Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

The old man was a bit further from the blast zone—Corpse Eater must’ve pushed him away and taken most of the shrapnel intended for him. In those short moments when the humming wasn’t drowning out all other noises, he could be heard quietly moaning.

Tsetse could see only one blast zone—its scorch marks on the ground couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Where was the other one? He had distinctly heard two blasts.

Another wave of humming—Tsetse wasn’t sure anymore if it was even a sound or something else entirely—rolled across the amphitheater, and the boy involuntarily raised his eyes, looking at the source of it.

One of the giant’s cocoons was damaged, its glowing contents spilling out onto the ladder leading up to the portal, and the giant inside seemed to be slowly waking up.

“The second explosion… That’s where he threw the grenade,” Tsetse realized. In horror, he watched the ancient entity coming to its senses and stretching its limbs.

He hated the General more than anything at that moment, but he couldn’t deny that he had been in charge for all those years for a reason; it was a brilliant distraction on his side.

The giant tore off the piece of cocoon above him and started rising to his feet. His many appendages, curled up into spirals, were slowly unraveling, and Tsetse could practically feel the monster’s thoughts overwhelm him. It was still not fully awakened, but the boy could tell: he wouldn’t be able to endure the madness that would wash over him with the creature’s first defined thought.

It spoke without a mouth, and Tsetse felt nauseous as visions of higher planes of existence that his primate brain couldn’t process swirled through him. He didn’t see them with his eyes: rather, he felt them as a tingling in his fingertips, as the taste of an unseen color, as the memories of distant smells. As a form of thought completely new to him.

“The stars… Aren’t right,” he heard Corpse Eater whisper. “It knows… It knows it’s time hasn’t come.”

It spoke again, louder, its words materializing as a green shine that lit up half of the Underworld like a new sun and, for a moment, Tsetse forgot who he was. Memories of many recent years were instantly washed out of him by a tidal wave of raw psychic power, and new ones didn’t stick around either. Every second he was finding himself in a new location, doing something else, unaware of what he had been doing a moment before or where he was, and only instinct, no more complex than that of an ant, was making his actions accumulate, giving them momentum and a goal.

When memories of who he was started coming back to him and he started coming back to his senses, the first thing he realized was that he was walking, being supported by someone. Blinking a few times, he looked into the face of the boy who carried him on his shoulder and, after a few moments, the memory of that face rose up from the hazy depths of his mind—it was Exterminator. To the right of him, Billy the Man-Eater was supporting the old man and, up ahead, Corpse Eater was leading them through the darkness, dragging his left foot behind him as he walked.

He must’ve zoned out, the boy realized. The onslaught of the giant’s thoughts was too much for him to handle.

The shining mists were gone, and Tsetse could see the yellow lights of underworld forests in the distance. That meant that the amphitheater with its dark portal was not too far behind them. If he were to take a glance, would he still see the giant’s words glittering in the distance, like a lone lighthouse of madness?

“Don’t look back,” Corpse Eater warned him with a raspy voice, without turning around. Tsetse had no clue how the boy knew that he had come to his senses, but he suspected that after everything he’d seen the boy do the answer would be too difficult to put into words.

“What happened?” Tsetse wondered instead.

“That thing woke up and started… started…”—Exterminator tried to explain to him. “Doing its thing. You two”—he nodded toward the old man—“were caught in its blast radius and—you went all crazy, man. When Corpse Eater brought you closer, the things you were saying… I can’t even repeat something like that.” Exterminator shuddered, making Tsetse cock his eyebrow in surprise. What phrase could make a boy who went through war shudder?

“I see,” Tsetse simply said, and Exterminator took it as a sign to continue.

“If it wasn’t for Corpse Eater you probably would have cracked your skull trying to get up those giant stairs,” the boy continued, and another memory resurfaced in Tsetse’s mind: the dark portal, so close yet so distant.

“I was trying to get in?” Tsetse whispered, bewildered by the revelation.

“Yeah. Do you remember why?” Exterminator wondered.

Tsetse shook his head; his mind had nothing but recollections of mangled thoughts. He had a small suspicion growing at the back of his mind though.

Perhaps, in what he believed to be his final moments, he had wanted to touch something greater, experience something unknown? Something that wasn’t from his world, where people crawled in the mud like vermin, trying to get their piece?

“It doesn’t matter,” Tsetse replied. “What about the giant?”

“It won’t follow us” – Corpse Eater chimed in. “Its time to wake up hasn’t come. It will go back to sleep pretty soon, so… Don’t worry about it yet.”

Corpse Eater led them through the Underworld and back to the surface without any issues. All beasts fell silent whenever they sensed his approach, and the boys weren’t attacked once. Tsetse could appreciate that—he was too tired to fight or struggle. For the first time in a long time, he could just take a walk without keeping guard. He’d let the others do that for him.

The sun was already rising outside—Tsetse could see its faint pink light as the new day was being born. Tsetse had always dreaded the mornings, as they promised nothing for him but responsibilities. But for one day, he felt like he could cut loose and relax. After who knows how long under the ground, the prospect of basking in the first rays of the new day was very pleasing to him.

Only Corpse Eater didn’t walk out into the light. He stopped at the very edge of the light and shadows, looking at the horizon.

“This is where we part ways,” he said, not turning around. “I am not going with you.”

“Why?” Tsetse wondered. It didn’t make sense to him that the boy would not want to leave that dreadful place. What was he even thinking?

“Why?” Corpse Eater repeated his question, turning around. “Tsetse, look at me.”

Involuntarily, Tsetse shuddered at the sight that had been presented to him. He could see that the Blood of the Giants was already at work, patching up what had been broken.

The scar on his face where the bullet had hit him was already unraveling, its edges splitting by the inhuman flesh growing underneath. It wasn’t scar tissue—although it probably functioned like one. Its texture and color was not something Tsetse had ever seen on a living being, and part of Corpse Eater’s cheek had already gone transparent, exposing muscles and jaw bone and teeth underneath.

His mangled arm, where entire bits of meat and skin had been torn out by the grenade’s shrapnel, was already being restored—but it was obvious that the processes going on there had no clue about human anatomy. Whatever limb the Blood of the Giants was trying to bring back was not that of a human. Tsetse could already see by the shape of new ligaments that covered Corpse Eater’s arm like a web and, despite seeing multiple injuries in the past, he did not recognize the puzzle that they were forming.

Buds of new flesh were bursting out of the boy’s already transparent skin where the bullets had hit him, ready to envelop the body whole, make it more durable, more resilient to future attacks, making sure the host would survive future encounters.