Toska

Shadows of the sun shone down on the depths of the vale. 

The true source of light was the brightness of the blood river that howled its contrast against the snow as it slithered through the valley from the mountain top far beyond him. But as he got closer, the ripples in the blood that traveled from the river of the earth traveled to the rivers in his veins. A shiver as soft as a feather shook him, powerful enough to be recognized and feared. The imposing structures around him became more eerily familiar, seeing some of those same patterns occur in the dreams of his dreams. 

A lightning bolt of shock struck him when he finally noticed the uncountable fleshly creatures crawling on the shadowy sides of the mountains and over the ambiguously floral pillars. Almost entirely made of flesh, they were composed of a cluster of large humanoid arms that helped them crawl and even cling to surfaces from all kinds of angles. All those arms, some of which were too deformed to function, were fused to the spine of a harp-shaped organism that stuck out of their back whose strings shimmered with a metallic sheen. Like how one wakes up from a dream and is able to perceive sound, Toska saw them in the hundreds and was suddenly bombarded by the symphony they played with their own spines.

All the disjointed melodies they performed were but an echo of all the songs he sung to himself in immense solitude. What he thought was a personal gift that bloomed in his soul blossomed by the hundreds like a meadow in the umbral valley. The closer he listened to one melody and remembered the exact location he was in when he sang that by himself, the more chaotic and ear-grating the other melodies became as they crashed over one another. 

But when he let his mind detach from it all and simply wandered the vale, all the individual melodies sounded like a euphonic symphony so beautiful that he was convinced he was in a dream. Their majesty, however, couldn’t last long as he thought of them crawling around every thought and feeling he had and turning it into another wicked melody unnerved him into dysphoria. He did his best to maintain his breathing as the static of his electric voice box exploded with a pop at the sight of what he saw. 

A pile of flesh with bones and metal components sticking out of the tattered meat sat on the other side of the red riverbank. Thankfully, it separated him from the group of those creatures who unflinchingly peeled away at the corpse with the cracked nails of their hands. Toska couldn’t help but stare at them as they tore the body to pieces in search of something, producing an awful hissing out from the boils of their body where their many limbs were attached to the spine of the harp. 

While some anointed their own arms with the blood, bile and other fluids of the corpse, others peeled away strips of flesh to find bone or some metal object with a similar shape to that of bones and sharpened them with their own nails. They gave it to the other set of arms aimed towards the cords that played on the harp strings to produce a sound so wretched that Toska nearly lost balance the moment he heard it. The only reaction he could think of after hearing the most intimate cry of his soul was to flee from it with all his strength, chasing the mystery he now wished he hadn’t bothered learning more of. 

Every melody that contained every thought of his now mocked him, tearing him apart and turned him into a meaningless pile of abjection. The images dyed his circuitry and became infused into his retinas, seeing nothing but himself in that pile desecrated by the melodious monsters. He could still feel their nails digging into him with every strike of his foot against the snow. 

That little ritual was apparently just the beginning, for the others tried to scavenge for materials as well. Those who couldn’t find a corpse tore away at one of their many own limbs and used the bone from their arm to slide across their bloody harp strings. The way they sharpened the bones accentuated the guttural depth bleeding from the sound that penetrated the marrow of his own bones. Or rather, it was that abyssal sound that tried to find its way back home in his marrow, tearing into every layer of his psyche with the desperation he used to run away.

Beyond the fleshly and fractal architecture, Toska finally encountered the origin of the endless bloodflow. In an open field where the valley ended, another mountain far away from him stood tall, shimmering with a deep crimson with turquoise and gold twinkling from the rusty metal parts of a fallen colossus. The mountain peak was permanently dyed in a reddish black as its body clung around it, its head dangling to the side with one eye of flesh rotten for eternity. Because the frost crystallized its decay, Toska was still able to see the great green disc of its iris, glowing in the sunlight like a dawn-kissed forest. The shredded organs of the creature that clung to the mountain peak became roots for new organisms that fused to the bloody veil. When staring at the surreal spectacle for so long, Toska understood that the vibrations through the earth came from the giant’s endlessly delicate death throes. 

The awful red dyeing the area around the green iris gave him the impression that it would burst any second, summoning an awful howl from the giant. But in between his trail of thought, he noticed how there was another stream of sound that was so similar to the giant’s that he could barely hear the difference until now. While his vision was glitching throughout the entire journey through the valley, he couldn’t believe how deceptive it was when he finally saw the large statues made of some unknown visceral material that littered the fields. 

Each one had the same design of a corpse-like humanoid in a meditative position with their legs crossed, their backs straight, and with their skulls split open to unleash a rose-like crown of petals composed of brain matter. They were numerous and scattered as far as his eyes could see, all facing the fallen titan.

Walking past them, he noticed a humanoid figure with a tattered cloak of skin or scales darker than the giant’s abyssal pupil. Even when he didn’t blink, the creature with the grace of the titan’s frozen tear seemed to be closer than he expected with every passing second. Having lost his grip on reality through the figure, Toska merely stood there as the faceless humanoid closed the distance within a heartbeat, drowning his universe in the darkness of night.