by Scott Jäeger
At the feast for those elders who will enter the Nest at dawn, you, like your father, cannot resist the scent of the wide streak of colourless slime on your arm. Every so often you retreat from the firelight and breathe deeply of its heady smell. It is like freshly killed game, like a flawless summer dawn, like the smell of your own children. It is all good things, an aroma without description.
In the last minutes before sunrise you and the other elders arrive at the dark mound behind the village, naked in preparation for your second birth. Immediately within the perfectly round entrance to the Nest, many tunnels branch off and as the others do, you move to the one marked for you alone. You know it is yours because the scent with which you are marked wafts from the darkness ahead and draws you on like a lover’s incessantly beckoning finger.
You walk tentatively away from the light, dragging a few fingers along one winding wall to guide yourself. When you stumble, the soft sand cushions you. The blackness is complete, but you increase your pace, and soon are running through the twisted tunnels without any guidance but the reward that guides you ever closer. The air is so thick you feel at times as if you are parting a river. You turn left, right, right, slither down a declining passage steep enough to be called a hole. You do not realize it but since up is the only direction denied to you, it is only natural you are moving constantly downward, below the Great Nest and below the earth.
You know you have arrived at your destination when you stagger into the arms of a half-dozen Diggers, servants to the same great god that you serve. You find yourself babbling out thanks and praise to the MotherFather as they gently lift you off your feet and into a warm and smooth declivity that shapes itself to your form. Here you are gently fixed with the same fluid the Diggers secrete at will. There is a profound silence then as the Diggers retreat, an ominous quiet which you sense portends even greater events.
The horror that follows is far from what you anticipated. A rough and terrible thing slithers up over your torso. Its texture is rough and bubbled and its shape, as well as you can make out in the all encompassing dark, is flat and broad, like a gigantic tongue. You thrust your head back as far as you may to keep its slimy tip from your face. The thing stops its prodding but still lays cold against you. You try to calm yourself, to order your thoughts. It must all be part of the MotherFather’s plan.
Some wickedly sharp part of the tongue-thing stabs you in the stomach, about the area of your navel, and plunges inside you. The pain is worse even than the birth of your first child, but before the echo of your first cry has faded, it is ebbing. The needle-like spine is withdrawn, leaving in its stead a spreading euphoria as intense in its pleasure as the previous violation was in its pain. A molten wave of joy floods you to the roots of your hair and the tips of your toes. At the same time, the interior of the night-black chamber becomes clear to your eyes. There is yet no light of any kind, yet your surroundings are now limned in a kind of blue-green flickering glow. You are in a great vaulted room, round and with a solid floor of wavy stone. Metal arches support the ceiling far overhead. Of the horrid leathery tongue you see nothing.
The greatest radiance comes from the massive glowing crystal set in the floor, and what you see there fills your skull entirely, for a time too wondrous to comprehend. It glows in all colours, and within it lays the MotherFather itself and you finally understand that it dreams the Diggers.
This you contemplate in awe for some time, but your transition is not finished. At first the sound was like a drumbeat, ever so distant and slower than the stars sailing between their cosmic ports. It is not a drumbeat, but a great throbbing pulse, overwhelming the beat of your own heart, and it rises all around. You know it to be the life force of the Nest. Visions of twisting warrens fill your brain, of Digger young wriggling in a rich soup of regurgitated millet, of bizarre machines and the Warriors’ patrols, everything limned in the blue-green fire. All the while the heartbeat of the MotherFather beats faster and faster again, until your heartbeat and that of the Nest are as one.
You believe now that the wonders of the MotherFather will never cease, that your existence has reached its ultimate purpose, that you will bask forever in the presence of the God of All.
Just before consciousness leaves you, you understand that the heartbeat of the MotherFather never changed in the slightest, but your own has slowed and slowed, until the wonders cease and you sleep.
****
You know at once that much time has passed. Your first sense is of a long and agonizing discomfort which has invaded your dreams for so long you awaken already weary of it. The roar in your skull has receded and been replaced by a never ceasing murmur, a chittering, clicking nonsense sound, that grates like a dirty fingernail scratching the inside of your skull. It is the silent language of the Diggers. When you open your eyes to spot the small group kneeling in a semi-circle some distance before you, their chatter thankfully stops. They do not move.
The MotherFather still glows incandescent in its thousand thousand colours but the emotions evoked before have been replaced with a desperate fatigue, and despite feeling bloated and heavy you are very hungry. You can no longer shift your head as it has been fixed somehow to the wall behind. Are there others from the village hung here in the god’s glory? Trying to squint beyond the MotherFather to the far wall of the chamber you imagine the other men and women of the village in a similar position to yours. Has their joy worn away as swiftly as mine? Is my faith in the MotherFather weak? You pray that there are other ways to serve the god than this.
Something shifts inside you, the kick of a little one close to birth. For a few moments, your groggy mind tries to recall the count of days since your blood stopped. But of course you are not with child. You lower your eyes as far as you are able and at the lowest edge of your vision discover the distended hump of a great pregnant belly. There are other movements inside you now, and a sound like stones rattling, accompanied by an unendurable, burning pain.
Then you remember the sunning of the eggs in the village.
Then you remember the membranous sack in which the eggs were delivered, covered in blood and gobs of flesh, fresh from their host…
Your belly is swelling still further, the bulge growing, and there is no rapturous joy to drown out this pain. As a shivering terror rises up to choke off your screams, you find yourself looking down at Ayat.
You are no longer Ayat. Mercifully, the egg chamber of the Diggers fades back into darkness. The images recede.
You dream no more.
About the Author
Scott Jäeger is a software consultant and sometime contributor to computer games development, currently living in the United States, with a keen interest in the genre defined by HP Lovecraft.
