Guten Lagen

Written by Vladicoff

Simon (pronounced 'Simon') had a problem: he had taken a metaphor too far. For twenty-seven years, from his time as a frightened mole-person to battles across the planet to battles across the universe, he had relied on two things: his pride and masculinity, as a metaphor for his dick; and the spiral of his Core Drill, as a metaphor for the human will to power.

The issue came when, as a homeless vagrant wandering the world he and his pals built, he took the implicit connection twixt these metaphors too far, and found himself convinced that his dick was a spiral.

Day after day, night after night, and night after day, he vagranted about with his hips in a constant swirling motion, frightening small children in his wake and rousing the villagefolk to sharpen their pitchdrills in readiness. He got on all fours in the sand and drew endless spirals with his penor. He would sometimes come upon a village at night and utilise his erectile tumerence to shift cobblestones and flatten grass like crop-circles, leaving at the crack of dawn to continue his pilgrimage.

If ever a curious onlooker, whether human or beastman, came by, he'd greet them with pleasant conversation - at first. But like a ship caught at the outer edges of a maelstrom, conversation would inevitably be dragged to the same singular focus: that the Anti-Spirals would come again, and that only true Spiral Power could stop them, and that the truest Spiral Power was right here in his pants. It wasn't even a particularly impressive dick; its hardness came more from the calluses accumulated through endless spiral scrapings than from any exceptionally potent de-flaccidising exuberance.

For many years, this fixation did not threaten the harmony of the new world. Simon was just a homeless mutterer, sustaining himself off sheer endurance and the various tomatoes and other produce tossed at him by angry peasants while their spouses shielded the children's eyes. Any town he'd pass through would talk about him for a few days before resuming with their lives with a shrug. He had the entire earth to wander, and so never visited the same place twice. The great project set in motion by the great walker, Camina, and continued by Simon himself before his heartbreak and wanderings, chugged along merrily enough without its former leader.

Until, that is, he saw that cliff.

At the edge of an expansive desert, into which he would likely have wandered into and died an ignominious end, was a mountain that jutted awkwardly at the border between dirt and sand. The night before, while sleeping in a nearby ravine (curled up, as always, in a spiral ball), he had been startled by a rumblous shuddering that rent the ground, followed by a deafening crack that pierced the heavens.

Now he came about the likely source of those frightful sounds: the mountain, which in the distance had seemed whole and singular, was revealed to have been cleanly split in two. And there, on the surfaces of the split cliff, was a sight that chilled his blood and nearly broke his mind.

You see, upon each cliff-face was carved a hole. To the left was carved a spiral, the most perfect spiral Simon had ever seen; and to the right was something else entirely. No words could do justice to the right-hand hole; it was so alien that Simon, whenever he no longer gazed upon it, could not bring his mind to reconstruct its shape. All that could be understood from its ungeometric form was this: it was the opposite of a spiral.

By itself, this anti-spiral hole terrified Simon, repulsed his every fibre and sinew. But the two holes were so utterly, primally opposite of each other that to look at both of them at once was more than his mind could bear. He turned away violently and refused to look up for what felt like an eternity, until a gentle longing for the left-hand, perfectly-spiral hole grew within him into a frenzied desire and he raised his head.

Finding himself unable to gaze only at the leftmost hole without a tiny bit of the opposite cliff in the corner of his vision, he reached down, plucked a pointed stone from the ground, and twisted it right into his eye-socket and gouged out his right eye.

Perfect, he thought, he could gaze at the spiral forever.

If things had remained at that, Simon would have simply thirsted to death seated by the cliff-face instead of marching through the relentless desert. That would have been preferable to Simon than what happened next. After a few hours of contemplation, merely staring at the hole no longer satisfied him.

No, he needed more. He needed to enter it. It was perfectly-sized as well as perfectly-shaped, after all. It was his hole. It was his. All his life had been leading up to this.

Simon got up and clambered over some boulders towards the spiralled hole. It was a ways up, but nothing too difficult for the hero of Seal Team Dai Guten. But after a few minutes of single-minded climbing, his pace slowed. His limbs grew heavy, and a certain hesitation seeped into his movements. He stopped, breathless despite the easy scaling.

See, due to the particular way in which the mountain had split, each cliff-face leaned in towards the other. At the bottom, where the rubble lay, they were far apart; towards the top, where the holes were, they were within jumping distance. The closer Simon came to that deliciously perfect Spiral, the closer he came to that counterspiralled horror. Even if he could not see it, it made its presence felt. Each step higher exponentially increased the fear and tremour which he felt, from a minor prickling of his neck hairs to a paralysing terror that gripped his as a vice.

Hesitantly, reluctantly, Simon slowly slid his way down the cliff's footholds and onto the lower boulders, all the while gazing up longingly at the prize just out of reach. Only once before had he felt such anhelation, such longing; but she had been gone now for many years, and his heart had since healed.

He made camp that night at the mountain's base. For the first time in months he bothered rolling out the sleeping-mat he kept tied to his pack, and dreamed uneasy dreams.

Simon awoke many hours after dawn, the sun blazing high in the sky. Despite his long sleep, he felt much the worse for wear and quite unrested. As he ate what little remained of his meagre supplies Simon struggled to remember what he had dreamt. Forms and figures of odd shapes had appeared and disappeared in his unconscience, before giving way to a blinding light. The light had no colour, or perhaps every colour, or perhaps some colour he'd never yet been faced with. It had shone high above him, and filled him with a sense of utter inferiority, that said light was greater than him and his whole world and always would be. The remainder of his dreams continued that theme of deprecation, interspersed by an almost lustful desire to fit inside the Spiral Hole.

After pacing around the mountain a few times, trying to find some route towards his desired cliff that didn't pass by its antipode, the now one-eyed wanderer settled down into the dust where he'd made his camp and grumbled at the behemothic stone.

It was a simple battle of wills for Simon. Did his craving for the perfect spiral outweigh his fear of its opposite twin? Or would his fear-born hesitation keep him trapped by the footrocks until he wasted away and his story came to a sputtering close?

That decision was soon taken out of his hands.

A low rumble shuddered out from the antipodal cliff, sending a sheet of dust and pebbles down upon the narrow twixten valley. A slithering and sliding could be heard, coming from deep within the earth and coming inexorably closer and closer to the surface. Simon, adrenaline rushing, backed away from the sound, his eye fixed on the anti-spiral hole in all its terror, his back against the cliff which he desired to call home.

By and by the slithering stopped and started up again as it neared the surface, as if navigating blindly through the dark. And at last emerged the thing responsible: sliding, slipping through the anti-spiral hole came a huge creature with an amorphous form and short, fuzzy hair coloured white and light-blue. It dropped to the ground with a muted thud, and pulled itself to its full height and shape. It was an immense caterpillar, nearly as tall as half the mountain, clutching with its many pseudopoda a smooth stick the size of a small tree, which it planted firmly in the ground and leaned on. Above its eyes, which were fixed unwaveringly on Simon, were two naked human women - deadened of eye and and of passive stance - where the antennae should have been.

It looked down unblinkingly at him. He looked up blinkingly at it. Neither moved nor spoke, until the giant caterpillar pried apart its mandibles and uttered out in a low but feminine voice.

'You look like half a monkey. I shall call you Sanage, unless it is you have a name of your own.'

Her voice dripped with an amused haughtiness. Simon gulped and stammered out a response:

'It's Simon, actually. And y-you are?'

'You may call me Satsuki. Satsuki Queeruin. I've come to tell you your world is in danger. And before you ask… no, your spiral dick cannot save you.'

To be continued