Everything was sticky and horrible, but at least Kayen could move.
The little Skyavok had no idea how long he’d been lying there on the ground. He remembered passing out, but that was about it. He’d had some sort of dream about some sort of organic machine trying to suck things out of him. Or was it real and he’d tried to forget?
Lingering shadows above him suggested that maybe it hadn’t all been a dream. There was a ceiling, but it seemed to be covered in various glistening pods. One of them looked like it had popped, and several fleshy appendages dangled from inside it.
Kayen took several large, deep breaths before throwing up as a wave of panic washed over him. He was beginning to remember. The goo, the slime, the tentacles, prodding and poking and feeling their way around him. It wasn’t a horrible dream. This was reality.
A reality in which the Goddess of Life had imprisoned him, intending to suck anything of use out of his body.
The wave of panic was followed by a wave of nausea and dizziness. Kayen was pretty badly dehydrated. He’d lost a lot of bodily fluids. Maybe too much. How was he even standing? Well, he wasn’t. He was lying on the floor now, groaning in pain.
How did he get on the floor though? The pods all on the ceiling, none of them had spewed their contents everywhere. As Kayen tried to focus on them, he realised that they were basically giant egg sacs, but with fully formed beings inside. Reverse egg sacs maybe? Sucking nutrients out while keeping their victims alive? The beings trapped inside were all Panvok beings, many of which looked similar to Kayen, but somehow twisted and broken.
A rumbling sound distracted Kayen. It was coming from somewhere behind and above him. Kayen turned around, trembling, trying to work out what it was.
Suddenly, something hit the ground, a pile of awfulness splatting on the hard floor. A body and trails of slime, as well as tendrils, still burrowing into their appendages.
Kayen edged closer to see what it was, but he could tell that it was dead. No heartbeat, no pulse, no breathing, no thoughts. It looked like a Rethavok, but its appearance had been altered, its armour plating had gone soft and tentacle-like limbs replaced its lower arms. It was dead, but it hadn’t been dead for long. Just enough for its body temperature to start dropping.
How long it had been here though, Kayen had no idea.
Something else started moving. Kayen hadn’t noticed it at first, but just after that body hit the ground, he’d sensed the presence of another being. Not an intelligent one, but certainly a hungry one. Like the corpse, it dropped down from the ceiling and quickly began to eat the body, gurgling as it did so. Kayen found himself frozen in fear, unable to do anything but watch as the monster consumed the corpse then began to lick up the liquid off the floor.
Eventually, the beast turned to Kayen. It just stared at him with four blank, reddish eyes. Thankfully, the creature didn’t seem interested in eating Kayen at all. It didn’t even seem to have teeth and claws. A scavenger, possibly bred or even designed to get rid of bodies. It was still terrifying though. If anything, it seemed to just be waiting.
“I’m not dead…” Kayen whispered.
The beast grunted but did little else. Did it understand him? Did it know he was not supposed to be here? Was it simply waiting for Kayen to die so it could eat him without any struggle?
His suspicions were confirmed when another sack erupted, dropping a small, malformed body on the ground. It looked like a Skyavok child. Couldn’t have been more than a few years old. Kayen didn’t see much else, as the beast immediately rushed over to it and swallowed the corpse whole.
It seemed as if the egg sacs would rupture if the beings inside them died. The creature here existed only to clean up afterwards.
So how had Kayen fallen out of his own horrible sack of goo? How had he broken free?
The answer hit him almost as hard as the creature’s stare.
“I died. I was dead. But I’m not.”
The creature grunted again. Did it understand him?
“You won’t kill me.”
Another grunt.
“How do I get out of here?”
This time, the creature stopped staring. It shuffled round, then sniffed the ground, stopping when it found something. Kayen hesitantly approached, seeing that the beast was licking a small arrow on the ground. The creature looked up and shrugged in the direction of the arrow. There was a very faint light in the distance.
“Thank you…” Kayen smiled weakly. The creature nodded, then chased its tail for a bit before running off.
Alone in the dark, Kayen slowly made his way towards the light. He had an awful feeling that everything was about to get a lot worse.