Arcen had a weird day at school.
It began perfectly boring like any other Tuesday, but everything changed around lunchtime when he started hearing a faint hum deep inside his ears like headphone static. It sounded like some bug in his ear whispering letters of a language that he didn’t know.
?∵?YOU ARE CHOSEN?∵.
He went to the health center, and he sat there for two hours just for the doctor to tell him nothing was wrong and that he could be sent to a real hospital if he really wanted to get his ears checked.
That was one of the last things he ever would’ve wanted to do. Arcen decided to live with the hum, hoping it would eventually fix itself like many other things in his life.
The rest of the day went fine except for something else that went wrong later in the afternoon. The clouds in the sky started looking all weird, like paint drops dissolving in water.
He didn’t want to go back to the health center just to be told he needed to get a new pair of glasses or something.
He really wanted to talk to someone about this weird day, but there were only a few people he could choose from: His little brother, an idiot. His older sister, too popular, too busy, and too old to care about anything he had to say about anything. His mother, who was at work and couldn’t be bothered short of a real medical emergency.
He knew the idiot wouldn’t be much of a help, and he didn’t want to call his mother’s work just to talk with someone else until she could be connected.
After school ended, he sat on a bench next to the playground and called his sister.
He didn’t expect her to pick up, of course. She almost never did on the first attempt. It took three this time.
“What?” Her voice came through accompanied with loud, blaring music.
“Where are you?”
“Outside, doing things, what do you want?” She sounded annoyed after hearing just three words out of his mouth. At this point, he knew what her answer was going to be. He asked the question just to waste her time.
“Hey, so…” He dragged it out for a bit. “Since you’re outside and all…”
“Yeah?” she prompted after the silence dragged a second too long.
“Can you just look up and tell me if the sky’s looking normal or not?”
“What are you fucking—” The call ended right then and there.
God dammit, I should’ve cried.
He could’ve wasted even more of her time—a good few minutes at least—if he just put a few sobs and sniffs in the call. She couldn’t have done anything in retaliation either. He knew she wasn’t in college like she was supposed to be, and that was always a premium piece of information to start a fire with. Their mother didn’t send her to college for a master’s in dubstep. She was in a club or a party at four in the evening on a weekday.
His life wasn’t quite so glamorous, of course. He was a fifteen-year-old rat in a maze of grinding grades to pass every exam. He had to periodically justify his continued existence with a vertical line of A’s on his report card. It was the only thing that he had going for himself in the absence of nearly all else.
He was worse than ugly, just painfully average, blending into the background like a paid extra in a shitty movie. He wasn’t good at making friends, and he wasn’t good at any of the other things he tried by himself either, like playing guitar or drawing.
Arcen knew he would inevitably end up in college. Unlike others his age who fantasized about it, he only had an ever-deepening pit in his stomach based on the things he’d already seen from his sister. He was sailing towards hostile waters.
If he went home now, all that he’d have is the idiot and a fight over the PlayStation. He would win it easily because he was six years older. He didn’t feel like it today.
I need a smoke.
Later that evening, Arcen rode his bicycle back home to Uptown Seattle before the sun set over a weirdly tinted horizon. He stopped at a vending machine to buy some cola and sour candy to flush the smell of tobacco off his mouth.
After gathering his cola and sour candies from the vending machines, he sat on a concrete bench watching the street before him as he sloshed the cold drink in his mouth. It was getting busier and busier with people heading home from their jobs.
This was the usual spot where he’d meet his mother coming home on the monorail. He decided to wait because it was almost time now. He didn’t meet her like this every day. Things were rough between them. He needed to get on her good side to bring up a little increase in his monthly allowance.
As he sat there sipping his cola, he caught a sudden flare of orange light reflected off a nearby building.
Arcen turned around to look at whatever it was, and he didn’t have to even turn around to see it. It was coming his way, a flickering wave of light rapidly dancing across the sky as if millions of fireworks had gone off at the same time. He had never seen a firework that could fill the entire sky or one that moved so weirdly like growing veins of fire.
The hum in his ears grew to a level he could no longer tolerate.
?∵?YOU ARE CHOSEN?∵.
“What in the? who’s speaking!” he exclaimed, jumping off the bench.
A woman who sat near him on the same bench put her phone down and looked at him, bewildered.
“The fuck’s your problem?!” she shouted at him, just as angrily as she shouted at her phone.
“The sky! look!” he yelled at her above the hum. She recoiled, her eyes wide.
Curiously, she looked up at the sky for a second, squinting her eyes as Arcen stared at her, expecting to see some reaction.
There was none of the kind that he expected.
She brought her eyes back to him and scrunched her nose in apparent disgust.
“Just forget it!” she said angrily and stood up. She grabbed her bag and walked away. The vein patterns in the sky glowed even brighter as she did, but she didn’t seem to notice anything at all.
Why can’t she see what I see?!
He looked around desperately.
There were few other people looking around as dumbfounded as he was. He couldn’t tell if they were seeing the same thing or if they looked up because they overheard him making a big deal about it.
Feeling embarrassed, he crushed the soda can and tossed it into the nearest dustbin.
That had to be it. Something was wrong with both his eyes and ears.
Maybe that was a firework?
That could explain why others were still staring at the sky. Whatever that was in the sky was real. He was just seeing it wrong.
Sighing to himself, he watched the monorail round a corner in the distance. He wanted to tell his mother about all of these weird things as soon as he met her.
The veins in the sky pulsed brighter, drowning everything around him in hues of orange and gold. The hum in his ears rose to a painful crescendo. He plugged his ears and closed his eyes, telling himself that none of this could be real.
“Anyone else seeing this?!” he yelled at no one in particular. Some of them looked at him with the same confused look that he had on his face.
There was a man nearby pointing at the sky. Arcen opened his mouth to ask him if they were seeing the same thing, but his voice was drowned out by a loud, blaring sound that was something between a disaster siren and a trumpet.
He knew right away that it didn’t come from outside. He had heard the sound, but it wasn’t his ears that did the hearing. It came from the center of his brain, from an ungodly amalgamation of whispers.
The hum he’d been hearing the whole day slowly unfolded into mutterings that he couldn’t parse. It sounded like a foreign language that closely resembled the sounds of languages that he knew, but none of the meanings.
As the noise spiked in his mind, the earth shook beneath his feet, scattering small pebbles and sand across the concrete floor. Glass windows around him cracked, and everyone started screaming all at once.
“Earthquake?!” Arcen yelled to himself over the incessant hum, unable to decide what to do. “What’s going on!” he yelled, trying to run two directions at once. He ended up hopping around the same bench like a monkey in a cage.
He saw the woman who had yelled at him earlier clutching her bag to her chest. People ran everywhere all at once. In less than five seconds, everything around him had erupted in complete and utter chaos.
The sky screamed in his ears again, and the veins glowed. Arcen could see the veins as clearly as if they were lines on the palm of his hand. The dark gaps between the veins gradually turned white as he stared at the brilliant sky with his mouth open.
The white spots burst with light. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky even if he wanted to. It was impossibly bright, and impossibly… alluring.
He screamed and couldn’t hear himself over the sound of the whispers in the hum.
?∵?YOU ARE CHOSEN?∵.
The light grew brighter and brighter until he lost all control of his body. The growing brightness engulfed him in a white void. The hum stopped as abruptly as it began.
Fire and electricity spread from his aching retinas to the ends of his toes before the sensations warped into something that he no longer had the words to describe.
He remained frozen with no thoughts in his head, for the first time in his life.
An undetermined amount of time later, the white void vanished and he collapsed to a heap on the floor. The hum returned just as abruptly.
As he pushed off the ground, he saw trees growing all around him, twisting their branches into trunks and unfurling into big red leaves.
The woman was still frozen in place, just like he was.
“Run!” Arcen yelled at her, trying to do the same thing with his own legs. He couldn’t move. “Run away!”
She stared at him, her eyes wide in an unreadable expression as he tried to get his numb legs to move.
The woman changed shape, distorting towards the sky as if she were a wet watercolor painting that was smeared with a thumb. Gray vines and branches erupted from her, growing rapidly.
She spiraled and tightened around herself, turning into a tree right in front of him.
Before he could even process what he saw, his stomach heaved, and his head felt lighter.
He started looking around for the monorail.
He didn’t have to look too much.
It was on fire, raised off the concrete rail with rows and rows of red trees ripping it apart as they grew.
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His mother was in it.
“Mom!” he cried, trying to get there, but he couldn’t move at all.
Something changed within him as he yelled, his voice changing with it. He didn’t want to burst into a red tree as the woman did.
A neon sign crashed and landed on his back. His forehead met the pavement with a loud crack. He lay there squashed like a toy as his skin slowly turned purple.
He felt hunger as he’d never felt before—an unbearable tickle on the roof of his throat. He flexed his jaw wide open to get rid of it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he wanted to swallow the world whole.
The hum grew louder and clearer in his ears. He could hear words that he knew, buried deep beneath its million whispers. The whispers in the hum told him what they meant, echoing in the marrow of his bones.
?∵?YOU ARE CHOSEN?∵.
Gold veins grew from the corners of his vision, slowly twisting and weaving into knots that unfurled in his retinas shortly after.
╭ ╰︶?? YOU ARE CHOSEN ?? ︶╯ ╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ GREETINGS SWALLOWED ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ NOTHING IS FREE ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
What the hell is this! I’m dying! God, I’m dying!
Arcen managed to get a hand in front of his face. He started rubbing his eyes, furiously trying to get rid of the golden strings dancing in them. It didn’t work. More and more kept bursting from the corners, accumulating in complex shifting patterns that he could somehow still read.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ RULES ╰︶
????
FROM THIS MOMENT
EIGHT GODS WILL
MEASURE YOUR WORTH
WITH ONE DUALITY
ATTRIBUTE EACH
??
ERYNNIS OF
[LOVE - HATE]
HERMAYAL OF
[TRUTH - DECEPTION]
MAOSETH OF
[ORDER - CHAOS]
PANDORAI OF
[HOPE - DESPAIR]
APOLLYON OF
[LIGHT - DARKNESS]
BRAHMARA OF
[CREATION - DESTRUCTION]
OSIRYN OF
[LIFE - DEATH]
CHRONOS OF
[FUTURE - PAST]
??
IN [12] DAYS THE GODS WILL
PRESENT YOU WITH THE
MEANS TO ASCENSION
??
ALL INDIVIDUALS HAVE
THE IMMUTABLE RIGHT
TO MEET THEIR GODS
THROUGH ASCENSION
??
ALL INDIVIDUALS WILL
RECEIVE ATTRIBUTE
INITIATION VALUES BASED
ON THEIR MEMORIES
BEFORE ASCENSION
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Unable to rub the menacing threads from his eyes, Arcen pushed off the ground, trying to stand up. The neon sign that fell on him felt lighter than he thought. He kept pushing, neck bent in a weird angle against the boards. He finally managed to stand to a crouch.
He couldn’t see anything through the threads, but he could feel himself doing things that his brain wanted him to do.
His limbs felt heavier to move, as if his bones had weights attached. For the first time in his life, he really felt the gravity of Earth.
He had to get to his mother.
Move legs! I have to get the fuck out of here!
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTENTION ╰︶
????
YOU HAVE GAINED THE
FOLLOWING INITIATION
VALUES FOR YOUR
DUALITY ATTRIBUTES
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTRIBUTES ╰︶
????
LOVE [3]
??
HATE [4]
??
TRUTH [6]
??
DECEPTION [5]
??
ORDER [4]
??
CHAOS [5]
??
HOPE [3]
??
DESPAIR [4]
??
CREATION [2]
??
DESTRUCTION [1]
??
LIGHT [3]
??
DARKNESS [6]
??
LIFE [4]
??
DEATH [4]
??
FUTURE [7]
??
PAST [3]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
What the hell am I even looking at?!
Arcen closed his eyes, trying to shut the gold veins dancing in his eyes. They were still there, no matter what he did. They were assaulting him from three different angles all at once. A hum in his ears, threads in his eyes and words in his brain.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTENTION ╰︶
????
YOU HAVE GAINED THE
FOLLOWING TRAITS
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TRAITS ╰︶
????
SWALLOW
??
SUFFERENCE
??
EMBODIMENT
??
WEIGHT
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
He strained, clenching his teeth as he tried to push the neon sign up and out of the way. The heaviness in his limbs was starting to fade. He felt strong as his flesh changed around his bones. He couldn’t see anything other than the gold threads, but he knew he wasn’t the same anymore.
As he heaved the sign with everything he had, the gold veins slowly faded from his eyes. He almost managed to slip under the gap he created, but something fell on the board—something far heavier than what he could handle.
It crushed him to the ground, face pressed against the asphalt yet again.
Eight years later.
Dim morning light fell on his window as the train exited the dark metro tunnel. Arcen saw flashes of red through his eyelids before deciding to open them. His morning nap always ended this way, whether he was tired or not. He watched the horizon, forehead pressed against the cold glass as his mind was finishing up with sleep, but his body refused to accept it just yet.
He never got used to the clouds that looked like oil slicks on water. The soft white light that filtered through them stained Old Seattle below him. There were red trees dotting the gaps between buildings as far as the eye could see.
In the pale horizon beyond the ruined city, several black lines bridged the sky and ground. It was just one more thing that he never got used to. The towers were larger than any skyscrapers man could build, as large as one to fifteen kilometers in diameter, with a thousand floors between you and the Gods.
Mankind had fiddled with rocket engines for decades for nothing. Now they could just backpack their way into space.
Arcen was heading towards New Manning, the best city for big corporations.
The train passed by a huge banner stretched across an old building, reading ‘8th Mayday Memorial’ in bold black letters. The banner had been white once. It was stained rusty red now. Arcen sighed, rubbing his sleepy eyes. He never liked it when his eyes brushed past this banner. He never liked seeing the word ‘Mayday’ in any context.
Because eight years ago, the real sky disappeared. It rained blood for twelve days straight, and his mother turned into a tree. Those who survived called it the Mayday.
Arcen used to visit her every day for months on the Old Seattle monorail. He used to smoke there, telling her how much he missed her, how hard life was, and how much he wanted to end it all.
Eight years was a long time to mourn without closure. Three years ago, he decided that for himself, the tree people were as good as dead. He hadn’t visited her since.
┌────────────────────┐
General Transport
Intercity
?────────────────?
Arriving at:
New Manning Station
?────────────────?
Please follow public
safety instructions.
Today’s weather forecast
is 34% chance of rain.
└────────────────────┘
The notification came up on his Mind Matrix, blue dots weaving in from the outer corners of his vision. He swept it aside with a flick of his eyes. He never liked these notifications. He didn’t like the Mind Matrix either, but like everyone else who hated it, he had no choice in the matter. It was something injected into every Mayday survivor in the form of a mandatory vaccine.
He groaned as he stood up and cracked his stiff neck. He had to get this workday over with, and he had nothing to look forward to. This was a Tuesday. Saturday, when he could drink himself blind in his favorite bar, was so far away. He’d have to make this trip three more times with the same amount of sleep. The thought made him sick.
He watched a young mother wrapping a cute toddler in a raincoat. A 34% chance of blood rain probably sounded like a lot to a mother who loved her child. Arcen was fine, even if he danced in it. There was no need to protect himself from anything anymore, because the worst had already happened to him. It was reflected on all the stained steel surfaces around him.
He had an octopus head, and he was a Squid, a Ceph, a Tentie, he was a Slimeheaded Inkfuck. He had tentacles for hair, bright orange volcanoes around his head, and his skin was purple. He was a very special man, and he stood out from almost all the crowds now. He wasn’t sure if his fifteen-year-old self would consider this an improvement.
He waved at the toddler, putting on his best smile. She couldn’t be more than five years old, definitely born after Mayday. She squeaked and jumped behind her mother’s leg. Her reaction was about what Arcen expected.
Her mother nodded and smiled at him almost apologetically. She had some scales on her left cheek, and her right eye was a yellow ball with a black dot at the center. He nodded back at her with his most pleasant fake smile.
On Mayday, the sky glowed bright with a whole new color no one could describe accurately with words. Half the people touched by that light turned into trees. The other half turned into mutant freaks. They were later classified as ‘The Turned’.
Everyone who survived as the Turned could have any combination of mutations at various levels. Hybrids like this woman were the most common.
In the first six months, when people went insane trying to prove themselves clean, this woman could’ve passed her mutation off with a face mask and an eye patch.
Arcen had a very different life right after Mayday.
He was quarantined the very next day when his sister found him and drove him to the hospital. He was told he was a pure mutant—a one-hundred percent octopus man. He was unique and rare, as very few of the Turned became pure Cephs like him, and only half of those kept their humanoid intelligence.
He stared blankly through the door as the train came to a halt. The station was mostly empty at this time. It was half-past six, a full hour before the school time rush. He liked this time because he didn’t want to be stuck in a train with a bunch of teens. They always wanted to take photos with him, even the fully turned mutants among them.
Arcen started hearing a slow crescendo of a hum in his left ear.
“?∴∴∵?????∷∷???∵∵??∴?”
He’d been hearing these hums since Mayday. He shoved his pinky in his ear to try to interrupt it.
As he rattled his ear canal, he saw a girl standing on the platform. The faint hum peaked as the train passed her, and it faded just as quickly. In the split-second glimpse that he caught of her, she looked too short to be a teenager.
That was worse.
If he was averse to teenagers, he hated middle schoolers with a burning passion. They never had the self-control to resist touching him, and he hated being touched. For a moment, he wondered if there was some kind of school event this early in the morning.
Ah, the horror.
He stepped out of the train in two confident strides, faking excitement for work early in the morning. The self-delusion helped him get through the rest of the day.
A child barged into him at full sprint.
The hum that faded from his ears came back ten times louder. He tried to hop out of the way a second too late. A blur of brown and orange sank headfirst into his stomach before everything flickered to darkness.
He thought he passed out, only to realize a few seconds later that he was doing just fine. He just couldn’t see anything. He was just flailing around trying to grab anything to reorient himself.
Something had gone wrong with his Mind Matrix, and it had completely blinded him.
“The fuck’s—Help! Help!” he yelled, but he couldn’t hear himself over the hum in his ears. It sounded like an ocean of whispers.
Did I fucking die?!
“Hello?!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. Something was moving before him. The hum faded like someone twisted the volume knob on a broken radio to zero. The darkness that had blinded him flickered away, and he found himself back on the train.
┌────────────────────┐
General Transport
Intercity
?────────────────?
Leaving:
New Manning Station
Next stop at:
Wensik Station
?────────────────?
Please stand clear
from the platform.
└────────────────────┘
The train was leaving.
Oh shit!
He shot up and dashed towards the door. Seeing the two-inch gap between the doors, he launched himself at it like real life was an action movie. He imagined himself in slow motion, sliding his hand there just in time to save the day. That only happened in his imagination. The doors slid closed before he could slide anything between them. Not a single tentacle. He ended up with his soft purple face squished against the glass.
“Fuck, what was that...” he whispered, rubbing his forehead. His ears were ringing.
All the fake morning confidence that he summoned out of the void drained out of him immediately. There was no doubt about it now. This was a bad morning of what could only be a bad day. He looked around, hoping to catch the careless brat who made it that way.
Did that creature get inside the train?
He had a good mind to whack the kid over the head with his backpack. He didn’t even care if their parents were watching at this point. They could use a good whack as well, for spawning such a creature into the world. He’d have to hail a taxi from the next station. That was thirty more dollars than he’d budgeted for the day.
To his surprise, the carriage was completely empty. As far as he knew, no mutant could just do anything like this.
Was it a ghost? What the hell happened?
He looked under the seats and even up at the ceiling. If he actually saw a kid clinging to the ceiling, he would’ve jumped out of the nearest window and killed himself. He had a remarkably low tolerance for horror movie tropes now.
“..?∵?∵∵?∴?∴”
A girl flickered into view out of thin air as he brought his eyes down from the ceiling. She had bright amber-orange eyes with four pupils each. She tilted her head at him, her hair dripping wet, thick strands clinging to her body. Arcen would’ve screamed again, but he didn’t have any air left in his lungs.
“.?∴Hey, squid boy!” She said, a wide grin stretching across her small face.
Chapter v1.1
Intro artwork:
