PHANTASIA
PHANTASIA
By R. Atlas
Prologue
They say that the true purpose of The Leviathan is to guard the terrors that lay hidden beneath the unfathomable depths of Eaut. That beneath the ruined palaces of The Black Sea where even the Mnes do not make their habitation, there, oppressed for innumerable millennia, lay loathsome creatures that drown themselves in worship of their sleeping God. My companion has spoken of rising from these depths, of his torturous wait underneath the billows of infinite oceans. Of a day when a war exhausted world would finally succumb to universal pandemonium, when the void would finally ascend to our world and extinguish its life. I would hear that maleficent whisper in my sleep, in those terrible phantasms that I could not differ from dream or prescience, “The void comes for you,” it would say, that terrible voice, that terrible voice, that terrible voice in the darkness.
The Evil Eye feeds on flesh and soul to maintain its strength. We hide under the sands in wait of solstice; the light weakens my companion. He seeks a prophet here, the mouth of the void, the one who may awaken what lingers in the abyss. I have touched his memories, seen him annihilate entire armies; I am not unfamiliar with the strange ambitions birthed by vast power. What weird tales would I have at the end of our voyage together? He watches as I write…the gaze of it is always upon me, its vision penetrates past this world.
-From the journals of Dr. Lurch
Chapter 1: Into The Rain
The violet rain that splattered across the stretched glass left streaks of such a powerful hue that the whole classroom seemed to glow from the inside. A drop would hit, crawl down the panoramic frame to the outside tip of the window, and then begin its long descent to the ground, several tezras below. The phenomenon, a byproduct of Cron pollution, was uncommon, although not unheard of. The protocol followed by citizens of Echidna City was simple — stay in, and stay dry. But the problem wasn’t avoiding the rain for students at Crest Academy, it was paying attention in class while being drowned in lavender fireworks.
The session today was particularly dry, a lecture on the anatomy of silicon crustaceans in the southern regions of Iris. Red’s already formidable deficit in attention could hardly suffer more; he couldn’t imagine how such obscure knowledge would ever help him in combat. The only thing keeping him awake, besides staring at the glowing window, was the anticipation of his field test tomorrow, which his team had been waiting on eagerly for weeks. Ranked first in their senior class, they were the only ones confident about how they were going to perform.
Breaking his trance on the caustic rain, he looked towards the other side of the classroom, where Magnus was equally zoned out. Almost as if on cue, Magnus broke out of his own trance and caught Red’s eye. Lifting up his wrist, he pointed to his giant obsidian watch and mouthed “Fifteen more minutes,” to signal the end of the painful lecture.
The rest of the class was faring no better in paying attention. Two of the other seniors sitting right behind Magnus were admiring his Mallet, a brine colored steel teeth weapon slightly curved to give it an alien look. He had undoubtedly heard the chatter, quickly fixing his posture to give them a better view. An imposing weapon, thought Red, appropriate for someone of noble birth. The mallet’s sleek form was more a reflection of its high cost than its effectiveness.
He had met Magnus when the two first arrived at Crest, and they had been inseparable since. In their initial encounter, they were pitted to spar against each other, a contest that quickly revealed their chemistry. Fighting, like all intense experiences, seemed to allow people to connect on a much deeper level, perhaps because the exercise brought out a more feral side of them. Whatever the reason, he was glad to have found someone he could relate to.
Magnus Basil was tall, broad, and built like a king — older looking for someone who had just passed into adulthood. Even his beard had a distinguished quality to it, shaping around his face the way a mane would. Above all, he was a good friend and fanatically loyal, traits that served well for both friendship and combat. He was a natural leader, but always preferred a secondary role. Red always thought that it was this exact reluctance to take authority that made him the perfect leader.
The professor paused for a moment and gazed out of the window for a few seconds himself, then bent over to reach for something underneath his desk. Without warning, he took out a large tinted container, which looked heavily armored with metal bands all around it, and placed it gently upon the table. Red casually glanced at the box, not bothering to identify the creature inside. Not another critter demonstration he thought dully. He wouldn’t have minded, if every demonstration wasn’t almost identical to the one previous to it. It was only once in a while that they would get to see something unique or a creature of a more powerful variety.
The professor seemed unusually anxious as he stepped back from the container and looked at the class, waiting for their reaction. Suddenly, a few students in the front row gasped, and rushed out of their seats towards the container. “Is that a real Xenosite?” one of them asked. With a sharp jolt, Red snapped to attention and got out of his seat, his mental fatigue vanishing in an instant. He rushed down the steps to get to the front of the lecture room with everyone else, diverting towards the left to meet Magnus halfway there.
He had never seen a real one up front before, despite the fact that they were the sole reason why academies like Crest existed. Specimens were nearly impossible to collect, as they could only be captured if they were found outside of their primary hive clusters. Their invasion had started more than a century ago, but little was known about the enigmatic parasites. Their limits constantly explored new territories, their origins were a mystery, and their nature remained largely undiscovered.
“It is a real one, alive and all,” Professor Kep replied. “I thought that would catch everyone’s attention,” he added with a look of satisfaction. “It is nearly impossible to get a hold of a live one, but luckily I had a friend of mine from within MegaCORP’s own research facilities who no longer had use for this one. Consider it a graduation gift. I must add, I was thoroughly surprised when I came to possess it. It is a beautiful specimen, and I should be shocked that one was so willing to part with it.” Red always thought that Professor Kep’s tone of admiration was a bit off, just a tad too revering in its pitch when it came to Xenosites. He shared a guilty fascination with the creatures himself, everyone did, but the professor almost seemed fond of them.
Red pushed his head in-between the huddled shoulders of his classmates to get a better look. The lecture hall was wide enough to accommodate a more liberal setup, but everyone clamored around the center in hopes of getting the best view possible. The Xenosite looked like an overgrown armored worm, with grooved spikes surrounding a clammy wet body. The spikes were immaculately engineered — so sharp that their edges disappeared into their ends. The slippery body that lurked underneath looked serpentine in shape, though no definite form could be traced. Noticeably, its armor did not fashion like normal critters, whose exoskeletons were usually plain shells that wrapped around a more vulnerable body. Here, it grew pervasively from the organism itself, as if it were intentionally evolved to be un-attachable despite what nature may have dictated.
The creature stood so still, it appeared to be dead or paralyzed. He recalled why they reserved themselves to this state, Magnus had explained it to him once. It was a form of deep hibernation that allowed them to live without oxygen or other vital resources for an indefinite amount of time. Even in such a vulnerable state, the creature looked fiendish. A daring volunteer from the class reached out his arm to touch the outside of the container, but took it back when the professor gave him a disapproving nod.
Red knew he was lucky enough to see one live at all, a luxury most students at Crest did not
enjoy. Nevertheless, he wished he got to see one a bit larger or more powerful. Recent accounts reported Xenosites that weighed several tons and enjoyed unadulterated capacities for destruction. Just before this class, he and Magnus had watched a holograph that was spreading like wildfire across academies. A perfectly angled camera captured an enormous and unidentified breed cleaving straight into a bunker to gain access to the people inside. But it wasn’t the initial cleave that made the instance unique, it was that the creature then slipped two tentacle shaped claws into the hole that formed, and stretched it open with sheer muscle, a shelter that was triple reinforced with bio-iron. The camera was fixed on the outside — giving visual of an endless stream of Xenosites flooding into the shelter. It never turned to capture the massacre that ensued, leaving the latter to the imagination of the viewer.
Professor Kep lifted up another box from below his table as he spoke, this time much more casually than before. Inside was a bright sapphire colored spider, about twice the length of a palm. It had sharp legs that looked like icicles from afar and eight deep blue eyes that were too large for its body. Its bulbous shaped abdomen was lined with pearl white bristles that vacillated up and down with the creature’s breath, making it seem as though the spider itself were constantly shifting between a state of fear and calm. Its legs left a sheet of frost wherever they touched the container, a tiny prison that looked specially built to handle extreme degrees of cold.
“The Crystal Sleet Spider is a highly intelligent, amphibious critter that prefers unnaturally cold climates and possesses several incredible talents including a bite that induces psychedelisis. Of course, this is all relative to creatures around its own size and power, it poses no harm to humans in its current stage 2 form. In further evolved forms, however, it can become far more intimidating in size, and much more dangerous in scope. Its blue stained web, for instance, eventually becomes capable of draining heat from anything it captures. Can someone guess where they are native to?”
“Eaut,” said Magnus out loud. “The Oceanic planet.” Magnus had once told Red that he was especially fond of this class, and not just when it covered overly powerful specimens. Red always thought that Magnus was a closet nerd, noticing that his friend found an inherent joy in discovering new creatures, no matter how minute or insignificant they were. In their earlier years, Magnus would often joke that if Red ever failed out of Academy, he would drop out himself, and retire to a life of research with Red as his assistant. He once even confided that he sometimes regretted his decision to attend Crest — reminiscing about his home city, Areopa, and the benefits of a more tranquil life. Being high-born, opting to attend Academy had a higher opportunity cost for him than most.
“Correct.” The professor replied. “Now, has anyone seen the process of infection live?” As the class nodded quietly, everyone looked around to see if there was an exception. Unsurprisingly, no one raised their hand. The front of the crowd stepped forward eagerly and broke out in whispers, finding it difficult to contain their excitement. Red glanced at Magnus and saw that he had no problem looking over the heads of other students; Magnus towered almost a foot above everyone else. A few of the shorter onlookers finally decided to move to the sides for an uninterrupted view, easing the breadth of the crowd.
Red leaned in as much as he could without pushing someone over. It was his first opportunity to see infection up front. The process had captured his imagination since the day he had first heard of it. He was only a child when the third invasion occurred, the first of his lifetime. He was too young back then to appropriately understand the scope of the disaster, but read the preliminary reports during his second year at Crest. Age had matured his grasp over things and he realized then that it was impossible to gather an accurate understanding of these events without being there when they happened.
They say they had rained down from the sky like fire — sacks filled with creatures that crashed all over Takis, the third outermost planet in their system, and introduced its inhabitants to a new form of terror. Colonies vanished overnight, cities were left in snakes of twisted metal, and kingdoms vibrated with carnage until they collapsed. A day before the invasion, everyone in Takis had led a peaceful and prosaic life. A day after, they had disappeared into ecstasies of violence. The invasion spread like an epidemic, bringing mass extinction wherever it went. Entire continents were terraformed into vast breeding grounds, hive clusters collected around regions saturated with resources, and oceans dissolved into pools of miasma and evolution. The losses were never tallied.
There was only one more planet beyond the metroid belt besides Takis, and it was mostly evacuated by now. The current hope was to meet the Xenosite after that, to fight them up front if they ever tried to invade the inner planets. Avalonia was far from the outer orbit. In its major cities like Echidna, the danger of Xenosites loomed like an abstract threat, a thought to be delayed as much as possible. Most of its current civilian population secretly hoped they would be gone long before such an encounter ever occurred. They had more pressing concerns anyways, from Cron pollution to increasingly erratic climates.
“Brace yourself then,” Professor Kep continued. I’ve seen it almost a hundred times, studied it carefully throughout my life, and I still find it jarring every time.” He attached the connector end of the spider’s container to that of the Xenosite’s and began to twist them together. The spider crawled around frantically, as if it sensed what was on the other side. A light electric current ran between professor Kep’s fingers and up his forearm. He chuckled softly when he noticed it. “Sorry about that, happens when I get tense sometimes.”
“Kep used to be on the field, an elementalist that specialized in electricity, I heard, before he retired into research,” Magnus whispered to Red.
“Never would’ve guessed,” Red whispered back. The statement made him relent his own classification even more. Fire was his specialty, but he hated being called an elementalist. He didn’t conform to the general characteristics of the class, besides the fact that he happened to be proficient in controlling an element. Most elementalists were overly intellectual and acted as ‘glass cannons’ on the field, rarely engaging anything head-on, a habit that happened to be Red’s favorite.
When the two connectors were securely coupled together, professor Kep began turning a lever to open a hole between the containers. As the gap grew larger, the spider hunted more violently for an escape. Eventually, perhaps when it realized it had no where to go, it reserved itself to a corner on the far right side of its container, where it quivered intensely. The Xenosite, on the other hand, reacted far more lazily. As if it had been aware of what was happening all along, its body began to uncoil exactly when the gap finished opening. Its movements seemed calculated and eerily unnatural.
Red watched with an anxious curiosity as the Xenosite lumbered its body across the container like a wicked slug of sorts. Despite his intrigue, he wished that it moved faster, that the whole process would be over with quick. The creature’s painfully slow crawl gave the classroom the ambiance of a nightmare. Every second in between made it a tiny bit more unbearable. But the anticipation of what was to come, no matter how horrible, or perhaps because it was so horrible, made it impossible for anyone to look away.
He exchanged a few glances with Magnus to share his increasing angst. The Xenosite had no eyes, using some sort of extrinsic sense to make out its environment. Despite his earlier thoughts about wishing the creature was of a larger variety, he imagined a size like this invited a new type of horror - the possibility that a tiny miscreation of this sort could be anywhere - in between the space of a crevice you could not see, underneath your seat, or crawling high above on the ceiling of your sleep-room, giving no notice of its existence or intentions.
The spider seemed to have conceded to the inevitable, now stretching out across its corner, anticipating a time soon enough when it would need to defend itself. The end of its legs turned a pale blue as the temperature of its tips rapidly approa
ched zero. It crawled left and right in a combative dance, practicing its dexterity. Red couldn’t help but sympathize with the creature, imagining what it would be like to be in its place. A thought suddenly twitched in his subconscious — that he would be in its place, maybe in just a few short years.
Professor Kep took a step back when the Xenosite finally reached the hole between the containers. The creature let out a hideous scream, one far louder than its body should have permitted. But it was the style of the scream, not the degree of its loudness, that made it so oppressive. Red had never heard anything like it, it was an awful noise that no creature should have been capable of making — paralyzing in its intensity, and malicious in its tone. Then, as though it were suddenly revitalized with energy, it launched itself towards the spider with a lightning velocity. For a split second, it became invisible to anyone who was using only their eyes to track its movements.
The classroom immediately withdrew by several feet. A few wondered if the container was really as secure as its designers had originally thought. The Xenosite latched onto the spider, covering the entirety of its body in an instant. The legs of the spider hung out awkwardly through the sides of the struggle, flailing wildly and attempting to jab its foe with their cold edges. While the body of the spider writhed in rebellion as it was being constricted, its head engaged the Xenosite more directly. It was being forced to consume the insides of its invader. The spider’s body swelled and contracted in rhythm with the Xenosite’s, as they both exchanged fluids and parts. Some of its pores expanded and popped, polluting the bottom of the container with a blanket of black pus.
Eventually, the spider ceased to move at all. Its legs poked out lifelessly underneath the mesh of the two bodies. After its main torso seemed to have reached a certain capacity, its legs began to pulse with the fluids. The process looked thoroughly bizarre as the carcass was being filled up to the brim with whatever the Xenosite was injecting into it. Magnus tilted his head slightly towards Red and whispered “And here…we…go…” in a curious but jittery tone. Red looked back at him and nodded apprehensively.