Unnatural Philosophy
Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2014 6:58 pm
The leviathan loomed in the distance, its silhouette resembling a small island moving against the current. The visible mass of barnacle-encrusted flesh gave a mere hint of the creature’s true size, most of it hidden beneath the waves like a living iceberg wandering the seas, siphoning the minute fauna drifting near the water’s surface.
Seeing that it was docile, Darian Montague lowered his spyglass as the crew rowed the vessel on its final approach. The creature slowed and exhaled, sending water spraying up into the air like a geyser.The crew cheered at the sight, it was a good omen, a sign that the giant had welcomed them.
“Every year she comes,” said Mareva, the captain. She was beside Darian, watching the leviathan with her own spyglass. “She brings a bountiful harvest with her. Fish, sharks and turtles accompany her, living on the reefs growing on her. They are abundant, though we take only what we need.”
“I understand that it is very important for your people,” Darian replied.
“Yes. Our ancestors followed the leviathan across the seas to settle in distant islands. That is why we celebrate their arrival,” she turned to Darian and he saw the elegant tattoos lining the side of her face, framed by hair bleached brown from a life spent under the harsh tropical sun. She smiled. “You came at a good time.”
“I’m glad I could make it. To observe such a mysterious creature is a great privilege.”
“Ah, you natural philosophers and your pursuit of knowledge,” Mareva clucked her tongue. “For you, they are rare animals to study, but for us they are so much more.”
Darian thought about the others back home and how they would give an arm and a leg for this opportunity. It was also a safer and more pleasant expedition than his previous adventures. He looked at the gentle giant before him, which was growing larger and larger as they neared.
They arrived and moored the boat on the leviathan’s flank, where bamboo poles had been tied to a coral outcrop to fashion a small makeshift harbour. They clambered up a rickety ladder and used ropes to pull several of Darian’s chests off the boat.
“Philosophical equipment,” Darian explained to the crewmen as he rechecked the chests’ contents and joined the rest as they explored the massive creature.
He steadied himself on his walking staff and gasped at the sight before him. The surface was living flesh, dark purple in color and coated in barnacles, corals, seaweed, sponges and all manner of growths and protrusions, making for a bizarre amphibian terrain that rose and shuddered with each breath. Anemones the size of children grew along with strange bulbous polypoids sprouting moss and algae. Amidst them, crabs skittered about, pursued by betentacled air-breathing molluscs the likes of which Darian had never seen before.
The natural philosopher was severely tempted to rush back to his crates to get a pair of tongs and specimen bottles, but he resisted the urge and continued on with Mareva and her crew. Nevertheless, he committed every sight, each a potential breakthrough, to memory.
“We go to the shrine to pay our respects. Along the way, we will check if all is well, if she is healthy and if she has not been harmed by whalers,” the captain glanced at Darian as he spoke. He felt a pang of guilt at the mention of the whalers, many of whom were his countrymen. His discomfort must have shown, since Mareva smiled and went on to say, “The leviathan itself is sacred, but the creatures on it aren’t. Including us, heh.”
Darian nodded and when no one was looking, he put on his gloves and pulled a leather specimen bag from his pocket. He found one of the amphibious invertebrates and stuffed it in the sack like a greedy child stealing from a fruit vendor. A thought then occurred to him.
“By the way, Mareva, how much time do we have until the leviathan submerges?” he asked.
“Until sundown. She basks during the day to sustain the life that grows on her,” she replied. “Come, we’re nearing the shrine. After we’re done here, we can return to the village and you’ll see how fisherfolk and islanders celebra-”
A chilling cry rang out. The captain and the philosopher ran towards its source and saw a crewman reeling.
“The shrine!” the man pointed at what had once been an arrangement of elegantly carved wooden totems, now defaced and broken, replaced by a towering array of steel scaffolding. At its center was a gleaming metal cylinder that reached down and –
“Sacrilege!” Mareva hissed. Darian saw it and nearly retched.
The cylinder reached down and punctured into the leviathan, boring a bloody hole through its hide, through its flesh. Blood oozed, slowly seeping out with each enormous heartbeat. An expanding circle of slowly coagulating gore formed around the steel construct.
Nauseous from the sight and smell, Darian looked away. Perhaps due to his instincts as a natural philosopher, he looked around and observed their surroundings. The broken totems had fresh markings, “I” symbols that only added to his unease.
“I’ve seen these before,” he said quietly.
The captain threw him an outraged glare, but he didn’t notice. He looked away from the totems and turned his attention to several large clumps of kelp and seaweed surrounding the shrine. They had moved closer.
“No. It can’t be-”
Things hidden under the vegetation rose, discarding their camouflage and revealing themselves. Black-clad figures wearing masks and holding glinting blades and spear shooters.
Mareva’s crew brandished their own sharktooth cutlasses and stingray tridents as they charged the desecrators. A spear flew and impaled a crewman in the throat. He fell, clutching his neck, gurgling blood and dying. Several others were similarly skewered before the distance was closed.
A masked form emerged from a kelp bush beside Darian. He saw the attacker was decisively human with something decisively sharp in his hands. He parried the incoming falchion with his staff and tried to backstep before his foot landed on a sea urchin. He screamed and staggered before his staff was struck from his hands.
It clattered on the corals. The masked man brought his blade up for the finishing blow.
“Oh, bollocks!” Darian pulled out his specimen bag and threw the mollusc within at the man’s face. It gave him enough time to pick up his staff and swing it as hard as he could, smearing its weighted end with blood and bone fragments.
Meanwhile, Mareva was sliding a sharktooth dagger across a man’s throat as her crew swarmed the remaining attackers. Just then, another thought occurred to Darian.
“Wait, leave some alive! We need to ask-”
It was too late. Before he could finish, the last of their mysterious assailants was finished off with a sharpened oar. Then they removed the dead men’s masks. The cadavers did not resemble the seafaring natives at all.
“They look like your countrymen.” Mareva observed. She was smeared in someone else’s blood, which seemed to flow with the fluid lines of her tattoos.
“I think so,” the natural philosopher concurred.
“Who are they? Why did they do this?” the captain gestured at the profane structure they had erected, unable to describe it.
“The marks they left on your shrine belong to a cult. They are the Internecivus, a group dedicated to corrupting living things in pursuit of their unnatural philosophy. I’ve met them before. I barely escaped alive then,” Darian went to examine the construct. Mareva and her crew reluctantly followed.
“Corrupting living things?” the captain looked at the pulsating gash.
“They want to manufacture corrupted creatures under their control. They turn them into weapons or machines for their industries,” Darian continued as they went around the construct and found several canisters bearing the “I” symbols. All were empty saved one. Inside it was a thick black liquid. “Ichor.”
This confirmed his suspicions.
“The substance they use to deform life,” he said as he wore his gloves and walked to a coral formation. He plucked a mollusc and asked a crewman to lend him a drinking cup. He used it to scoop a small amount of ichor from the canister. Then he placed the mollusc on a large wooden dish meant for shrine offerings and poured the foul fluid on the hapless thing.
The cephalopod’s rudimentary lungs uttered a painful shriek as it convulsed. Its skin blackened and hardened, the ichor coagulating into chitinous carapace as spines stabbed out from under the mollusc’s skin and the suckers on its tentacles morphed into grotesquely serrated hooks. The pupils of its eyes narrowed into reptilian slits as its flesh absorbed the remaining ichor. It grew larger and –
Darian produced a vial from his coat and emptied it on the malformed thing. Liquid silver drenched it and it shrieked one last time as it began burning. Seconds later, only a shrivelled husk remained,
Mareva and the crewmen looked at him, their faces pale from shock.
“The elders had a story, a legend, that the leviathan’s children would be stolen from her and turned into monstrous beasts that would consume everything in the sea,” the captain said quietly. “I never thought that it would come true.”
“Are you saying that this leviathan isn’t even an adult?” Darian asked. The idea that the creature could grow even larger was unsettling.
“You misunderstand. The leviathans come to these waters to spawn. The warm currents are better for their young than the cold northern seas,” Mareva pointed at the ruins of the shrine. “To celebrate this, our ancestors built the shrines over their wombs.”
“So the cultist drilled into the leviathan’s uterus to inject the ichor and infest its unborn young,” Darian said to himself, noting that they must have used incredibly powerful ether or other chymicals to dull the pain or else it would have submerged. “As for the leviathan itself... I think, I hope the ichor they used isn’t enough to corrupt something so massive. The canisters are probably only enough for the embryos.”
“And if they are born...” Mareva trailed off.
“It may not even get the chance to give birth. The ichor accelerates growth, as you saw. The corrupted foetuses might eat their way out of the womb, killing the leviathan.
“We have to tell the elders. We must do something,” Mareva looked at him desperately.
“I know.” Darian nodded. “I have a plan.”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kZ_ ... sp=sharing
Seeing that it was docile, Darian Montague lowered his spyglass as the crew rowed the vessel on its final approach. The creature slowed and exhaled, sending water spraying up into the air like a geyser.The crew cheered at the sight, it was a good omen, a sign that the giant had welcomed them.
“Every year she comes,” said Mareva, the captain. She was beside Darian, watching the leviathan with her own spyglass. “She brings a bountiful harvest with her. Fish, sharks and turtles accompany her, living on the reefs growing on her. They are abundant, though we take only what we need.”
“I understand that it is very important for your people,” Darian replied.
“Yes. Our ancestors followed the leviathan across the seas to settle in distant islands. That is why we celebrate their arrival,” she turned to Darian and he saw the elegant tattoos lining the side of her face, framed by hair bleached brown from a life spent under the harsh tropical sun. She smiled. “You came at a good time.”
“I’m glad I could make it. To observe such a mysterious creature is a great privilege.”
“Ah, you natural philosophers and your pursuit of knowledge,” Mareva clucked her tongue. “For you, they are rare animals to study, but for us they are so much more.”
Darian thought about the others back home and how they would give an arm and a leg for this opportunity. It was also a safer and more pleasant expedition than his previous adventures. He looked at the gentle giant before him, which was growing larger and larger as they neared.
They arrived and moored the boat on the leviathan’s flank, where bamboo poles had been tied to a coral outcrop to fashion a small makeshift harbour. They clambered up a rickety ladder and used ropes to pull several of Darian’s chests off the boat.
“Philosophical equipment,” Darian explained to the crewmen as he rechecked the chests’ contents and joined the rest as they explored the massive creature.
He steadied himself on his walking staff and gasped at the sight before him. The surface was living flesh, dark purple in color and coated in barnacles, corals, seaweed, sponges and all manner of growths and protrusions, making for a bizarre amphibian terrain that rose and shuddered with each breath. Anemones the size of children grew along with strange bulbous polypoids sprouting moss and algae. Amidst them, crabs skittered about, pursued by betentacled air-breathing molluscs the likes of which Darian had never seen before.
The natural philosopher was severely tempted to rush back to his crates to get a pair of tongs and specimen bottles, but he resisted the urge and continued on with Mareva and her crew. Nevertheless, he committed every sight, each a potential breakthrough, to memory.
“We go to the shrine to pay our respects. Along the way, we will check if all is well, if she is healthy and if she has not been harmed by whalers,” the captain glanced at Darian as he spoke. He felt a pang of guilt at the mention of the whalers, many of whom were his countrymen. His discomfort must have shown, since Mareva smiled and went on to say, “The leviathan itself is sacred, but the creatures on it aren’t. Including us, heh.”
Darian nodded and when no one was looking, he put on his gloves and pulled a leather specimen bag from his pocket. He found one of the amphibious invertebrates and stuffed it in the sack like a greedy child stealing from a fruit vendor. A thought then occurred to him.
“By the way, Mareva, how much time do we have until the leviathan submerges?” he asked.
“Until sundown. She basks during the day to sustain the life that grows on her,” she replied. “Come, we’re nearing the shrine. After we’re done here, we can return to the village and you’ll see how fisherfolk and islanders celebra-”
A chilling cry rang out. The captain and the philosopher ran towards its source and saw a crewman reeling.
“The shrine!” the man pointed at what had once been an arrangement of elegantly carved wooden totems, now defaced and broken, replaced by a towering array of steel scaffolding. At its center was a gleaming metal cylinder that reached down and –
“Sacrilege!” Mareva hissed. Darian saw it and nearly retched.
The cylinder reached down and punctured into the leviathan, boring a bloody hole through its hide, through its flesh. Blood oozed, slowly seeping out with each enormous heartbeat. An expanding circle of slowly coagulating gore formed around the steel construct.
Nauseous from the sight and smell, Darian looked away. Perhaps due to his instincts as a natural philosopher, he looked around and observed their surroundings. The broken totems had fresh markings, “I” symbols that only added to his unease.
“I’ve seen these before,” he said quietly.
The captain threw him an outraged glare, but he didn’t notice. He looked away from the totems and turned his attention to several large clumps of kelp and seaweed surrounding the shrine. They had moved closer.
“No. It can’t be-”
Things hidden under the vegetation rose, discarding their camouflage and revealing themselves. Black-clad figures wearing masks and holding glinting blades and spear shooters.
Mareva’s crew brandished their own sharktooth cutlasses and stingray tridents as they charged the desecrators. A spear flew and impaled a crewman in the throat. He fell, clutching his neck, gurgling blood and dying. Several others were similarly skewered before the distance was closed.
A masked form emerged from a kelp bush beside Darian. He saw the attacker was decisively human with something decisively sharp in his hands. He parried the incoming falchion with his staff and tried to backstep before his foot landed on a sea urchin. He screamed and staggered before his staff was struck from his hands.
It clattered on the corals. The masked man brought his blade up for the finishing blow.
“Oh, bollocks!” Darian pulled out his specimen bag and threw the mollusc within at the man’s face. It gave him enough time to pick up his staff and swing it as hard as he could, smearing its weighted end with blood and bone fragments.
Meanwhile, Mareva was sliding a sharktooth dagger across a man’s throat as her crew swarmed the remaining attackers. Just then, another thought occurred to Darian.
“Wait, leave some alive! We need to ask-”
It was too late. Before he could finish, the last of their mysterious assailants was finished off with a sharpened oar. Then they removed the dead men’s masks. The cadavers did not resemble the seafaring natives at all.
“They look like your countrymen.” Mareva observed. She was smeared in someone else’s blood, which seemed to flow with the fluid lines of her tattoos.
“I think so,” the natural philosopher concurred.
“Who are they? Why did they do this?” the captain gestured at the profane structure they had erected, unable to describe it.
“The marks they left on your shrine belong to a cult. They are the Internecivus, a group dedicated to corrupting living things in pursuit of their unnatural philosophy. I’ve met them before. I barely escaped alive then,” Darian went to examine the construct. Mareva and her crew reluctantly followed.
“Corrupting living things?” the captain looked at the pulsating gash.
“They want to manufacture corrupted creatures under their control. They turn them into weapons or machines for their industries,” Darian continued as they went around the construct and found several canisters bearing the “I” symbols. All were empty saved one. Inside it was a thick black liquid. “Ichor.”
This confirmed his suspicions.
“The substance they use to deform life,” he said as he wore his gloves and walked to a coral formation. He plucked a mollusc and asked a crewman to lend him a drinking cup. He used it to scoop a small amount of ichor from the canister. Then he placed the mollusc on a large wooden dish meant for shrine offerings and poured the foul fluid on the hapless thing.
The cephalopod’s rudimentary lungs uttered a painful shriek as it convulsed. Its skin blackened and hardened, the ichor coagulating into chitinous carapace as spines stabbed out from under the mollusc’s skin and the suckers on its tentacles morphed into grotesquely serrated hooks. The pupils of its eyes narrowed into reptilian slits as its flesh absorbed the remaining ichor. It grew larger and –
Darian produced a vial from his coat and emptied it on the malformed thing. Liquid silver drenched it and it shrieked one last time as it began burning. Seconds later, only a shrivelled husk remained,
Mareva and the crewmen looked at him, their faces pale from shock.
“The elders had a story, a legend, that the leviathan’s children would be stolen from her and turned into monstrous beasts that would consume everything in the sea,” the captain said quietly. “I never thought that it would come true.”
“Are you saying that this leviathan isn’t even an adult?” Darian asked. The idea that the creature could grow even larger was unsettling.
“You misunderstand. The leviathans come to these waters to spawn. The warm currents are better for their young than the cold northern seas,” Mareva pointed at the ruins of the shrine. “To celebrate this, our ancestors built the shrines over their wombs.”
“So the cultist drilled into the leviathan’s uterus to inject the ichor and infest its unborn young,” Darian said to himself, noting that they must have used incredibly powerful ether or other chymicals to dull the pain or else it would have submerged. “As for the leviathan itself... I think, I hope the ichor they used isn’t enough to corrupt something so massive. The canisters are probably only enough for the embryos.”
“And if they are born...” Mareva trailed off.
“It may not even get the chance to give birth. The ichor accelerates growth, as you saw. The corrupted foetuses might eat their way out of the womb, killing the leviathan.
“We have to tell the elders. We must do something,” Mareva looked at him desperately.
“I know.” Darian nodded. “I have a plan.”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kZ_ ... sp=sharing