another like an absurd memetic nightmare given form, knotted together by interminable limbs of putrescent flesh perpetually distending and retracting with great sinuosity. An affront to morality, and one held together by swollen tendons plagued by sickly ulcers that bled no ichor but depraved snapshots forever frozen in time, each flex birthing legions of godlings and daemons.
It 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.
It came 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 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.
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 their intent ascended from the place of no return and crept into this world, crawling into the child's soul.
It craved this new strange lore, unheeding its gore from the cattle that is life, as its fragmented yet determined form parasites their core, in that moment between its home and the soul, its fragment form driving the human family to madness's 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.