CRITIQUE WANTED WRITING YOU WHO WOULD EAT WILL BE EATEN

[Hecatoncheires]

YOU WHO WOULD EAT WILL BE EATEN
1.1 (2nd Draft)​

INTRODUCTION

There's an old line attributed to Genghis Khan that I discovered recently, which goes a little something like "there is no good in anything, until it is done". As a writer who never finishes anything he starts, I've taken this as both a personal attack and as something of a call to action.

You Who Would Eat Will Be Eaten is an Action Body Horror story drawing inspiration from Castlevania and Nechronica, as well as my attempt to actually sit down and try and get a project hammered out start to finish. It's also one of several ideas I have floating about (the joys of an easily distracted brain that prefers the whimsy of the idea to the difficulty of 'make idea into actual story'). I'm envisaging it as something I could write as a Web Serial, requiring concise but regular updates to try and keep my own writing momentum going. Before I commit to such a plan, however, I need to know if the story's actually, y'know. Not awful.

That's where you (hopefully) come in.

This is the opening section of the story, so I'm curious to know whether it hooks anyone in or if it falls flat. I'm open to whatever feedback you've got, so please don't feel the need to pull your punches: I'm (reasonably) certain my ego can take it. In addition to that, I'd also love to hear your thoughts on a few specific things:

• Are the Body Horror elements too much, or not enough? I find I can't really trust my own judgement on this one. For one, I'm a bit of a gorehound when it comes to films and books. Yet I've read stories that other people proclaimed to be "too much" that struck me as quite tame, and other stories that got under my skin (pardon the pun) didn't seem to hit as hard for other people. A fresh pair of eyes would be ideal.
• Is Piper's condition coming through properly? I can't quite decide if the setup for Piper's mental fugue is too much, or not enough. Or even if it works at all. Does it intrigue, or frustrate?

---

"The fairy tales warn you:
Do not go in,
you who would eat will be eaten."
- Jane Hirshfield, 'Amor Fati'​

I awoke amidst the fog with a pounding headache, a burning itch beneath my skin, and absolutely no recollection of how I had found myself in such a desolate place.

Less than five minutes later, I was also convinced that something was following me.

I couldn't put my finger on exactly how I knew this. It was a scratching, nervous feeling that had me looking over my shoulder as I drifted through the fog, some ancestral instinct lingering from a time when humanity was not the dominant species on our planet. It had me moving, plunging through the gloom, even before I'd had the chance to get my bearings.

Then the screams began. That told me I had to run.

They sounded almost human. That was the worst part. Like some half-remembered song I'd listened to years ago and then forgotten, I could catch some familiar notes amidst those howls. Yet they were shifted, altered to a pitch and strain that made me recoil. No human being ought to be capable of making those sounds. They dogged me as I fled across unfamiliar moorland choked by fog, my eyes glued to the ground as I tried not to lose my footing amidst the gloom.

Even the ground was alien, bare earth and grass seemingly desaturated of all colour to leave only the whites and greys. As the screeches continued behind me, I focused my attention on a sparse thicket of trees I could just about make out through the incessant fog. It didn't look like much, but it was at least something I could take cover behind if I got there before my pursuer. I couldn't keep my fingernails from scratching at my skin, even as I ran. Nothing brought relief: this was eczema on steroids.

Panic lent me speed, and my pursuer fell behind by degrees even as the fog began to thin. Bounding down the hill I launched into a sprint, somehow managing to keep my footing on the uneven ground. My breath was coming fast as I finally reached the thicket's perimeter, ducking under branches to make my way within. Whatever the hell that thing behind me was, I had absolutely no wish to meet it in person. Every step through the undergrowth was accompanied by brittle snaps, as though I was walking across a bed of bones. I winced, trying and failing to keep the noise down. In the end I decided that speed trumped stealth. Crouching and weaving, my leggings and jacket catching on gnarled branches equally as devoid of colour as the ground, I tucked myself behind the thickest tree trunk I could lay eyes on. The screeches warbled through the fog behind me, but it could not see me now. I just needed to keep my head down and wait for it to move on.

But I didn't keep my head down. I instead made the horrible mistake of looking up.

Up through the last vestiges of mist that had been obscuring the world around me until now. Up through the spidery tree branches to the skyline above. Up to the shape that had been looming there all this time, waiting for me to notice it. Before I could wrench my eyes shut or turn my head away, I looked upon the Castle.

It reared out from the earth to fill the skyline, stretching up beyond the point my neck could strain to. Even though I knew I was looking upon stone or metal, my first thought was that I was gazing at some gargantuan tree with myriad branches stemming off from the main trunk. Only upon closer inspection could I not deny that I was looking at towers and spires jutting outwards to hang in the air, nothing but a thin connecting passage seeming to hold them in place. It was impossible. Cognitive dissonance made manifest in stone and steel. Yet there it stood, in defiance of conception and the laws of physics. The shape that lurked behind it, backlighting it in grey shades, could not be called a sun. Nor a moon. It was a void, a burning black orb that seemed to swallow all colour and light around it.

My mind reeled, desperately reaching for something, anything, to justify the sight before me. To explain just where in the hell I had found myself, shivering and beyond any frame of reference my head could conjure. There was nothing. My brain was empty noise, a television tuned to a dead channel. Images and sensations flashed through it as my panic grew, devoid of context or meaning. The exterior of a university building, all sleek glass and metal. The sliding sensation of a train carriage drawing to a halt. Had I been a student there? A visitor? The memories and experiences needed to make sense of it all were just out of reach, no matter how much I strained and searched. I was aware of them only through their absence. Lost, in the truest sense of the word possible. Both to myself, and to the world around me.

Then the screams came again.

A nervous jolt forced me to sit up. They weren't a memory echoing through the damaged recesses of my head, but tangible. Echoing through the trees, and closing fast. My pursuer was just outside the thicket, bearing down on me in spite of my hidden position. Had it seen me going in? Had it just got lucky? Hunters do not track through sight alone, something told me, and my heart sank. It could smell me. With a curse, I threw myself onto my feet and started moving. Had I waited another second, I never would have moved again.

Something tore through the section of tree I'd been slumped against, embedding itself into the trunk. I had the briefest flash of a pale, writhing shape, then I was past it. The sound of bark splintering behind me mixed with an enraged, guttural howl loud enough to make my ears vibrate. My pursuer was back, in force. How was it moving so fast? Just minutes ago it had seemed a lurching, ungainly thing, but suddenly it was inches from taking my head off. Fear spiked, pushing me forwards through branches and underbrush to burst through the opposite side of the thicket. You'll never get far enough if it has your scent. The thought rippled through my mind even as I fled out across the moorland again. The Castle loomed down upon me from the darkling sky, mocking my every step. The itching beneath my skin spiked: there was blood beneath my fingernails as I scratched.

You have nowhere to run, that same rogue thought insisted again. I ignored it. Pushed forwards. What else was there to do? Fight or flight had me in their grip, and the latter was winning the argument. The only way out is through, Piper. That caught me off guard, the panic losing its grip on me slightly. Was I losing what little of my mind I had left? Or did I just have an overactive subconsciousness making its presence known?

Yet there was something else starting to drive at me through the fear. A scent wafting from behind me, from my pursuer. Sharp and cloying, coppery yet somehow warm. It stirred something within, something that made my skin crawl. Another voice spoke. Another instinct making itself known. No words, nothing so tangible. It just pulsed, hot and violent. Resonating with the scent. Despite everything, I could feel myself growing angry. Something was making me angry.

My pace was slowing without me even realising. I knew I needed to keep moving. To keep running. That thing would be on me any second now if I didn't. But with every heartbeat my rage was growing. With every hit of that scent in the air, something else was beginning to develop. Something disturbingly close to hunger. It was a craving that did not belong to me, and yet it still made my stomach lurch uncomfortably. I had the horrible sense that I was losing control of my own body.

I was not alone inside my head. Nor was I the only one calling the shots now.

Arms burning with every motion, I found myself twisting about to face the thing that had dogged my footsteps ever since I awoke. It was charging at me like a maddened berserker. All sense of self-preservation lost to it. From the legs up it could pass for human, clad in the remains of a business suit. A tie even dangled uselessly from it's neck. That thin scrap of fabric acted as the border between ordinary man and horror. Where it's head should be, something had erupted. Fleshy, tubular segments flailed madly as it came, stretching longer than the full length of it's body and ending in a puckered maw. A scream erupted as the mouth opened, revealing layers of fangs that retreated beyond sight.

This was insane. Beyond sense. Any ordinary person ought to be screaming and running. But the smell was too much. The hunger was relentless. A call to action.

The things beneath my skin were more than willing to answer it.

They pushed through my torn skin pores, swelling and distending as they came. Tangled coils of white, writhing worms that began to weave themselves around my arms like the hand wraps of a boxer. Forging themselves into the imitations of flesh and sinew, of muscle. Within seconds my limbs had swelled to inhuman proportions, stretching out to brace against the oncoming creature.

Another scream tore itself loose from the flailing horror rushing me. This time, it was met by another. A roar of challenge and fury spilling from me before I could stop myself. That wordless impulse inside of me taking control of my very voice.

Us or them, Piper, something whispered.

I decided at that moment that it sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

YOU WHO WOULD EAT WILL BE EATEN
1.2 (2nd Draft)​

We launched ourselves at one another like starving dogs, full of desperation and fury.

I was moving with a speed I had not known I possessed, with a fluidity that seemed completely alien. Under the lashing maw of the creature. Closing the distance between us. Artificial muscles tensed, the worms seeming to anticipate the coming impact. A wild overhand slammed home. That was a term that resonated with me. 'Overhand'. 'Jab'. 'Hook'. Muscles remembering what my mind could not. The force of the blow resonated all the way up my shoulder, lifting the flailing monstrosity bodily from it's feet. Sending it flying backwards into the wispy grass of the moor.

Even as it hit the earth, I was in pursuit. Pressing the attack. The worms demanded blood, and I was dancing to their tune. My aggression almost cost me dearly: I made the mistake of expecting human movements from an entity that no longer fit such a category. The creature's head drove itself into the ground like a coiling spring, propelling it's body at me. I felt my blood surge. I was reacting even before the danger had truly registered, slipping under the humanoid form being used as a flail and swatting it away. Yet again I was caught out by it's inhuman nature. I focused on the body, not it's elongated mockery of a head. Puckering jaws snapped at me as it careered past, inches from my face.

There was no grace to my pursuer. It hit the ground like a body flung from a car. Rolling, spasming back upright. Charging. Muscle memory brought my engorged hands up to my head, angled my body towards the oncoming threat. The worms, that wordless urging within me, were driving me to push forwards, but I fought down the impulse. The creature's fury was making it predictable: I just needed to get the timing down.

Coiling, lunging, the segmented head snaked out towards me. Maw open. Fangs exposed. Aiming straight for my throat. All I had to do was match it for speed. Arms that had swollen to inhuman size by the mass of worms moved into place as I slipped. Rose. Grasped. The momentum carried us both round in a furious dance as I swung the creature off it's feet. Another twist of my arms sent it soaring upwards. Then I heaved down.

My pursuer hit the earth with enough force to make the ground shake. Bones splintered with the impact. Screeches erupted from it as it tried to writhe upwards again but I was already closing. Crashing down upon the thing before it could rise. The wordless fury of the worms reached a crescendo, and I no longer had the power to ignore it. No longer wanted to ignore it. Hammer fists rained down like artillery shells, barraging the prone form beneath me. Fingers clad in pale extensions grasped, pulled tore. It was like my blood was singing in tandem with the violence, my whole body vibrating with hunger and rage. Any terror this thing had provoked in me before was long gone. All that was left was frenzy… and a terrible, aching need. Snake-like, it's head snapped up in a final impetuous attempt to drive me off. But it was so slow now, as though the beast was crawling at me through waist deep water. My hands snatched out to grasp the head before it even got close. The maw flailed and spasmed in my grip, trying and failing to wrench itself free. Someone was laughing. I was laughing. A maddened, triumphant sound that was not from my own volition. I didn't care.

I squeezed. Twisted.

Beneath my fingers I felt the thing tear. Then burst.

Dark gore ruptured from the space where the thing's head had been just seconds before. Coursing down over me. Over the headless body. The network of worms that formed my artificial arms seemed to sway and weave like sunflowers basking on a bright day, drinking in the reeking blood. My head swam as the full force of the scent hit me. Intoxicating. Overwhelming. I gazed down upon the body I still straddled, taking in the sight of it. The tender, pulverised flesh that glistened with gore. Red blood still spurting from the ragged stump. My stomach ached, suddenly ravenous. A phantom hunger that was not truly mine, yet still demanded to be sated. At that moment, I was only too happy to give in. Why should I not? To the victor, the spoils. To the hunter, the meat.

The corpse's arm was almost to my mouth when my eyes focused on it's hand. Something glinted there, faintly glimmering in the gloom of our surroundings. A ring. Just a simple gold band on it's fourth finger. It sparked something in my head. Something that pushed through the fugue of hunger. That other voice again, needling at me. This was once a husband. Perhaps a father. A man.

Revulsion hit me like a blast of cold water, shifting 'it' to 'he' within my mind. He was once a man. Whatever he had become, he was once a man. A strangled cry erupted from me and I hurled the arm away, disgust casting the scene before me in a horrifying new light. The brutalised body. The blood. The worms. I stared at them like I was seeing them for the first time, truly seeing them: these wraps of artificial muscle that had seemed so natural seconds ago now made my gorge rise at the very sight of them.

I pulled at them. Trying to rip them away. My breath came in ragged, infrequent gasps. My head was suddenly swimming in a cacophony of sensations as the worms protested. As my panic rose to boiling point. Above it all, I was consumed by a single, frantic urge.

I wanted them out. Now.

The worms recoiled, seeming to respond to my revulsion as they receded back beneath my skin. I let out a shriek, scratching at them in a desperate bid to dig them out. I could feel them moving, sliding between the layers of my flesh. An invasion. A violation. I fell backwards, writhing and clawing at my own body like a woman possessed. I gouged at my skin, raking it with my nails. No matter how deeply I dug in, I could not get at them.

For how long I lay there, I could not say. The only thing that registered was when my frenzied state had at last receded. My skin no longer bulged and crawled with parasitic movement, and though I could still feel that wordless hunger in the dark spaces of my mind it seemed that whatever festered inside of me had gone dormant. All that was left in its place was an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. Even the prospect of opening my eyes felt daunting. Not that I would dare. I lay there, shuddering, as the wispy grass of the moor clung to my damp clothes. Knowing that if I opened my eyes, he would be lying there next to me. Skin beginning to cool. Blood beginning to congeal. Knowing that although one part of me would be overwhelmed by disgust at the sight, there would be something else beneath it. Something forced upon me, riding my body's impulses to make its demands known. Even lying there in the grass was bad enough, because I could still smell the body I had just created.

The scent still made my mouth water. And it was enough to make me want to start screaming again.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

YOU WHO WOULD EAT WILL BE EATEN
1.3 (2nd Draft)​

It was a long time before I was able to pull myself back onto my feet and slink away from the scene like a kicked animal. With every step my skin burned. Not just from the deep gouges I'd carved into it with my nails at the height of my panic, but from beneath. I could feel them in there. An alien, sliding sensation as those things dragged themselves across muscle and sinew. Wound their way around bone. I wanted to scream, to start digging at my flesh yet again, but all that would achieve was bloodied arms and further frustration. My brain might have been a mirror that someone had just put their foot through, but something told me that this was a maladey I wasn't going to be able to fix myself. This was Porton Down territory I was suddenly immersed in, the sort of thing they sent men in moon suits to contain.

Typical. I knew about highly secretive biological research labs, but I couldn't recall the faces of my parents. Or whether I was even a student. Or, for that matter, how the hell I'd found myself in this nightmare to begin with.

Yet if my skin burned, then the shame and disgust burned brighter. Hotter. Searing. I could not bring myself to look at the corpse I was leaving behind as I stole away across the ashen moors, but even that wasn't enough to escape it. The smell chased me, lingering in my nostrils long after it would have been out of sight. Every intake of it made the worms move faster, sent another alien hunger pang coursing up to prod at my mind. I should have looked. That would have been the decent thing to do. To look upon the aftermath of my actions, reflect upon what I had been about to do. But that would have been the end of me, I was certain. The shame and disgust would have risen to an inferno, and there would have been nothing left of me.

So I ran. Like a chicken shit little coward I ran, fleeing across the moorland.

Nothing about that place made sense. It was like I was walking through some surrealist painting, a landscape rendered only in whites and greys. The ghost of a landscape, lifeless and empty. No signs of life, no lights in the distance. No stars and constellations to guide me to safety. There was only the Castle. Amidst that void, it was the one constant. The north star of a pale and forsaken land that I found myself wandering through. It disturbed as much as it seemed to invite. Pin pricks of light twinkled from it's many windows, and even through the ever present fog I was sure I could see gatehouses and archways on it's lowest sections. Even the things infesting me seemed drawn to it: I could feel fluttering impulses whenever my eyes fell upon those walls. Unbidden, the image of slaughterhouse gates leapt into my head with near perfect clarity, and I felt my jaw tighten.

Gazing up at that cacophony of impossible architecture, I sucked in a long breath.
"Yeah," I muttered, as much to the Castle as to myself, "bugger quite literally everything about that."

Then I spun on the spot, exhaled, and quite deliberately set off in the opposite direction.

I had no idea what I had found myself submerged in. Just minutes before I'd found myself quite on board with the notion of cannibalism, and nothing about that structure filling the horizon behind me suggested that things were going to get any less weird. Maybe this was all a delusion of some kind. It sure as hell didn't feel like it, but then madness has an annoying habit of disguising itself as clarity. Delusion certainly felt like a solid working hypothesis. Regardless of my mental state, I was quite certain that men with writhing tendrils in lieu of heads did not typically roam the countryside in search of victims.

But whatever it was, I wanted no part of it. I was going to take my bloodstained self back through the fog, find myself some sign of civilisation, then follow it back to a place where sanity and the laws of physics still held sway.

The trouble was that such a sign of civilisation and normality was not forthcoming. I strode through those pale hills, increasingly feeling like I was travelling through the aftermath of some apocalyptic event by way of a labyrinth. I refused on principle to turn round, to look back. I knew all too well that the Castle would not have moved. It would be leering down at me. Mocking me. Cursing, I quickened my pace. I just needed a road. A house with a phone. I forced myself to believe that normality was still out there. All I had to do was get away from that damned Castle.

The fog was a sea now, swelling and ebbing around me. Draining the already still world of the last vestiges of sound and colour. The grass seemed to be calcifying beneath my feet. It crunched like frost with every step. Still I pressed on. Determined. Or stupid. Ignoring the warning signs.

I nearly missed the moment when the ground gave way entirely.

At the last second my eyes registered something, a deeper darkness in the fog beyond. My foot was hovering out over it before it registered in my mind. I yelped. Lunged backwards. Lost my balance and toppled. The force of my landing buffeted the fog around me, sending it spiralling outwards and revealing the emptiness ahead. The pallid earth had ended in a sheer cliff. Clean cut, as though carved by precision tools. Beyond was an abyss, as black as the shape that hung behind the Castle. Confusion was giving way to panic as I hauled myself upright, waving an arm in a vain attempt to banish the fog. My head swept left and right as I told myself this was just a cliff. There was something beyond it. There had to be. I was not trapped, being driven like cattle to the slaughter. Being driven through the gates of the one place I was adamant I did not want to enter.

So I walked. Then jogged. Then finally I ran. Winding along the edge of that unnatural cliff-face in the desperate hope that it might end. Might open out to more moorland, or a bridge. An end never came. Panic was morphing, swelling like my arms had done just minutes before into full-blown fear. I twisted about to face the looming shape I had tried to escape, screaming up at the Castle mindlessly. It offered no answer. Why would it? The damned thing had me in it's grasp already, and we both knew it.

Piper. Focus.

I blinked, snapped out of my little bout of self pity. There was something scratching in my head. The worms making their presence known again. I'd been ignoring it, writing it off as more foreign hunger pangs, but the voice's interruption made me realise that the sensation was different. Not hunger, but tension. A warning. The scent came next, sending a shiver up my arms. Another one of those headless things? The scent was different, though. Less cloying. Maybe even enticing, somehow. That last thought didn't belong to me, I told myself. That was the worms speaking. I really needed to believe that.

Through the fog, a shape emerged. Just a silhouette whose form was little more than a guttering candle within the fog. I tensed, caught between the warning sirens the things occupying my body were sounding and the urge to meet someone who's head wasn't a thrashing mass of flesh. I'd gone in search of help, had I not? That steadied my nerves. Allowed me to force the alien impulses clawing at the edges of my mind back into unhappy acquiescence. A voice called through the mist, muted and flat. A man's voice, young and surprisingly upbeat given our surroundings.
"Hey! Just to clarify before I get any closer, you're definitely people, right?"
"Last I checked, yeah," I called back, before I could stop myself. My passengers were restless again. A hornet's nest flaring up in response to a threat. It gave me pause, but I'd already run my mouth.

In comparison to the monstrosity I had met previously, the man who at last came into view was surprisingly mundane. He had the vibe of a university seminar tutor, all scruffy attempts at smart casual and an ill-kept beard. His face was round, maybe even friendly, but as he held up his hand in greeting I felt my skin prickle. The smell was worse now, and somehow I could taste his breath on the air. The sharp, metallic notes lingering on it. That I didn't like at all. Stopping perhaps ten feet from me, he slowly lowered his arm.
"You look even more lost than I feel, if you don't mind me saying," he remarked, studying me in a way I wasn't entirely comfortable with. The smile he flashed me was no doubt meant to be reassuring, but did not quite hit the mark.

"Don't worry," he said, "I think I can help with that."