FFM 4 - The Spine of the World

He can't remember when he last took the medication. It could have been weeks. He doesn't know, can't think: skull pulsing with maggots. They've burrowed into the cavity of his braincase, squirmed against the flat bones of his cranium. He hears them sliding, feels them fester in his grey matter. Feels them breed.

He can't go outside. Hasn't tried, too afraid, yet promises each time, huddled in a dull corner, he will do it, soon. He sees a flickering shadow waiting. He hears metal screams. He is cured but they will poison him. To leave was slavery, to stay starvation.

He reaches a hand but his fingers are palm leaves. His body is a knife, too sharp to move incautiously. He has no choice, never had except for the when of his fate. Leaves wrap around the scaled handle of his door-turned-tree. Feels the jolt of electricity when it resists, but he pushes through and turns.

His footsteps fail. He steps outside the monolith. The shadow is behind him, above him, somewhere he can't see. The tree closes and green hills split themselves, brown soil vomiting from the ground like geysers. He hears the splash of water and smells the brackish, syrupy infection coursing through him. A toxic sunrise ascends. His skin burns from the radiation light of the green sky-crystal.

One root grows then his guts are clutched by a clawed hand. Blood turns to acid. He heaves caustic, retching fleshcraft distortified when alien insects writhe segmented from his lips. Black mass slithering up his throat, grabbing onto his tongue, expelled by kin. He tastes them, loses their names.

Child of ink on the lupine carpet, devour no fruits. When the membrane erupts, a trothed woman is reaved, nameless she. Many are passing, to the east, direction of fetid creators of coffee. West, three monochrome horses and blue giraffe for happy lion. North is panacea, the amber grace of mead. Four hundred seventy nine stars into a fiery downpour; the subduer wakes, veins of the universe intruding at an angle he perceives, transpiration of ichor.

A darkling approaches, then another. They push the air, vibrate their structures. Them animated dead, one of the firmament risen again, the other full of brain. Crying both, that futilitarian pursuit, signalling more of their number, howling and shrieking in the devil's interval. Congregating neurotypes all the same, all colorless green asleep and grazing on furious dreams. Obscured and shaded, madness hidden from sight. Unlike he, empyrean child of celestial virtue, radiant counsel of numen. He self-determines, is utterer and audition, one being of all in all.

Into him they carve an adumbrated blossom, marrow and stem, that spiked flower of language. Knotted and twisted and tied, awkward and swollen, flushed and bleeding, grainy effluent of an empty returning mark. He hears their chatter gather around him, meaningless vocables wailing closer. All around him false: bones of the sky, chimes of the silver wind.

He collapses, fibrous column of earth, then shadows take him.