It is not unlike dying when the body that was Chinyere becomes a husk as the sensorate ejects itself from their living corpse. The sensorate crawls out from the closest orifice—that which wails and yammers and sings—with an ogdoad of arms. First comes claws, the fingers, the wrist, then the rest. Head tilted to the blackened skies, mouth agape, the unhoused body kneels for its passenger’s escape. The spirit is slippery on the body’s tongue, slightly too large for its unhinged jaw, the corners of salt dry mouth cracking with thin lines of welling blood. Slick with tears of loss, the sensorate slips the last of itself free. A trail of spit clings from the tip of its ephemeral tail to parted lips smeared with red across uneven, yellowed teeth.
The sensorate glances back at the collapsed anthropoid husk with the hazy cloud of its impermeable face radiating something like disappointment at their incompatibility. Beneath it also lies pity—and that is the worst of all. Rejection is a cold burning for Chinyere, the spirit too large for the costume of flesh it once so forcefully inhabited as a worm pudgy and slick within its cocoon. It must spring free like all mortal beings on this dying earth.
Come hear: it is the end of the world.
Bodies like Chinyere are rarer and rarer as the Nothing eats all there is. Bodies whose original inhabitants occupy such miniscule space their presence is but a mote in the eye of an obstinate tempest. Sensorates can weather the coming apocalypse, that omni-powerful storm of black salt, but those of the mortal countenance require protection, even at the cost of who they once were. Thus a body as a house for a spirit it does not belong to.
So the sensorate cuts its losses, drifting untouched past the Nothing’s flaying storms and into the Waterspout. Made of more than mere mortal stuff, the sensorate is subsumed into the mass of many at the heart of the Waterspout, a fathomless mirror from edge to endless edge. Perhaps to be born again in another world, perhaps to weather the end.
Unmoored from their own self, Chinyere jerks to their feet unsteadily. Imitating the movement of their former resident, Chinyere’s milk-pale gaze lowers to a pair of hands hardened by toil—striations mark the years, and raised scars the punishment that is living. Indeed, what use have spirits a broken body, unfit for work much less the glory of what is to come after? A flare of hatred, so vague it is but mist in the tempest, pinches their chest before fading into rising winds. Emptiness buzzes across their taut skin, smelling of stagnant rot.
The ground is crumbling around them and soon there will be nowhere left to stand. What is there that remains for a shambling hollow, bereft of purpose, kin, and mind?
With nothing else to do, Chinyere walks toward the shining eye of the Waterspout in the darkening sky.
Hours pass, perhaps centuries.
The body that was Chinyere no longer walks so much as drags the last vestiges of a frayed mind along the weedy mud banks of the dead world. Nerve endings spark, so fraught it takes the effort to cleave mountains to move a single digit. Dead already, they await burial among the sunken piles of flesh melting into putrid blood.
The husk passes material suffering, sparing not even a glance at the clustered corpses swarming with wheezing flies and bloated maggots. Anthropoid laid atop draconic intermingled with the demonic, all alike in death. Shattered ivorine horns and five-fingered limbs blend with thin, spindly tails and towering enamel mandibles from which exposed nerves protrude, wilted for lack of connection. Farther along the waning shore, the infestation of bodies and parts grows sparse, more mounds beneath the surf than above it.
Here is what remains of the world once the Nothing has swallowed all: ochre salt, wine-dark water, and sand so thick with blood it spills pitch-dyed between trembling fingers.
The Waterspout has long evaporated into the endless drear that fills what used to be the sky, forever barring the mortal animals from the holy sensorates. One must imagine a better world than this—of a sinless age crowned in perpetual gold-washed glory.
Yet still—this old world heaves, gurgling with the vestiges of life and clawing with the rash desperation of all matter. Multiply, live, survive.
The shattered ground trembles under Chinyere with the threat of a coming flood. Exerting the last of their strength, they glance up with blood-burst eyes to see the deluge. A blood-dimmed tide, more repugnant green, barrels into them. There is little time to draw in a gasp before they drown under a surge of pure natural power.
Washed away, their blinking corpse floats with all the others into the dead city. Its vast cyclopean architecture looms all around. Rising columns of stone meet vaulted ceilings denoting buildings with no possible walls, angles that exist twist alongside those that do not, brickwork tinged bile green from the depthless waters form steps that curve around themselves and lead off to nowhere while spheres depicting horrible torments bubble with an inevitable future. The loathsome geometry is almost too much for Chinyere’s unsettled vision.
A speck before the Great Dreamer and the Charnel Scourge, their awe upends.
Their thick and guttural voices are a million ants in Chinyere’s ears—too loud, too quiet, too much—crawling along the folds of their brain and skittering down the back of their throat with the taste of acrid ooze. Convulsions wrack the dead, a writhing mass so insignificant the Great Dreamer’s webbed forefeet could crush them in a forgetful moment.
Nightmares and inexorable images pulse in Chinyere’s head and they double over, an excretion of repellent miasma dripping from their ashy mouth, brown with the acid mush of an empty belly. Another pulse, another expulsion, and Chinyere falls to their knees.
Limbs slack, they blink as best they can in the disturbing shadow of the Charnel Scourge. Lepidopteran body, the caricature of anthropoid features, and what seem to be more eyes than the mind could possibly comprehend looking into.
A rubbery hand twice as large as their unused body grabs their chin, lifts their face to meet as visage of twitching feelers. The Great Dreamer smiles. It is unspeakable, unfathomable, unimaginable—their mind splits in twain. Blood and viscera seep from their ear canals.
Chinyere’s mouth falls open in a scream that never comes.
The body that was Chinyere comes to see pain as a partner, the lashes a loving embrace, the chilled torrents of the corpse-city a constant companion, and the unrelenting horrors mere daydreams. It is the closest they’ve ever been to acceptance. Finally—adoration, strangled in heavy layers of grime.
Chinyere turns their face into the waxy palm of the Great Dreamer whose prodigious claws card matted coils away from their bruised brown cheek. On their other side, the Charnel Scourge cradles them within its scaled forewings, soft and drenched in so much scarlet mucosa that its eyespots disappear amid the carnage. It drips onto Chinyere’s forehead, between their eyes, and into their inviting mouth. The sweet tastes of a warped and lovely desire.
The pair, once wardens of insouciant torture, shine like green suns in Chinyere’s watery gaze. Salt gouges tracks beneath their lower lids. The Great Dreamer dries their tears with membranous wings and slathers a slimy appendage across their face in imitation of anthropoid affection. They laugh, so far gone from the mortal comfort of touch that this filthy sensation is a welcome warmth. Here in the depths of the abominable city they are cherished, possibly even loved, in spite of the hollow thing the sensorate left them. Each never night is a repetition of agonizing infinities, bedded on thorns and blanketed by glass. It is not a gentle existence, but it is better than that rending, unending walk.
“The old world is dead,” the green suns tell them between bouts of tough love. Another layer of welts, mottled purple-dark flesh that forms a malformed halo around their neck.
“
Foul leathery limbs turn their ringing head to the sky. Through the verdant waves, Chinyere spies the vain monuments of these new immortals. Ringed spheres extend in a strange pattern from a shattered world around which tracks a metal serpent coughing black smoke. A sucker-tipped appendage forces their eyes to narrow, and that is when Chinyere truly sees it—a nine-spoked wheel breaking through the shimmering water.
It is the truth and the lie of this world. The seed of khaos from which spins the fate of all things, burning with the unnatural power of eternity.
Pale boils on the brain, clad in a foolish tri-pointed cap patterned as motley as the rest of their harlequin appearance, Chinyere rises from the underworld with an ogdoad of arms.
A mouth gasps with the desperate rasp of resurrection. They scrabble at the dark silt before finally gripping onto a withered cord. With it, they push and pull and push until popping free of the earth. Alive again, they moan and groan as algae clings to their every facet, every inch. It seems the corpse-city can’t completely let them go.
Reeds and sprigs of piquant watercress sway in the shallows against their bare calves. The ocean whispers a promise each time waves swash onto the beach. Yellow-green grass hugs the white sand banks of the shoreline. Above, living, dead, and dying suns swim in the cosmic skies.
Heels—arch—toes flush to the earth, Chinyere senses telluric lines humming with an immortal power unlike that ponderous gene-born alchemy of the dead world.
Even the air smells new, both hopeful and disquieting. Gulping it down, Chinyere comes to a realization: they can never go back.
A wistful laugh bursts forth as they shake off the rankness of death. Two, four, six, eight; they blink steel-tempered eyes and turn toward the new world.
A planet unlike any there ever was, a smattering of fractured islands floating through the watery remains of the galactic Nothing. An ecumenopolis of gilded lands through which magic flows as breath. Once more, that metal serpent chugs by, silver chassis trailing with stars and powdery smoke as it winds toward the molten core of the planet where khaos lies.
Much has changed during their centuries spent in the infernal depths.
Every world, planet, realm, is an unending ring looping back on itself, the same as it ever was. The end is coming, though the storm is different. Not the Nothing, but a feeble spider whose venom seeps with the death throes of all the abandoned and forgotten—the bodies whom the holy left to wither in the effluent waste of what once was and soon shall be again.
Come hear an ineffable truth: this new world is doomed to die.
The body of Chinyere Ætercoppe frolics along the blooming shore more gracefully than any sensorate. A knife carves their soles, but they ignore the pain as their lips curve into a crescent. With every step, wine-dark water rushes to fill the print, marking the sand like marching ants spiraling continuously to meet a fated doom.
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U.M. Agoawike is a Nigerian-Canadian author of short stories with vibes for plot and SFFH novels featuring everything but the kitchen sink. When not writing, they can be found reading fanfiction, watching horror movies, or playing video games. Their fiction has appeared in Saros, Augur, and Baffling Magazine—amongst others—and their debut novel, Black as Diamond, is out now. |