Volume 1: Path - [Awakening Arc]
Chapter 1: From filth, came beauty.
Read the Author's Note before you start reading.
...
Sunlight filled every nook and cranny of a lovely garden with golden warmth. The tall, old trees at the garden's edges had thick branches that spread a cathedral-like canopy above them, and their trunks were twisted with age.
An old willow with gently swaying tendrils near the east, a silver-leaved olive tree casting flickering shadows near the center, and the tall sycamore in the northwest were all of different species.
An ancient brass faucet set into the ground kept the dewy fresh, and the grass was lush, bright green, and soft underfoot. With sporadic hisses, it sprayed erratic misty water arcs, creating tiny rainbows in the atmosphere.
Hiss... shhh...
Bright blooms were arranged like a living compass in the center of the garden: milkweed to the east, swaying gently in the breeze, coneflowers to the west, standing proud in soft pinks, asters to the north with violet and white hues, and zinnias to the south in a burst of red and orange.
Butterflies swarmed around these flowers. Smaller, bright-blue Common Blue butterflies fluttered among the Asters, while monarchs with their distinctive orange and black wings danced above the Zinnias.
A rare purple emperor shimmered with iridescent violet hues near the coneflowers. The delicate Swallowtails spread their pale yellow wings like stained glass at the Milkweed.
Low-growing bushes belonging to the butterfly bush family surrounded the garden beds. From a distance, the subtle scent emanating from their lavender-colored blossoms beckoned butterflies.
The majority of the butterflies drank deeply from the nectar while nestled here, their wings motionless.
Through the silence of the garden came a quiet voice, very feminine and warm, "Cael."
"Yes, Mother." After a moment, a soft, slightly hollow voice answered.
The Mother once again spoke, her voice was a melody that hardly stirred the rotting air as she beckoned again, "Come here."
The boy responded, "Yes, I am coming," as he came into sight.
A thirteen-year-old child with midnight-black hair that has ghostly silver flecks at the ends. His pale, gaunt face was shadowed by his fringe, which blocked his eyes. In the daylight, his skin appeared nearly translucent and sickly white. He resembled a sculpture of something that had once been alive because of his hollow cheeks and sharp, angular jawline.
His clothes fit his body; a black techwear jacket with a high collar clung to his slender frame, its silver zippers resembling surgical sutures. His black cargo pants were stark and clean-cut, with matte buckles that shone like restrained chains, and beneath it a dark gray turtleneck held him close. His feet were bare, the flesh touched by sunlight that felt too bright for his presence.
The boy ran lightly, unnaturally quiet, toward the flowers and the butterflies. Tap... tap...
He moved with unnatural silence toward the garden's center.
There, his mother and father waited inside a perfect ring of flowers. Seven paths converged on them like a ritual diagram. The symmetry was eerie. Too exact.
He ran to them. His mother opened her arms. Her embrace was warm.
But her face blurred. Her features were missing.
His father's as well. Both were silhouettes, memories fading before completion.
As the hug ended, his expression twisted in horror as he looked at his parents. His gaze fell on his mother's right eye socket, which was grotesquely empty. An optic nerve dangled from the hollow, the eye itself completely gone. There was no blood, no gore leaking from the void. Instead, a caterpillar emerged. S
quirm... wriggle...
Its body was a segmented coil of obsidian-black flesh, slick and glossy like oiled stone. Faint crimson runes etched into each segment glowed like embers pulsing with forbidden energy. Dozens of shadowy tendrils writhed and curled from its sides, never still, as if constantly searching for something unseen.
Its face was smooth and featureless, except for six glowing red eyes arranged in a chilling formation, giving it a cold, watchful presence. The tendrils atop its head twisted like smoke in still air, and its entire form radiated a creeping, soul-staining dread.
Paralyzed with fear, he turned to his father to cry out. But what he saw next rooted him in place. His father's hair was gone, and his skull had been split open. His brain was exposed, glistening in the light. Dozens of identical caterpillars crawled within the folds, devouring the matter and drinking the fluids. Squish... slurp... chew...
Instinctively, the boy pushed away from his mother's embrace. His eyes were wide in terror as the world around him began to twist. The colors dulled into a suffocating reddish-brown, the trees around them drained of all life, becoming withered husks.
The grass that once felt fresh beneath his feet vanished, evaporating into air. The vibrant flowers shriveled and died in seconds. Crack... crinkle...
As he tried to back away, his body struck an invisible barrier. Thud! He collapsed forward, breath caught in his throat, and when he raised his eyes, he was forced to look at them again.
His mother's condition had worsened. The caterpillars gushed out of her right eye socket, and then the left collapsed too, spilling more of the black-red monstrosities. But it didn't stop there.
From her nose, mouth, ears, genitals, and even from torn patches of her skin and hidden folds, the infestation erupted.
Splurt... hiss... squelch...
The creatures gnawed their way out through her flesh, carving bloody tunnels slick with internal decay.
His father's brain had been entirely consumed. The caterpillars, slick with cranial fluid, stacked themselves atop one another and slithered free from the ruined skull. They poured out of the skull as they fell to the ground. Then, with a bone-splitting CRACK, his father's spine shattered.
The corpse bent unnaturally backward, limbs jerking into impossible angles. His chest caved in, ribs broken and missing, others stripped clean to gleaming marrow. Shreds of muscle hung like torn cloth, quivering as the caterpillars passed through.
Twitch... twitch...
His mother's form was even worse. Her torso had collapsed as if her insides dissolved into acid. Her flesh sagged like soggy parchment, full of holes. Her legs gave out beneath her, and her arms were locked mid-scratch, fingers buried into her own skin, trying to dig something out. Her throat, torn wide, became a passage for the flood of black-red caterpillars that flowed from her mouth like a dam had burst.
Gushhhhh...
Each larva glistened with a dark sheen, its pulsing body filled with madness and meat. They tunneled through the corpses like through eyes, jaws, spines, and groins, chewing flesh like fruit and cartilage like brittle crackers.
Crunch... chomp... squish...
One squirmed from within his father's jaw, curling between yellowed teeth. Another writhed through his mother's ruined pelvis and ribs.
Cael's legs couldn't move, trembling under the horror of watching his parents being consumed.
Then came the spinning of silk strands.
By binding flesh and wet muscle into thick strands of silk, the caterpillars started weaving with nerve fibers.
Hiss... slick...
As pupae throbbing with unborn life, pulsing, veined sacs appeared. Their bodies had devolved into hideous nests, serving as scaffolding for the subsequent phase.
Then there was the sound. A break and immediately a split.
The cocoons exploded violently, not gently. SCHLUK! SPLOTCH! with meaty, moist squelches.
The gore spilled sparked horror.
In name only, they were butterflies. Their long, jagged wings resembled ripped veils or stretched daggers, their elegance broken and reconstructed into a threat. With glowing red veins that resembled ancient, cursed runes pulsing with forbidden energy or cracks in scorched glass, the wings shimmered a deep black. Light twisted into shadows, bent away, and did not flow through them.
They had slender, dark bodies that seemed to be made of ink suspended in water or condensed smoke, rather than being solid. They had ethereal tendrils in place of legs, which twisted and hung with every step, creating ghostly trails in their wake.
They had round, small, and frightfully motionless heads. Like hot coals in a dying world, two red eyes blazed from each other with soul-piercing clarity. Long, curved antennae that writhed gently and twitched with unnatural life—thin like wires but alive like flesh—extended from their foreheads.
There was nothing gentle about them.
They didn't flutter; rather, they haunted.
Wrrrrrr...
As the final wing fluttered, the garden transformed once more.
Spider lilies exploded from the corpses. Fwoom! The man's chest split again as wet red blossoms tangled around his ribs. His wife's eye sockets poured petals, and her mouth overflowed with red blooms.
From filth came beauty.
The grass turned to black rot. The flowers are dead. The world around them had reddened, desecrated.
The garden had become a grave. A sanctuary for the damned.
It was a place only the dead could love.
As if the corpses had nourished the soil itself, red spider lilies bloomed where death had struck. The trees collapsed into mush. From their branches, more caterpillars rained down, crawling toward the boy. Plop... plop... squelch...
The boy stood still, his body frozen in revolt.
His stomach twisted. His spine convulsed. Then, violently, he vomited.
HUAAAAGH!! SPLASH!
But what came out wasn't bile.
It was life.
Hundreds... no, thousands... of black-red caterpillars burst from his throat. Oily, wet, and slick with rot, as if hell itself had delivered them. They landed in a quivering mass, and without pause, they turned toward him in perfect unison.
Skitter... skitter...
The boy felt his heart beat faster than ever, the thump-thump-thump pounding like thunder in his chest. He turned around slowly, struggling to rise from the ground.
Shhhh... rustle...
Even with his legs trembling violently, he managed to push himself upright. His gaze locked onto a tall mirror. This was… this was the one that had caused him to stumble when he tried to move backward from his parents. What he saw in the mirror stopped his breath. Gasp...
Standing within the reflection was a man, older than him by about eight years, but otherwise identical. Same face. Same bone structure. Same hair. But everything else was different.
He was a tall, slender figure encased in ripped cloth and shadows, standing at the edge of the light. Despite his thin build, he had the toughened edge of someone who had endured too much. Stretched taut over a wiry frame and angular features, pale skin almost glowed against the darkness.
Layers of tattered fabric and bandages cinched around his arms and waist like makeshift armor, and his clothes were fluttering and ragged with weathered flaps. As though he had outlived a thousand promises, a long black cloak hung from his shoulders, tattered and spectral.
Untamed and unconcerned, his hair fell across his face in a wild, tangled mess of inky curls. However, it was the eyes—those eyes—that struck like a blow to the gut.
Fwoosh...
Lurid, glowing red, filled with an ancient fury or curse. In them was a hollow emptiness, as if he had seen the worst of the world and made peace with it.
Scars marked his skin like whispers from forgotten wars. Dried blood crusted the collar of his shirt, a memory he refused to wash away. Every inch of him radiated quiet danger, like his soul had been stitched together with pain and loss.
He looked twenty, but his aura screamed older, ancient in trauma, and ageless in silence. He was the kind of presence that seared itself into memory.
And the boy realized, with chilling clarity, that the man in the mirror... was him.
He heard his heart beat, Thumping...
silence...
[End of Chapter 1]