Deep in space there is a warmth. If you held your hand against it, you would feel it radiate, you would feel skin and hair and perspiration – everything so human – radiating into nothingness, moving and squelching from nothing to nothing. The flesh is unending. A planet of flesh, a moon of flesh. It seems to have no mouth, no eyes, no openings, no endings. It is perfect and round and it’s pores flare under your fingers, and you can push the veins in when you find them. Perfection can exist on different scales. Perfection exists in the beauty of radiance in the cold of space, the satisfaction of meat in the emptiness of the galaxy.
You could be killed by it, but it would not be a murder of passion. It does not understand you – and you do not understand it and neither of you have a desire to dig deeper. So you do not.
You do not reach to find it and it will never reach to find you.
In the ocean it waits. Long arms, millions of sharp teeth, an even sharper mind. It hungers for flesh, and more than flesh: violence. It rushes from the depth to ships above – humans invading its home. It crushes them in lethal hugs, it digs its thousand mouths into the wood, tearing holes – holes that, when found by scavengers, will be rationalized into nothingness. If one managed to survive and take a piece of the thing, they would not be believed. We are too eager to shout down the doubters, those who have seen something the rest of us do not want to know. We will never find out what it is, but we will be satisfied with not knowing.
Your existence is fickle next to its endless hunger and for once your flesh may be the answer to its question. It waits in the depths, it can wait forever and maybe you can hide forever from it.
Out in the dark there glow little lights. They come in pairs, the pairs all in respectable distance from each-other. They watch. Their eyes are wide – their mouths fill with drool. It drips past their teeth – designed to tear through your flesh. Shaped to leave an impact on this world. You could have an impact on them the way they have one on you – become their whole world for but a moment – your last moment. How fleeting, how beautiful.
They are vast. They are uncountable. They move as one but act as many. The hounds are coming. The hounds are coming. The hounds are here.
Their teeth gnash in hunger, it is only your selfishness, that keeps them miserable. What else is there to say?
You hardly notice it at first. You are busy, you don't tend to sit in silence – and now that you do you hear it, you wish you could sit in silence again. Instead what you hear is crunching, slow and particular. You have to imagine their mandibles, ever so slightly hairy. Biting and crushing the material of your walls. You hear the buzzing of their wings, the drumming of it against what you thought was impenetrable brick and insulation. The density of most woods, of drywall is lesser than that of the average human cell. But don't worry – they can eat even through fiberglass, which can pride itself with a higher density than your average cell.
It tortures you, the thought of their legs, their pulsating bodies. The mandibles. The gnashing. The crunching. The horrible noises, you hear them even when you're not home. You cannot help it – your body remembers the sound, the feeling of goosebumps and raised hair on your skin.
They are so personal, so close to you and yet you can't see them. Not yet.
It starts with a walk through high grass. It starts with an unexpected encounter. You feel the movement under your clothes and you brush it off as nothing much. Sure, you searched quickly with your hand and found no irritant. Therefore, it was a play of the mind. You cannot help but feel paranoid anyway.
When you arrive home and inspect further, you find them. And when you do, you find them en mass. They do not move, not anymore. They've found their permanent homes. Buried into your skin. You did not feel when they dug into your skin with their horrid little mouth-parts – but now you cannot help but notice it every time you move, every time your clothes rustle against them, every time you brush any part of yourself against any objects. They consume your blood and your mind. And they didn't even need to cover your skin entirely – just a bit.
Pay no mind to the blood however, you'd require ~9090 ticks in order to drink you dry – that would cover not even 0.1% of your skin. Pay mind perhaps instead to the 20 or so diseases ticks can potentially carry
There's always flies around. The pests are irremovable from our lives. We can hardly imagine it without them. They cross us all the time – and this time it changed you.
It carved it's way into you with its feather-light touch. Its eggs are incubating under your skin. The way it bulges and blushes around the irritated area. It itches, but you try to not run your nails over it. You know it runs the risk of infection every time you scratch and you suffer through the agony of not scratching – it burns and screams in your mind, the simple solution glowing before you. With all your restraint, it gets infected anyway. It bleeds milky puss. It leaks a sticky yellow. Almost opaque, but not quite.
Is it the maggots within? Or your nails? Your body in protest?
All you know is that it is irritated, it is protesting and so are you. You are at war with the parasite eating away at you.
It bulges more, tiny little pockets of life under your skin – until they burst and the tiny irritants worm free.
They leave behind a myriad of holes, glowing and bleeding. You are stuck with it.
You live within the final horror. You have no other choice. Your consciousness is endless and it is trapped in a finite body. You have an expiration date. You exist physically and you have no way to tap out that doesn't end you.
You are forced to witness and stick with every horror that is committed to your body. Your mind may try to protect you but it can only try.
There is always something, some creaky joint, some leaking somewhere, an irritation, a feeling. Some unexplained – most unnecessary. Your body gets sick without your consent, it aches without your consent, bleeds without your consent.
You are helpless.
Your demise could come without warning, it could be inflicted upon you, or it could come at random.
But it is going to come.
And we stopped fighting it.
We committed the greatest sin of all: Apathy.
What else is there to do, after all?