The 13th Chime

Chapter 10: The Earth's Mercy to Heaven

A bell chime was all I could remember. Then, boom, I'm here. I don't know who I am, I don't know what this bell is, and I don't know why I'm here. All I know is that I must live.

My senses slowly trickle back in, and I become aware of my surroundings. A vast, desolate wasteland stretches out in all directions, the landscape a twisted amalgam of decaying earth and fractured stone. The air hangs heavy and still, choked with swirling particulates of dust and ash.

As I struggle to my feet, something weighs heavily in my hand—a large brass bell, its surface etched with strange, spiral markings. Clutching it tightly, I turn in a slow circle, scanning the bleak horizon for any sign of anything. Shelter, water—a clue as to where I am or how I arrived in this forsaken place.

But there is nothing. Just an endless sea of burnt, lifeless earth, undulating gently like the preserved vestiges of some cosmic shockwave. Here and there, surreal geological formations rise up—jutting archways of fused stone and twisted, petrified tree trunks.

The silence is overwhelming, a void of sensory deprivation that seems to swallow every shallow breath I draw. Only the faint whisper of ash motes dancing in the thick air offers any sense of movement or vitality in this dead world.

As the minutes drag on, the silence starts to exert a maddening pressure. My grip tightens around the bell, its curved lip pressing into my palm with reassuring solidity. No matter how alien or bizarre the circumstances, this object is the only tether I have to...something. Even if that something is just a figment of lost memories.

I force myself to start walking, one hesitant step after another across the treacherous, uneven terrain. With no discernible landmarks or celestial bodies for guidance, I pick a direction at random and press onwards, desperate to find any sign of refuge or habitation.

The ground shifts and groans underfoot with each plodding stride, as if the earth itself is straining beneath my weight. The air grows steadily thicker and more viscous the further I venture, stinging my eyes and parching my throat with each ragged inhalation.

Just when I fear my meager reserves of strength are reaching their limit, a soft, keening whistle seems to materialize in the void ahead. My head snaps up, senses straining as the ethereal sound carries through the dead air - the first indication of anything resembling life or movement in this purgatorial realm.

Driven by a newfound sense of urgency, I quicken my pace towards the source of the noise. The whistling cry rises and falls in eerie, subsonic cadences, thrumming with harmonics that seem to vibrate deep within my bones.

Then, cresting a low ridge of fused rubble, the panorama unfurls before me in all its ineffable, cyclopean grandeur. For a moment, I can barely process what I'm seeing - the sight is so staggering, so antithetical to all conventional perspectives of physics and spatial rationale.

At the center of a vast, circular expanse, the remnants of a towering...structure? Entity? Rise from an interwoven nest of petrified, fibrous tendrils. Great archways and spinal protrusions jut out from its core at angles that seem to defy both gravity and Euclidean geometry.

The keening whistle is deafening at this proximity, resonating forth from the cyclopean ruin in ethereal harmonics. As my eyes slowly trace the surviving superstructure, I realize with dawning disbelief that those curving arches and skeletal spires aren't beams or trusses, but the remnants of eye sockets, jaws, and malformed orifices stilled in the midst of some titanic convulsion.

This was the remains of a colossal, monstrous being, its very scale and proportions so vast, so wrongly-geometried, that the human mind could scarcely parse its lineaments unaided.

And I had awoken amidst the belly of its corpse.

The whistling moan grows in intensity, almost deafening, as it buffets forth from the cyclopean remains in subsonic pulses. I cover my ears, but the sound seems to reverberate up from the earth itself, shaking my bones with its droning cadence.

All around, loose sediment and scorched debris shudder and take on an almost liquid fluidity in response to the mounting harmonics. Fissures snake outwards in real time as the unstable ground shifts and buckles like tectonic plates in turmoil.

I can only look on in stunned awe and terror as something begins to coalesce amidst the blighted epicenter. An inky, vaporous miasma churns upwards from the gaping throats and wounds adorning the remains, rapidly taking on structure and malformed coherence.

Jagged, obsidian-like protrusions burst forth, twisting and convoluting into a teetering pseudo-skeleton that rapidly fleshes itself out with pulsing, veined tissues. Flickering orifices blink into vague approximations of eyes and mouths, resulting in a half-glimpsed silhouette of sheer elemental wrongness.

The subsonic drone crests into an eardrum-perforating crescendo, and I instinctively clutch the bell tighter, raising it like a talisman against this resurrecting monstrosity. But even as the construct reaches what appears to be a towering apex, the very air around it begins to distort and shimmer.

Kinked filaments of iridescent calligraphy sprawl out in fractal patterns, rapidly inverting and mutating into fresh layers of hyper-geometries and topological corrosions. The entity disassembles and remakes itself in rapid, delirious intervals, losing all cohesion of solidity or mass as it bleeds into higher and higher dimensions of abstract deformation.

My mind rebels at the sight, spatial references and depth perspective shattering under the assault of such paradoxical, anti-structural geometries. For one brief, hyper-lucid instant, I perceive the nameless, sentient aberration in its purest form - a circumvolution of unmerciful non-spirit and abjured matter that transcended all notions of physical rationale.

Then, just as abruptly as the unraveling phantasmagoria began, it subsides back into relative corporeality. The spire-mass constricts, folding in upon itself like a fractal inverse until a singular, diamond-like geometry remains hovering above the blasted crater.

Silence reclaims the blighted expanse, broken only by my own haggard, desperate gasps for air. The mirage-crystal hangs suspended for one final moment, flickering and pulsing with baleful, liquid fractals that seem to reach beyond the mere visible spectrum.

Its thrumming pitch compounds upon itself, distilling into tighter and tighter concentrations until finally reaching the apex - the singular frequency whose unspeakable overtones realigned every unraveled strand back into cohesive, hyper-dimensional stability.

And then, just like that, it detonates. An implosive shockwave of gravitational force slams outwards, flattening me to the earth as it propagates across the ashen plain. Only my white-knuckled grip on the bell's looped handle keeps me from being scattered into the cosmic winds by the singularity's discorporating pulse.

In the crater where the phantasmagoria once raged lies a single, motionless entity, its vast shape improbable and inhuman yet unnervingly solid despite the eldritch contortions that birthed it into this plane. 

And then, the supposed entity burst out, having imploded from some sort of internal pressure. And now standing in its place, a humanoid being of larger stature, reaching around 2 feet above my own height. 

The beings hand reached out to me before it spoke

"....."