Yuyo
❤︎
I'm bored out of my mind without writing and I'm falling back down in a bit of mental void. Not doing great nor bad, but I hope writing this will bless my mind with an impulse once again. This will all be written in one single go without pauses and such. I hope you enjoy the short story, toodles.
Even before the first clap of thunder split the sky, Captain Bartolomeo raised his voice above the roar of the wind: “The storm is no match for the fortune that awaits us in Nascentis.”
Under the rain that cut like needles, the ship creaked like the roar of a dying leviathan. Each wave lifted us twenty meters before dropping us into a salty abyss, the lantern on the bowsprit, swaying with the tide, barely scratching the blackness that devoured the ocean.
I, a reckless city dweller, felt my ribs vibrate to the rhythm of the twisted wood. I closed my eyes to stifle the vertigo and murmured nameless prayers, clutching my diary as if its pages could conjure up a lifeline. The sea salt mixed with the icy sweat, and a strange chill fluttered at the back of my neck, like the consciousness of a giant sleeping beneath our ship.
When the keel threatened to split with a long, threatening creak, a momentary silence tore through the night. Nascentis emerged on the horizon: a silhouette of cliffs shrouded in fog, bathed in a pale moonbeam. The men burst into cheers; I alone felt a dread deeper than the storm itself, the suspicion that this fragment of land was no refuge.
With desperate maneuvers, we dropped anchor and, trembling, jumped into the icy water. Each stroke was torture; the ocean, barely separated from our chests, roared against the rocks with an ancestral echo. We dragged chests and nets to the shore. The rain soaked us to the bone, but when I looked up at the cliff, I felt a different kind of cold, born of the living matter of the island, rising up my legs and taking root in my spine in a cruel way. My diary survived the cruel storm, a small light in the midst of the sinister gloom that surrounded my mind at that moment.
The mouth of a cave opened at our feet like the jaws of a huge, lethargic beast. We entered with flickering torches and saw lichens glowing with a ghostly green, as if the rock were exhaling a forgotten bioluminescence. The air was filled with the smell of dead earth mixed with a metallic breath, and the captain lit a fire whose swirling smoke was devoured by the stone vault, as if the cave sensed our warmth and at the same time rejected it with disgust.
Armand, the youngest of the crew, his innocence intact, approached me, curious. With a trembling voice, he took my journal and asked, “Why did we come here?” I invited him to sit down, and, under the flickering light of the fire, I told him the legend:
Centuries ago, nomads crossed the Pacific with reed rafts and cunning. Fragmentary accounts tell of how they reached Nascentis, settled there, and erected an enclave dedicated to an arcane cult that has no name. Then, without warning, they offered their lives in an unknown ritual. All that remained were worm-eaten scrolls: references to cyclopean chambers, golden towers that sparkled like encapsulated suns, and symbols in languages without mother or father.
Telling that story reignited my ambition like a spark on live gunpowder. I imagined golden galleries, immemorial engravings, and forbidden manuscripts. If I unraveled that mystery, my name would resonate in academies and taverns as a revolutionary, a hero, and a living legend.
The wet wood exhaled smoke that danced with the dying embers. We shared rations of biscuits and rum, celebrating with pride even though the rain drummed on the rock with a funeral cadence. Each spark rose like a beating heart, marking the rhythm of my own heart racing with excitement for the mystery that awaited the next day. Bartolomeo silently stoked the fire; his face was lit by dancing shadows and a feverish glow, despite the celebration taking place in front of him.
Exhaustion overtook me before dawn.
As I rested, I had a dream, my mind invaded by images that I now wish I had never seen, for they haunt me wherever I go.
I was suspended in the sea, but everything I saw was wrong, defying the nature of what was possible and what should be. The water, thick as rusty syrup, enveloped me relentlessly. I tried to scream, but the sound dissolved into a chorus of abyssal whispers. My hands sank into the thick darkness; each stroke was a futile struggle against a living fluid.
I looked down and discovered a swarm of sepia pearls rising in spectral waves. They were not pearls, but eyes: thousands of eyelidless retinas, staring at me with nameless voracity. Their moist glow was a silent judgment, a measurement of my faults and secrets. They rose not only invading the water, but the sky, resembling stars as they did so. Upon contact, a wave of disgust rose in my throat, and I woke up gasping.
I sat up with a start, my fist pressing against my chest, my mouth dry.
The crew surrounded me in silence, gathering embers and tuning strings. Their elusive, cloudy gazes spoke of shared dreams. No one uttered a word, but their gestures betrayed the same primal terror that burned my temples.
At dawn, we left the cave and entered a maze of undergrowth. The jungle enveloped us with brambles that scratched our skin and vines that hung like hungry arms. The air smelled of rotting vegetation and tropical humidity. Occasionally, my ears picked up a choral murmur coming from among the roots, so faint that I wondered if my mind had invented it or if someone in the crew was playing a cruel joke on me. After hours of walking, we emerged into a clearing dominated by rocky debris. Rows of collapsed columns and walls pierced with tentacle and claw motifs stood like relics of a previous world. Each block had curved reliefs and impossible angles, surfaces polished by an unknown friction. The silence was absolute; neither the wind nor the swaying of vegetation seemed to interrupt that moment.
My machete struck something hard. I pushed aside the leaves and found the fragment of a gigantic rib, white and immaculate, curved like the bow of a mythical ship. It showed no signs of erosion; its surface looked freshly exposed, as if it had been carved recently. I took a step back, my stomach churning. I vomited without warning, and the retching brought up nothing but bile and those translucent little balls, identical to the ones in my dream.
Bartolomeo approached with solemn silence, not a word, not a sigh. He looked at the pearls and patted me lightly on the back, something that in another situation would have been comforting, but now caused me even more questions to rise in my throat, without any answers. An internal pulse warned me of something nesting in my flesh, a silent murmur that I would not ignore for long.
The captain walked away with the crew, disappearing into the undergrowth before I could follow them. I started running down the path, my unsteady steps guiding me in my attempt to regain the false sense of security that comes with being in company. The undergrowth crunched under my feet and the murmur that had disturbed me earlier seemed to grow louder, as if its source were nearby. I continued along the same path until I came across a stone mass: a cathedral carved into the mountain itself. Its pillars rose in spirals and twists, crowned by disproportionate skulls and bones carved from the same stone. The lintel was carved with hundreds of oval eyes; it was unclear whether this was a warning or an invitation.
A chill propelled me forward into a corridor flanked by phosphorescent algae. The walls, dampened by constant dripping, vibrated with a low hum, as if thousands of throats awaited my arrival in that dark place. My reflection trembled on the shiny floor, multiplying into fragments of shadow. Each step resonated with a hollow echo, and I was certain that the stone itself was beating beneath my feet.
At the end, the vault collapsed into an open sky. The moon hung high and bloody, surrounded by alien constellations that twinkled with a hypnotic rhythm. It was then that I understood that the sky was a colossal eye, watchful and hungry, hovering over the temple with an icy glare.
A viscous splash shook me: a warm, steely liquid was oozing from a crack in the rock. The sour stench of hot blood turned my stomach. Looking up, I found the captain kneeling next to a pillar, tearing at his throat with claw-like nails. His sobs were not of terror or pain, but of ecstasy. Black pearls sprouted from the wounds, hatching into tiny crustaceans.
Those creatures swarmed over his body, piercing his flesh and devouring his entrails with a coral-like chirping. His skeleton, exposed like a whitish reliquary, was the testament to an inconceivable offering.
A muffled scream tore me from my spot. Armand, the poor soul who had shared a moment of curiosity the night before, was still struggling on the ground. Insects crawled through his mouth, nostrils, and eyes, feeding from within. The young man whimpered and writhed in agony so long that it eclipsed all compassion. At last, his body succumbed to the voracity, leaving behind an empty shell of flesh and smoking carapaces walking across the now red floor, painted with the flesh and blood of those who had once been my traveling companions. The horror took my breath away. Looking up, I discovered an immense eye spinning in a stone arc, its snowy iris and endless pupil scrutinizing me with hunger, hatred, desire, and disgust, its impossible geometry throwing me to my knees. Around it, stone arms emerged in a tangle, topped with hands as sharp and delicate as those of a maiden, gently lifting me toward the stars and the moon that dwelt above that cursed temple.
Their mouths, toothed like a hungry beast, inhabited a different space within the structure, and even beyond, moving between the ground, the sky, the blood itself, and even my own skin, uttering incomprehensible and evil words. That vision defied all logic, penetrating my brain unpredictably like a parasite nesting deep in the center of my cortex.
I believed that death would come with its justice, but the enclave dissolved into a murmur of calm waves. I opened my eyes, and I was back in the cave, the rain still hammering the ground and the remaining crew collecting embers like talking ghosts. No one mentioned Armand or those who were lost. But the captain smiled peacefully as he walked through that chamber, filling me with anger and sadness. This journey, this destination, all of it had been premeditated, cruelly calculated, with a purpose that to this day I wish to deny, but cannot.
I looked for my diary, but its pages were blank, stripped of stories. No pearls, no colossal bones. Only a tremor remained in my veins, something I could not decipher at the time.
The return to the ship was a ritual of sepulchral silence. The sea, tamed after the storm, murmured mockingly. Every night, when I close my eyes, I relive the crunching of the shells, the flickering of the seaweed, and the sobbing of that skeleton in ecstasy.
I have returned to the big city, but not with my body intact. I feel beneath my skin a foreign whisper, a heartbeat that I now recognize, the seed of Nascentis germinating in my flesh, feeding my regret and my terror.
I was Corey Laws, and these are my last words before the final act of your play unfolds. It doesn't matter if you fight against its voice, it doesn't matter if you want to deny it, you will meet the same fate as my companions and me.
Forgive me, my friends, forgive me, my family, forgive me, humanity. There is no turning back now, we are all irretrievably Nascentis.
Nascentis
Even before the first clap of thunder split the sky, Captain Bartolomeo raised his voice above the roar of the wind: “The storm is no match for the fortune that awaits us in Nascentis.”
Under the rain that cut like needles, the ship creaked like the roar of a dying leviathan. Each wave lifted us twenty meters before dropping us into a salty abyss, the lantern on the bowsprit, swaying with the tide, barely scratching the blackness that devoured the ocean.
I, a reckless city dweller, felt my ribs vibrate to the rhythm of the twisted wood. I closed my eyes to stifle the vertigo and murmured nameless prayers, clutching my diary as if its pages could conjure up a lifeline. The sea salt mixed with the icy sweat, and a strange chill fluttered at the back of my neck, like the consciousness of a giant sleeping beneath our ship.
When the keel threatened to split with a long, threatening creak, a momentary silence tore through the night. Nascentis emerged on the horizon: a silhouette of cliffs shrouded in fog, bathed in a pale moonbeam. The men burst into cheers; I alone felt a dread deeper than the storm itself, the suspicion that this fragment of land was no refuge.
With desperate maneuvers, we dropped anchor and, trembling, jumped into the icy water. Each stroke was torture; the ocean, barely separated from our chests, roared against the rocks with an ancestral echo. We dragged chests and nets to the shore. The rain soaked us to the bone, but when I looked up at the cliff, I felt a different kind of cold, born of the living matter of the island, rising up my legs and taking root in my spine in a cruel way. My diary survived the cruel storm, a small light in the midst of the sinister gloom that surrounded my mind at that moment.
The mouth of a cave opened at our feet like the jaws of a huge, lethargic beast. We entered with flickering torches and saw lichens glowing with a ghostly green, as if the rock were exhaling a forgotten bioluminescence. The air was filled with the smell of dead earth mixed with a metallic breath, and the captain lit a fire whose swirling smoke was devoured by the stone vault, as if the cave sensed our warmth and at the same time rejected it with disgust.
Armand, the youngest of the crew, his innocence intact, approached me, curious. With a trembling voice, he took my journal and asked, “Why did we come here?” I invited him to sit down, and, under the flickering light of the fire, I told him the legend:
Centuries ago, nomads crossed the Pacific with reed rafts and cunning. Fragmentary accounts tell of how they reached Nascentis, settled there, and erected an enclave dedicated to an arcane cult that has no name. Then, without warning, they offered their lives in an unknown ritual. All that remained were worm-eaten scrolls: references to cyclopean chambers, golden towers that sparkled like encapsulated suns, and symbols in languages without mother or father.
Telling that story reignited my ambition like a spark on live gunpowder. I imagined golden galleries, immemorial engravings, and forbidden manuscripts. If I unraveled that mystery, my name would resonate in academies and taverns as a revolutionary, a hero, and a living legend.
The wet wood exhaled smoke that danced with the dying embers. We shared rations of biscuits and rum, celebrating with pride even though the rain drummed on the rock with a funeral cadence. Each spark rose like a beating heart, marking the rhythm of my own heart racing with excitement for the mystery that awaited the next day. Bartolomeo silently stoked the fire; his face was lit by dancing shadows and a feverish glow, despite the celebration taking place in front of him.
Exhaustion overtook me before dawn.
As I rested, I had a dream, my mind invaded by images that I now wish I had never seen, for they haunt me wherever I go.
I was suspended in the sea, but everything I saw was wrong, defying the nature of what was possible and what should be. The water, thick as rusty syrup, enveloped me relentlessly. I tried to scream, but the sound dissolved into a chorus of abyssal whispers. My hands sank into the thick darkness; each stroke was a futile struggle against a living fluid.
I looked down and discovered a swarm of sepia pearls rising in spectral waves. They were not pearls, but eyes: thousands of eyelidless retinas, staring at me with nameless voracity. Their moist glow was a silent judgment, a measurement of my faults and secrets. They rose not only invading the water, but the sky, resembling stars as they did so. Upon contact, a wave of disgust rose in my throat, and I woke up gasping.
I sat up with a start, my fist pressing against my chest, my mouth dry.
The crew surrounded me in silence, gathering embers and tuning strings. Their elusive, cloudy gazes spoke of shared dreams. No one uttered a word, but their gestures betrayed the same primal terror that burned my temples.
At dawn, we left the cave and entered a maze of undergrowth. The jungle enveloped us with brambles that scratched our skin and vines that hung like hungry arms. The air smelled of rotting vegetation and tropical humidity. Occasionally, my ears picked up a choral murmur coming from among the roots, so faint that I wondered if my mind had invented it or if someone in the crew was playing a cruel joke on me. After hours of walking, we emerged into a clearing dominated by rocky debris. Rows of collapsed columns and walls pierced with tentacle and claw motifs stood like relics of a previous world. Each block had curved reliefs and impossible angles, surfaces polished by an unknown friction. The silence was absolute; neither the wind nor the swaying of vegetation seemed to interrupt that moment.
My machete struck something hard. I pushed aside the leaves and found the fragment of a gigantic rib, white and immaculate, curved like the bow of a mythical ship. It showed no signs of erosion; its surface looked freshly exposed, as if it had been carved recently. I took a step back, my stomach churning. I vomited without warning, and the retching brought up nothing but bile and those translucent little balls, identical to the ones in my dream.
Bartolomeo approached with solemn silence, not a word, not a sigh. He looked at the pearls and patted me lightly on the back, something that in another situation would have been comforting, but now caused me even more questions to rise in my throat, without any answers. An internal pulse warned me of something nesting in my flesh, a silent murmur that I would not ignore for long.
The captain walked away with the crew, disappearing into the undergrowth before I could follow them. I started running down the path, my unsteady steps guiding me in my attempt to regain the false sense of security that comes with being in company. The undergrowth crunched under my feet and the murmur that had disturbed me earlier seemed to grow louder, as if its source were nearby. I continued along the same path until I came across a stone mass: a cathedral carved into the mountain itself. Its pillars rose in spirals and twists, crowned by disproportionate skulls and bones carved from the same stone. The lintel was carved with hundreds of oval eyes; it was unclear whether this was a warning or an invitation.
A chill propelled me forward into a corridor flanked by phosphorescent algae. The walls, dampened by constant dripping, vibrated with a low hum, as if thousands of throats awaited my arrival in that dark place. My reflection trembled on the shiny floor, multiplying into fragments of shadow. Each step resonated with a hollow echo, and I was certain that the stone itself was beating beneath my feet.
At the end, the vault collapsed into an open sky. The moon hung high and bloody, surrounded by alien constellations that twinkled with a hypnotic rhythm. It was then that I understood that the sky was a colossal eye, watchful and hungry, hovering over the temple with an icy glare.
A viscous splash shook me: a warm, steely liquid was oozing from a crack in the rock. The sour stench of hot blood turned my stomach. Looking up, I found the captain kneeling next to a pillar, tearing at his throat with claw-like nails. His sobs were not of terror or pain, but of ecstasy. Black pearls sprouted from the wounds, hatching into tiny crustaceans.
Those creatures swarmed over his body, piercing his flesh and devouring his entrails with a coral-like chirping. His skeleton, exposed like a whitish reliquary, was the testament to an inconceivable offering.
A muffled scream tore me from my spot. Armand, the poor soul who had shared a moment of curiosity the night before, was still struggling on the ground. Insects crawled through his mouth, nostrils, and eyes, feeding from within. The young man whimpered and writhed in agony so long that it eclipsed all compassion. At last, his body succumbed to the voracity, leaving behind an empty shell of flesh and smoking carapaces walking across the now red floor, painted with the flesh and blood of those who had once been my traveling companions. The horror took my breath away. Looking up, I discovered an immense eye spinning in a stone arc, its snowy iris and endless pupil scrutinizing me with hunger, hatred, desire, and disgust, its impossible geometry throwing me to my knees. Around it, stone arms emerged in a tangle, topped with hands as sharp and delicate as those of a maiden, gently lifting me toward the stars and the moon that dwelt above that cursed temple.
Their mouths, toothed like a hungry beast, inhabited a different space within the structure, and even beyond, moving between the ground, the sky, the blood itself, and even my own skin, uttering incomprehensible and evil words. That vision defied all logic, penetrating my brain unpredictably like a parasite nesting deep in the center of my cortex.
I believed that death would come with its justice, but the enclave dissolved into a murmur of calm waves. I opened my eyes, and I was back in the cave, the rain still hammering the ground and the remaining crew collecting embers like talking ghosts. No one mentioned Armand or those who were lost. But the captain smiled peacefully as he walked through that chamber, filling me with anger and sadness. This journey, this destination, all of it had been premeditated, cruelly calculated, with a purpose that to this day I wish to deny, but cannot.
I looked for my diary, but its pages were blank, stripped of stories. No pearls, no colossal bones. Only a tremor remained in my veins, something I could not decipher at the time.
The return to the ship was a ritual of sepulchral silence. The sea, tamed after the storm, murmured mockingly. Every night, when I close my eyes, I relive the crunching of the shells, the flickering of the seaweed, and the sobbing of that skeleton in ecstasy.
I have returned to the big city, but not with my body intact. I feel beneath my skin a foreign whisper, a heartbeat that I now recognize, the seed of Nascentis germinating in my flesh, feeding my regret and my terror.
I was Corey Laws, and these are my last words before the final act of your play unfolds. It doesn't matter if you fight against its voice, it doesn't matter if you want to deny it, you will meet the same fate as my companions and me.
Forgive me, my friends, forgive me, my family, forgive me, humanity. There is no turning back now, we are all irretrievably Nascentis.