Leviathan

II

I awoke in the broken shadows of the cave, the smell of sulfur and decay all around me. Pebbles and rocks scraped beneath my body where I lay prone. I groaned with pain as I propped myself up, feeling for the matchbook I'd left in my pocket. It was still there. I shifted weight reaching for it and the stones underneath my hand shattered, gashing my fingers. Cursing, I fumbled with the matches, finally getting one out and lighting it. I was in an enormous chamber filled with bones, human and animal alike. My hand was in the middle of a child's ribcage. I drew back in horror.

As I did, the match fell from my hand, burning out and plunging me back into darkness. Yet the darkness was not as total as I had first taken it to be. Off in the distance, through the cool air, there was a ruddy glimmer of flame. I crawled towards it, not trusting my feet on the bodies that lined the floor. At one point I had to climb over the skull of a creature with two teeth the length of my body, at another I crawled under a hollow structure made of what seemed to be iron; it reeked of death. I moved on, caught in that hellish bone yard.

As I approached the light the air grew warmer, and at last I realized what it was: molten stone. It flowed like a river through the plain of bodies, scorching everything it touched and sending up great gouts of smoke. I lay flat and surveyed the scene, trying to figure out where I was. I was a creature of instinct, seeking only the nearest escape from my pursuers, both real and imagined. There had to be a tunnel, a passage, something, anything. On the far side of the magma I noticed columns almost entirely concealed in shadow. I crawled forward, hoping to find a spot where I could get around the fire and make my escape.

Then the columns moved, shaking the earth beneath me.

They were legs, hundreds of them.

I whispered the Lord's Prayer.

A segmented nightmare the size of a mountain lurched forward out of the darkness. Its enormous mandibles clicked excitedly as it moved, the spines on its shell quivering. The creature moved to the lava river and drank deeply, swallowing it the way that a man dying of thirst drinks water. As it drank, lightning quivered along the spines of its hide. Turning to resume its feast in the darkness beyond the river, it let out a low, trumpeting scream, or perhaps a challenge.

I want to forget. I want to be able to say what I saw was a lie, or that when I fell into that sinkhole I went insane, or even that I inhaled some trapped cavern gasses that caused me to hallucinate. I cannot, however, because of what happened next.

Bone scraped on bone behind me and I turned to face the cause of the noise. Standing almost next to me was the black-eyed, broken-mouthed demon that had brought me to this nightmare.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" he rasped.

At least, I assumed it was a he.

I stared at him numbly.

"You want to ask me what this creature is, why you have been brought here, why you heard a little girl crying out earlier. You have so many questions. So I will start with a simple answer: no, Nathaniel, it is not by mistake that you and you alone were lured here. You will be my Elisha."

The last part he said in Ellie's voice, the young, girlish tones profane on his tongues. I flinched and stepped back, trying to flee, but he grabbed my face and forced me to stare into his eyes. Memories that were not my own flooded my consciousness.

I am on the surface of a far distant world, in a far distant galaxy, trapped in my iron cocoon. One day, I hatch, ready to feed. I burrow into the depths of the world, tunneling out a hive for myself, feeling the sweet, warm glow of the molten stone against my hide. As I grow I reach for the minds of those on the surface, barely advanced enough to bend to my will, yet I press on, breaking and molding them to the needed forms. From amongst them are elected a cult of prophets to bring me sustenance through the long millennia as I grow and burrow, digging out a hive for my millions of daughters.

When I am ready, I give birth. My first daughter is born pregnant and lovingly wrapped in molten iron, preserved for the millennia to come. The others burst from their nutrient sacs centuries later and begin devouring the world, growing to be hundreds of miles in length. When they are done there is nothing left and we all starve. Everything I have ever known, everything my daughters and mother and aunts ever knew, is all transferred to that single daughter in the cocoon as she floats into the cold embrace of the vacuum, carrying with her the hopes of a people who now gladly succumb to mass suicide, devouring each other in a frenzied massacre.

Now I am that daughter. I float for eons in utterly loneliness. I go insane, regain my mind, and go insane again. At last, long after I had given up hope, there is impact on a small blue world, tender and impossibly hospitable. Yet the impact has shattered its fragile surface into a patina of ash that coats its atmosphere, choking out the fragile lives on the surface. I must wait. I must be patient as evolution takes its course. So I wait quietly through millions of this sun's cycles. Until four cycles past when, at last, this world was prepared for consumption.

I woke up gasping and sweating and sobbing, my body sick with fever and my mind breaking from the strain of the memories. The firstborn prophet, that unholy Elijah, was gazing me in the face, holding my skull so tightly my skin bruised and my jaw creaked. He turned me roughly to face the river.

It was gone. There was nothing but darkness in the chamber. The fear of discovering yet another horror filled me, and then there was movement not a yard from my torso.

Leviathan had lain herself along the length of the river, her thousand eyes level with my face, her mandibles encircling myself and the fiend who held me still.

Before I could even react or cry out a spine struck me in the chest, filling me up to the brim with venom.

I screamed as I was reborn and the Mantle of the Prophet came upon me, bending me to her will.

I tell this all so that you know there is no hope. When I release my hold on your mind there will be no choice but to turn and face Leviathan, Devourer of Worlds, She Who Cannot Die. You will be born anew in blissful agony, and serve with me as harbinger of the death of a planet.