Lunacy
by Crow-Black Dream
When Cye suffers a monstrous transformation, friends and family desperately search for answers. Meanwhile in the Nether Realm, moons align and threaten to unleash cosmic horrors unto both worlds.
Author's Notes: Obligatory disclaimer stating that I do not own any of the characters in the Ronin Warriors universe.
This is the revised version of a story I began to post several years ago. What started off as a seemingly simple plot has evolved into an attempt to develop the characters beyond the series. As an American writer who has never visited Japan, I have little idea of what their culture is like nor do I understand the language aside from bits and pieces. Therefore I will be making using little or no attempts at writing in Japanese aside from the tradition of surname first.
While I have seen the entire series including the OVAs it has been many years for the latter. Never have I read the untranslated manga. Certain aspects of the characters' lives are canon including Cye's family members, though I have taken liberties with many details. Please pardon any typos or grammatical errors.
Set in late summer 1994, approximately 6 years after the war with Talpa.
Genres include: scifi, drama, horror (of sorts), mythology, origins, family. Current rating is T - may change to M due to subject matter. Beware the gory details.
Lastly, a polite nod to H.P. Lovecraft for all the monsters and madness.
Chapter One
Cye was lost in the peaceful silver light as he arched and rolled through the currents. Here it was quiet. Here he did not need a breath. On and on he flowed into the depths, mesmerized by the tangle of lights and shadows. Somewhere in between something began to take form. The longer he looked at it the larger it was, a mass of darkness that grew and seemed to become the ocean itself. Rhythmically his arms reached for a lure of silken black fins.
Through the fluid came a great guttural noise. It was organic: a purr, a hiss, a growl all at once… yet it was a sound no known creature can create, too much like metal rending apart. Or perhaps it was too much like groaning door hinges. A pressure wave rattled his head and heart before it faded into the whisper of wavelets breaking against the sky. A sting of salt coursed through his nose. Inky blood streamed around his face and in the splintered beams of light he could see the saltwater had turned it vile green.
A watery basso laugh echoed maliciously, sending a bolt of loud electricity through his nerves as the light above turned sinister. He knew that voice; it was the sound of hell itself.
And then he remembered. Of course he needed a breath. He began to kick furiously toward the blinding rays even as they began to sear him. Just as soon as he wondered if there was a fire above burning away the air, he surfaced somewhere between waves and blankets of sand. For one moment he saw a towering red gate.
Gravity struck him with a rush of sea foam. His head lolled as vertigo sent the stars spinning overhead. He lay there for what seemed to be hours, yet when he sat up it felt as though mere moments had passed. It took longer still for his equilibrium to right itself. He caught sight of the reddened moon rolling like a marble. When he shut his eyes the colors reversed themselves into a sickly green disc with a black halo radiating out into static white. He put the palms of his hands to his eyes and rubbed away the afterimage. Cautiously he cracked open his vision and discovered with much relief that the world had stopped spinning. Beyond a short beach and up a hill was a city darkened in slumber. Candle flames cast little havens of light from where they danced along the edges of town.
With a sudden weariness he set himself to scaling the hill and found himself worn out barely halfway up. The soil had become nearly vertical and, looking up, he noticed the terrain curve back over his head. He felt as if he looked back far enough he would seize with dizziness and fall. Instead he set to climbing without ascending into the concave formation. When he thought he had made his way around it the sandy earth began to erode under his hands. Frantically he grasped at plant roots and found them tearing out in his grasp. It was then that he noticed how very different his own body looked. Larger, as though the bones of his wrists and fingers had grown, and perhaps it was the dirt on his skin, perhaps it was the moonlight playing tricks, perhaps it was the fact that he was too busy trying to cling to the side of the slope… but it looked as though the back of his hands and forearms were matted in hair. The world seemed to tip back again. Terrified, Cye dug nearly up to the elbows in desperate stabs as he climbed over the edge of the hill.
And then there he was, safe at last.
All the candles flickered out, or rather they seemed to converge into one small bonfire. Inside the blackened glass buildings strange faces shied away when he looked upon them. As he marched into the fire's illumination he could see the details around it: a circle of stones and beyond that, a small table. Atop said table, a long-necked bottle was fiercely alight with reflected flames. The closer he got he was able to make out a figure sitting in a wicker chair. His heart missed a beat when he realized it wasn't moving. Instinctively his feet froze in place.
It was a woman with her head resting crookedly on her shoulder. Blue reflections of the galaxy shone in the raven-black hair cascading down over her face. A glass of red wine was clutched in her upturned left hand resting on the table. When Cye looked at the little moon reflected in the surface of the wine, the glass began to tremble as her head righted itself in a slow tilt. The skin was stretched taught and the moonlight that played over her features gave her face a very lifeless look. From the hollow sockets he could feel something inhuman gazing absently at him. All at once he recognized her. The wine-stained lips moved to recite a warning:
Three moons rise; one door unlocks.
A wolf turns and howls.
A sacrifice shall be made.
The words cut through him like no enemy blades ever had.
Cye shuddered. He nearly asked her what it meant but he was too frightened to hear any of it again. The woman's voice was overlaid with masculine tones, one like sandpaper, one like a mountain river. He hesitated too long, for a single passing cloud swept necrotic shadows across her face as she sat up in her chair with her arm extended to point out into the darkness behind him.
The entire time he had been hearing an implacable buzz in the background. At first he assumed it was cicadas. Then in the silence following the macabre poem a sputter and hiss made him jump back expecting snake strikes. He looked around for the source, the otherwise silent world underscored by this sound which was nothing more than the ocean crashing against the beach. It had never really been gone; the forefront of his mind simply picked it up again. With his jumpy heart calming a bit, he remembered her standing there and looked up. She was posing exactly as she had been before, a strange juxtaposition of living and dead. Before he turned away from her he realized all the stars had gone out from the sky.
By the cast of moonlight he recognized the cityscape stretching away over the ocean. The old bay bridge gleamed. Around the footings churned the eternal whirlpools. Brilliant white light darted every which way in the angry waters. Looking upon it he felt that it was both the reflection of the piercing moonlight and it was boiling up from the depths.
The poem repeated itself in his head. Pondering it a second time around, he lifted his eyes to the horizon and saw the gate beyond the whirlpools. It rose menacingly from the waves, giving an impression that if the doors opened one could swim through. The sea lapped at a lock.
The sight brought the vertigo rushing back. All at once he was on an unseen edge and before he could even consider finding a handhold he was already plunging headlong toward the swirl of salt. He tried to take one more gasp of air just as his body broke the water's surface, the shock finishing the job.
…
Cye choked on air as he sat up with the conviction that he was currently drowning in saltwater and his own blood. He flopped back onto the bed, panting, initially unable to recognize his surroundings. Hazily he wondered if he really had been holding his breath in his sleep.
He was back in his bedroom, or rather, he had never left. The house was dark and still only for a moment. Immediately his ears tuned into the measured tick of the living room mantle clock that opposed the chaotically bubbling fish tank aerator downstairs. The sound of rain pattered against the roof tiles and heavy curtained windowpanes. Gray gloom hinted at light from the outside world. For a while he looked up into the darkness. He wondered what time it was. Ultimately his mind kept circling around to one worrisome thought: the words in his dream were an omen. And so he lay there nervously running his fingernails over his itchy skin and through his facial hair while the adrenaline coursed through his body.
It was tolerable for a while. It became apparent, though, that this wired feeling was not about to subside. It was beyond the electrified nerves, beyond the nightmare. It was something else. A visceral anxiety that began to rise when he realized he could not drown out the noise.
With two pillows vainly muffling his ears Cye recalled the source of this trick from old cartoons and cursed to himself when it didn't work. Besides, the two pillows around his head fulfilled the creeping sense of claustrophobia that had been weaving around him in a cocoon of blankets. Irritably he pushed them away, sick of being sick in this bed. His back ached and his legs thrashed involuntarily and at last it was too much for his body. He bolted upright to his feet, dragging the sweat-drenched sheets off the bed in the process.
That poem seemed either important or threatening… or both. Certainly worth writing down. Normally he was not one for keeping a dream journal (heaven knew there would be enough to fill the pages) and so the only reasonable option at this hour was a sheet of notebook paper. There was sufficient light for finding his Physics notes in his desk and scratching out the words on a clean sheet. Only when he was nearly finished writing did he realize that he had penned it out not in his native Japanese but in secondary English. He finished writing and read it again. He might have heard it in both languages; it had happened in dreams throughout his life.
Under the poem he began to write down the entire dream for consideration in the morning. He described swimming and chasing after something he couldn't put a name to. He got as far hearing Talpa's laugh. He put the pen down on the desk, shut the notebook and got up very purposefully as he felt his saliva begin to thicken with bile at the mere memory of the dream-vertigo. Suddenly his entire digestive system knotted around itself and contracted upwards.
He threw open the door and stalked naked down the hall toward the bathroom. All too late he found out that the overhead light was too much for his eyes; as soon as he flipped the switch he shrank back with a wince and a groan. There was a sharp crack of bone on tile as he fell to his knees and fumbled open the toilet seat just in time to be sick. The vomit was a foul, brackish fluid welled up from the pits of his small intestine. It was all water and canned soup, for that was all he'd had the energy to handle. His abs flexed and cramped in an attempt to force it all out in one push. In the moment he spent willing his body to ease up he also tried to remember the names of the various rock stars who had asphyxiated on their own puke. The headache clamped around his eyes with the action until the edge of his vision went white. He coughed, doubled over with pain seizing his groin. Long strings of spit nearly reached the toilet water and the sight made him sick all over again.
This went on for a few minutes. At no time did his strangely keen hearing focus on the phone ringing in the kitchen.
Finally his body had exhausted itself of all returnable liquid content. He wiped his mouth the back of his hand and cursed the poor decision when the mucus-thick spittle clung to a patch of hair on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. He wiped it away with toilet paper and threw it into the bowl, grimacing at the mess there. With the glass sitting on the mirror shelf he drew a cup of water from the tap, swished it around his mouth, spit it into the toilet. He did this until his mouth was cleared. Each time he spat he felt his sickened body relax. After brushing his teeth he took cautious, painful gulps of water only to discover that his throat was burned raw with vomit. He closed the lid, flushed, and collapsed back into the corner between the wall and door, absolutely exhausted. His abs trembled. His body had been through this for many days now.
Sleep overtook him there in a light doze. After an hour his mind drifted back near his body, which was vaguely aware of the light shining against his eyelids and the ache in his joints. When he came around he clambered up the doorframe in an attempt to stand. He studied his reflection, at first from the distance of the doorway as his sight adjusted, inching closer and closer until he was inspecting every angle in horror.
It looked as though he hadn't shaved in weeks. More than that: it seemed the finest hairs masking the outer angles of his eyes had thickened noticeably. His eyebrows faded into his hairline, if there was a hairline to be spoken of. The growth pattern of his beard (something relatively new in itself) was beginning to sweep back into the nape of his neck. He leaned against the mirror to inspect every follicle on his face before looking at his arms. Sure enough, an obscene amount of hair, and an obscene auburn red to really draw attention.
I look like a fifty year old man! Cye thought as he stared at his knuckles with morbid fascination. Thirty years too young for this!
He opened a drawer under the counter to fetch his shaving kit. He grimaced at the razor when he spotted the hair between the dull blades. There were no new heads under the sink. Impatiently he sighed and did his best to wash out the mess before mixing up a lather, which he applied from the inner angles of his collarbones nearly up to his eyes. The razor made a slew of sickly scrapes that harvested only a thin crop of hair and abundant springs of blood. Cye craned his head back and stretched the skin of his neck to make another pass with the washed blade. Again, barely half the hair came away as his skin protested against the micro cuts. He kept working across the neck, wondering how many ingrown hairs would come of this. By the time the underside of his jaw was shaved from ear to ear he was oozing blood. Angrily he threw the razor in the trash, knowing better than to continue on to his face. The skin was too reddened and raw.
On his bare neck he could see his Adam's apple was protruding more than usual, giving his throat a lumpy, unhealthy look. His skull, too, seemed abnormal. Without a decent razor to shave his face he ran his fingers through the scruff to feel underneath. The cheekbones were sharp, lending to the illusion of sunken eyes. He looked uncertainly at his forehead, which seemed to be developing a heavy slope. The jaw had lost its curve and gained sharp angles. Peeling back his lips revealed teeth that seemed to grow larger and sharper even now as he watched. Cye turned away, unable to stand the sight anymore. His body revolted him more and more each day. Tonight's nightmare was the first time he had noticed it in the dream world.
Suddenly the nausea seized his innards and he collapsed with the sickness welling up again. Small, exhausted tears ringed his eyes. Outside, the rain roared down and masked a hungry moon.