literature

The First Epiphanical

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Daily Deviation

Daily Deviation

August 9, 2007
The First Epiphanical by ~Twyce This story is a little on the heavy side, but stick with it and what's going on will slowly dawn on you, like a hideous, creeping, crawling thing up your back, slithering through your hair, and then popping before your eyes.
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Literature Text

The First Epiphanical

It stirred, rising up from a dreamless slumber into the dull and barren plane of existence that constituted the real world. The only degree of separation between the two was that in one it felt desire, the will to carry out one process that drove the creature’s entire existence. It felt hunger. The singular nature of this objective was one of the reasons that it and its kind thrived down here in the inhospitable depths that they may have called, were they able to do so, home. The key was a simple form of logic, the likes of which is often questioned and subsequently discredited in certain circles by certain sentient organisms, many of which lived far above the creature. The logic was this: If you do not breathe you cannot suffocate, if you do not have fluids you cannot freeze, if you offer no resistance you cannot be crushed, and if you do not need to eat anything other than dust you cannot starve. The creature was subject to all of this, it was also unaware of the situation. The questioning, the discrediting, the sentient organisms, the suffocating and the general not dieing. To all of this it was oblivious and as a result it need not worry about anything other than feeding, and in turn as this was its only concern its requirements for survival were not hard to meet, even in these barren and unyielding depths.

Time, as it will often do, passed. The creature as not concerned by this, only the hunger warranted its attention. Each moment was identical for the creature, the one just past was the same as each and every one that was coming. To the creature time did not exist, and so as it gently unfurled its many appendages there was no urgency, only purposefulness. Hundreds, upon hundreds of arms unwrapped themselves from around the creature. The only place from which they did not arise was about a small slit in the creature’s shell, it was what passed for an eye down here. It was never used, an evolutionary hand me down from eons past, long before its ancestors descended into the depths. The limbs, spindly and delicate things, were tipped with thousands of fine threads that trailed in the wake of the limbs. Their many joints carefully flexed and twisted, manoeuvring the multitude of limbs in a meticulously choreographed dance programmed by instincts formed from a billion years of evolution. Within minutes the sequence reached its end and every arm was clear of its siblings they tensed. It was as if an entire forest had sprung up in a split second. It would have been beautiful, if beauty were not in the eye of the beholder. Any human eyes, and the attached beholder, would have been crushed and frozen before the nervous signals from the retina even considered going up to the brain.

Feeding began. Hundreds of arms twirled, each in their own pre-ordained pattern. The thousands of threads sought out tiny particles of nourishment. It was as if the creature was looking for a needle in a haystack that had already been eaten by twenty cows, which were now all burgers. When the search stopped, and it only did so rarely that it barely merits mention, one would arm extend down to the creature’s mouth at the base of its shell and carefully deposit one tiny, inconsequential morsel. It was drudgery to the extreme, but the creature had no time to its existence and hence it could not bore, it could not idle and it could not rush. There was no variation, there was only hunger.

There may have been, to a degree, when it was said that there was no variation. In a manner of speaking there was only hunger. Sometimes it just wasn’t that of the creature. Its single-mindedness made it ignorant to the subtle changes in pressure around it. Something big was moving towards it, the immense size of it forcing the environment to deviate. The tugs, ebbs and flows that the creature drifted through became wild and unpredictable as ripples ahead of the approaching behemoth punctured through them. The creature remained unaware of this. The behemoth bore down on its prey. Its massive body shot through the depths, guided by mighty fins and a sped on by an insanely powerful tail. It was a predator. It was the predator. There was no escape, it could not fail. Its maw opened, baring row upon row of sinister spiny teeth, and beyond them only a terrible black, laced with death and oblivion. Its heart pounded and its blood seared in its veins. It felt power, raw unabated strength, a primal sense of gratification and then… Nothing. Seeing as how it has become pertinent to the situation it may be a good time to note that even here in the depths, there is always a bigger fish.

The creature, once more, awoke to the hunger. It may not have been sure how it had escaped had it been able to do so but, of course, it was not aware that it had escaped nor that it had been in a position to need to escape from anything whatsoever. It was, of course, aware that it was hungry. It unfurled its arms. As it did so there was, for a brief moment, some vague sensation that something was not quite right. The creature was not capable of understanding it so its mind automatically disregarded it. It cannot be said that, regardless of how dim an organism is, loosing seventy two arms does not go unnoted in some shape or form. These elegant limbs had been torn off inadvertently as the creature bounced off the nose of its anonymous savior as it made its way to the creature’s would be killer.

Time, as it has previously done and shall continue to do, passed. The creature fed, somewhat less effectively than it had done in the past. It drifted along, oblivious to its change of locale. It was then, that something happened that had never before transpired in the unrecorded and unnoticed history of the creature and indeed all of its kind. Something was different. The creature stopped, it was hard to carry on feeding when much of the brain is suddenly occupied with coping with a sudden, unprovoked change in a perspective that has never gone unchanged in an entire lifetime. It was around this time that two more unprecedented events took place. The first of these was realisation, and the second was shock. Realisation that it was now experiencing warmth followed promptly by shock that it was experiencing and realising. A fourth unprecedented happening took it upon itself to happen, of the lot it was the one the creature found the most agreeable. This was fainting.

Days crawled by as the creature began to come to terms with the drastic changes to its world. Warmth was only the beginning, new sensations had come thick and fast. A sense of movement as the creature drifted along the stronger currents. The suggestion of strength without the forces of the depths fighting against its every motion. The dull pressure of smell in what was apparently an olfactory sensor in its mouth. Its eye, never put to use in the impenetrable dark of its new home, presented the creature with sight if only a vague glow from a distant light source. The creature, presented with so many contradictions to the reality into which it was born to inhabit. Any being would, their minds cracking under the strains of the mental conflict between denial and realisation. Somewhere, still far above the creature, sentient and intelligent organisms suffered this on a regular basis, more often than not without realising it.

Time, as it- oh you get the picture. It’s later on.

The creature had made a discovery. It had no idea what it had discovered, nor had it any notion that it had made a discovery. Instinct screamed at it to leave it alone but curiosity had crept up on the creature’s mind and had pounced while it was still coming to terms with this new turn of events. Slowly, cautiously and gingerly it made its approach.
It was a ball of some sort. The creature regarded the orb, a million hues of green, brown and blue enveloped in brilliant white strands. The colours melded into one another with such fluidity it could only have been an organic process. There was a strange otherworldly glow about it. It was as if light flowed into it, becoming interwoven into a barely visible halo around its surface. The glow and the colours were not the most fantastic property the orb possessed. Many things are coloured or have strange glows and most of them do not offer much on closer inspection, especially after the drugs have worn off. What really drew the creature in was what it witnessed in as it moved from merely looking at the orb to really taking it all in. It stared deeply and found depth.
The orb was not flat. Its surface was not a skin stretched over its core. The creature witnessed the scale of it, down to its smallest detail. The vast distance between its enveloping white strands to the elevations and depressions of its surface. The intricate pathways of the blue. The smell was fantastic, shifting from wonderful purity to rancid toxicity. The thing was beauty made corporeal and of all the new sensations that had been forced upon the creature this provoked the most violent reaction. Its mind became the epicentre of a cognitive storm the likes of which has never occurred within the confines of this universe. Ideas, emotions, senses and even new instincts burst into the creature’s mind. It was a billion years of evolution in a single moment. Other races took eons to develop feelings and identities, the creature had inadvertently taken a short cut. Some might cite that a scientific marvel, an insight into the secrets of life itself, while the vast and overly more resentful majority would certainly call it cheating.
In the middle of this pre-life crisis that the creature was undergoing it began to question. What was that thing? What was happening? It was then that what was left of its original mindset reached out and gave its one and provided the only answer it could. Food. The orb is food. The arms extended, their dance elegant as ever, even as the creature struggled with its own sudden development. One gracefully extended and laid its hairs upon the surface of the orb.

The arm swept around, circling the orb. Heat billowed amongst the hairs. Brilliant shining shards of red and white flowed between each feeding strand before rising away from the orb and breaking into a million pieces time and time again until they were no more. The blue boiled off into wisps of white, dissolving into nothing. The colours vanished as the hairs passed over, leaving behind only black and barren swathes in their wake. ‘Sensational’ couldn’t come close to an adequate description of the experience, even ‘orgasmic’ is doomed to fall abysmally short.

The beauty of the orb was gone but the creature was not deterred. This was one last autonomous function, a final expression of an existence that was soon to be gone forever. Such things are not generally interrupted. It carried on sweeping around the orb. It’s blacked surface warm and coarse to the touch. It was strangely appealing to the creature. It was surprised that something that had been so exquisite before could be so changed in so little time. The creature was evidently making progress, it had mastered a sense of time.

The black skin of the orb soon became thin and brittle. Cracks began to form. Striking red lines began to weave their way around the orb, thickening as they joined. The black receded into the red and was gone before the creature could register it was happening. For a single second the creature stopped. It pondered. This new layer seemed to be some sort of viscous liquid. Carrying on as it had before would be messy. The creature really was making progress in leaps and bounds. It was able to conceive and was developing a semblance of something akin to table manners. It brought its arms to bear and began to pluck. Thick blobs of the red goo came away. It emanated a dull glow the creature noted before it shoved the first morsel into its mouth. It was like liquid joy spreading through its interior. Satisfying warmth permeated the entirety of its form.
The red was gone faster than the creature would have liked but what it found underneath was so much more fantastic. The shining golden core of the orb lay before the creature. The excitement was so intense the creature could barely contain itself. Greedily it plucked the core and shoved it into its mouth in the blink of an eye. Briefly, the core merely sat in the digestive tract of the creature. Without warning or provocation it burst. Heat a thousand times more intense than ever before shot through the creature. Simply put, it was magical.

The creature cogitated. The orb had forced it up onto a higher plane of existence. It recognised its own existence now. Before it had been an it, now it was a whom. It was dimly aware of what it had undergone in the depths for its entire life before this epiphany. She was also aware that she ought to try and elevate others. Perhaps she ought to draw out some sort of plan? Another orb shot past. It was grey, dull and considerably smaller than the first. Perhaps she could grind that down and make some sort of marks out of the dust to help her remember the plan?

Gregory sprinted across the street, eager to be home as soon as possible. Rioting and panic was rife since the freak eclipse, it was a bad time to be out. Tucked under his arm was a meagre package of dented tins and dubiously coloured fruit. It had been all there was at the supermarket, the frenzy of panic buying, and more recently looting, had left all the shops bare. He muttered to himself as he rounded a corner, only the odd coherent word amongst the angry noises. People had said it was the end of the world, if that was the case his last meal was going to be crap to say the least. Suddenly, for no apparent reason it grew warm and a red glow appeared on the horizon, silhouetting the houses on the far end of the road. He stopped and stared, praying it was the sun coming up. When he began to sweat in the growing heat he began to think perhaps not. When it appeared he knew this was it. A colossal pallid green wall rose up from behind the houses, it encompassed the entire skyline. Before the heat boiled off his bodily fluids and flash incinerated his flesh he noted it looked some what like a giant tentacle.
My future self is ever my worst critic, hindsight is 20:20 after all.

I think about this peice and it seems ever so pretencious. It was published in a British small press magazine called The End is Nigh, a publication which concerns itself entirely with the cheerful purpose of foretelling planetary doom in all its forms. I frequently ponder wether or not it was merely tollerated.

The style is, as ever, overly formal and convoluted with awkward breaks in the flow forced in by my ever present need to try and be funny. The word limit forced me to hurry things along a tad, and it has an air of haste about its construction as a result particularily the ending which is a bit shit. I make up a few words too I believe, which is something I like to do occasionally partly out of my brain not working so well or spite for people who dont like language to change.

Oh well.

Anyways, for every time you dont read this story a kitten explodes and the shrapnel maims an orphan. Go on, call my bluff. I DARE YOU. So does little Timmy and Mr Fluffywhuffy

The END IS NIGH issue four is due out sometime in May.
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© 2007 - 2024 Twyce
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johnbjuice's avatar
This is definitely very thick...but I like where it's going. I'm going to have to finish it when I am not exhausted. :P