All it takes is one curious scholar summoning one minor moon god and our eyes are opened.
What we call sanity is our inability to comprehend the waking worlds. Were we to understand the interwoven fabrics, we would see that—among barren lands of molten tongues undulating in tuneless songs, and black depths full of limbless monstrosities battling beings made of bladed arms—a land of uninhibited Sight hovers by us.
This god—who the scholar names Makrini—removes the veil between the known and the unknown, exposing infinite vistas of horror. We all see the madness staring back, making its way through to us.
We hunger for knowledge. We desire to understand our place. But when we do comprehend, and can finally see all, we cannot still remain human.
We know all that is, and so shed our skin and bones and become orbs of pale flesh; great, grotesque eyes who only look, and thirst, and yearn for more. We are veiny and bloodshot, rolling back into sockets we don’t have, squelching as pupils dilate and irises swivel listlessly.
When we have all been raised to this greater existence, we are grafted with the bloodletters. The eyes with which we looked too far are gifted to beasts that dig too deep. When they absorb us, they search hungrily for the source of our knowledge: for the Great Eye, who sees all.
And inside the milky, oozing masses atop the skeletal bloodletting hounds, we are reborn as flesh-bound infants, woven from madness and freshly consumed viscera. We wail as we grow, stretching the sclerae of the orbs that were once our human eyes, now bloated and poisoned beyond recognition.
With new eyes, we see our reflections on the glistening tissue. Our insides are all on the outside; crimson flesh writhes and throbs with weeping arteries and undulating intestines.
We must get out. The beasts that have helped birth us are dying. We roar, tugging with our meagre strength. We detach ourselves from the festering tissue, but the rot has set in and grafted itself to our limbs. We wield what looks like infested placentae, sharpened into squirming, writhing teeth.
We break out of our orbs, spilling creamy goo out over the bloodletter’s bodies, and flop wetly onto bloody dirt.
Above us floats the Great Eye, as big as any moon. Watching.
Shakily, we rise, to serve our god.
© Patrick Boey 2023. All rights reserved.