PROLOGUE: WELCOME TO SPARKER'S BAY
Anger is like acid.
You remember that much don't you? You remember the "what" even if you don't know the "why". You know what it feels like as it drips down from your boiling brain, chewing through nerves and pitting bone. Hollowing a hole in your stomach. Heart thudding, pumping poison through your body even as your skin starts sloughing off, your muscle starts sizzling away, until all that's left is a trembling, toxic, mess. Hands twitching, spasming, as you silently scream.
You remember that helplessness, that impotence, that
fury. You remember it consuming you, chewing you, eating you alive from the inside out until it's all that you were. Until it's all that you knew. Until that's all that's left. A smoking skeleton, wrapping searing fingers around the throat of the world and
squeeeeeezing until either your brittle bones break or everything else snaps.
...Yeah. There it is heh, that sullen splatter-
hiss in the back of your head. Your old friend, it never really went away. You just forgot about it for a few minutes? Hours? You don't know, you're not sure. You don't even know when you got here or how long you've been here. The weight of the water presses upon you, silk-smooth and even. Invisible currents flowing over the lean lines of your body; caressing bare limbs and a bloody back. Ruby red pennants flutter in the undersea breeze as you drift. As you float into the blurry haze between black and blue.
There is no up here. There is no down. There's just you, you, those shapes in the distance, and the endless deep. You're not even drowning. There's no raw, crawling itch in your throat, no helium pressure in your lungs, drawing them as tight and shiny as balloons. You exhale, breathing out a long stream of bubbles and...nothing. You don't feel it. They flow along with the water, a few clinging to you. You see other swarms of bubbles, other long skeins of scarlet. You see the others drifting nearer, gathered together by the sea, your blood mingling together.
You see men and women, young and the old. A dozen or more: they're a melting pot, a tattered clot, of humanity. Their bodies stripped of cloth, their skin scored (just like yours). You see…
fur and fangs and horns and hide
Your head aches.
Draw your hand to your face, fighting against the weight that drags you back. Grind the heel into your sockets, try and let the pressure ground you. A sharp spike against the constant dull throb of muted pain. Some small measure of focus but it's so hard to concentrate. So hard to think. Something scratches your cheek as your hand comes away and you look at your fingers with all the bleary indifference of the barely awake. Curving claws fuse with your fingers; thicker than nails, heavier, the glossy black arcs anchored to your flesh. They glimmer in the half-light.
The world pulses. The ocean
shifts. Compressing, crashing, unfolding, like some cosmic paper fortune teller.
red yellow green blue
will my love be true?
There's a wall of plant matter. A colossal forest of seaweed that sprawls out, stretching in every direction. An infinite expanse of black and green and grey. It moves. It undulates. It
breathes and in the depths you see flayed meat, flexing muscle. In the depths you see naked spines and leviathan ribs piercing the mass, arcing around the tendrils like cathedrals of bone. You don't even have the energy to swim away. Just feel your head tip forward as the sea sweeps you on and let it happen.
The forest bends to great you, tentacular limbs looping around your thighs, your chest, your biceps to draw you in. The plant matter clammy and razor edged. Salt and encrusted shell scraping against tender flesh. Fresh bruises and new cuts grace your body, the red mingling with the riot of swirling colors. The royal purples and sapphire blues. The jaundiced yellows and violent oranges. Milk-white stars shoot past, swiveling to follow your progress. The entrance closing around you as the beast swallows you whole. Slimy bands of green slither across your mouth; slippery and slick around your throat, your wrists, your ankles.
You lose the light.
Static ripples along your body setting your nerves alight with an induced shiver. Your ears popping as the pressure changes, the soft keening in your ears changing pitch and timber. Your progress slows as the growth becomes thicker. Denser. A solid wall of vegetation: bones giving way to simple barnacles, pearls to plastic trash. Feebly you reach out into the tangled mass of rubbery ribbons. Groping with all the grace and strength of a geriatric. Clumsily sweeping your arms, onyx claws slicing into the winding, sinuous, wraps. Reaching, blindly clawing, mutely calling, trying to get free. Trying to get out.
Your head breaches the surface, torn scraps of seaweed floating off into murky waters. Shoulders and sides emerging a second later. You try to wriggle the rest of the way out. You try to push yourself free with aching, burning muscles. It gives when you strain against it, not taut enough to break. It binds you when you relax, constricting movement and freezing range. But you squirm. Like a snake you
squirm until your black taloned toes clear the solid bank. Dragging a cloud of trash and greasy vegetation behind you like afterbirth. Light descends around you, casts your body into gradients of grey. You look up.
...You can see the moon heh. Shining like a coin in the sky; its glow a gentle curtain rippling down through the depths, gently caressing your body. You can see the surface, not ten feet over your head. It's like quicksilver poured atop the black; rising and falling, cresting into choppy waters and heavy surf before collapsing back. You see impacts pockmarking the sides of the glassy slopes: the first drops of rain.
And then the pain crashes down around you. Huge as a tidal wave, a towering wall of sensation that for a second is mercifully blunted simply by how vast it is.
You can feel the slit, spread edges of every single cut criss-crossing your body. You can feel the sediment and
salt the tides press in. You can feel your lungs, full of dead air, wrenching and wracking inside your ribs. You scream, nails to your scalp, hands to your face you
scream. A single, wavering howl that could shatter glass fading into a whimpering sob. A meager little mewl swallowed up by the sea. The water rushes in to fill the void, caught in the reflexive gasping suck for nonexistent air. It runs up your nose. It surges down your throat. You choke. You splutter.
But you don't drown.
Freeze, head cradled between your palms. Breathe out, wasted water and a stream of bubbles flows past your lips, curls around your nose. Breath in and your head fills with the metal-tinged reek of the sea and your lungs swell with fluid. The ache of deprivation subsides. The inferno in your skin dies away to flares and match-heads. There's a weight between your shoulders. A weight hanging from the base of your spine. Points of pressure atop your head. You can feel the fault-lines with your flesh, the fresh stitches like you were sewn together. Your body is a fuzzy, tan smear. Your Skin the color of coffee with too much cream. Blink once, eyelids blocking out the view. Blink again, transparent membranes sliding across your sclera, sealing like goggles, your outline collapsing into razor definition.
See yourself and stare. Touch your stomach with a shaking hand. You've never been this tall. You've never been this lean. You've never had this build before, this brawn, this tightly corded muscle drawn tight beneath flawless skin; stylized and idealized as a Greek statue, athletic and lithe. Scales dapple your sternum. They cling to your ribs, your upper legs, guiding the eye along the lines of your body. Virulent, emerald green giving way to oil-slick black. Pick at one, pluck at it, see the skin below tugged up with it. See the long, finned tail that extends past your feet. Trailing down, nearly brushing the top of the seaweed below. The weight on your back shifts. Coils and stretches and you still, heart hammering on your tongue as a snake slices through the water from the corner of your vision.
Thick as your forearm. Back dyed black, belly that same shade of acid green. Head heavy, angular, snout saurian and prehistoric. Some beast swimming out of a primordial sea. Slitted eyes lock with yours as it curls nearer, probing you curiously. And-and it is curious. You can tell in the same way you can feel the pattern of muscles in its belly contracting, relaxing, as it worms through the water, in the same way you can feel the base tugging and pulling where it's fused with your back. Other serpents swim in, twining around each other, until your vision is framed in writhing snakes. They bump into each other. You feel the impacts. You feel the slow, reptilian surprise. The dim impressions of what they see, what they taste in the water. The crackling, tongue-numbing sensation of the barrier below. You make to run your hands through your hair. Trying not to think too much. Trying to just focus on breathing.
The familiar motion stops the second you feel the base of your horns.
Hah. Horns. Because...because why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you have horns? It's like a puzzle, the world's worst jigsaw. A thousand part picture being snapped together piece by glossy, cardboard backed piece. Start at the corners. Work your way in. This is you. You drift up, you drift on. Between your feet you see other heads emerging from the wound you left in the seaweed. Plants parting over bare backs. You see the shock hit them too and you see them weather it better.
There's trenches in your head, gouged out furrows where the Thorns ripped away thought and memory. The geography of your mind spitting and jumping like static as you probe the edges. The wounds throb, swollen and inflamed. You don't know where you are. You don't-...do you know who you are? You feel for it, fumbling through the contents of your brain, a man sliding his hands along a desk in a darkened room. Knowing, instinctively where things should be. Where everything
belongs but too panicked, too unsure to pluck it out. You force yourself to stop. Force yourself to breathe in deep and stop fighting, let the information filter in. Slowly it coalesces a steady drip drip drip percolating through your brain. Icing its way down your spine.
Drip. Your name is Levi. Levi Alza.
Drip. Your birthday is in the Fall. You're...you were twenty. You'd just finished your first year of college. Are you older? You feel older.
Drip. Changeling. Arcadia. Fae. You know what those words mean, you feel the intent sitting on the tails of your forked tongue.
Drip. Drip. Drip. It comes in a steady tide. Other images, other thoughts. Blurred out and half focused, you seize on one, trying to concentrate. Trying to remember.
[ ] A kid sitting by himself at lunch, doodling some monster in a speckled composition notebook.
[ ] A teenager sitting at a washed out dining table, sullenly staring at his plate as his family eats around him.
[ ] A young man in a hooded jacket, sitting on the edge of his bed with a leatherbound book open in his lap.
[ ] A pile of clothes on the sandy shore, a tan form half submerged in the waves and a hazy figure before him.
[ ] A nightmare void that pulses and flexes, filled with bruised colors and slick black stone, details running and flowing.
