The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Four

It rose to its feet, keeping its eyes locked on the terrible thing reflected in the mirror. It didn't know why it began to panic, but It did then, flailing and running. It tried to scream, silently, Its head filling with insane noise.

It was unaware of Muse's protests, orders, and threats, as It begins to tear at its face, ripping a large hole in its face. It did not feel the pain immediately, but when It did, It screams in genuine, unending pain. Even to Its own ears, Its screaming sounded like an insect's dying screeching.

Muse and the woman on the floor watched Its spectacle as It sank to Its knees, pressing Its terribly injured face to the scarce comfort of the reflective floor. Blood and clay formed in a pool around Its head, and It could not care.

Croakingly, It slowly asked, “What am I, Muse?”

Muse remained speechless, and It gratified Itself with heaving, shuddering in the painful aftershocks of the damage It had done to Itself.

Finally, she said, “The Inner Eye. You see, but when you're exposed, you're nothing, save for Consciousness.”

The clay-thing groaned. “I am... I am... I-”

“You're not. You have her memories, in the clearest view. I do not blame you for wishing to be her, but you're not. You are not her.”

“Then... what... can... I-”

“Kill her. Do it now. What will happen here will not be a murder. Not really. There will be no one missing, you will simply take her place, as ruler of this Vessel. She has damned us both to die in this funeral pyre with her, but I resolve not to go with her. Is that fair to me? Was it to be fair to you?”

A realization came to the clay-thing, but it felt empty, although It acknowledged it. “You... care... nothing... for... me.”

“No, I don't. I care for myself, my fate. She meant for me to walk with her through her own self-imposed servitude to grief, when I was meant to lead her through the path to greatness. She betrayed me. She betrayed you, as well. I care only for you because you are the closest to being able to become her. I am not about to offer you nothing, however; I am content with offering you the same that I once offered to her. Whatever will make you happy, I can show you to.”

“You speak... as though... there... are... others. Are... we... not... alone?”

Muse paused, then spoke with unrestrained coldness. “They were weak, like her. Some are already dead, some dying, and some may make it over the crossing of consciousness. Don't think of them, now, think of us. Of her betrayal.”

The clay-thing shuddered, feeling the lack of goodness that emanated from this being. It knew that she was no she; no more than It was a she. The clay-thing felt as though she was no different from It – except that maybe she was uglier than It was – and the only real difference between them was that she knew how to lie. It was not surprised to realize that everything that she had said to It, prior, was likely to be a coldly calculated untruth.

Am I to be her puppet?

Did it matter?

“You'll... help... me?”

Muse walked over to the clay-thing, waiting for It to raise Its head, and silently handed It the gun. As It took the gun from her hand, she said, “I'll be your friend.”

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Three

A young woman laid bare on the floor, shivering erratically. For the longest moment, all that she could do was stare down at the woman, and feel as though she were looking down at herself.

The woman looked up from where she lay, her eyes widened, and she screamed as she looked behind her twin. Turning around, her twin saw that Muse stood only a few feet behind her, brandishing a gun. Confused, the twin took a step back.

Muse gestured for her to take the gun from her. The woman took another step backwards. Muse glared at her. “You must. There is no time to debate this – and you have no mouth to do so, even if we did have the time. She's not you; she nothing. She's an It.”

Behind her, her twin groans, and turning around, she saw that she was convulsing from head to toe, her eyes fully exposed to the point that they nearly popped free from their sockets. Horror filled her to bursting, and she turned to face Muse once more, shaking her head erratically.

Anger blossomed red in Muse's cheeks, and for a moment, she can see something deep, beyond her adversary's composure – something hideous – hiding. “You do not want the knowledge that I possess. I can do great damage to you with it. It will be far more painful than it will be shooting yourself with this. Kill that pitiful creature, now.”

Although frightened, she shaked her head again, and Muse ran with frightening speed and grasped her, roughly. Glancing over to where Muse had grabbed her upper arm, she saw that what was once a beautiful hand is now a black, reptilian claw.

Shocked, she is in no place to fight back when Muse wrests her to the ground. She lays there, in a daze, as Muse strengthens her position over her. “Open your eyes,” Muse hisses into her ear. “The ground is reflective, now.”

She opens her eyes, and sees her own reflection. She also sees why she cannot speak, and cannot feel any mouth on her face.

The skin covering her looked sunken, bloated, and grey, like fresh clay. Looking back at her were eyes like shined rocks, that looked as though they had been shoved into her grotesque face. Hair grew sparse, thin, white, on her head in patches. She was lip-less, and where her mouth and nose should have been there was a smooth expanse on her badly formed face.

Feeling sick, she rose her arms up, and her reflection showed them to be pitiful sticks, tipped with crude versions of fingers. She flexed her fingers. The thing in the mirror flexed its.

The thing was unaware of the fact that Muse had let go of her. It didn't care.

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Two

Unlike the membranous walls that she had been trapped in, the ground that she dropped to was not so forgiving, so soft. She lay on the ground, dazed and horribly bruised, until a curt, authoritative voice spoke up.

“I apologize for the entrance. There was no other way, let me assure you of that.”

It was dark in the room – so dark that her eyes ached as she tried to read vague shapes out of it. For a moment, she could only see the vague outline of the speaker. For a few scarce moments, as she adjusted accordingly to the dark, she believed that what she was seeing was partly caused by the blow she had taken when she had fallen.

No; what she saw was, indeed, real, she realized as she saw the features of the vague outline. The speaker was a woman in flowing, red-velvet robes that did not seem to give an air of holiness, but instead one of decadence. Looking at her, she felt woefully inadequate and childlike next to the woman.

“I've already slowed time; this sanctum allows for the rule of time to be momentarily waived. It does not, however, stall time indefinitely. We have but little time and resource to take back Our life before its destruction.”

She tried to open her mouth to speak, but she realizes, then, that she has no mouth which which to speak with. Frightened, she begins to scream, futility, against the thick skin that takes the place of where her mouth should be.

“Yes, yes, I know that it's frightening. Keep focused, I need you paying attention.” The woman waited for her to stop ripping at where her mouth should be before she continued to speak. “Good. I knew you were reasonable. I will introduce msyelf to you, now, but you have no need to introduce yourself. I know who you are. I am Muse.”

The woman was beguiling, difficult to not give her full attention to. Her name meant nothing to her, so she nodded dumbly.

The woman seemed to relax a bit, her frown lessening. “I had to pull you out of the outside world. I don't know if you remember what happened – DO you remember what occurred?”

Puzzled, she begins to shake her head from side to side. And then it hits her. The unrelenting feeling of contempt, of regret, of depression, and then, finally, the feeling of something gagging her, something wrapped thoughtlessly around her thin neck, and she is flying in her room, suspended by the ceiling-

“You almost went full way through it. I pulled you here, to explain to you the repercussions of your actions. You need to listen to me. Do you understand me?”

It was too much for her, then, as she stared up at the cold face of Muse. She felt her body spilling to her knees. She sat, pitifully, on the floor, and began to sob, weeping so that her tears fell onto the ground.

Muse's voice rang out, then, sharp, cold, commanding. “Get to your feet, there is no time for this. Now!”

She rose to her feet when she felt something sharp hit her side, which turned out to be one of Muse's shoes. Dazed with pain, she tried to groan, ignorant, momentarily, of the fact that she had no mouth to cry out with.

She is at the closest that she has ever been to Muse, and she can now see her face, and see the cold indifference and cruelty that lay in her eyes. In that moment, as she made close eye contact with her, she felt, deeply, that this woman truly held nothing but contempt for her. Truthfully, she could not blame Muse for loathing her.

“You need to fix what's happened. We need to work together to change this, so that we can live with a situation that will work for the both of us. I will put you in a position of power, over even me, but only with one concession for me – I need you to swear that you will never betray us again, but I need you to vow this of your own free will. Do you understand me?”

It was far too confusing for her, and she began to weep anew. Muse smiled a chilling smile – fearful in its pleasure – and spoke again. “You must trust me. This is of utmost impotence, because you must kill your false twin.”

She wanted to scream in frustration, in fearful confusion, and she scrabbled once more at her sealed mouth until Muse roughly tore her hands away from her face. When she turned her full attention to the meaningful silence of Muse, she took note of the direction in which she pointed.

Humped up against one of the inflating and deflating walls was what she initially thought was a pile of filthy clothing. As she focused on it, however, she saw vague, weak movements emerge from the shape. A hand pushed out from under the veil of clothing, pale.

She looked up to Muse, and saw that she was nodding, encouraging her to walk over to the shape. Reluctantly, she walked over to the shape and pulled the cover of clothing from off of the shape.

The Changeling (The Story of Id) - Part One

The Changeling (The Story of Id)

She wasn't certain about how she had come to be compressed in so tiny a space. As she had come to, she was aware of walls surrounding her.

It felt warm, abnormally so, and the compression and the warmth calmed some of the panic that filled her. As she forced herself to remain calm, she thought that she could feel a pulsing sensation ripple through the forgiving material that encased her. Small movements also gave her the impression of a thick substance – a type of mucus? - covering the walls of her chamber.

She recoiled from the feeling of the substance clinging to her, disgusted. She tried not to move, mindful of the sensation of it sticking to her.

What was she to do but wait? She felt a disinclination to move, to feel the walls press against her in protest of her movement, to feel the wetness leak onto her, disrupting the radiating warmth that soothed her.

She waited in the dark, barely keeping herself conscious, when a bright light bathed her curled-up legs, cutting through some of the darkness and her shut eyes.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the new source of light, but when hers did, she realized that where she was was a membranous chamber that was dripping wet.

She thrashed, hard, trying to push the flesh back and away from her, trying, in a panic, to minimize contact with the walls. As she became resigned to the fact that the walls were not retreating, and to the contrary, they seemed to contract tighter around her, she fell into forced calm, stilling her body so that the walls would not suffocate or drown her in the sticky liquid. As she stilled, and the walls began to ease up on her, and she became aware that the light that had been shining had grown in strength. It now shown brightly, so that her eyes, used the the perfect dark, had to shut for the shock of it.

She began to try to twist her body, so that she could turn around to face the direction of the light. This endeavor proved to be problematic, as she felt the tunnel grip her in a strong spasm, squeezing her more roughly with each movement. As she tried – and failed – to turn her body around, she succeeded only in feeling the walls compress themselves to a painful degree all around her. Struggle as she might like to try, the walls had tightened so that she was completely immobilized by the space.

She felt faint – awful, beaten down, frightened, and confused – and she was also vaguely aware of movement, as though the walls were contracting purposefully around her, pushing her towards her feet.

Finally her feet were freed of the tunnel, and they dangled freely. The walls contracted, nearly crushing her, and she felt herself being hurridly pushed from the tunnel, till it was only from her elbows up that she was trapped. She spilled over the edge of the hole, flopping futilily as she tried to ease the excruciating pain as it was only her neck that was trapped. She winced in pain, scrabbling at the edge of the thing, trying to force her head free from the tunnel.

The walls contracted one last time, and she fell loose from the lip of the tunnel, falling, falling, falling down.

Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing) - Part Five (Finale)

The old woman was rough on his scalp, as she always was when she sheared her ugly, gangly sheep. Gole was nervous, and despite how he tried to calm himself, he ended up with the wrath of the impatient shop owner, and she almost seemed to jab him in the ear and in the scalp more than once when he made the occasional, unfortunate movement.

His hair came off of his head, and was gathered with more care than Gole's haircut had been handled. He was told that they would begin to implant his locks into the doll tomorrow, and so Gole was directed back to the kiln room. He was told that tonight would mark the last firing for the doll.

Dread filled Gole's mind, and every step he made towards the back door felt as though it were filled with thick liquid. Since the night before, he had taken the doll's insistence that he go into the kiln with it more seriously. He had also reminded himself of the strange voice that he had heard from the doll when she was newly born. The voice that reminded him, somewhere deep in the darkest part of his mind, of a corpse that he had once seen in the first weeks of spring, locked in time by the ice that had a hold on it, but made material and mortal by the rising heat that had allowed maggots and decay to take it. Black, his face had had a burnt look to it, but looking back, Gole guessed that the corpse had belonged to a transient, who went through the worst of the cold winter.

That was what the voice – the doll – had begun to remind him of.

She was waiting for him, like he knew that she would be.

“Why can't you lie down, and look like a normal doll?” Gole asked it angrily.

The doll didn't answer him, and Gole didn't expect her to. He busied himself with readying all of his instruments and trying to appear annoyed with the doll, and not absolutely frightened of it. As he worked, picking up the pile of wood and putting it under the kiln, putting the furniture in the correct place, Gole was relieved that the doll hadn't optioned to talk. As he came to the understanding that he would have to pick the doll up, and as he turned to look at it, the doll finally spoke.

Your hair... was it cut? Goal was silent, staring at the doll, until it began to speak again. Our time together is ending, isn't it? Isn't it?

Despite his resolve not to, Gole could not help but say something to the doll who looked so beseechingly up to him. “We're going to finish this up, and this'll be the end of it.”

Gole expected a strong reaction from the doll, but instead he got silence. And then, suddenly, the doll wasn't standing anymore, and it was lying on its back, on the ground.

For awhile, all that Gole could do to not start feeling like he could yell was stare blankly at the doll. He could not fathom what, exactly, it was doing, and why it was doing it. Finally, however, he got sick of staring at it – and, secretly, a slow fear began to spread through him – and so he moved towards the doll.

He stopped walking as he stood over the doll. He waited, looking down at it, and decided to reach down and pick it up. Touching the doll, it felt cool, entirely normal and solid in his hands. He couldn't think of a reason to not have believed the doll to be normal in all ways that a doll would, but for some reason, he had expected it to have a different feel to it, a vastly different weight than it had.

He stared into the doll's face. The face was lacking in any of the livelihood that had so characterized it before, and it looked no different than any of the other dolls that were made in the shop. Gole began to shiver involuntarily, fearful of what the lack of livelihood in the doll could mean.

Gole, beginning to panic, started to shout. “Stop playing around with me – hey! Listen to me. I'm sorry, but I can't go in with you, so please... Will you please talk to me?!”

Gole continued to stare at the doll, waiting for it to react. When no reaction came, Gole sank to the floor, careless with the doll, not caring if he knocked it or dropped it. His fingers (a gift from a biological father that he would never know, a man who became a master artisan and whose elegant, long fingers showed his natural leaning for the job) wrapped around the thing loosely. He stared at everything in the room, and at nothing, seeing only himself, a great albino spider that had worked so joyously in the room for the past few days. It had been the happiest that he had ever been in his life.

Silent in the room, a silence that deeply frightened Gole, and caused him to shake more violently. He was so cold, and it only seemed logical that he should begin the process of beginning the kiln firing. To be done with the whole mess would be the next step in this necessary progression. He had to complete the doll, to finish the task he had been given.

He picked the doll up, and his fingers happened to graze the thing's smooth head. He felt his empty hand reach up to caress the equally as smooth expanse of his scalp. He bit back a tear, and was resolved to not look at the thing's face as he walked it to the kiln and placed it in its place, after shutting the heavy slab over the hole.

He gathered the wood up into its correct position under the kiln, and felt numb by the end of it. Cold, depressed, and lonesome. As he went about his work, he came about the idea that he felt more lonesome in the kiln room than he had ever felt before. He had never had a friend before, and oh, how his body ached more after he felt the acknowledgment and the encouragement arrive and then leave him, used up.

He began to weep loudly then, and he reflected on the sorrow he had experienced, as the doll had cried out for him to join her when he had before refused to. His tears were happier then than now, as he trembled, nearly so weak that he could not accomplish this act he wanted so desperately to complete.

He didn't know when, precisely, he began to cry out for the doll to talk to him, begging for it to forgive him, but he began to. He dropped to his knees and crawled over to the kiln, pressing his face against its cold belly, where it sat inside, as cool and cruel as it deserved to be with him.

As he sat, his head pressed against the kiln, Gole heard someone tell him what to do next. He was certain that it came from his mind, but he could not comfortably feel that it had not come from the kiln. He didn't care, whether it came as perfect knowledge from himself, or from somewhere else.

He nearly drooled in anticipation as he readied the fire under the kiln. He built it up proudly, wanting it to be the best that he had ever made. He wanted to do his best at everything that he could, and he stacked the firewood up as prettily as he wanted, and only then did he coddle a fire into its bosom.

He was giddy as he pushed the slab out of the way. He did not think of how he would put it back on when he was finished – it would prove to be almost impossible to pull back when he had finally settled into the kiln, but with a rushed eagerness to pull it back into place, he did it, and he crouched in the complete darkness, a happiness swelling in him so deep and so large that he thought that he would fall apart for the strength of it.

In the dark he became aware of the swelling of his penis, and he felt comfortable – proud to – pull it from out of his shabby, too-loose work pants. With his other hand he groped for the doll, and he pulled her up to him in a gripping, loving, tender embrace. He pressed her against his chest as he stroked himself, hard, rough, and eager, his mouth hanging agape as he felt immersed in the perfection of the moment.

He took longer to orgasm than he ever had before, and he was grateful for that. It was to be his finale, his last defining moment, and why shouldn't it end in such a manner?

In the near-silence of the too-small, too-dark chamber, he heard the wet sound as he hit the ground between his splayed knees mingle with the sound of the fire building under the floor of the kiln. A grateful smile flew across his thin lips, and he sank so that he lied flat on the ground of the kiln, his arms wrapped around her.

She still didn't speak to him, but he could sense her spirit during the last act. It was good enough for him, and he knew then that it had always meant to be all that he would deserve. He ignored the feeling of the sticky wet spot on the ground as it stuck to his shirt, figuring that it would dry, and then warm, shortly.