The Eden Projects (Book I)

Chapter 27. Vessel.

- Kasper -

It's so dark... 

Warm... I'm warm...

Kasper swam in something like a molasses. It filled his mind and muddied his thoughts, the ones he could form. Where was he... why was he there... who was he... Everything felt segmented, and he was tired. 

So... tired...

He twitched in his body, a prison he was unable to escape from. Everything he was, was fading away and all that held him there was the pain. Everything hurt. He was moving, but it wasn't him pulling the strings and though he begged whatever kept him there to let go, it wouldn't. So the pain only grew, never tipping past the point of killing. It was just at the edge, holding him in a grip like steel, forcing him to stay. Planting his face so firmly in the fire that nothing but bone remained and even that was turning to char. He was burning Alive.

I can't breathe...

He felt his body wrack with the motions of screaming, though whatever produced the sound was left a gaping hole. He felt his lungs tugging for breath when hypoxia threatened to take him, the singe on his skin, and the shatters of bone that pressed through his outermost layers like spurs. The smell of death and burning hair. What was it that had pinned him? What was it that his body fought against? Something had its teeth in him, and it wouldn't let go.

Let me go... 

Overhead, though he couldn't see it, he could hear it now, through one good ear. The one not ground to mash. Concrete slamming against concrete. Rock skittering and explosions ripping at the surrounding area. Then his fingers burned. they were clawing through something. It wasn't soft like the earth, it was hard and more jagged than anything he had ever felt. His nerves were alight with the sensation that pricked at his bodies delicate structures. All he could manage was a soft moaning that gurgled in his throat, mixing with saliva and his own bubbling blood. He writhed when the clawing had grated down to his finger-bones and he felt nothing else. He begged it to stop when his lower half shattered as it was drug up and out of whatever he was in. Kasper tried everything he could to fight the waves of vomitous reactions that twisted his insides with the sickening pain. 

And he imagined death-

The promise of it- 

Why can't I just let go...

-then light broke his darkness. 

At first, only a prick in the veil of stone and rebar, enough for him to see and see he did. His own hands breaking a path out of the rubble and fire. The way his skin was bubbled down to yellowy gatherings of fat and muscle toned pitch, and his bones. Oh how his skin cradled them and had failed to save them. How useless it all was. He was a passenger in a vessel made of his own flesh and yet he couldn't command it. In between his own moaning, something else was screaming. Something so foreign, yet unbearably familiar... 

Forgotten... 

IT was saving him. 

Whether he wanted it or not. 

IT was burning too.

At moments, his vision blurred and he caught sight of his legs, the remains of a tail. A mangled mess that slowly seemed to be working themselves back to position with every fist flung purchase he made. Though in the tangle they were. How they could ever be set right was beyond him. Then the agonizing grinding that came from his hips and lower back as whatever made it possible for him to move reconnected, entwined, and saddled back together. He felt his palms catch the ground and his nerves reignite when it was finally their time to wake. All of him groaned when he was pulled up onto all fours and sent running. Through a thin veil of ebbing blackness and dagger like teeth he could see just enough. 

He was moving.

He was alive.

When his arms had finally repaired, and his weight had been distributed; the limbs were swung ahead of him in a propelling leap and he marveled at what they were. He felt his innards pulling back up into his abdomen like string wound tightly to a bobbin and the crawling itch when muscle, tissue, and all matter of things covered them up and the pain was gone. He vied for control, and was given none. 

So he was running and he grew to wonder... 

What. Am. I?