Mask of Humanity

Nicolai felt the Seed’s eagerness and desire to start, pushing out from it, pressing against his mind from the other side of their connection. It knew it was in the right place, it knew it was ready, but it required his permission and it was begging him to grant it.

Nicolai gave it a brief pulse of affirmation, feeling just as eager himself. The Seed’s Soul Sense tendrils snapped back into it from where they’d been passively spreading in response to his unconscious urge to check and investigate his surroundings. The Seed then shifted mentally, drawing into itself, everything stilling as a fire blossomed to life at its heart, beginning to burn the energy he had fed it.

In the dim room, the light of his Seed grew brighter and brighter, from a white light to a burning mixture of colours that writhed around and over him, spreading through the air, then pain erupted from his chest.

Nicolai gasped. His hands wanted to snap over and grab the Seed, but he forced himself still, clenching his teeth and snorting through his nose.

It was digging into his chest, boring a hole through blood and bone and tissue.

The light and the shadows twinkled and danced around him and Nicolai’s grimace became a savage grin, a mirthless chuckle rasping from between locked teeth. He gasped again, and now it was a gasp of pleasure, the pain transforming.

Through his connection to his Seed his mind moved with it as it cut through him, and entered his heart.

Blood poured through the tear it left behind, his heart's blood pumping straight out from his body through the hole. That’s not good, he thought dizzily, everything spinning, stuttering, his heart burning. He slapped a hand against the hole and tried to apply pressure, but he was weak and gasping and his body spasmed and shook, reacting with instinctual terror and confusion that warred with his mind for control.

The Seed was inside his heart, and he saw the interior through its eyes, a confusing world of raw muscle and dark, shifting blood. It was following some kind of instinctual guide, swimming through his blood. It settled, forming itself into a little orb which then began to spread a mass of tiny thread-like pieces of itself into his flesh, worming through his heart then out, spreading through his body

Nicolai choked blood, spasming, blackness encroaching on the edges of his vision. The pain was back and it was twisting out through his heart, through his arteries and veins. The Seed pulsed and writhed with energy, a little furnace of determination, one that would not stop no matter how he cried and shook.

He felt suddenly numb, and cold, and confused. His mind floundered on the sea of consciousness then was dragged below into the depths of unconsciousness.

###

Kleos watched the human as it shook and grunted, his eyes cutting through the dim light to find Nicolai’s pale, flexing face.

It had fallen unconscious a short time ago, and now it moved randomly. It didn’t look at all happy; it looked like it was in pain and possibly dying, a possibility which Kleos found deeply worrying. Without the human he would be in dire straits.

The blood had stopped pumping from the creature's chest at least, and Kleos felt that must be a good sign.

Then the human stilled, let out a slow gasp like a death rattle, and stopped moving. He grimaced at it. ‘Come on,’ he hissed. Don’t you die!

Its body shook again and it let out a wet cough that kept going in nasty, shaking hacks, then dark, thick fluid burst from between its lips and nose and a similar wet noise sounded from lower down. There was a gurgling sound as it tried to breathe, then more coughing. Wet gurgle. Hacking cough. Increasingly desperate, its body thrashing. Was it choking on its own vomit? Was that possible? What kind of idiot had designed these creatures?

‘Nicolai!’ he yelled. ‘Wake up!’ The human kept spluttering and choking. ‘Come on,’ he begged. Strange as it was, likely insane as it was, this creature was his only hope.

Its eyes opened.

###

Nicolai woke to a pounding headache and a mouth full of something horrible. His windpipe was clogged, his lungs spasming as he tried and failed to pull in air. He managed to roll over in the dark and hacked it up, his lungs squeezing painfully with each expulsion, until he took in the first shaking gasp of air and collapsed, breathing heavily, to lie there. His arm wormed under him to grope at his chest, and he found the hole the Seed had made was gone, replaced by something rough. A scab?

Kleos was yelling something.

‘Ugh,’ he mumbled in response. ‘Feeling really bad.’ His whole body was burning and shivering, in the throes of the worst fever of his new life. His palsied, shaking hand groped around until he found one of the water bottles, popped its lid and managed to tilt his body enough to suck in a mouthful of water, soothing his dry throat.

‘What’s happening?’ came Kleos’ voice, desperate.

‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. His stupid body was crying. Pathetic. ‘Fuck.’

His abdomen spasmed and he twisted and threw up, clenching and clenching, throat flexing as he emptied his stomach, expelling a stinking black sludge that stuck in his throat. Just as that stopped, something spasmed lower down and he felt his bowels loosen and he shat and pissed himself. How pitiful. It smelt awful.

Nicolai let out a weak laugh as he collapsed, lying there with the side of his face pressed into his own vomit.

‘What?’ asked Kleos.

‘Flesh,’ Nicolai growled.

‘…What?’

‘Weak.’

Things continued in that vein for many minutes. Nicolai could do nothing but endure as his body pushed the black filth out through every available orifice and he shivered and trembled, hot and cold and horrible.

He ended up curled into a stinking, fetal ball on the stone, his teeth chattering, limbs shaking. He’d lost his sense of the Seed at some point, but he could feel something happening inside of him, something rising and pressing through his flesh, something which throughout the entire process had been spreading from his torso out through his body, changing him.

His legs and arms, fingers and toes, were all done and it was coming up his neck, then it reached his head, his brain.

It felt like him. Like a part of him that had always been there, only he’d never noticed it. It was him.

A glorious wave of energy, alongside exultant, thrilling joy and satisfaction rolled through him as the tiny threads finished filling his body, and the thing pulsed, beating with his heart. Nicolai clenched his fists and teeth and groaned, an awesome wave of pleasure rolling through him. Every nerve in his body was being massaged. Then the wave of pleasure faded and his mind expanded.

His Seed was gone. It had transformed itself into something different, and its Soul Sense was now his Soul Sense, emerging from his body and mind.

There was a tingle from his Marked hand, and he knew he’d just completed a Challenge, but Nicolai had no attention to spare for it. He wanted to dive in and see what had changed. However, he did have time for one thing, as he quickly took the red water bottle and cleaned his body. The water, made for this purpose, did a stellar job and quickly removed the filth covering him.

He settled back down. His awareness, his Soul Sense, moved through his entire body and he felt muscle and bone and flesh and blood, able to somehow see and feel all of it as though he now possessed an invisible hand-eye that moved within.

The Soul Sense was still shifting, growing, the final part of his transformation, and abruptly it broke free from the prison of his body, erupting like gas from a leak. It spread rapidly, and his awareness went with it, until he could feel all the space for about a metre in every direction around him, as though every inch of it was touching him. The cold clutch of steady stone below, the bright energy of the torchlight shining onto him, the quietly lurking and endlessly watchful shadows.

It was far different to what he’d experienced when using the Soul Sense from his Seed. In comparison, that had been like fumbling around with weird spiritual fingers which were covered by thick gloves. Now, the gloves were off, and those fingers had grown eyes.

As his Soul Sense settled around him, he began to explore it. His mind grew to one of the edges of what he could feel, and he tried to press outwards. His Soul Sense shifted as a tendril extended from it, much like the tendrils he’d used to explore the world with his old Soul Sense, only this tendril could see and feel far more.

It was as though there was an eye on the end of the tendril, one that gave him a washed out, grainy vision. He extended into the next room, peering around with his new spiritual eye. As he did so, he felt the rest of his Soul Sense slowly contract, thinning at the edges.

It seemed he had a certain amount of Soul Sense which normally, would passively sit around him, but when gripped, it could be manipulated to extend this tendril, or perhaps even take on new shapes en-masse. But as he experimented he found that no matter what he did with it, there was only so much.

His Soul Sense tendril had only gone about ten metres when it stopped, unable to continue as the length of it, extending from his outraised arm, now comprised the entirety of his Soul Sense, the passive cloud gone from around his body. The tendril was quite thick, thicker than the tendrils of his Seed’s Soul Sense had been, which explained why he was only able to go such a short distance. If he were able to make it thinner… Nicolai attempted to do so, but no matter how he struggled, he was unable to make it any longer or thinner. It seemed stuck at this state.

There were quite a few differences between this new Soul Sense and his old, and in Nicolai’s opinion not all of them were positive. With his old Soul Sense he’d been able to easily make many tendrils, something that no longer seemed possible, and all of those tendrils had been very slender, thus able to extend quite some distance even though overall, he felt the old Soul Sense had been smaller. But his old Soul Sense had been utterly lacking in clarity. He’d needed to swarm things with those tendrils to get a decent idea of what they looked like, and he’d moved them like a blind man reaching out, feeling at the world with hands covered by heavy gloves.

The new Soul Sense didn’t merely tell him exactly what he was feeling the moment he touched it, it also possessed the ability to see, and perhaps even hear, from every part of itself. A secondary set of sensory organs, though its vision was very nearsighted and grainy compared to his eyes.

On top of that, when it surrounded him as a passive orb he knew exactly what was in that orb, everything that happened immediately around him. His old Soul Sense had sort-of allowed that when he took the time to surround himself with the tendrils, but the detail had been greatly lacking with large blindspots. The new one had no blind spots and gave him a perfect understanding of everything happening in that area, down to the tiniest detail.

Overall, he felt it was a significant upgrade, though he hoped to be able to lengthen the tendril in time. His examination of his new Soul Sense complete, Nicolai closed his eyes and moved his awareness from his external Soul Sense, to the internal.

This was another area of improvement. He’d looked inside himself a couple of times with his Seed’s Soul Sense, but it had been a lacking and confusing experience. Now, he could literally see the interplay of muscles, the movement of blood, the workings of his lungs pulling air in and out. When he focused he was aware of every part of his body and its current operations, an overwhelming deluge of information which forced him to focus on specific places at a time. Nicolai imagined that were a biologist from Earth to gain this ability they’d about cream themselves with joy. Inevitably, he moved towards his heart to investigate the newest part of himself.

Buried in the wall of his heart’s left ventricle was what had become of his Seed. It was a now perfectly spherical white-ish little marble, which he was glad to find was not hindering the workings of his heart in any way. The organ had healed entirely since the integration, no sign of the hole his Seed had made. His awareness pressed against the marble and he found it hot to his new sense, hot and buzzing with energy, full of it.

He pressed harder, then his mind flipped and he found himself inside. His awareness stretched, shocked to find himself in a place that seemed vast, a tiny universe. Filling this world was a sun-like collection of vital energy that pressed at him, whispering its eagerness to be used.

Nicolai recognised the energy immediately. He’d interacted with it many times before. It was Oma, but not in a state he was used to. Rather than the hardened form it took in an Oma crystal, this was a living, ready type, and unlike the Oma that had filled his Seed, it was his, he could feel that implicitly. His Oma, to do with whatever he wished, eager and ready to respond to his will.

Staring at it, silently marvelling at it, Nicolai began to recognise a second type of energy within the marble. It came from the edges, the marble’s exterior.

It was being pulled in towards the centre of the orb of Oma, but it wasn’t Oma. It was something much more vague which he struggled to understand even as his Soul Sense surrounded it. This second, hazy energy was dragged to the centre of the collection of Oma.

Nicolai latched onto a piece of the colourless energy, his awareness swimming beside it, passing through the Oma within him as he followed it to the centre

In the very centre of the Oma-sun, he found something strange. A twisty knot formed of dark tubes, wrapping endlessly back on itself. His Soul Sense slipped off when he tried to grasp it, and his strange spiritual vision was dizzied by the sight of it. It seemed in constant motion, parts of it appearing to move around, and yet he felt sure it wasn’t moving at all. It reminded him of an optical illusion, one that made him increasingly nauseous and confused the longer he looked at it. He forced himself to focus on his initial target, the strange second energy.

This colourless, hazy energy was being pulled into some part of the black twist, and there was a sense of pressure, a process, and then the tube pushed it out, changed, and it was… it was Oma! The dark twist took the energy and transformed it into Oma! I’m generating it, all by myself? He could hardly believe it, but the truth was in front of him. This changed everything. No more would he be a slave to Oma crystals, constantly worried about running out.

Nicolai squeezed his Soul Sense out of the shell of the marble, back into his heart. Where is the colourless energy coming from? He saw it then as he looked around, finding it in his blood, and he began searching for its source, opting to move through his heart and examine it in more detail, checking the amount of colourless energy in his blood in each area until he found from where it came.

He knew how hearts worked, but he enjoyed seeing his in action, in his own body. It reminded him of a collection of lakes, only these lakes could squeeze and draw. The right ventricle of his heart was the end point for all the veins in his body, collecting the de-oxygenated blood which had gone out to fuel his cells. Once full, the right ventricle would pump, squeezing this blood through a dedicated system of blood vessels directly into his lungs to be re-oxygenated. Nicolai observed this, and found little if any of the colourless energy in this blood as it exited his heart’s right ventricle.

But when this oxygen hungry blood reached his lungs, and he breathed in to refresh it, not only did his blood greedily draw the oxygen in the air into itself while venting its carbon dioxide, but it also filled with something else. The colourless energy, pulled from the air alongside oxygen. From there the next beat of his heart pushed and pulled this blood from his lungs and back into his heart, now into his left ventricle, where his heart beat again and pushed it out to the oxygen-hungry cells of his body.

But in this pause before it did so, the marble worked. He could feel it now. It had a beat of its own, one that formed a counter beat to his heart. Each time the freshly oxygenated blood containing the strange new energy was squeezed into his left ventricle, the marble reached out, and it claimed this energy for itself in the moment before the blood was pushed on. From there, it took the energy to the centre of itself, twisted, and made it into Oma.

Nicolai’s Soul Sense left his body and pervaded the air around him, and he felt it there, too. The strange colourless energy was everywhere, not only in the air but also in the stone, in his clothes, even in his body, though less so as his marble worked to take all that it could. It was this pervasive stuff that was just all over the place.

As his mind roved around the room, he came across something strange beside him, something that pricked at his Soul Sense. Nicolai focused on it, drew closer, and found some kind of messy tangle. It looked like a big mangled scar. It felt like a broken lock.

Nicolai opened his eyes and turned about, and he found himself looking at Kleos. His eyes widened.

The head stared with some confusion back at him, unaware of Nicolai’s spiritual regard. It couldn’t be aware. Someone had done something awful to Kleos’ spirit. Burned it and broke it and stuffed it tight inside the head, chained to the flesh, no longer capable of leaving and wandering as Nicolai now could.

‘Who did this to you?’ he found himself asking.

‘What?’ The head frowned at him.

‘Your Soul is… broken.’

‘Oh. I know.’ Kleos’ lips twisted into a bitter little half-smile. ‘Part of the punishment. Stuck inside my own head, forever.’

‘That’s horrible.’ The words came out of nowhere and left Nicolai speechless. He was feeling something very strange, a kind of weird pain in his chest that pulled at his face.

‘Yeah.’ Kleos stared at him. ‘You seem different. Do you feel different?’

‘I…’ Something had changed. ‘I do. I think I feel… I…’ Nicolai shook his head, confused, disorientated. What the fuck is going on? He wanted to laugh and he did and then with a confusing wrench the laughter turned into tears.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nicolai, his face twisting in bittersweet misery. He sobbed, and laughed. ‘I don’t know.’ He was feeling things he didn’t normally feel. Searching through himself he tried to locate the source, and to his surprise he found it. The emotions emanated from the new part of him, from his spirit. No, from one specific place on his spirit.

He was beginning to understand what a spirit was. It was the part of Soul Sense that wouldn’t come out. The part filling this body, which the rest emerged from. It was a mirror image of himself, writ in energy and thought.

His Soul.

There was something on his Soul’s face, and it was making him feel things.