For the uninitiated and unconverted this entire post will seem like the ramblings of a madman. And perhaps it is. But for those of you out there who practice the rituals, I implore you: tell me what I must do to bring my friends back. I’m seeking a true ritual master. No more soothsaying charlatans burning incense, pretending to have fits, and playing with cards. There is nowhere left for me to turn but here. And if any of you have lost loved ones to the Others… Please, forgive me. I did not know any better.
My thoughts and memories surrounding the Calamity are fragmented and, despite the many years which have passed since, still painful to revisit. By structuring the events chronologically I hope to paint a clearer picture of what transpired immediately following the failed ritual and the conception of the Others. Not only for my fellow ritual practitioners, but for myself as well.
I fear I may have overlooked some crucial detail in the ritual. With your help, perhaps I could achieve now what I failed back then. We were, after all, only children, with no real concept of what we were doing.
In a span of seven hours after the Calamity:
1,
Adam lost an arm. It tore from its socket with less effort than you’d tear damp paper. The screams of his agony rang harshly in the valley in a surreal sort of way. I was truly convinced it was a nightmare in that moment. Does that absolve me from the sin of abandoning him?
Adam lay writhing in pain while the Others gathered round his half-naked body, the sweat on his bare chest glistening ever so slightly in the pale moonlight. They walked toward him as if it were the first steps they had ever taken, stumbling around like newborn babes. It would not last long. Soon they would learn to run.
My lungs burned and my legs cried in pain. But though I could see neither my two feet nor the path ahead, I ran as fast as a startled deer and, as I imagine the animal does as well, I thought of nothing but survival as the sickening sounds of their feast commenced behind me.
2,
Miranda surrendered and they embraced her as a sister. Who could blame her? At the thought of being devoured alive, the flesh ripped from your bones as you were paralysed by a choking fear, it was no wonder that she’d choose the path of less pain.
Of course, once she crossed over she was no longer Miranda. It seemed no different than death, in essence, but it was a more palatable form of the condition to the mind of one desperate to survive.
3,
Niko killed one, then took its place.
When faced with the horror of what he had done, his burning anger was extinguished in an instant. Niko surrendered himself to the embrace of the Others with a welcome sense of relief. Becoming one of them was less painful than living with what he had done after his first kill: cracked open the head of his best friend with a frantic swing of his arm and a particularly sharp stone. The blood had gushed from Jon’s skull like water from a split coconut. In the blinding light and the smoke and the confusion, such a mistake could surely have been forgiven, but forgiving oneself is often more difficult than forgiving others.
4,
As soon as I had time to reflect on what had happened, and the fire in my lungs had settled, I lost the last remnants of my faith in a dank cave five miles from our campsite. The inherent goodness of the One, which we had all come to believe in, was unmistakeably a lie.
My devotion to the One had been my everything. It had given me my dearest friends, and they had given me hope that life could be different for us.
Every one of us had been broken in some way, whether through abuse, misfortune or from birth, but our belief in the One had been our salvation. The power of the One gave us hope. We had formed a connection to something beyond our individual selves, becoming links in an unbreakable chain rather than five indistinct chunks of corroded metal.
That sense of belonging had been shattered by the Calamity, and in its wake the nebulous emptiness had crept back into my heart and made for itself a permanent nest. If only I could snap my fingers and go back in time, I would’ve tried to be content with what I had before the ritual.
By the time I realised what I already had they were all gone. Isn’t it always so? And the fault was entirely mine. I had convinced them to do it, pleaded with them to help me bring my family back. How could they ever have refused such a request? My selfishness gave them no choice.
5,
I returned to the campsite for the book. At this point, logic and reason had all but left me, and I could not—would not—leave it behind.
Niko had found the nondescript book in his father’s garage, but I had been the one to mould it into an (admittedly primitive) ideology. It contained a series of individual rituals meant to appease the One, an enigmatic being whose nature was never explained or described by the author or authors.
At first we were just playing around. The book was just a book, and the rituals it contained were simply a game. That all changed when our second attempt at a ritual transmuted the water in Adam’s bottle into dozens of pristine diamonds. We only realised when he started choking on them. After our first successful ritual, the book became our Bible and the One became our God.
6,
I killed my first one. The being sat motionless, hunched over the burnt-out coals of our campfire. Part of its spine had split open the skin, and a foul red slime oozed from the visible vertebrae. Then, as I approached, it started grunting, rocking back and forth with its long arms wrapped twice over around its knees. It let out a loud, lonely, accusing howl at the fading moon. A series of howls answered in the distance. They would all be returning soon.
I picked up the largest, heaviest rock I could find and smashed it into the back of its head. It screamed like a banshee and struggled under my weight as I straddled it from behind, kicking with its many legs and scratching at my eyes with long arms and claws at the end of them like the talons of a hawk. Fortunately, the first blow had left it weakened, or I would have died there and then. I lifted the rock again with both hands and brought it down on its head, putting all my weight behind the strike. The sickening, wet sound made me vomit the last of our last dinner together. Its frantic movements stopped after a few moments’ twitching.
I turned it over to look at its face. The being had once been Miranda. Her pale skin had acquired a deathlike grey-tinted pallor, and her face had shrunk on her head in an almost comical way. Her nose, her mouth, and her eyes were all centred, perfectly to scale, in a small indentation the size of my fist.
Yet her eyebrows and her hair remained where they had been before. Almost she seemed like her human self, and guilt at what I had done threatened to consume me then. But her body was twisted and scaled; the skin cut open in parts by jagged pieces of bone. This was no human. Red slime began to ooze out of her small mouth and nose, out of her ears, and out of the many deep wounds that covered her body.
I grabbed the book and fled as fast as I could, blinking away the tears.
7,
Back in the safety of my cave, I flipped through the pages, desperately searching for a way to undo what I had done and convinced them to do. Many of the rituals required multiple worshippers, but not all. Conjuring fire, transmuting liquids, enchanting a weapon… Such things were a trifle even for one person, but especially for me.
Undoing our attempted resurrection was not. Indeed, there did not seem to be any counter-spell mentioned at all, unlike for the other rituals. A former practitioner (perhaps Niko’s late father?) had left a single, hastily scribbled note in the margins of the page, which I had conveniently forgotten to mention to my friends.
“Those who challenge the One’s Death MUST pay Death’s toll.”
8,
A storm raged outside, which added a certain dramatic effect to my desperate resolution: I would undo all of it. I had to. The book in my hand would allow me to tap into a veritable fountain of the One’s power. I’d cup its traitorous liquid with eager hands and drink. It was either that or suicide. Living with the guilt of what I had done was not an option then.
Nor is it now.
The aftermath
I made my way back to the city, alone, clutching the book tightly to my chest. Each night I heard their howling. Their accusing screams echoed in my head. I cried myself to sleep and drank only water as a form of penance. Not that it helped anyone, but the pain and the hunger tasted to me of justice.
Somehow I made it back intact. A few missing orphans were not the cause of too much alarm initially. The only one among us who had someone who cared about them was Niko. His mother never forgave me and never visited me again.
At her hysteric insistence, the police launched a reluctant and frankly half-hearted search, convinced as they were that the little brats would soon return of their own accord. A few weeks later they began a more serious investigation, but by then most in the community determined it to be far too late. The missing boys and girls were certainly dead; it was only a matter of time before their bodies were found. The world was not kind to stray children, and especially not to the broken and unwanted ones. As for myself, I was forgotten, falling between the cracks as most orphans do.
Once life had settled back into a routine, as it inevitably always does, I began my research. Young as I was, there wasn’t much I could do in those days except flick through the book and consider my options. The ordeal had taught me patience. I could not afford another failure.
There was nobody to ask for help back then, either. Over time, however, I encountered other groups who had practised the rituals of the One, and I learnt what I could from them. I soon realised that I was far more adept a practitioner than they could ever hope to be. Most of my research has since been conducted in perfect solitude.
I hope you’re different from the rest.
Thoughts on the ritual of resurrection
“Those who challenge the One’s Death MUST pay Death’s toll.”
Well, it had always seemed obvious to me that each ritual must have its price. Its required reagents, for one. Then something to seal the spell and determine the intended target. Why should the ritual of resurrection be any different?
My lifeblood, the blood which I shared with my family, was the toll I had paid. A dark scar on my palm remains to make sure I never forget. The ashes of my brother, father, and mother, kept in a pendant around my neck, served as the seal, almost like an address to the underworld. I mixed it with some of the blood (for added potency) then fed it to the flaming tongues of the campfire.
The law of conservation of energy applies to all rituals, in a sense. The energy is taken from you or from your reagents. For a loyal follower the One gives some of their own energy to balance the scales, as it were. Yet, unbeknownst to us, our ritual of resurrection was half-baked and our offering less than insufficient. The result was beings who were not quite alive and likewise not really dead. The family returned to me by the One were not as I had expected them, to say the least.
And so it was that a group of five children, one of them particularly adept at the rituals, created the Others, huddled together as they had been around a flimsy campfire in an otherwise unassuming meadow miles away from the city they called home. They had been laughing and smiling, hand in hand, just before the Calamity struck with a sharp crack, like a sanguine bolt of lightning from above.
Moments before, I had flashed a seldom seen smile at them, my friends whom I loved, and who were willing to do anything for me and my happiness. What a fool I had been. And still am. For the only thing I live for now is to bring them back. No matter the price.
A bitter game of cat and mouse.
Two more of the Others I’ve killed in the years following the Calamity. Their bodies look different now, more human and fewer legs, but their faces haven’t changed. I buried them near our original campsite with the rest. Three still pursue me, and those like me. People like you.
They’ve learnt much over the years. They’ve learnt to do strange magicks of their own. They’ve learnt to blend among the humans. They’ve learnt to track me as well as to elude me. And they’ve grown much, much stronger. The only saving grace is that each generation of their progeny is weaker than the last, or my folly would certainly have doomed the world and all in it.
Our game of cat and mouse still continues. Am I the predator or the prey?
Once I’ve gathered the last of their bodies, I hope to perform another ritual. A stronger one of my own design. Death’s toll will be their bodies showered in my blood. Or is there something else that the One wants? My life? So many have died since then. Some parts of me have died since then. Have I not already given enough to the cursed One? I’ve paid my toll.
Two decades have passed since the Calamity, but I firmly believe that I can still redeem myself. It cannot end like this. I won’t allow it.