Phenomenon 46 is one Jacquelyn Knaff—dead, depraved, ravaged, and slain. (~2.4k words)
⚠️ Content Warnings ⤴
Info
Content Warnings: Quite a bit of violence and body horror.
Never did I really understand the meaning of it all.
Three hundred times over.
A knock at the door. Something foul, something sickening, and yet it is omnipresent. Leering through the gaps in eyes and tongues, cawing at all, cawing at me.
A crash on the surface, under the weight of a thousand gashes, a thousand stakes. The sky tilts at a revolting arc for all to see.
It gores my hands, becomes part of them, to drag the world down into the muck of sick, lying mirrors.
I must grab its wrist and dig it out.
Lest the day cease its inheritance of meaning.
Consciousness is a funny thing. It wasn’t really supposed to work, yet here you are. It’s dark and humid, made of things you can’t properly comprehend, things you can’t find the time to notice. A claw breaks the surface and slams the concrete, heaving yourself out of the woodwork. Bones of a former shell slither off you, the smell of pipework tainting the air. You take in a sharp breath. You seem to recall having a name, and yet you can’t be bothered to remember it, not here, not now. There’s Something ringing, somewhere in the complex, honing in on you.
Your eyes split open. It sees you now. Through walls that no longer matter and distances that no longer exist. Through every sense you possess, and senses you don’t. For once, It stops for a moment and rips Its form towards you through pipes and metalwork, away from a place where old memories call out. But you’re more important to It.
You’re not quite sure what It is in any conscious capacity, or what It wants, or what you want. And yet something crawls to the front of your mind with direction. Without a second thought, you burst forward towards a cluster of leaking pipework as it shifts sideways. Your claws leap between its grasps, tearing through retreating concrete. There are too many of them, pulling you forward like invading aberrants. But they have better things to do.
Not a second later It crashes down from the ceiling behind you, dust and debris spilling across the floor. The room warps to accommodate Its presence. It’s a horrid thing, a mutated mess of blades and fangs and all the things that make hairs perk and skin tense up. All the things that pierce your chest. Spines jut downwards, sinking into the ground, pausing for a split second before It whips towards you. Speed is irrelevant; space shifts faster. The walls follow Its path, cracking open to reveal crowded jaws, over and over.
No matter. Running has always been a mere temporary measure. You latch onto a pipe mid-sprint and turn around, heels digging into the ground as you skid to a stop.
It does not do the same, instead, lunging at you from every comprehensible surface. You’re not bothered by this; you crack a fist to the one on your left, and It recoils a row of teeth. Quickly, you raise a pipe that squirms under your grip, ready to bring it down on the next one.
Until a second row bites down on your skull.
And for the second time, you’re dead.
Life. The bane of us. Serrated fingers caress upwards across the space under our eyes.
When the world wakes up every day and every second, it looks at itself and wonders: Why?
The Adversary is the answer. Probably.
It’s all of us. I think.
When you look into the mirror, how much of it is you, and how much of you is it?
The ground cracks to reveal the heart of it all. A bloated little thing, tired and worn, like a corpse dissolving in wet sand. A disgusting gaze, to be turned away at the doorstep, and for the rest of us to cower at the world’s end.
And yet it is the Adversary. And an Adversary must be faced.
Again. A single crunch echoes out as you spring up from your hold, the muck of old wounds splattering across the floor. Eyes this time; they squirm under each other as they dart around frantically. The air is different here, more dry, more vulnerable. The overhead lights flicker with familiarity. The place poses some significance, something like the last one, though you’re not sure what. But you do know It's here. Better hope spilling yourself across the floor was worth it.
You sprint left this time. Your gazes quickly fall upon It as It emerges from the walls of your confines. It stares at you for a moment, before pulling Itself off the concrete that’s melting like thick slime. It’s different this time, but still the same old, same old. Appearances don’t matter—you’ll always understand what’s inside.
Better to give It no time of day. Before It can fully set Itself free, you take the first hit, your eyes pulling themselves to the ground as you hammer a fist down. It doesn’t return the gesture. You try to tackle It, and It splits in twain.
The two of them dart sideways in opposing directions. First clamps its jaws on a set of pupils. They scream in protest as Second swipes some incomplete appendage across your face. You kick First away and run your body into Second, slamming it into a stray crate that splinters upon impact. You raise your foe once more and throw it across the room. You don't see it hit the floor.
You look back towards First. Second? Before you even have the time to figure it out, Third lunges at you. You dodge to the side; when were there three of them? It misses and slams its face into the recoiling floor.
You look back at First again. Are there four now? No, stop thinking. Stop thinking. First and Fourth pace around you. Fifth gazes into your bleeding eyes. Sixth is pulling on the tips of your visage. Seventh. Eighth. Ninth. You can’t take your eyes off of them. You can’t take your mind off of them.
The ground sinks under their weight. It crawls up their forms, stretching and tearing open underneath them. It becomes one with them. More crawl their way out of it, shrieking to pull their ravenous masses towards you. There are too many of them. They latch onto your form. Your brain sticks to their snapping hearts.
They’re overwhelming.
The last thing you see is the faint shadow of a figure that can’t understand you as you’re pulled down into the floor.
Undefeatable, undeniable. And yet the world keeps spinning.
The universe folds to the wayside as a speck turns blind once more.
Phenomenon 46 is one Jacquelyn Knaff—dead, depraved, ravaged, and slain. To be dragged into the underbrush and grab a jagged edge in the face of it all.
Her form is a placid structure, glaring at itself under the wake of a gnawing idea.
And yet her corpse must prevail.
The world is a crying battlefield, to be fought in, to die in. To crawl oneself up a rotten hill, to drop to the ground under the presence of stars above, and to get up once more.
Rightward this time. Your feet skid against the hardwood floor of your current locus as you look around. Everything feels still here. There’s the faint sound of what may have once been music echoing throughout the halls, stinging the back of your head. It’s here, It has to be, but for once, you’re not sure where. The memory you crawled out from is starting to wither, soaking the floor in dying liquid. Something with the scent of venom asks of purpose in your own voice.
You pace around. One, two, three, four. Something feels wrong. There are people around, you think, but they can’t see you, can’t see what you’re up against. The air turns ever more stale as you walk, dust building up quickly. It’s not long before you start to notice the fog, enveloping every crack and crevice in the space.
A splotch stains the antique walls, slowly dripping to the ground. The wallpaper rots in Its wake. It grows and grows and grows, a big, dark, bulging thing that overtakes the wood. You take a step back. A giant eye blossoms open from the mass. It blinks at you—once, twice. And It grows and grows and whispers at you like the disgusting thing It is until It overtakes a space as large as your body. There’s more of them. They emerge from bursting tumors, splattering painful things across the floor as they split open like their predecessor. You try to swipe a limb at one, but that only makes you stumble backwards.
The walls slowly transform into It. Tongues, noses, teeth. It feels as if the space is shrinking. Before long, the room becomes nothing but a visage of a cruel imagination, glaring down at you—is you. It's overbearing. But that doesn’t take much, does it?
The people around you fade; they’re nothing now. They can do nothing now. Were they ever really anything?
All you can do is cower behind furniture that slowly becomes one with the mass around you. It’s sickening. It understands you, understands all that you are and all that you’ve been and all that you always will be. You’re groaning under the pressure of something greater than you’ve ever realized, greater than the heart in your chest and the memories in your head. Greater than you.
You’re on the ground, too weak for this.
The walls gladly consume your stagnant body.
For what purpose shall the day end for a shell in flames?
Pain is the benefactor that makes one claw their way out of the dirt. To burst from the belly of meaningless debris.
Grass bellows beneath the flow of crashing winds. It’s a calm day at the heart of a tempest, something worth fighting for. To burst forth under obsidian confines and fracture a false sky.
To see is to comprehend. To comprehend is to live.
Understanding scars in the wood is to understand what lies beyond them. An overbearing sun reveals its true nature to the moon. And an Adversary is weakest when it is closest.
Once more, your eyes split open. You haul yourself out, slowly this time. Long, deep breaths as the last of your form is free. Bone dust flutters in the air. Your skin is sticking to the floor, expanding out like overflowing water. It feels loose on your body, unfitting. You wonder if it was meant for someone else.
The space around you is dark, unlike the last ones. It’s a wide, open place, lined with houses and the buzzing of dim streetlights. It’s quiet, quiet enough to hear the crunching of dry leaves under your feet and your heavy breaths on the sidewalk. You’re alone, exposed, vulnerable. There’s a smell of wet grass and dead, rotted things. Things like you.
You can’t see where It is, can’t sense It anywhere. For longer than you’re comfortable with, nothing happens. No bulging eyes, no crushing teeth, no sinking ground. You scramble around for a while; the placidity makes your skin crawl.
Except, your skin is actually crawling.
Something underneath pushes against your organs and your muscles. It’s a skittering, disgusting thing, vying for the space under your fingers and between your eyelids. It’s squirming in there, into you, into all that you’ve ever been.
You have to get It out.
You rake your fingers across your surface. A wet glob of cells separates, spilling an ooze to the ground — it’s what you’re made of. No time to dwell on that. You tear into skin and flesh, frantically clawing at It as It pushes Itself into deeper and deeper spaces. Again, again, again. You know what It’s doing to you. You can’t let It.
It’s in your chest now, under muscle and bones like the worm It is. You dig your hands in after It, ignoring the splitting cracks and grime bursting out. You’re desperate. Desperate like a cornered animal, desperate like you’ve always been. Is it ever enough?
A drop of fluid slides down your arm. Was it really worth it?
Your body buckles to the ground.
Maybe this is it.
…
Bullshit. You’re better than this. You have better things to do than this.
Get up.
You know how to get up.
A shrieking leg is planted on uneven ground. Get up.
A tired body rises, slowly.
You take in a sharp breath of air.
And plunge every limb on your form straight into yourself. Your fingers are digging into It like they always should’ve been, tearing It out bit by bit. It shrieks under the force and buries deeper, but that doesn’t matter. Pull, pull, pull, it’s all you have to do, it’s all you need to do.
Rip It out. Rip It out. It squirms to no avail.
An orb of a blistering idea is visible beneath Its sheath. They harken back to things that no longer matter to you. It’s just you now.
You burst the thing between your teeth.
Maybe one day you’ll find a way to soar above the clouds. And maybe there will be nothing. But at least there will be you.
It’s late.
Fingers run across the soft armrests of a velvet couch. There's a scent in the room that brings back a treasured past, clinging to wallpaper. No windows line the walls, no sound enters from outside. The air is still enough for dust to start settling on the ground. The floor is still.
A clock slowly ticks atop a wooden shelf. Eyes see the self for what it is, gazing down at a book sitting on a lap. Tick, tick, tick. And maybe no one else does, but that matters not, for the world keeps spinning. The clock strikes twelve, but the carpets care not for the passage of time. Old wood creaks, but it is free.
Tired, tired, but that’s okay. An insect buzzes lightly as it lands on the lightbulbs above.
A fixture that needs no description sits idly on a table beside the figure. It once served a purpose, gave something that could only be fought with blood and iron talons. And now it is given a chance to rest. To be one with the slow wafting air of a quiet room. Past melts behind the foreground.
The night sky knows there are more things to get to. There always will be. But for now, work is done.
It’s a nice day, isn’t it?