#this took 3 days with no braincells and this is probably an oversimplified wordvom version

[vcrtigoes-a]

anon sent  /  Drabble about how Mike feels in regards to each of the other entities besides the vast. which ones does he prefer? which ones does he hate? if he had to pick another one to serve? etc.       —  meme

blanket cw for not super explicit mentions of body horror, dysphoria, death, unreality, and too many tense errors i don’t care to fix. 

the corruption started with the little things. of course, anymore he does not fault himself for not knowing ( though he did, he did, he carried that weight like a pair of body bags wrapped around his neck for years before he recognized how pointless it was. anything was. ) food went bad within hours. roof shingles crumbled to dust and flaked apart. the sickly-sweet odor of rot seeped in brief whiffs from the very walls from an otherwise very well kept family home. of course there was the book, slick with something unknown, causing agonizing pocks and rashes upon his hands, but for a blue sky he found it a trivial price to pay. struggling from the ruins it caused, tome clutched in his scarf, listening to the chorus of earthworms and boring beetles and silverfish that had made their home there, it turned his stomach, but he did not answer their song.

the dark was his next attempt at refuge, a venture he regards undertaken with a childish mindset. he knew just because he hid beneath the blankets the world with its flickering, flashing light only seemed all the more brilliant and hard to adjust to. its laughter still sounded like snapping wires, and he left it nearly as soon as he found it. 

the flesh - viscera, he truly thought was his first break. he had been searching for months, tangled in infinite dissertations, the branches between magic and madness, mathmatics and spiritualism, and with the buzz of blood in his ears he pressed through the boneturner’s tale like it would hold the answers. it does, though of a different sort, and he learns several truths to himself:  to be made one must be unmade first and he is marked at the very bones. for two weeks he tears himself apart, strips skin from muscle from marrow and realizes that he is branded, cracking everywhere his fingers touch with jagged lichtenberg lines. the other, that he could stomach doing what he needed to, if he needed to, slaughter tastes like bile with iron and holding a man’s twitching lungs outside of their body in a split reaction of panic is somehow not the strangest thing to happen to him. 

he knew then, there was something of flies and rot, something of flesh, and if there were a thing of darkness it did not hear him. so what, then, did the thing that followed him belong to, made of lightning and laughter that sounded like television static? the spiral lived nestled in his flesh, in his very bones, the thing of doorways and blinding white pain, of breaking storms, the dizzying edge of madness and constant twisting nightmares. the scent of ozone trailed after him like an afterimage, a ghost and legacy he would grow into one day, but today staring at his reflection in the mirror he does not run from it. he does not give it the satisfaction. 

it is the very nature of this aversion that leads him away from the stranger, the edges between the unknown and lying too close to warrant anything closer than a morbid sense of curiosity. 

the eye finds him of its own accord in hand-bound leather he could not read, and for awhile, he didn’t mind it. certainly it was more quiet and unobtrusive than what he had dealt with so far, and was he not himself desiring of knowledge? still more than that, of course, beholding meant to be seen, known and realized in ways he did not want to be, and while mike did not do much secret keeping, he did not enjoy feeling so transparent on terms that were not his own. it was too close, perhaps, to the chords of anxious paranoia already plucked away upon during the sleepless witching hours already.  mike was not sure why he gave the book to the lonely, in turn. ignorance, perhaps, or maybe some vague sense of kinship, for had his feet ever really touched the ground? for all lives fallen in and out of, there was nothing, no one at the other end of the tether. it was not with joy he considered his lack of companionship, it was not how he wanted to live. he put the book in the ground and moved on. and on.

the buried he elected to pass after, he doubted there were enough earth to ever bury his history and found himself a little nauseated in tight spaces. the hunt went around the same, if not with more disdain, for he knew what it was to be prey, and relished in no long-lasting pleasure to imagine himself on the other end. 

desolation was no stranger to his life; senseless, total loss, the white-hot pulse of flesh constantly burning. he found himself something of a guest to the lightless flame for a time, an observer, complicit, seeking something like family in the arms of that searing heat that split him into fractalling, spiraling shards. immolation was its own art form, but pain was never any true calling to inflict. theirs was an admirable dedication to their patron, and one, all the same, he could not find himself participating in. it made parting, understandably, not on the best of terms.

the end was, in its rightful place, the end of things. always there, a patient shadow in his peripheral, somehow, coldly, the only source of stability he would ever claim to have ever held. it did not change, waiver, or disguise its intent - it simply was, in all its forms, and for that mike found some macabre source of comfort. death would wait, so incredibly liminal in a life lived in infinites, and with every step into open skies he begs the question, how long?