panaceawriting

[panaceawriting]

i'm in kinda a weird place with this blog cause like I don't have the confidence to post anything but i can't bring myself to delete the blog

[panaceawriting]

Untitled fantasy thing no. 1

Written 2024, some time in may I think

TW's: Gore, Cannibalism* kinda

I take a step, then another. Yet another, and two more fall onto the hard, hot marble. Then, I lift the first foot and repeat the process. Slinking between the grid of identical pillars and the web of walls between them, I’m searching for food. I know it’s near, I can smell it. I’ve found it. A knight to the goddess of sunlight, separated from his people. Ordinarily, his blade would be enough to deter me, my skin being much softer than that of the beasts it’s meant for battling. This one is different, however. His leg is deeply injured, his shield is missing a significant chunk, and his armor is in shambles. It may not be a costless meal, but a meal to be sure. Unfortunately for me, he hears me approaching from behind. Perhaps it was the noise of my footsteps, or my breathing. Regardless, my chance at an effortless kill is gone. He draws his already bloody sword and chipped shield, trying to anticipate my attack. I drop the pigment in my skin, restoring my skin to its natural pink, and rush at the knight. He thrusts his sword forward into my cheek. This is what I wanted. I grab his wrist and breaking it, releasing his grip from the sword. Then, I rush forward, now also gripping his head and injured leg. He bites at my hand, ineffectually. I lift him into the air, upside down, and slam him onto his head, repeating until I'm certain he’s dead. I pull his body into my mouth, biting him in half and swallowing each piece. Minutes later, I spit out the shield, sword, and armor.

[panaceawriting]

Flawed Construction

Written Feb 20

TW's: Surreal gore

She gets out of bed, and stretches. She gets dressed. Then, the floor opens beneath her, and swallows her into an unfamiliar space. The room she finds herself in consists of glass walls, with statues made of a reddish crystal spread around the room. The statues depict a transition; from a human to a pig clockwise, and the reverse counterclockwise. She feels a numbness in her chest. She looks down. The flesh of her chest cavity disintegrates. She attempts to scream in pain, realizes it doesn’t hurt, then screams in terror. All the skin, fat, and muscle that would conceal her organs turns to a coarse, red dust. Her ribs jut out into the newly exposed cavity on her abdomen like stalactites in a cave. She looks at her heart, still beating unhindered. She looks at it’s red and purple shade, how the shape changes and the light shimmers off it as it pulsates. It seems almost dry. She touches it, rests her palm over it. She feels it contracting and expanding, working forever. She runs her fingers over the rest of her newly exposed organs. She feels the sponges of her lungs expand with each breath she takes. She cups the bag of her stomach, full of food and fluid. She runs her fingers from her stomach down her intestines to her hips, where the opening ends. She pokes at her liver, and kidneys. None of it hurts, but she cries anyway.

[panaceawriting]

Bells in the Trees

Written January 4th, 2025

TW's: none :) jus a lil sad

There was a park near my childhood home, I spent a lot of my time there when I was little. Maybe ‘childhood home’ is inaccurate, given that I still live there. That’s one of the benefits to going to a local college, not having to uproot everything. Sure, their environmental science program isn’t as extensive as if I might’ve gotten if i’d shot for something more prestigious, but a degree’s a degree. Besides, it’s comfortable here; even now, in the dead of winter, the weather doesn’t necessitate more than a hoodie.

‘Was’ is also a little misleading, the park is still there, at least on paper. There’s still a path through the grass, though it’s brown and dry right now. The pond’s still there, just with a few less fish, and a little less clear. There are still plenty of trees, dead as they are this time of year. That place is always a little depressing during the winter, it’s really more of a summer attraction. 

Every year, at the start of spring, I’d go out to watch the birds building their nest, see the trees growing new leaves and flowers, stuff like that. I don’t think that’s going to happen this year, though. This year, I have a feeling that the summer sun will rise to trees as dry and dead as they are today. I have my scientific reasons to believe this; the atmosphere’s warming faster than predicted, the soil’s getting more acidic every year without a solid explanation, there are less pollinating insects every time we measure, ect. If i’m being honest, though, it’s mostly just instinct. Every time I walk down the street I can’t help but feel a sense of finality attached to the park. Like it’s already over, and I was the only one who didn’t know it was ending. 

Every year, between thanksgiving and christmas, they put up these bells, in the trees. Usually, I can hear them on windy days, if I open my window, but this year I couldn’t, for whatever reason. I decided, one December evening, to go investigate why. I crossed the street, quiet as it usually was at 4:00 on a tuesday. The trees were already dead by this point, like every year, and most of the birds had already left the area. I approached the edge of the pond, which was where the bells were usually strung up. They were, like every year, up in the trees, yet they weren’t making any noise. It wasn’t for a lack of motion; it was plenty windy that day. Intent to find an answer, I attempted to climb one of the trees the bells were suspended in. It had, of course, been some time since I had tried climbing anything, and I got a little roughed up in the process, but I did get to a branch where I could reach the bells. Reaching out towards the nearest one, I held the little bronze object in my hand, turning it around and feeling inside. It was empty.

[panaceawriting]

The Loss of a Genius

Written June 24th, 2024

TWs: Loss of agency ig?

Belka was a genius; she effortlessly flowed through school, had scholarship offers from any school she could have chosen, she would have topped any field she applied herself to. What she chose was the only field that interested her: archeology. Having acquired a degree before most of her peers had started college, she was eager to put herself out there, to make a name for herself. Driven and blinded by ambition, she accepted a job many were reluctant to. An undocumented temple had been discovered in the Siberian mountains, after it had been exposed by a mudslide. There had been failed expeditions into the temple already, but most in the field were hesitant to touch the project after rumors circulated of the first few expedition’s results. Belka accepted the role without hesitation.

The flight in was not what she had expected; she had imagined a hike into the mountains from a nearby village, not the helicopter ride directly to a research site set up around the exposed portion of the structure she had been delivered to. The site was built decently considering the time frame it had for construction, though it was still clearly impromptu. The site consisted of a cluster of tents, presumably to house the personnel, a row of somewhat more solid structures, which housed equipment for both use and storage, an electrified chain-link fence around the site, and the helipad her flight had landed on. 

Belka stepped out of the helicopter, bracing against the rushing wind and snow. Two unarmed guards aided her to one of the ramshackle wooden structures, which was mercifully warmed internally. Inside was a man she recognized as the research head, pouring over a desk littered with papers and graphs. He offered her little more than a nod of acknowledgement upon her entry. She moved closer to introduce herself, but as she approached he stood and handed her a bundle of 4 papers labelled “Expedition 4 directions”. Belka stepped back, mildly offended, and began to read through the directions. She quickly found that the directions themselves only took up a small amount of the paper. 

“To the 4th expedition team for site 231: as you may be aware, Ms. Agapov, you are the sole member of the expedition team. Previous tests, though they yielded some useful framework information, have failed to give us a clear picture of the site’s nature. We would like you to provide us with the following: an accurate map of, at minimum, the major walkways of the second floor of the site or lower, one of the ceremonial knives that reportedly can be found in certain chambers, which we have unfortunately not managed to procure, samples of moss, fungus, or other such flora growing on floors 2 or lower, and status and location on the members of the previous expeditions. Below I have attached the results of the majority of surface research we have conducted.”

Much of the information in the following pages consisted of dense information from fields in which Belka was not sufficiently advanced, but picking up what she could, her heart raced. The stone had been dated to several thousand years BCE. It had been found to be identical in composition and construction to another temple in Utah, and very similar to yet another in a debated area between Egypt and Sudan, all of which had been recently unearthed after an unknown amount of time beneath the ground. 

Belka wasn’t able to finish reading all the graphs and charts, as she was escorted out of the building by the guards, much to her dismay. Leaving the warm wooden building, she expected to be taken to a tent to rest. They headed away from the mass of tents, though, she realized that she was to begin the expedition immediately. Though she had expected to be able to recover from the journey before she began, she was eager to begin, and worried she’d be perceived as lacking drive or commitment if she requested to rest for the night. She finally gathered her determination to push forward just as the entrance to the temple came into view. 

The gate to the temple was massive, Belka estimated the opening to be 40 meters tall by 20 meters wide. The edges of the gateway had a pillar-like structure which went around all three sides of the gate. The pillar had letters carved into most of its surface. Belka flipped through the graphs and reports she had been given: the script had some Latin letters, but many unidentified characters were present in the text, and the letters did not form words in any known language. As the little light that drew in through the blizzard fell away, Belka turned on helmet light. The small light mounted to her protective helmet had battery life to last for 12 or so hours, but its light was dim and yellow as a tradeoff of the long battery life. She had an additional flashlight, which was brighter and had battery to last for about 3 hours of continuous use; the flashlight was to be saved for if she needed a better look at something, or if the batteries in her headlamp ran out. She had hoped to be given a set of spare batteries, but there was nothing to be done about it at this point. 15 hours should be more than enough time for her to complete the expedition and get out.

As she moved further into the temple’s tunnels, the passageway shrank to 10 by 5 meters. Though smaller than the gate, the tunnels were still almost uncomfortably large in comparison to Belka’s solitary figure. She investigated the tunnel walls, in an effort to distract herself from the sense of solitude inching over her. The walls were constructed from smooth stone bricks, without any visible mortar between them. In contrast, the floors were a single piece of stone, smooth enough to seem almost slippery. She held out a clipboard, which held the informational papers she had been given, as well as a paper for her to chart a map of the temple as she went. Belka’s hand mapping was inaccurate despite her best efforts, but it was to her understanding that the map’s accuracy was less important than range and thoroughness.

The path went straight forward for maybe 20 minutes of walking. When it did branch off, though, it became a mess of hallways branching from hallways to hallways. Each hallway consisted of a row of openings leading into mostly identical rooms, occasionally broken by a space to branch into another fractal hallway. The rooms were unusually empty, as though they hadn’t been finished. Each was 10 or so meters in each dimension, and the only meaningful variation between them was a waist-high rectangular protrusion in the center of the floor present in some of the rooms. Finally mapping out the branch she had continued down, she realized that the two hours of mapping she had thus far committed had accomplished at most a third of the first floor. Upon confirming that the other two branches lead to much of the same, she decided that mapping the entirety of the first floor could wait, and that moving down a floor should take priority. She found the point of descent rather quickly, it being in one of the first rooms on the left branch. The stairway was covered in something like a tarp, and surrounded by metallic dishes full of wax. She was able to move these aside and progress down with little effort.

The second floor was structured similarly to the first, being composed of hallways in an almost-coherent pattern. The difference between the two floors was that, in opposition to the first floor’s complete emptiness, the rooms of the 2nd floor were furnished, and luxuriously so at that. From what she could gather, it seemed that the space had been a living space of some sort. Some of the rooms were fitted with ornately colored hammocks, others with rudimentary bowls and knives in what looked like an early kitchen of sorts. The mold, which had appeared throughout the ruins, was particularly thick in many of the kitchens. As she entered one such kitchen and stepped over a damp green-blue patch, she registered that this would be a good chance to collect a sample. Unfortunately, as she bent down to scoop the sample into its container, the floor gave beneath her, and she fell.

The floor beneath found itself unable to withstand the force of the falling rubble, and gave way much like the floor above had. The next floor caved in turn, as did the fifth and sixth floors. She now sat in a pit full of rubble, leaving her level with the temple’s 7th floor. Climbing down the top of the pile and up the edge of the pit, she took stock of herself. She had landed on her bag multiple times, which had reduced the damage she had taken, but destroyed many of the bag’s contents. Her flashlight had been shattered, the vials in which she was meant to take samples had all been broken, and her clipboard had flown from her grip and been crushed. She hadn’t broken any bones, but her ankle had been sprained, and she had cuts along her back and legs. 

Belka stumbled to her feet, and sampled the room she had landed in. Around the edge of the pit, more metallic dishes of similar construction to those around the staircase between levels sat. Suspended in the air by chains in the center of the room, just behind the pit, was a stone sarcophagus. The coffin had etchings across the surface, but even once she had gotten closer, she couldn’t make them out. What she had taken to be a pile of rubble beneath the sarcophagus was, upon closer inspection, revealed to be the lid of the coffin. It was largely destroyed, presumably by the fall from atop the coffin. There seemed to be a spiral pattern carved across it, almost like a brain. She mentally noted the room, most likely of ritual significance, and turned toward the exit. There was what looked to be the remains of some kind of gate across the exit, but it was barely holding against disintegration, much less blocking Belka’s path. 

Belka proceeded down the long, dusty hallway. Several rooms split off as she passed, but she didn’t feel the need to pursue into them, focusing entirely on getting herself back to the surface. She was lucky that her legs would still function, and that her headlamp still worked, but given how long it took to find each staircase, she couldn’t be certain the battery would last. Belka’s curiosity began to grow, though, as she began to notice oddities in the rooms she passed. Far from the identical, repeating hallways of the upper floors, the rooms of the 7th floor varied wildly in size and frequency, and often consisted of baffling, dysfunctional architecture. One room had a 7-foot cylindrical pit in the corner, another’s floor slanted up at a 45-degree angle. 

Initially, she wrote off these oddities as having some combination of ritual significance and haphazard construction to be deciphered once she was out, but as she saw the rooms grow increasingly bizarre and unsettling, she found herself unable to resist investigating. She entered a room in which the back half was raised a bit over a foot from the front, creating something like a stage. Sitting on the stage was what appeared to be a set of skeletal human remains, in a device which must have restrained it before it decayed. The device was shaped similarly to a chair, and featured two boards: one on which the person sat, and another at an angle in front of them. Straps around the neck, midsection, and arms held the person’s upper body to the board, leaving them bent over. Investigating closer, Belka noticed holes in the top of the head. They were too clean to be a result of blunt-force; they must have been cut, or maybe drilled.

Belka felt an arm wrap around her from behind, followed by two more. A fourth hand slipped her headlamp off, then slid down to rest around her neck. The arms were gentle in their touch, but strong enough that she couldn’t get any motion out of them. The skin was cold to the touch, and had an unpleasant, damp feeling. Belka’s heartrate spiked, though none of her instinctive thrashing was effective in freeing her, or even inching the arms. She felt lightheaded as the air seemed to become staler than it had been a moment ago. The voice that came with the arms did not aid Belka’s nerves.

“It seems another rodent has snuck into my home. Ordinarily, I would be displeased with such an intruder, but I did very much need a meal”

It had a mockingly condescending tone to it’s voice. On top of that, it spoke slowly, as though the words were seeping into Belka’s ears. She tried to say something, but choked on her words as she attempted to speak. 

“It’s in your best interest to remain still.”

Belka felt an immense piercing pain on the top of her head, as though her skull was splitting open. Her legs gave out under the pain, but the arms held her up. There was an unpleasant crawling sensation, like something moving beneath her skin. Her eyes started to tingle, and she felt her vision blur, though there wasn’t much for her to see. Though the initial pain in the top of her skull had faded, she felt sharp flashes of pain throughout her head, like needles being pressed into her brain. Seemingly random memories rose to her mind, became increasingly distorted, and gave way to the next memories. Emotions sprung up as well, initially related to the memories, then in a seemingly random order. Any feelings that had originated from her current situation were drowned out as unfamiliar, esoteric emotions reverberated around her mind. She felt her limbs start to twitch and shake slightly, though she was unable to move them herself. She experienced various sensations in shifting patches across her skin; heat, cold, itching, numbness, and so on. Then, mercifully, she felt her mind fog over as her sense of rationality was clouded and she became disconnected from herself, a passive observer to her own circumstance. 

The arms released her, and Belka stumbled forward in a daze. Her eyes were glazed over, and she failed to coagulate her mind into coherent thoughts. She ran her fingers over her face, as though to check it was undamaged, and began to wander about. As she bumbled into walls and over edges, she heard the being that had done this to her walking away, intending for the exit; she did not process the sound. Belka continued to wander aimlessly. 

The disappearance of such a talented young woman was considered to be a tragedy by the archeological field. The program to investigate the ruins was shut down following the disappearances. The institute running the expedition paid her family a sum of condolence money, and the incident was written into the records as one of the many tragedies that have come as a result of the profession’s dangers.

[panaceawriting]

If I live long enough to get there

Written December 27th, 2024

Tw's: Serious injury, one graphic depiction of a wound

I stumbled through the now-empty halls of my former workplace, trying not to lose too much blood. I was an endocrinologist, and one of the best in my field at that. By no means should I have had a dangerous job, and yet, when the CIA or whatever approached me to offer a position at a fucking secret laboratory for biological testing, my dumb ass said yes. I was good at it, too. I had one of the best track records in the company. It couldn’t last, though. And of course, when it all went wrong, it all went as wrong as possible all at once, because nothing we were doing here was ever a good idea. We did pretty well for a while; the place had been going strong for seven years when I got there, and I worked for another eight. All it took was a single beat missed, though. 

Something had stabbed me in the abdomen as I was running. It scampered away so fast, I couldn’t tell what it was, but I had a guess based on the vomiting blood and fainting. I didn’t have any way to tell how long I was passing out for, but it shouldn’t have been more than a minute at a time. Still, apparently that was enough time for me to be left behind, enough time for something to take off half my foot without waking me up. 

I had been trying to get to an elevator, but my brain was pretty fogged at the time, and those harsh blue lights were giving me a migraine. Still, I was starting to panic by this point, thinking I had made a wrong turn somewhere. I quickly ducked into a nearby room, part of the administrative department, hoping to find a map, or at least a moment to gather my thoughts. I stumbled into the cubicle nearest the door. Taking off my coat, the piece of cloth I had used to stop the bleeding in my side was near saturation. 

I tried booting up the computer, and by some miracle it almost worked, but it crashed before I could get anything of use out of it, and I couldn’t get anything after that. After a moment of resting, I went to leave, but I was hit with an overwhelming sense of dizziness, and had to sit back down. I fought against it for as long as I could, but I passed out after what probably wasn’t too long. 

I woke up about half an hour later; the blackouts were getting longer, which was concerning. Very concerning, actually, but I didn’t have the resources to do anything about it, so it’d have to either be fine or kill me. Pushing through the waving in my head, I stood up, and kept moving towards the nearest elevator, hoping it would be operational. 

It took a while and a few wrong turns, but I did make it to the elevator, though the poison was rapidly getting worse. I leaned against the smooth metal doors, trying to poke through the thickening fog in my brain to press the button. I slammed the button, and stumbled back. I did my best to look forward and watched as the door. Slowly, creakingly, the two metal panels slid apart, revealing an empty elevator shaft, countless cables and wires scaling the sides. 

I stared down the shaft, dejected. I considered climbing down, but after a sudden bout of dizziness brought me to my knees, I had to accept that it wasn’t happening. I sat down by the door and, for lack of anything better to do, cried until I passed out, which wasn’t long. 

I woke up some time later; I’m not sure how long, but it was long enough that my throat was dry when I returned. I got up, my legs shaking, and started walking away. Looking back, I’m not sure what my goal was. I wanna say I was going to find another elevator, but I think I might’ve just been looking for a better place to die. I’m not sure, my thoughts were all kind of blurry at the time. 

I remember passing that big yellow ‘dangerous product ahead’ sign by the doorway to the wing where they kept the fucked-up things. I stumbled through the halls, each and every door opened. I’d poke my head into the cells for projects I was familiar with; they were all empty, with the exception of one immobile thing, which I felt bad for, but didn’t have the capacity to help. As the poison’s symptoms got worse, I sat down to rest, if just for a bit. 

After a bit, I started to feel a pounding in my head. I assumed it was the poison at first, but it became quickly apparent that it was, in fact, the sound of something rather large approaching. I got up and did my best to run, but with the weakness growing in my legs compounding with the sudden vertigo that came with standing up, I moved far too slow, far too late. I heard a voice behind me, though I didn’t have it in me to turn around. 

“Oh, it’s you.”

I felt whatever was chasing me pick me up, and seemingly sling me over it’s shoulder. All I could see from there was the back of the orange jumpsuit we give to all the human-shaped things we make, but between the thing’s size and it’s voice, I had an idea of who this was. I always thought that the orange uniforms were meant to make us less empathetic towards the subjects, maybe by reminding us of prisoners to imply they deserve this, somehow. The higher-ups insisted that it was for economic reasons, though, and I definitely don’t doubt that they were cheap. Anyways, in the adrenaline of being chased and picked up, I passed out pretty quickly. 

The next moment I was aware, I was laying on a blanket in a cornfield. Looking up, I saw the sky stretching out above me, blue and clear in every direction. It wasn’t until I sat up and felt the breeze blowing through the corn that I accepted that I was actually outside, and not just having some weird hallucination. I turned around, and jumped as I saw my… kidnapper? Or maybe savior? The person who took me was sitting behind me, eating a cheeseburger in two bites. 

She was one of the first projects I was assigned to, and supposedly one of the first human subjects at the facility. To my understanding she was more or less someone they grabbed off death row and pumped with experimental drugs, but that was all years before I got there. I was never given a name for her, just an identification number. 

We made eye contact a moment later. 

“Oh, shit, you didn’t die.”

“I… didn’t. You didn’t kill me.”

“Y’don’t say. I don’t have like, any memories from before y’all started tryin’ shit on me, d’you know where I could get like, an ID or somethin’?”

“I- No, I do-”

“Figures. Y’might wanna get that checked by the way, shit smells rotten.”, she gestured to the wound in my side.

I slipped my coat off, pull up the corner of my shirt, and sure enough, it was not doing well. The edges of the wound had turned purple with necrosis. I pulled the cloth out, its former rich violet now stained rust red-brown. 

“I’ll carry you to the nearest city if you spot me some cash.”

“I- if I live long enough to get there, sure.”