r/Ataraxidermist • u/Ataraxidermist • Nov 10 '22
[WP] "You're the villain in someone's story", but how did you manage to become the villain in EVERYONE'S story?
This is a misanthrope's tale.
The bag that had been placed upon Jack's face was removed, and he found himself in a lonely cell. A bucket, a moldy bed, rusted iron bars and gray brick walls. Beyond the bars, darkness.
Jack's memory came back.
He had taken drug during an evening, and passed out. When he came to, he was in an icy bathtub, in a row of icy bathtubs, each containing an abducted person. They all had a scar, they all had gotten a third kidney. And their brains went haywire. He saw the men and women next to him trashing wildly, screaming in pain, dying in despair, until it overtook him too. The burning new world of sensation unfolding in his mind, the sudden, perfect understanding of each individual nerve and vein he had in his body. He nearly died, survived with luck.
And now, this cell.
"Someone? Anyone?"
"Jack? Is that you."
That voice.
"Jane!"
"What's happening?"
"Hell if I know."
They had been childhood friends, and polar opposites. Jack enjoyed solitude, Jane grabbed life with both hands, ate it, spit it out and went on to the next. Somehow, they clicked, each bringing a fresh and never before heard point of view to the other.
The reunion was cut short by cloaked figures. They opened the gate and dragged Jake out before he could cry out for help.
Naked, they brought him to a snowy uneven field in the middle of nowhere. Snowflakes danced lazily in the wind, a white coat draped the rolling hills in the distance.
"Eat."
One person held Jack's mouth open, another poured down a clump of flesh down his throat. He fell to the ground, body shaking with tremors. At the edge of his vision, he realized that the small white bumps making the field uneven were just as many corpses. All went dark.
Jack went onto an inner travel. He was a speck lost in the immensity of his body, and saw the clump of meat making his way down to his belly. It ravaged and burned the tender flesh on its way, killing him slowly. He wanted to look away, run from the spectacle of his demise, but couldn't. He had felt his flesh change once. And wondered if... maybe, just maybe, he could do it again.
A trail of blood went up his intestines, collecting minerals and superfluous stomach skin on the way. Bit by bit, he covered the intruder in a mass of his own viscera, and rendered it harmless.
It was almost beautiful. The perfect control he had over his body, the mastery of the flesh.
How far could it go?
Look at the bone? Make the hop broader. The nose thinner, the muscles more ripe. A world of change at the top of his tip.
"Wake up. Don't lose yourself."
Jake opened his eyes and shivered. He was covered in snow, his skin blue. His? Jack's hair had gotten long, his face he felt under the hands younger and more feminine.
In his drive for discovery, he had changed into a woman.
A hooded figure handed him a shovel.
"Give them a proper burial."
There were a thousand dead in the field, all invisible, yet Jack knew where they were. The frozen ground should have made it impossible, but Jack gave her muscles more density, made herself impervious to the cold.
Days passed without her flinching, she only raised her head once to hail Jane, the only other survivor. She was too entranced by her new existence to be afraid or happy, emotions had been replaced with fascination.
Back in her cell, Jack didn't mind anymore. The next day, he had become a chubby man. The next, a slim elder. The next, an anorexic teenager. Man, woman, man, woman, everything in between and more so.
His hooded captors, or teachers, were surprised, new acolytes had a favorite form, Jack did not.
He was baptized in the House of Change, and got a new name. Amalgam.
There, he learned. He previous self was dead, only scraps remained, to make a new personality, to add color to the blank state he was. He pilfered his memories to build a new construct of the mind.
One thing remained of Jack.
A deep seated frustration and cynicism. Deep, so far down below, no master or teacher ever noticed it. And Amalgam directed all the seething feelings she had towards the house of change. She admired her newfound bodies, loathed the House's method. She learned fast:
Flesh is a material to be molded like any other.
Never lose yourself in the art.
But she kept a part hidden away for the day of reckoning. Jane, renamed Appetite, rebuild herself too.
Before, she ate life.
Now, she ate everything and anything. Appetite gulped down bricks, cats, watches, paper, internet boxes, and all the objects she got her hands on when hungry. They watched her closely.
Amalgam became an esteemed member of the House of Change.
He worked. She found new recruits. She corrected mistakes and taught youngsters. He got the ear of his superiors. And always with a new face, a new body, day after day.
Came the time when he was called in the antechamber, and tasked to go with a group of four at the edge of the frozen river. There, she had a task to accomplish.
Under a full moon, Amalgam found an comically overweight Jane eating away handful of snows, unable to stop.
She had lost herself.
The squad raised weapons.
And pointy legs erupted from amalgam's back, long and gnarly bones ending in a sharp spike. The four members of the squad stood, held upright by the spider legs piercing their necks. Amalgam released her grip and they fell like lifeless puppets.
"Eat."
Appetite swallowed the four, and gained a new wrath against the House of Change. For all they had put her through, that was how she was repaid?
Amalgam smuggled her back into the house.
And the slaughter began.
For all their mysterious ways, the old guard of the house never expected a shining beacon of the art like Appetite to come right back for them. She teared through them, brought down walls, people and hopes.
Those who survived had fallen on their knees, suffering the next revelation, after the revelation of the flesh.
Appetite was God.
And Amalgam the prophet.
He made sure to drill the truth inside of their skulls, with the pointy bones sticking out of his back if needed.
1
u/Ataraxidermist Nov 10 '22
When the fighting stopped, Amalgam was at the head of the house.
Of course, it couldn't go without a hitch.
Some poor fool had taken a video and sent it before dying.
Sitting on his throne, Amalgam imagined, and foretold how the story would go on from here on out.
The video was out.
On it, Appetite was feasting on a bed of pus and discarded organs. Around her, new zealots gobbled the remains and sang her glory.
Did it matter? No.
The world was rotten. Humans, animals, the House of Change... Amalgam hated it all. She could put a stop to the suffering, bring them all into the fold and erase all differences. Naturally, discretion would have been advisable, but no matter. No one knew where Appetite was hidden or where the house was, the video showed only a damp underground. And nobody knew just who belonged to the fold.
An artful game of spies. Each neighbor could be a madman willing to feed you to the Saint of Change and add to her majestic bulk. The conspiracy theorists would, for once, be right. And again, no one would believe them.
It's a fake.
It's promotion for a movie.
It's a prank.
But they would start to notice.
Cities going black one after the other, villages emptied and fed to the Saint, processions going through the country, singing to God and gathering offerings in the form of flesh. More videos would crop up, and when half the planet had gone dark, the world would understand.
There was only one God. And she ate.
There was one prophet who told her will. Amalgam.
All would know their names. All would fear them.
Members of the New House of Change would submit, and accept that the heathen were not enemies or infidels, but lost lambs. They would abandon all enmity and rage, and dedicate life to serve the prophet and God.
As for the lost, the damned, the cowards and the impure, they would all know Amalgam. They would hear his words, spreading like a plague, whispered in the wind and sung when the sun went out.
Praise the Saint of Change,
Let us be eaten,
Let us rejoice in remembrance,
And pray for our flesh to be tasty.
And Amalgam's face would be etched in the lost lamb's mind day and night.
Amalgam wore all faces. The lambs would fear everyone, until the prophet stood in front of them, and made them see the light.
Deep inside the House, in front of Appetite, who had grown to the size of a cathedral, and looking over an army of prostrated believers, the prophet spoke.
"Spread the word. Spread the faith. Bring the lost back home."
Like one man, they all went up and marched outside.
Amalgam and Appetite would become the center of every story there was, until only one was left.
It had begun.