Ever since the light faded from my eyes, I’ve been thinking about the things that hunt, about things that prey. A mindless, savage collision course with something that is to be consumed, or a slow, methodical search for something, thoughts curving like a tunnel of pointed daggers towards an object.
To hunt is to pursue.
Every object in the universe is pursuing something. A hunt for inertia. A hunt for energy. A hunt for stability, for structure and a hunt for total collapse.
Meat machines, materializing out of an inherently ravenous universe, so hungry that it clawed it’s way into existence out of seemingly nothing, setting it’s organelles alight with physical processes that would last for the rest of time. An eternal hunt for motion. Meat machines, becoming carbon reflections of the ravenous universe they were born out of.
The greatest gift that some animals are born with is the momentary illusion that they aren’t pursuing something, to pretend they aren’t just one big process, hurtling towards a final destination. A human sits at the base of a tree, watching the stars, not a worry in the world, forty trillion cells fighting to keep his body still, to keep this illusion alive. The stars are beautiful tonight. My soul will not get caught in a chain of processes and events that will lead me to drown in the Bay of Spain in July. My brain is not craving a chemical, sending a bolt of electricity to solicit it from my cells. Every organ, every cell, every atom in my body is not screaming for the comfort of a fatal equilibrium that will kill me once it arrives. The stars are beautiful tonight.
Some processes are as old as time. As hungry as the universe.
A God is a process. A God is a beast. A God has no space in it to afford multitudes.
There are Beasts out there that will hunt you forever, chase you till your mortal coil unravels and blackens and burns to its final remaining thread. The Hunt is all the Beast is, a mad, demented process making sure that it completes itself. Some of them, we know intimately; Death, a wave of gentle mutilation rotting everything in the cosmos. Others are forever beyond our sight.
Dog-mask lead me down a long, winding road. Reality tried to emulate distance as best as it could, but it failed. Every now and then, the world flickered, receded to its normal self, then back to this stringy patchwork of stolen matter and idea.
As we walked, the inhabitants snaked beneath our feet, interlocked in an orgy that stretched all the way from the palace. Bodies and masks melted into each other, carried along in a river of motion.
“Why are they like this?”
“Matter is too much for them. Their sensoria aren’t built to handle this. They’re feeling a euphoria they were never supposed to feel.”
The road began to branch off, forming a jointed, hexagonal path that lead right back into itself. Both of us walked back the way we came, and I thought better than to tell a God that his sense of direction was lacking. The bricks in the road were sharper, and more detailed now. Where there’d been nothing but a palace floating in an infinite blackness, a city had come into being. Time was jagged, broken, spread too thin over the few atoms they’d salvaged from us. Buildings twisted into inconceivable shapes, retaining their symmetry by the slightest atom. Bazaars where simple polygons gleamed a lustrous black, swarmed by the few who weren’t writhing within the monolith of pleasure that speared upwards from the palace, spilling from the acropolis onto the streets below.
“We must be careful now,” Dog-mask said. His hand rested on my face for a moment, and a skull materialized, covering everything but my eyes.
The Deer-king emerged from the palace, massively-sized, tiny figures clinging onto his belly, crawling out the sockets in his deer skull. A procession of beings followed him, each masked by the skull of a vulture. They were tied to each other and lead to the edge of the acropolis, seven vaguely realized figures standing against a crudely constructed sky.
The Deer-king towered behind them, antlers eclipsing a glass moon.
The orgies slowed, expressionless masks looking upwards.
The Deer-king stretched out a hand - fingers shot out of it, fractallising into seven thin, black lines. Then, a rope drooped downwards from each one of them, looping in on itself infinitely to make a noose with a fat, fat neck.
The people squealed in delight at this little magic show, squealed even more when the Vultures walked forwards into the noose, necks snapping like cartoon characters.
“Here,” Dog-mask said, pointing towards an alley obscured by a crowd.
The world flickered, receded, and we saw an explosion of purple blossom from the superstructure. When the world reformed, Vultures dotted the crowd, screaming with rage. Orbs of light streaked through the air, crashing into buildings, melting them into empty patches of reality.
Pure, primal terror rippled through the crowd as the Vultures began melting people down.
Reality receded. Ideas burned away, leaving behind a meaningless gray residue.
“What the fuck is happening?”
“An insurgency. Unsurprisingly, not everyone seems to happy with the direction their world has taken.”
The glass moon glinted a faint purple.
Dog-mask lead me into an alley, an empty space between two shimmering dodecagons that stretched away infinitely into a nocturnal pool of even more shapes. Lines and shapes danced in the darkness.
I dissolved easily into the liminality of it all, a dream that eroded more and more of my consciousness until I felt like a single dot traipsing a line. Abruptly, the line seemed to catch fire, break off in two.
“There’s something following us,” I managed, sticking my head above the dream. Dog-mask nodded.
“I shouldn’t have brought you to the city, but I need to show you something.”
Dog-mask’s voice helped me recentre my mind. I turned around, saw a Vulture following me.
Reality receded.
The Vulture shot towards us, a blur of purple. Dog-mask was a massive scintillating sphere, polygons and circles swirling beneath its surface.
Reality reformed.
The Vulture gripped his mask.
“Take the mask off, Death. Show us the true face of the Apocalypse. Show this puny little thing here the face of the Beast that lies underneath. Show them what makes you a God.”
Reality receded.
Dog-mask devoured him, sphere swallowing the purple blotch. When reality reformed, there was nothing there.
“Keep walking,” Dog-mask said, before ascending something. Reality grew sharper up here, and I began to feel the textures in the air, the outlines of the stone beneath my feet. The structures clustered together here, forming a dizzying kaleidoscope of buildings that peeled away from each other in one place and crashed into each other in another.
Reality receded. We soared through the kaleidoscope and stood before a pulsating, iridescent orb.
Reality reformed. A smooth black triangle, composed of smaller triangles that aligned and misaligned to completely rebuild the triangle every so often. A red glow rippled through the structure rhythmically.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. I followed Silas’ psychedelic trail through the psychosphere. It tapers off here. Inside this structure.”
“Well? What’s inside?”
“Something indescribably horrible. It’s been here since the beginning, since the first seed of Truth. Only the Gods know it exists, and the Gods know that it must never emerge. Whatever it is could spell the end of this reality. Obviously, I’m delighted that Silas has been here.”
The triangle swirled, rebuilt itself. From inside, I caught a blur of blinding crimson.
“There’s no concept of time here. What is present here has always been here. But this Thing… it’s wormed its way into this reality, complete with a past, with a mythology. It wants us to think it’s always been here. But I can feel it. The outlines of a memory that feels… inserted. Rough. Fabricated.”
I began to walk towards the structure, hesitated. Those triangles were sharp, edges converging hypnotically to a singularity.
“Don’t. Nothing is supposed to get in. Or out,” Dog-mask said, a little lagged.
“Well, whatever it is, I can ask Silas. He gave me something that could help me find him.”
“Wherever he went, he never returned. There is no physical trace left of him. It’s like someone cut him out of this world… like they’re hiding him from me.”
“Keep tracking me. Show up if I start disappearing from the grid,” I suggested.
“That should work,” Dog-mask said.
The triangle swirled again, and when I caught the blur of red, it felt like I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see. Whatever was inside wasn’t a living thing. But it watched me. When I saw it, it saw me.
“We should leave,” I said, tugging at Dog-mask. He nodded, and we turned around.
“We build our reality upon the bones of yours.”
A vulture skull stared back at me, red eyes shimmering with murder.
“We pollute the very fabric upon which we live with your disgusting delusions. Matter, time, space? Like pus upon a pearl. We are the Truth. We are Knowledge itself.”
“Who the fuck is this,” I turned to Dog-mask, only to see his dog-mask burst into ashes.
Dog-mask returned me to our reality before I could get the chance to stare into his true face, the face of a god. His eyes were gone from my sockets, and I awoke to a windpipe that was being violently sealed, the stench of a rotting, naked man tightening his hands around my throat. I drove my legs into his stomach, stuck my hands in all the places I could find and pulled and ripped. Even as I tore away his cheek, he continued to strangle me, hands tightening, saliva dripping down onto my nose.
I watched something dark rise out of the peripheral vision. The woman, body bloated, mouth twisted in a frown. She had Dog-mask’s eyes. When she walked over and snapped her lover’s neck, oxygen rushed gleefully back into my lungs.
I keeled over, coughing up spittle. The woman’s eyes changed, and she tore away the pendant that dangled from her bruised neck, knelt beside me. I could feel her closing the golden links around my neck, tying it, tightening it…
The man raised himself to his feet, head bobbing like a water balloon.
The chain snapped.
A tiny photo of them together at the beach fluttered in the air while he beat her to death.
I crawled, dragged myself through the doorway, into the grass, the sound of bone striking bone ringing out unceasingly behind me. I continued to hear it even as I began to smell the dead men strewn around my bike.
A solitary head stirred beside the overturned bike.
“Run. Keep moving. That reality is no longer safe. It’s in revolt. Something is hunting us. Something powerful, on the verge of being a God. If you see a human being, kill it. Don’t think. Whatever you do, do not return to Reality B. Do not get high. If anything happens to your body in the psychosphere…”
He never finished his sentence. I searched the ground for my travelling bag, took the men’s weapons, propped my bike up.
I biked for the next few days, stopped whenever I saw a house so that I could pillage it for food. The fuel ran out on the fourth day. By now, I was far, far away from wherever I’d started. I’d followed Silas’ ledger of cause and effect and found a little shortcut out of civilization.
Eventually, I found a trail. These trails were like cyphers, seemingly random species of flowers and plants clustered together to spell out a specific direction, a language of the old world.
I rationed out food and water and continued on foot. Abandoned houses cropped up at opportune times. I heard nothing but the rustling of trees, smelled nothing but the earth for weeks.
On the seventh day, I smelled burning metal. I scaled a tree, tossed a pebble from the air, listened to it crash against something.
The trees swayed, obscuring something with outlines too straight to belong in the jungle, miles and miles away from any civilization. It somehow smelled as ancient as a mountain, as fresh as morning dew, as earthen as a flower, as sterile as a petri dish, all at the same time. It was toying with my senses.
I walked slowly towards it, hatchet in hand. The sound of gurgling. A stream.
A river, I thought, the gurgling growing to a roar as I got closer to the figure.
A school bus. The windows were shot through, glassy, senseless jigsaws of violence. Chassis pocked with bullet burns. A hand hung out of the window, blood trickled down the fingernail into a river of blood, rushing past the tires, rattling the vehicle.
The school bus wasn’t the only thing submerged in the river. A child sat with his back to one of the tires, cross-legged, uniform perfectly intact, trousers a beet red. He was young, barely even a teen yet. His eyes were wide open, healthy, white as a yoke.
I wasn’t going to harm him, no.
“Child?” I said, approaching him.
His eyes found me, impaled me with a stare that drained all my humanity. He looked me in the eyes and spoke my true name. He had briefly yanked at the mask that held together my entire soul.
“You walked the path of vengeance. Predictable, linear. And then a mewling God asks you to make reparations, and you obey him. You trusted him. You trusted a god!”
The boy laughed, and it was like a tarantula had crawled down the spine of the universe.
“Disappointing. I thought you apes had brains of your own.”
His right eye twitched. His voice was like the grinding of bones, the crackling of branches, things being crushed to ash and dust. The grass at my feet began to wilt.
“You are tired of asking us who we are,” the schoolboy said, grinning when no sound escaped through my clenched teeth.
“What are you?” I asked, hatchet trembling.
It giggled, licked its lips.
“I have no name. I wear no face. I am an undying, primordial hunger, and only the name of a universe can satiate me.”
I dropped the hatchet, slumped to the ground as my nose filled with blood, ears ringing with the sound of the cosmos being torn in half, stars and planets and gods disintegrating at the seams. Mind dissolving into soup. All the while, he fixed me with his gaze and spoke gently, and I could feel the abyssal darkness of his eyes swallowing me while the edges of the world burned away. All the while, he smiled.
“Commit a sacrifice, impure and unjust and repugnant and massive. There must be no acceptance. There must be no noble gesture. They must die, scared and confused.”
Blood trickled downwards from the hand, crashed into the water. A tattered uniform surfaced from the river, then sank back into it.
“Then, come to my home in that wretched reality. I sensed the currents change, followed them, felt something delicious brewing in that world. I have sat there for so long, planted at the site of the grandest feast of all. And you will deliver it to me. Do not disappoint me, Child.”
In the blackness of my mind, the schoolboy appeared, eyes swiveling like galaxies. I was like an ant, crawling on his leg, too small to warrant his attention yet, his eyes had found me, narrowed in on me.
“How do you know me? How did you find me?” I rasped.
“Oh, we are very well-acquainted, Child. You are the crux upon which the universe hinges. You just don’t know it yet, but you will when the lights in the universe dim, and all that is left is you and I.”
He vanished.
The pain crawled slowly out of my veins, and it took several hours for my mind to start putting together coherent thoughts again. When I became conscious, all that was left was the stench of whatever unspeakable bloodbath had intrigued the thing enough to give this world a visit, and a discarded husk of a schoolboy. Blood lapped at his shoelaces, tugged at them, played with them like a loving mother.
***
Time stretched away into a liminal twilight. I don’t remember how I fed myself. I don’t remember a minute of traveling. A few times, I would see humans lurking in the darkness. Some of them were still, watching me. Others went about their own business. It didn’t really matter to me what they were doing. I still pulled the gun on them, fired it before I could see a face, before my mind slipped them a name, before I heard a plea for mercy, and then I kept walking.
The entire trail felt unreal, zigzagging between reality and psychedelia. Fungi hung from the trees in long curtains, golden mists falling from them, sweeping through the air, gently drowning me in dreams. I dreamed I was a spore, I dreamed I was a germ, I dreamed I was a concept, and eventually, I dreamed my way to the other reality.
Dog-mask told me not to return to Reality B, but sometimes I drifted there in my dreams, pulled there like a leaf floating on a river. I walked through the alley, ascended, found the kaleidoscope. There, I found a being who glowed a deep blue. They only spoke to me in the old reality, and they spoke to me in ideas.
Beautiful things glimmer. Beautiful things are eternally suffused with light. Blue was beautiful. Blue showed me such incredible ideas, ideas that altered the very colour of reality. The skies became auroras plucked from the irises of angels, the people became little outposts of joy, the glass moon above became suffused with a lambent blue.
It showed me how to navigate the superstructure. It showed me its spiraling arches, ideas that swallowed the tails of other ideas, flowing into each other to create systems of thought. It showed me the seed of Truth from which all ideas grew, showed me entire systems of concepts that had gone obsolete and gray, showed me the necrotic patch of reality where the Void had been ripped away from the world, splattering into a million pieces.
It showed me others like it, concepts untouched by the filth of our own world, suffused with their own magnificent glow. Something had creeped into this world and planted a fallacy in the structure, a fundamentally wrong idea, and it had poisoned the civilization from within. When a lie accumulates atop a lie, it simply starts to look like a very complex truth. The poison seeped into every god, every person, and only beings like them had noticed its intrusion and expunged it from their systems. If one were to find this flaw, realize it into existence, all their systems would collapse, reducing their civilization to ruins.
It took me to the prison, parted the triangular walls to reveal the thing that slumbered within. I saw it, and it saw me. A small, simple idea, capable of ending everything. It had trickled into every idea, every system of thought, every fundamental concept. To be aware of its existence was truly horrifying. To be aware of the fact that an entire civilization had lived without being aware of it for so long, that I had joyously explored all these superstructures without ever noticing it was even more horrifying. I felt sick to the stomach. What if one day, we found out that everything we’ve ever believed in was terrifyingly wrong? Not just slightly misguided, but just wrong. A fatal error. That some basic belief we hold, something so natural that it lies beneath every passing thought in our mind is a mistake of the highest order. Like a race that believes life isn’t meant to be lived.
That was the only time Blue frightened me. Every time I met them, I’d feel myself swimming away from the urgencies of reality, melting into their loving tutelage.
I did not suspect any manipulation, could not suspect any manipulation. Their Eden of ideas was too immaculate, too alien for me to even conceive of human vices. Besides, I needed Blue. Its little psychedelic gifts helped numb my brain to the unceasing bloodbath that had become my life. Would I ever be able to see a human again without reflexively drawing a weapon? This one time, Blue didn’t show up for two days. For those two days, life became a waking nightmare. I went to sleep, face slathered with gore, and when I dreamt, all I saw were the faces of those I’d slain. When I awoke, I could not shake the feeling that something was watching me, that an Insurgent hung from the rafters, or that the Void had finally found me. The forest became a purgatory - guilt alters the very fabric of the world when your entire bloodstream is filled with fungal psychedelics.
The sky swiveled, faces rose out of the trees and screamed at me, the soil turned red, the branches became long, bloody spears, impaled through headless bodies. The air seethed and quaked with my agony.
When Blue returned, the forest calmed. The leaves turned a gorgeous pink and fell gracefully to the earth, embroidering the soil, festooning the trees, imbuing the lakes with a light pink.
Three-quarters through my journey, I began to reconsider what I was doing. Could I really wipe out an entire universe of beings? Dog-mask had been there for an eternity - how could he even fathom such a thing?
As time went on, my body seemed to build a tolerance to the psychedelics. I saw lesser and lesser of Blue, and the world turned dull again. Viscera festooned the trees, the lakes, the soil.
One night, I slept on the balcony of an abandoned fort. I saw Blue’s light spilling through the cracks in the walls, splattering onto the green moss carpets I slept on. I approached them, and they said that they were departing the kaleidoscopes to find a place to hide in the superstructure. Something was hunting them, hunting them for my location. It said that sharing its ideas with me, watching them refract through the prism of my beautiful mind gave it much joy. This was the last time we would meet, they said. Farewell.
It blinked out, and I only ever saw it one more time.
Sometimes, you feel so greatly devastated that your body ceases to function. You can literally feel your mind, your heart grinding to a stop, leaving you to nosedive into a great dark expanse that fills your entire body, chokes every organ.
One of the last things I remember Blue telling me was this: never trust a God. A God cannot afford the luxury of multitudes. A God is a perfect animal – it hunts, and it spears through anything that stands in the way of the hunt. It dons morality when it is convenient and, if it speeds things up, spontaneously drops morality, dissolves the value of life in an amnesia towards all things human.
Dazed, I stumbled out of the fort.
Silas sat on a log, came to steady me as the world warbled.
“You’re almost there. You’re almost there,” he whispered into my ear.
I slumped to the forest floor.
“The Void is very, very near. You need to move. If you can make it to us, we can protect you.”
Words, words, words. I pressed my ear to the soil.
“Get the fuck up. If the Void finds you, its next host is fucked.”
His hologram began to fade behind a fresh mist of spores.
I got to my feet, ran back into the fort and grabbed my bag. I continued to follow the trail, the world around me a quagmire of rage.
Silas materialised before me again. He said my name twice, then asked whether Dog-mask was trailing me. I said I wasn’t sure.
“You have to tell Dog-mask I’m dead. You have to,” he said, gripping me by my shoulders, his eyes shot through with veins of blue, purple and red.
“Why the hell would I do that? He needs your help.”
“Oh no, he doesn’t. Why the fuck do you think I’ve been hiding out here for three years? Who do you think I’m hiding from?”
From up ahead, I heard rustling in the bushes, the snapping of twigs. My hands clasped my shotgun.
“I don’t understand.”
“You think Dog-mask just stumbled into being a deity? That the name of the Universe just came to him in his sleep? He’s replacing another God. He’d spent an eternity in the other reality, to the point where he lost his humanity and his body. When the Void was expelled from their reality, the universe came to him, gifted him with its name. He is a process. He is the cosmic death of their universe. He is the universe’s death sentence to Reality B. Me personally, I don’t feel very comfortable annihilating an entire universe.”
A figure barreled out of the darkness, hurled something sharp at me. I ducked, Silas’ hologram parted, and then I leaned forward and pulled the trigger. Blood arced through the air in mesmerizing patterns.
“You cannot negotiate with a God. Especially the immanent cosmic death of a reality. We’re all just pawns to them. Pieces to be manipulated.”
“What exactly are you hiding from him, Silas?” I asked, checking my bag for more ammunition.
“The anti-data. A controlled Void. I bet Dog-mask told you not to kill the Void? Now you know why. He thought it would come in handy.”
I was out of ammo. I dumped the smoking shotgun in the foliage, grabbed my hatchet.
“I met a God. One from the higher planes.”
The hologram began to flicker violently.
The forest went silent.
The shadow of an abandoned watchtower stretched through the forest like a dark, necrotic gash. Dog-mask’s eyes glinted, two iridescent stars in the night sky.
Two dead insurgents lay at the base of the tower. I climbed the ladder. I felt Silas in my mind, obscuring parts of my memory, hiding them from the eyes of the God who waited for me at the top of the watchtower.
Dog-mask told me that the city was in upheaval, insurgents thronging the streets, forming a patchwork god out of their superstructure.
“A New God, attempting to overthrow the Deer-king. The Deer-king calls them the Insurgency. They will not rest until they find us.”
From Dog-mask, they wanted the name of our Universe. From me, my silence and the Void’s continued existence. The Insurgency saw matter as a perversion of the truth, a twisted, deformed gem of information that was no longer raw, pristine, crystallized. They felt it best that our universe simply vanish, and their reality return to its original state. No more matter to delude it. Like breaking Prometheus’ legs, erasing fire from the slate of the world.
He hadn’t asked me about Silas yet.
“I smell the stench of a God on you,” he said, instead.
Gods are inherently opposed to each other. Antagonistic elements.
“Probably from our last trip to Reality B.”
Colors spun violently in his orbits.
“Right.”
Something climbed the ladder behind me, quiet, hidden.
Don’t look behind you.
I didn’t.
We’re going to kill a God today, Orphie!
A second voice spoke in my mind.
I’m opening it in 5 seconds.
Five.
Dog-mask’s hand shot out towards my face.
Four.
Two insurgents climbed onto the platform. Something was hiding them, removing the footprints of their existence.
Three.
Dog-mask wrenched memories from my brain.
Two.
Insurgent One shot Dog-mask in the face. He stumbled backwards, forced to obey physical laws in his physical body.
In one divinely swift motion, Dog-mask stretched out his hand, broke every bone in the Insurgent’s body. Insurgent Two ran past his outstretched hand, ramming into his body, pushing him off the edge of the tower.
One.
A void opened in the air, abyssal, controlled, circular. Down they went.
That was no way to kill a God.
Dog-mask’s eyes surfaced in Insurgent One, and he grabbed my leg. The world tore in two, and both of us were hurtling through Reality B. Silas was gone from my mind. Reality receded, and I streaked towards the kaleidoscopes. Dog-mask was hot on my trail.
Blue outlines.
Leave, I shrilled.
The lines grew, branched off, fractallized into a beautiful blue tree.
Goodbye, Human, Blue said, and opened a rift for me.
I never saw Blue again.
Silas’ hologram stood before me.
“Ask the Orphan to hide me. Now,” I pleaded with him.
“Orphie can’t completely hide you here. Head North, as fast as you can. You’re very close to the settlement.”
I gritted my teeth, began to scramble down the ladder.
At the bottom, an insurgent rushed at me and I buried a hatchet in her neck, all while I thought about how much she looked like me at the age of 16, how dead her eyes were, how beautiful her crescent-shaped earrings. She staggered backwards, blood fountaining from her neck and I began to run. A sudden burst of energy possessed her, courtesy of Dog-mask, and she lurched forward, hands closing around me in a chokehold.
The world tore again.
Silas was there this time.
I know his true name, he said.
A fist descended from above, crushing my body into dust and I awoke again in my reality to a hatchet in my neck. I pulled it out, clawed at my throat, blood spurting from between my fingers. My own body lay a few feet away from me, unconscious.
I crawled towards it, punched it in the face, put my finger down its throat but nothing seemed to awaken it.
Magically, the rift opened again.
I stood before Dog-mask and the Void.
“Silas is off protecting your body. I think he’s hoping you’ll pull off a little trick like you did last time. Foolish.”
Dog-mask stepped closer to me.
“I’m sorry I gave you hope. I’m sorry I involved you in something beyond you the reach of your existence.”
His eyes bored into mine. I finally understood what the colours were. They were the world, unraveling.
Silas materialised, leaned into my ear.
Sorry, he said, and opened a rift.
I woke up again in the body of the person I’d murdered. Blood wetted my cheek, flowing slowly out my neck. I was no longer able to move. I was barely able to think. Images coursed lazily through my mind.
I watched my own body get to its feet, turn towards me and grin. It walked over to me slowly, unburied the hatchet from my neck and butchered itself, limb by limb, organ by organ, laid it all out neatly on the earth.
As I died in a body that wasn’t my own, Silas fed the name of a God into my ear, syllable by syllable, and the Void drained my memories, little by little, until it found a little infant born in a crackhouse, born in my cursed arms.