Panultima (Scene Three), by Schuyler Cyr

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Small rocks and streams of pebbles crumbled down, as his climbing loosed the unstable pile beneath him. The revelation, that this cave-in had clearly happened recently, came to Ikkabod as the tumbling rocks made the suddenly renewed silence all the more apparent. That’s when a sickening thought occurred to him.
“Harmony are you in there?!” He called, “Please, if you hear me say something, anything!” It was all his naive hope could do to keep him yelling up into the cave instead of down, directly into the stone pile.
There was a pause, again felt and remembered as infinitely longer than it possibly could have taken.
“I-Ikka?”
He choked back a sob. “Harmony! Yeah it’s me! Don’t worry Harm, I’m coming!”
“Hurry..” Her voice had shrunk into a whimper. Ikkabod scrambled. Kicking back a new cascade of loose rocks with every hastened step, he reached the top of the pile in moments. The gap was barely wider than his head, but he was pushing through it nose first as soon as he could. A strangled sigh escaped him as soon as he took in the scene on the other side.
Harmony sat curled up against the right side of the cave wall in the tattered pale pink tunic she always wore to bed. Her arms wrapped around her bent knees, and her eyes were wide and fixed fearfully on the far corner of the rubble pile.
“Ikka I don’t know what’s happened.” She stated vacantly, without averting her gaze.
“Don’t worry, it’s gonna be fine.” He lied, as the sodden mildewed scent of the cave interior brought his attention to their surroundings. The tunnel itself had an oddly smooth cylindrical shape to it. Except for two dark gaping cavities in the ceiling towards the cave mouth which were angled down towards Ikkabod and the great pile of stone beneath him. While the floor was littered with yet another grove of innumerable, eerie, luminous, mushroom pairs which spread as far back into the cave as he could see. Their sickly illumination made it clear that the cave itself went on deep into the hill until it shrunk into an indiscernible dot before revealing any kind of end.
“Watch out, it’s right there.” Harmony warned in a petrified monotone, as she continued to fix her gaze upon two large rocks sitting at the foot of the rock pile along the cave wall opposite her. Ikkabod stared down the pile towards his sister.
“Harm, what are you look-” He saw the eyes. “OH GODS! WHAT THE?!” He started, slipped, and went tumbling down into the cave like so many loose pebbles before him. “ACK! No! Oof! Oh Nonononono!” No sooner had he reached the cave floor than Ikkabod was scrambling away towards his sister without so much as rising to his feet.
“Harmony!” They were both on the floor now, holding each other. “What the fuck?!”
“I don’t know Ikka.” she responded warily, also staring fixedly towards the corner. Her eyes were narrowed and conspicuously devoid of ominus glowing. “But I think it’s stuck.”
The boulder directly across from them was all wrong. Its color and texture matched that of the larger boulder next to it, but the longer Ikkabod looked, the more erroneous the smaller stone became. The profile was far too smooth, uniform grooves ran in curved columns all along its underside, and of course, there was the terribly unmistakable presence of two eyes staring straight at them from its misshapen front side. Exactly five seconds of tense and reciprocated staring ensued between the children and the rock, before Ikkabod finally accepted that he had absolutely lost his mind.
The rough jagged lines of the rock’s surface melted into one smooth continuous plain, while the varying degrees of gray warped into vibrant layered shades of deep milky blue, tinted with streaks of silver and white. The clenched grooves along it’s bottom unfurled out into two long fans of countless wriggling tendrils on either side. The top of the mass sank down against the floor, then what could only be the head emerged. As flat and rounded as the rest of its body, the head stretched out with a smaller curtain of even more tangled palps and barbels hanging down from it’s narrow snout. This entire transition went on for about a second and a half, until a kind of horrible, discolored, amorphous, upturned blossom writhed gently before them. Still staring with that unmistakable, yet altogether other, pair of eyes.
Those eyes, which Ikkabod had first recognized within the false stone, were the only thing that had not changed. The eyes sat there in the creature’s head, angled towards the two frightened children, giving them both an excellent view of just how bizarre this thing really was. Its pupils were not circular. In fact, they weren’t even so much as elliptical. The dark shapes waved and curved in long strips like the many strange appendages squirming beneath it. They seemed to subtly track each of the Nanbu’s slightest movements with minute shifts and twitches. The pupils’ curve traced the equally non-circular shape of the creature’s eyes themselves, which wrapped around the small mounded crown of it’s head.
Though they were hard to discern in detail, that the objects were eyes at all remained quite clear. They watched. Those vague squiggles swiveling along their respective fields towards them. Ikkabod and Harmony swayed side-to-side together, and saw each pupil track their movements without delay.
Caution. The essence of the word inhabited all three of them as they watched each other move through the cave. Left; then right. One, Two.
“Harmony, RUN!!!” This, in retrospect, was a silly thing to say because that’s when he threw her. Ikkabod had never thrown anybody before. He had been taught that it was, especially amongst the seafaring, quite a rude and dangerous thing to do. But now he did, because in that moment all that mattered was saving his sister’s life. Her flight was not anticipated, and its landing was not graceful. However Harmony had been moved almost all the way to the top of the rock slide in a matter of seconds, finding relative safety in a splash of tumbling stones.
Ikkabod looked back to the creature just in time to see it looking back to him. He matched its gaze reluctantly. The entire surface of the thing seemed to be in constant rippling motion, and quite frankly, watching its skin crawl made Ikkabod’s skin crawl. Instead, he watched Harmony regain her footing above him, before realizing that he was now alone in the cave with the beast. It lunged forward, throwing its whole body all at once. Then it snapped back just as quickly, before it could do anything more than trace a small strip of slime across his ankle with the lashing end of one of its longest tentacles. The animal’s tail end still seemed to be pinned securely under the boulder next to it. Ikkabod backed up, making sure he was well out of the monster’s reach, but also distancing himself from the cave’s exit.
“Harmony? You up there?”
“My leg is bruised.”
“That really does suck buddy, sorry for throwing you.” Ikkabod stated evenly, sounding twice as calm as he felt. “Can you get to the top and see outside from there?” A silent moment passed, but he didn’t dare look away. “Harm?” Ikkabod could only bring himself to break eye contact with the creature in one quick glance. In that time he saw Harmony peering out over the pile and back into the jungle. Then she turned back to look at Ikkabod, her eyes flickered with an awful, familiar, cyan light before the entire surface of her eyes snapped into a solid consistent glow, and she fell. The last thing he saw of his youngest sister was her bare upturned feet disappearing over the other side of the rubble heap, amid a soft echoing of bumps and clatters.
“HO NO NO NO HARMONY!” Reaching out and stepping towards the cave mouth, Ikkabod nearly tripped on his own dragging right foot. Looking back, he paused, then tried to bend his right knee again. It creaked weakly by a degree or two. He stared at his own leg dumbfounded, as he realized that he couldn’t feel his toes. Looking up, he noticed that the creature too had shifted its attention to his right leg. Looking back and forth between the thing’s warped eyes and his own useless limb, Ikkabod’s gaze finally fell upon the small patch of moisture still glistening on his bare ankle.
He snapped back up with a glare, and the two met eyes once more. He began shuffling away from the demon as he watched it slowly and deliberately stretch out two narrow tendrilous arms towards one of the pairs of ethereal mushrooms littering the ground before it. Neither of the two would break their mortal staring contest for anything. So without looking away, Ikkabod shambled back, and the creature gently uprooted two caps, raising them to expose the thick singular root which connected their stalks underground.
Ikkabod stopped unconsciously to stare at the thing. His father would have been fascinated, that they all grew in pairs seemed to make some small kind of sense now at least. Before he could reassert his focus from the mushroom, he collapsed to his side as he lost all sensation in his leg. Spluttering and cursing in panic, he managed to sit up, grab his ankle, and try to wipe away the substance with his hands and shirt, while his fellow prisoner watched intently, holding its uprooted caps close. He only spent a handful of seconds wiping his leg before Ikkabod discovered that the surface of his hands had developed a creeping numbness of their own.
“Great! No yeah, absolutely fucking fantastic!” He could still speak, he had that much. “Couldn’t possibly be any better right now! Best day ever am I right Harm?” No answer came to him besides the heavy slithering coming from out of sight to his left. “YEAH OKAY YOU JUST DO YOU OVER THERE I’LL BE FINE! I DON’T NEED ANY HELP OVER HERE! NOBODY NEeds teh plaehbmyunukwuh-” He could only feel the faintest echo of the constricting grasp which began dragging him along by the arm, as Ikkabod finally became an entirely helpless spectator within his own body.
All sensation was entirely dominated by what Ikkabod could not sense. He did not feel the ground as it rumbled and bumped along his back, he only heard the crumbling grind of rubble and the soft groans of plant life shifting along beneath him. He did not feel the bruises on his hip and shoulder, he only remembered the distinct thuds they produced when they broke his fall. And of course, he did not know that his captor had bitten off one of its mushroom caps and had begun tearing the soft disk apart behind the thick palpus curtain that was its mouth, he only saw its warped head draw right up close to his, gob agape. It was the glow. The glow from the tiny mushrooms. The glow from the ship. The glow from Harmony’s eyes. Now those luminescent spores were coating the creature’s mouth just as they had Akki’s the night before. Ikkabod wanted to scream, but even if he hadn’t been paralyzed, his jaw would have been too busy being pried open by the soft, sticky, prehensile mandibles of the beast. It was on him. Clasped about his face and connected by the mouth. Maintaining its firm grasp, the animal’s head rose and tilted forward, and Ikkabod transcended into an otherworldly plane of revulsion. Whatever it was that paralyzed him had left some feeling on the inside. He was aware of the sensation of a damp chewed up pile of fungus as it tumbled down through his throat, bit by revolting bit. Their heads were suspended in this non-consensual face embrace for several silent seconds before being suddenly released and bouncing back down to ground. Now that it was looming over him, Ikkabod could see as the second mushroom cap was pulled from its stalk and devoured. Now the creature held between them one long pale noodle of a root, with two newly revealed stumpy barbs pointing out from each end. These barbs swayed menacingly, like some exotic instrument of torture, held just over his chest. His unmoving eyes could just make out the way their cruel curved ends faded from white to red towards the tips.
Then one barbed noodle-end was raised in a tentacled grasp, and swiftly shoved point first all the way into the animal’s underbelly. A visible shudder rippled all over its body as transparent ooze began dripping from underneath the fresh wound. The ooze grew a faint blueish tint, along with everything else in Ikkabod’s field of vision, as the amorphous beast’s torso shifted closer to Ikkabod’s eyes. The creature had positioned itself, and its wound, and the wound’s noodle, straight over his’s impotent body. The blue tint became brighter, as it poured from his own limp jaw which had begun to loll open. This realization, that the light came from him too now, dawned on Ikkabod as he saw the remaining end of the dangling root raised in a coiled arm, angled downward, then plunged straight into his thigh. Though dulled, the echoes of pain still reverberated from the wound, as shock set in and Ikkabod’s vision began to fade.
The root had pierced him, and he watched as it began to convulse and pulsate rapidly while still running between the two of them. Ikkabod began screaming and thrashing, and so did the creature. It’s screams came as a kind of strangled gurgling howl, but Ikkabod knew immediately the creature was experiencing the same complete loss of control that he was. They both dropped. Writhing together on the floor, Ikkabod only felt his actions now as part of some grotesque first-person show, detached and involuntary, in which his only role was to observe. The light, which he realized was also coming from behind his own eyes now, grew brighter and brighter until it drowned out all vision with its burning intensity. Pain, confusion, and fear, these were the last sensations Ikkabod would ever feel solely as himself, just before everything faded into blackness.


Several times that day, he had begun to suspect that his relationship with reality had become flawed. A floating corpse had opened its eyes and exhaled light, a pile of red crust had pointed out its penis, and of course, a boulder with eyeballs had come to life and force-fed him a mushroom. But it wasn’t until this last mishap that he became sure; this couldn’t be real. He wasn’t sure how long he had been passed out, but apparently in that time the entire universe had plunged into chaos. First of all, color appeared to have given up on the world entirely, and decided to not even bother showing up. While at the same time, his sight had gained the sense of touch. At least, this was the way his mind had begun processing such a new sensation. He had always been able to get a general impression of an object’s texture by looking at it, but now he knew. There was a level of depth to the world he could never have imagined before. The rugged gray jags and sharp creases along the rough gray cave wall were a certainty to him. He perceived the smooth rise and fall of every speckled gray lump, and the shallow plunge of each gray pore, upon the surface of every mushroom cap. He could even track the rapid shifting and creasing of the wrinkles on his own gray shorts as he watched himself twitch and squirm quietly on the cave floor, the sleek gray skin around his closed eyes and mouth forming creases of their own as he saw his own expression rapidly make the subtle shift back and forth between discomfort and consternation. It took a moment before the incongruous nature of this sensation, of watching one’s self from the outside, with closed eyes, fully dawned on him.
Oh yeah, that’s definitely not weird at all. He thought.
“Flurghle, wrolp wrolp shloreh.” He garbled.
It was at that moment when Ikkabod opened his own eyes, and the searing mind numbing headache of a lifetime began. Color was everywhere. He only saw the blue and brown hues that highlighted the cave ceiling, but they were everywhere. Color itself startled him, and he began to wonder how he even had a word for something so strange. This flat vibrant world was just as hard for him to recognize and understand as the deep tactile monochrome one he had found himself in moments before. He lay there transfixed and entirely motionless, staring with equal intensity at the cave ceiling and his own face. It was all he could do to stare, he wanted to wonder at the madness and impossibility of what was happening, but everything he felt also seemed entirely natural.
I should move now. It was the only idea that his thoughts could agree on. So he did what he had always done when he wanted to go somewhere; Ikkabod began lunging his spine up and down, waving his arms and legs back and forth, and wiggling his fingers and toes as fast as he could. He went nowhere, and as he could plainly see, he looked ridiculous, flopping around uselessly on the cold floor, going nowhere.
I should walk now. He corrected his foolish mistake and began walking, Glaucus heaved his upper body up above his lower half, swaying precariously, and began flopping one hind flipper ahead of the next, just as Ikkabod had been doing since he was young. Glaucus’ tendrils splayed out everywhere, his balance gave, and he came squishing down over himself in a limp sagging heap. Ikkabod couldn’t see himself this time, but he knew he must look even more ridiculous now than he had before.
They stewed together in humiliation before something occurred to Ikkabod: Where was the monster?
No sooner had Ikkabod’s thought solidified in Ikkabod’s mind, than a great overwhelming echo of exasperation overcame him.
“Fucking hells, are you serious?” The words came involuntarily from Ikkabod’s mouth, still upturned over the cave floor. Even the phrasing was certainly his, but Ikkabod felt no responsibility for the sentiment. Which was not to say that he couldn’t understand where the thinker of the thought was coming from, after all, there was no way the slimy boy could be that stupid.
In fact, the sooner he catches on the better.
“Okay, what the shit!?” Ikkabod exclaimed as he quickly sat up and turned.
There was the creature, right next to him as he knew he would be, looking at Ikkabod once more. This had already obviously become a day of many first occasions, but this moment, when Ikkabod and Glaucus first met eyes after waking up, would burn brightly in their collective memory for the rest of their interlaced lives.

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