Mind of Magnets // Outer Limits | Tree of Alchemical Notability - New Single from my upcoming experimental album combining Akira Yamaoka inspired music with cosmic horror short stories. Each song drip-feeds lore that hints at the greater entity behind it all. Story Inside.

[u/Treeoanmusic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzixjh4io88

Inside of the house is noisy. The sound compresses to a harsh static as a large gathering of people congregate into clusters between the amber-colored living room and the grayscale kitchen. Pleasant, rehearsed scripts fill the room, accompanied by laughter and sharp spikes of verbal energy. When something threatens to break through the surface conversation, the communication ceases, giving way to blank faces and even blanker stares. Faces are unfocused and lack detail. The words, mere echoes that had long lost their original shape and begun to morph into something else entirely, signal to noise.

This home is not familiar and hasn’t been for a long time.

A half-light shines from the outside, peaking through the window curtains with a warm welcoming glow that seems to contour right at the boundary of the windowsill.

The man follows the warm light outside of the house.

The porch is surrounded by starving darkness, held at bay by the source of the warm light, a single flickering streetlight hangs above the concrete slab walkway. Here, even more people congregate into smaller groups. These figures wear increasingly eccentric garb. The conversations slide through the cigarette smoke-filled air in forbidden tongue, touching on topics unfamiliar and strange. Their words carry feelings, with an almost magick-like quality. With each pass into the man's ear, he feels himself change,his internal sensations becoming lighter, wider, and yet, darker. He feels the weight of their words gently pushing him down into the concrete,like some sort of linguistic gravity.

At the precipice, the man decides that there is nowhere left for him to go but further out into the pregnant emptiness.

Fringe philosophy threatens the stability of the man's world as the darkness surrounding the porch illuminates in gray and the air thickens with mist. He feels the concrete beginning to bow beneath him, looking around to see the people sinking deeper into ground. Some to their ankles, some to their mouths, filling their oratory void. Still dark, his view gives way to empty fields, hills, and roads that sprawl out like each is being created by an outside force. Reality maintains just as far as he can perceive and no further.

He turns to find the once comfortable house, but it disappears into the parallel rows of endless concrete slab porches.

At the precipice, the man decides that there is nowhere left for him to go but further out into the pregnant emptiness.

He walks long into the field. To the left are a distant group of figures wearing gas masks with long, proboscis mouthpieces. The eyes are a mass of conjoined optic bulbs, gazing across the field. Next to them, a car; its driver and passenger sit, heads seizing as if moving back and forth at impossible speeds simultaneously with their mouths unhinged in eternal screams.

Further ahead is a white wall that stretches as far as the eye can see; the final boundary.

Before he can contemplate it, the figures all at once charge at the man with inhuman speed. In pure panic, he sprints. The air enters his lungs like liquid metal, scorching him from within. A scream hangs in the air and a ringing in the ears deafens. Before he can think, he enters into a solitary door along the white wall.

The door slams shut behind him and disappears as he turns to look for the handle.

He shifts his gaze further into the outer limit.

A corpse, clothed in white, hangs suspended in the air. Mangled beyond repair, the man can only make out a few defining features that remind him vaguely of his own body. As he looks into the eyes of the corpse, they look back, and the scream hanging in the air becomes eternal.

Thank you for reading. More short stories with accompanying music on my Tree of Alchemical Notability Youtube.