This is My Body

Maertock staggered into his cabin as he clutched his sides, exhaling a degree of white frost as he felt a sense of foul cold run through him. His mind had been a dazed, gentle sea since he devoured the kraken’s mana, thoughtless and drifting. As if not entirely in his control. He barely remembered the trip back from the hunt, it was all foggy and dark in the depths of his mindscape.

Grimacing as he staggered to reach for a nearby bottle to dull his senses, a tentacle extended from his own shadow to clasp his hand, halting his movement with a sudden gesture entirely alien to his own. The shadow shark would shudder at that, glancing at the tentacle as it writhed around his arm; black eyes of the abyssal depths sprouting upon its length as they stared into his depths.

His head suddenly pounded with agonizing pain as he clutched his hat, his vision going blurry and black as immense pain sifted through his form.

Words came from his mouth that were not his own.

“This vessel is fragile. It’d be simple to destroy it, and yet it felled my carcass. What is it to think of this?”

The sirenian would gag as he vomited a black stream of ooze, heaving steadily as his arms hung limply from his side. His eyes widened not with surprise, not with amusement as the laid back reaver always maintained. Genuine, primordial fear; the innate anxiety at the thought of losing control.

He looked for a witty retort, anything to play for a laugh. But he was so, so very afraid.

His heart suddenly felt as if it was being crushed from within, the shark gagging once more as blood spewed from his mouth, streaming through his serrated rows of teeth like a crimson river flowing through a forest of ivory.

“I followed the map. Sunk the last herald of the deep to do so; reckon its my mantle to keep now. It was always gonna be me or you. I picked me. You saw who he chose.”

Silence, as if his ears had been deafened from within. Then went his sight, that he could not perceive his surroundings. His nose was suddenly assaulted by the smell of rotting squid. A putrid, horrible odor was all he could perceive, amplifying its potency to the agonizing extreme.

Then there was nothing. Nothing for what felt like forever. A cold dark with no end in sight, time having no meaning in the senseless, black abyss of the prison that was his own body.

Until suddenly he was heaving on the floor, his senses restored.

“It thinks this one is arrogant. It could destroy your mind for its pleasure, but it hasn’t. Does it wonder why? “

More words that were not his own left his lips tasting of sour rot, another vomit of black, inky ooze upon the ground as his eyes teared up involuntarily.

“You’d destroy your mind too; body has no use if its brain doesn’t work. Not a real vessel. Damning yourself to idiocy. Too egocentric for that, you wouldn’t.”

It was becoming hazy for Maertock when his words were his own, and when they weren’t; not unlike a progressive, building pressure as his mind swayed and melded in eldritch shapes only an ancient demigod kraken of the deep would manifest.

“It could always just take this flesh. Weak, not like its own. How long could it fight back?”

Without a thought; almost as if this trusty companion had a mind of its own, Saltspite’s blade was suddenly drawn with the blade pointed up to his throat.

“Then I’ll end us all. Before you can. Won’t stop me, I don’t give up, this is my body. Join me, and we become more powerful.”

All of a sudden,  every nerve in the shark’s body felt as if it was jabbed with razors; the endings fizzing and agonizing his every movement as he rolled upon the ground in pain. Black ooze continued to be vomited as a puddle of ink like substance settled in upon a welling pool upon his chest.

Before a tentacle rose, with an eye. It stared right through Maetock in a sense.

“It understands how it fell. It will have what it desires in time. It will not have its vessel destroyed until then…..it will shadow its every step.”


All of a sudden, it was as if after a long journey at sea his mind finally cleared through a cloudy haze. The inky gathered around his form from all that he had vomited up involuntarily, fusing into the inky cloak of shadows that manifested around his form in an ever present obsidian shroud as it suddenly grew murkier, dense, more predatory and ominous. The ink that made up the manifested darkness warped constantly in maddening trajectories, tentacles and eyes sprouting outwards ambiently from its depths.

The kraken had become his shadow; it’s ink was the darkest in all of the horrible abyss.