BOOK II OF THE VICISSITUDES
“Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia!” —Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine The Great Part 1
“What kind of life is it when you stop asking questions about who you are, when you stop exploring your mysteries?” - Christa Wojciechowski, Sick
Chapter 1: Awakening
The Daimoniac
He descended into the pitch-black waters, broken and maimed, like a doll that’d known too many winters in the hands of a callous child. He was not certain how he still lived, save that at the core of his being there pulsed a life that was his but not his, familiar and yet also strange. Long ago, his lungs had collapsed. His bones were shattered. He bled, internally and externally, a kite trail of gore shimmering behind him, drawing the mouths of loathsome things, things that hunted in the deep.
The core of energy, of power, burned blackly hot, like a coal ensconced within an Engine’s furnace. He clung to that core with all his will.
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And the core spoke.
Death waits for you. And there is no afterlife for your kind.
“I know,” he answered in his thoughts. He had long ago disbelieved the stories of the gods, and while the gods had turned out to be somewhat real, the heavenly promise he knew to be a lie.
Your only salvation lies with me and the seed of power I contain. Release me. Unleash me. I have just enough power to reshape you, just enough power to change your Fate.
The Daimon’s words washed over him, more lulling than the tectonic gushes and moans of the ocean, more drowning than the water in his lungs and stomach and pores. He had absorbed but a small piece of the primordial monster, a seedling of regrowth, four thousand years in the making. But now, it’d found new soil in his flesh and mind. Now, it wanted to grow.
It had already rescued him from Death’s door once before. He saw little alternative if he wished to continue his mission.
What was his mission? What now did he live for?
Fool, have you forgotten already? You and we desire the same thing: the destruction of the gods.
So it was. This was the task for which he had been born, to rectify the injustice of the cosmic design, to tear down the false idols worshipped by the idiot masses.
Pressure crushed him, shrank him. Soon, there would be nothing left to regenerate, nothing left to restore.
Now! Open up! Let me out!
In the dark of the ocean, he bloomed.