Title
Contents
Title Page
PART 1 - ROOMS
1 - Larvae
2 - Zoning Out
3 - Kiss
4 - Lyin' Eyes
5 - Split
PART 2 - CELESTIAL SHARDS
1 - Walk
2 - Out of Water
3 - The How and the Why
PART 3 - CAUGHT IN A WEB
1 - Full
2 - Ready
3 - Faker
4 - Go Time
5 - Down and Out
PART 4 - TREEHOUSES
1 - A Particular Path
2 - Bridge Work
3 - Elder
4 - Hive
5 - Affliction
6 - The Prize
PART 5 - CONNECTIONS
1 - Inside Outside
2 - Good Omens
3 - Easy
4 - Damien's Story
5 - Illusion
PART 6 - THE PRISONER
1 - Trunk or Treat
2 - Church
3 - Bars
4 - Reject
5 - Breakthrough
6 - Access
7 - Negotiation
8 - Born
PART 7 - TIME TO KILL
1 - Roundabout
2 - Keys
3 - Dear Ones
4 - Driven
5 - Bad Omens
6 - Church
7 - Goddess
8 - Film
PART 8 - RESCUE
1 - Masses
2 - Walk Down
3 - The Fix
PART 9 - DEVIL INSIDE
1 - Reset
2 - Stress Point
3 - Explanations
4 - Away
Land of Phantoms
Titan’s Song #6
By Jacob Stanley
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.
This is purely a work of fiction. Any names, characters, events, places, or businesses are totally fictitious, and any resemblance to real life names, characters, events, places, or businesses is entirely coincidental.
Version 1.3
PART 1 - ROOMS
1 - Larvae
The worm fed, and Simone slept on.
After many hours perched atop her, gorging lustily, the creature had grown big, and fat, and juicy; fully six feet long and heavy enough to make the bed sag in the middle.
Feeding on the soul-energy of a being so powerful as this fresh, young Dragon-kin had worked out very well for the worm. Such creatures were always far more nourishing than normal humans. Their connection to the Great Power was staggering, and that connection filled them with incredibly pure stores of delicious mana; made all the more nutritious by the fact that the worm was feeding on her here in the mirror world, where all the many underlying mystic forces that gave rise to life were far more real and solid.
Yes, the young worm had been lucky to find itself pulled into this situation—one moment resting sweetly in the birth nest, and the next drawn out of that darkness into this place of light and life; this place that was overflowing with bright fountains of nourishing energy. And—as if that one piece of good fortune weren’t enough—landing right here in the lap of this ripe young Dragon-kin…
So, so lucky…
And, of course, it planned to remain in contact with the young woman for as long as it possibly could. Such a resource as this could not be taken for granted. With her to draw on, and in this place where reality was so very, very malleable, its power basically had no limits worth speaking of. It could be like a god here.
A wonderful and delicious GOD!
Its brood-mates would be frightfully jealous when it told them—assuming it ever saw any of them again, which of course might never happen. Its siblings numbered in the thousands, and already it was beginning to forget their names. Those many months in the nest were no longer terribly relevant to its life. The worm was much more focused on the future now; the bright and shining future it planned to make for itself.
During the night it had explored the powerful young woman’s memories, learning many things about her world, about her life, and with that knowledge to draw from, a plan had begun to form inside its ever-expanding mind.
And it would need a plan, because now, after only one night of feasting, it was already time for the creature to graduate from the larval stage and become a full adult.
Just one night with one special woman, and so much accomplished…
It was hard to believe, wasn’t it?
The worm kept thinking about all these interesting things, until it felt a prickly sensation moving over the surface of its pale flesh, and then it knew childhood’s end had finally dawned.
It was time.
2 - Zoning Out
Simone woke with an awareness that something bulbous and slimy was nestled between her legs, pressing against her stomach, writhing and twitching, making little sucking sounds.
She screamed, and sat up, fists clenched, teeth bared, ready to fight.
The lights were turned down so low that it was nearly pitch black, much too dark even for her greatly improved eyes to make out anything, but she reached down with her hands was able to feel gobs of sticky goo smeared all over her belly and her groin and all the way up to her chest.
What the hell? she thought.
She was about to leap out of bed, in pretty much the same way somebody might if they woke up and realized they were laying in a pool of vomit, but then she felt a slight tingling around her temples followed by a little prickle of pain, and all the sudden the slime under her hand was just gone.
Zap.
One second: slime. The next: nothing. Like a magic trick.
She ran her fingers all over herself to see if she could still feel something, but her skin was smooth and dry. Perfectly normal.
“What in the actual fuck?”
She sat there for a few seconds, staring into the darkness, letting her breathing and her heart rate slow down a little.
Maybe I was still dreaming, she thought.
She could remember all kinds of fucked up dreams from the night before. Really bad ones. Lots of people getting killed and eaten, and sometimes it felt like she was the one eating them.
Probably just another thing I’ll have to get used to, she thought. Bad dreams that keep going even after I wake up.
“God this sucks so bad.”
She suddenly felt a powerful hitch in her chest, and knew that she was going to cry. She didn’t try to stop it, she just turned over, put her face in the pillow and let it happen. And it was good. The tears took a lot of bad things with them when they left.
After a few minutes, her stress levels normalized a little bit, and the waterworks dried up, at which point she became aware of a brutal urge to pee.
In the dark she couldn’t see squat, but could feel well enough to easily find the dial on the wall near her bed and raise the light level.
She hurried across the room, and opened the door to what Camilla had told her was the bathroom. The light in there was off too, but she found another fader knob on the inner side of the door and twisted it until she could see.
The room was huge, almost as big as the bedroom, and there was a gigantic submerged bathtub within, nearly pool sized. The entire back wall was covered with a mirror, stationed above a very traditional looking lavatory.
Simone caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—her nude body, covered with strange reptilian skin; her bright silvery hair hanging down past her shoulders, covering her breasts; her creepy eyes gleaming like little fires were bu
rning inside her skull… She felt a violent pang of shock at the sight, and quickly looked away.
She searched around for a toilette, and at first was a bit worried because she didn't see one. Then her eyes landed on something odd in the middle of the floor, and she realized it might be some kind of toilette. It looked sort of like a stubby wishing well. There was no visible tank, so you could sit facing any direction you wanted, and from the size—about as big around as an average dining-room table—it seemed to be made with the concept of communal use in mind, which was, in Simone's view, pretty much inexcusable.
A shiny metallic pipe rose out of the water in the very center of the bowl, about waist-high, with a lever for flushing. On top of the pipe there was a rounded wire basket filled with the sort of rough brown tissue papers they handed out in school cafeterias.
She walked over and tried pushing down on the lever.
Immediately, there was a loud hissing sound as the water in the toilette disappeared down a set of drains on the bottom, and then slowly refilled.
Yep, she thought. That's gotta be a toilette.
She sat down, did her business quickly, and flushed.
If this were an ordinary morning, the next steps in her routine would be to take a shower, brush her teeth, and put on some makeup. But she didn't have the supplies for any of that, and really, with the way she looked now, most of that stuff seemed kind of pointless. There was no fixing what was wrong with her at this point, at least not with cosmetics.
Still, she found herself walking over to the mirror anyway. At first glance she wanted to avert her eyes, but instead she forced herself to look at her face. Tried to be objective.
It was still the same face. Nothing wrong with it in terms of the shape of everything. Just different skin.
In fact, if her skin and hair were the only things that'd changed, she might not feel so crummy about it.
I bet I could even get a part as a sexy alien in some stupid summer movie, she told herself.
Even the freaky orange eyes weren't so bad. They were kind of alluring. She could work with it.
Unfortunately, there was one other big change that went way over the line; something that she couldn't ever find it in herself to embrace. She cracked a smile, just for a second, and the horror in her mouth made her want to jump out of her own skin. One look at those teeth and any normal person would be ready to run for cover.
Yep, she thought. Those suckers are a deal breaker.
She held her position at the mirror for a few more seconds while she did as much as she could to smooth the sleep-bedraggled disarray out of her strange, shiny hair without the aid of a hair brush.
Then, just as she was about to go back to the bedroom, Simone noticed a movement behind her in the mirror-reflection, and her eyes locked onto-
What the fuck?
The creature’s bulbous and massive segmented body puffed in and out like a balloon with each breath, and its little wings flared, dozens of legs working in concert, propelling the wretched thing upward as it scaled the wall beside the bathroom door, leaving behind a trail of disgusting slime.
Her mind quickly registered that it was the same sort of creature she’d seen during her hallucination the day before while eating lunch with Camilla. Only this one was much, much bigger.
She spun fast, ready to do something about what she’d seen—maybe attack, because she wasn’t afraid so much as disgusted and sickened, like she felt when she saw a big fuzzy spider crawling too close to her bedding, or a rat nosing around in a pile of garbage. She wanted to make this thing go away, to make it stop existing, to rid the world of it and all it represented.
But now that she was actually facing the wall, there was suddenly nothing there anymore.
She walked over for a closer look, and touched the spot where there'd been slime before, but the surface was smooth and clean.
There one second, gone the next, just like the slime I found all over me when I woke up...
A shiver ran down her spine.
If that horrible thing was real, and if it had been crawling around on her while she slept…
Jesus no... That’s just fucking wrong.
The thought was honestly too horrible to contemplate. She would rather assume she’d been imagining things.
Just hallucinating, like always.
But that's not what she thought. Not really.
She stepped away from the wall, looked all around the bathroom to see if she could pick up on another glimpse of the creature, but there was nothing at all; she couldn't even feel it with her radar sense.
She went back to the mirror again to see if it was still visible in the reflection, but the only thing behind her was a wall.
The thing, if it was real at all, appeared to be some sort of phantom. It was phasing in and out of existence.
Or something.
Like a monster in a Twilight Zone episode.
3 - Kiss
Simone spent a few more minutes fretting about the possibility of giant flying worms hiding in her room, and then decided to pretend she was just crazy and ignore the whole thing.
For now.
She wanted to check the time, but quickly realized there was no easy way to do that. Without windows she couldn't even tell if it was day or night. There was a little device on the wall above the bed that she figured might be a time-piece, but it didn’t work like any clock she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t read the thing at all. So she gave up on figuring out what time it was, and decided to get dressed.
She managed to ignore her ever-persistent urge to go around in the raw, and started to put on the white robe she’d found the day before. But it had a strange smell—like old sweat mixed with rotten lemons.
Just great! she thought. Even my BO is weird now.
She grimaced, threw the robe in the floor, feeling sort of disgusted in a general kind of way. Then climbed into the bed, and leaned back, propped against the headboard with her knees up, just staring; just passing time.
And in the silence, her mind quickly found its way to focusing on several things that annoyed her; things that were perfect candidates for spending lots of time worrying and fretting over.
Like, for instance, the fact that there'd been no visitors so far today.
Camilla had said yesterday about having some clothes sent up to her, but no one had ever shown up.
Which maybe wasn't all that surprising. The Countess had made that promise before the ugly little incident.
The pee-pee incident.
God, I was such a bitch to her… Huge mistake. The girl might be a horrible little psycho, but she's nothing more than a product of her environment. Probably millions of people worse than her around this place. And I need friends in this situation. No reason at all to poison the fucking pond on my very first day. What the hell was I thinking?
The answer was pretty simple. She hadn't been thinking. She'd been in the grip of a nearly overwhelming desire to cause someone—anyone—pain. Preferably physical pain, but emotional pain was enough to get the job done in a pinch.
And after it was over, I felt better, too. Felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
Simone was pretty sure she hadn't even been consciously aware of the aggressive feelings at the time, but looking back, they’d been slowly building all day long, like an itch that needed scratching.
Was that how this was going to work? Would she just get the occasional urge to do something awful to someone?
- - -
There was a knock at the door about an hour later.
She wrapped herself in her blanket, and answered, expecting to find Camilla, eager to make amends with the girl for the rude and crude moments from the night before.
Instead it was a squat young woman with a strong jaw, dressed in the typical servant outfit, pushing a long metal clothes rack with all sorts of garments, attached via (very ordinary) wire hangers. Behind her were two men carrying a finely wrought wooden bureau.
“Clothes, Your Highness,” the maid said with a thick German accent. “Courtesy of Lady Camilla.”
Simone stepped aside so they could bring the stuff in.
Highness? For real? That’s what they’re gonna call me?
The men put the bureau up against the wall to the left of the door, and the girl pushed the rack over beside it.
Simone studied the clothes. They were all quite nice—luxurious even. Certainly not the sort of garments she’d asked for. She didn’t see a single white gown like the one she’d worn yesterday. Which was irritating.
Simone addressed the maid, “I asked Camilla for more gowns,” she pointed to the stinky one in the floor, “like this one.”
The Maid’s eyes widened with surprise. “So sorry, Your Highness” she said. “I’m sure the lady mentioned it, but perhaps someone misunderstood. I did not receive the orders personally. They were given to the head of the service staff, Mr. Handel.”
“Where is the Countess anyway?”
“Lady Camilla left last night and has not yet returned.”
“Last night?” Simone suddenly felt a little uneasy. There’d been a dream about Camilla in the night. She couldn’t remember much about it, but it had involved Camilla on the road in the dark with two men, and it hadn’t been a good dream.
“What time did she leave?” asked Simone.
“Very late, apparently, but I’m not sure of the exact time. Before leaving she made arrangements that we should bring you some garments today, and since I speak English, she left instructions that I should stay here to take on duties as your personal servant, Your Highness.”
“I don’t need a servant,” said Simone.
“Of course, Your Highness. I will leave if you prefer.”
“Do you know where Camilla went?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
The girl had her eyes cast down and was nervous enough to be visibly shaking.
She’s scared of me, thought Simone. She thinks I’m angry with her.