The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

When her stomach had finally settled again, she was too exhausted and out of breath to flush. Fhá oozed back into the corner. Burying her face into her knees, she began to sob uncontrollably. It was too much. It was all too much. As she sobbed and wailed, she felt herself dissociating more and more.

The world faded into the distance around her.

Time slipped.

Sensation of the real world...

...retreated into the distance.

Her discomfort wedged into the space between the toilet and the wall and the chill seeping into her bones dissipated into ever thickening mist.

Sounds of her whimpering and crying became echoes.

Echoes in a cathedral strange and yet altogether too familiar.

Past resurgent, the bathroom faded entirely, she was no longer there.

Stood before the altar and dressed in black, the robe ill-fitting—a last-minute compromise for a precocious girl. There in that hallowed place, an urn of synthetic porcelain rested on a scarlet pillow. She gathered its weight in small arms, what remained of her mother weighing somehow more than the ashes and the vessel that contained them. As if the memory of her lineage had settled both upon it and her shoulders in the rituals of passing. The last of her kin—a weight of responsibility she was entirely unprepared for, barely of an age to comprehend the gravity of it.

Looking up, to the vicar, who oversaw the Holy Sepulchre of the Imperium of her childhood, she saw his solemn expression turn. Behind her, the pews were empty. No family left to attend this memorial. Friends so-called too preoccupied with their own occupations, love, affection, or even the most minimal forms of sodality expressed only in sad bouquets of polymer passing as flowers, their attendant cards anodyne and without any substance as to identify whom they were for, except by name.

Alone.

She realised with sudden clarity she was entirely alone.

Looking into the vicar's eyes, she could see something malevolent forming. No longer full of warmth or compassion, the last consolation faded and he grinned a smile of knives as he had so many a time before, but never so openly. He drew his robes about him, in that way he had before, a harbinger of unholy things to come. Fhá clutched the urn tighter to her chest. The bulge beneath his robes grew more pronounced as his grin reached eyes too large for his head.

A scream ripped through the cathedral.

She dropped the urn.

Synthporcelain shattered at her feet and from the ashes.

A misshapen hand with fingers too long burst forth, grabbing at her ankles.

A face like a skull with skin drawn taut over it burst forth. Fhá shrieked and kicked at it, freeing herself as it crawled fully out of the ashes.

"Fhá! Calm down! Relax! It's just me!" the face exclaimed with Hvang's voice.

In an instant, the nightmare was gone, and she saw Hvang fall backwards, collapsing against the stall door in a heap.

"By the gods, what's gotten into you!" he swore, pushing himself back into a semi-upright position.

"Go away!" Fhá shrieked, trying to push the thin, lanky man away from her with her feet.

"No!" he defied, whacking her kicks away with one hand as he attempted to push himself to a seated position with the other.

"Ow! Fuck!" Hvang swore as she stubbed his finger on her heel while reaching for his glasses. "What's going on!? Why are you naked!? What the fuck did Ngèza drag you into!?"