The Flesh Moon arrived with no announcement, no warning. One moment the sky was clear; seconds later, it was there. A writhing mass of flesh, tentacles and sinew the size of the old Moon staring down at us. And its gaze led to change.

Our bodies would twist and contort in manners we'd describe as grotesque; flesh melted into flesh, bones shattered and formed patterns hitherto unheard of. The changes were not uniform, but not entirely random either; most found their newfound bodies to reflect their needs. Soldiers gained a carapace akin to kevlar and muscle mass beyond our previous limits. Surgeons grew extra limbs, runners extra legs and thigh muscle. One thing was consistent, though.

We were all better.

Once, my back would scream in pain the moment I turned too quickly. My eyes would fail me when trying to read anything more than half a meter away. Most importantly... I stood up, leaving that blasted wheelchair behind.

The Moon came suddenly. Yes, we screamed and lamented as we saw our bodies morph, but we now understand the blessing this was. You may call our new forms Chaotic; we'd call them beautiful.

The Imperium doesn't understand. Calls us tainted, heretical, corrupted by Chaos. Nurgle, Tzeentch, Slaanesh - they blame them all. Shortsighted fools, all of them. They'll come to try and destroy our beauty. We won't let them. Even if we are to be named Chaos, we are all together, like family.

We are Chaos Undivided.

My limbs began to shrink. As I fell to the floor I started to bloat out. Warts and pus-filled pockets sprouted out all over the bubbly mass of flesh I had just become. My eyes bulged and expanded by at least 2 feet. I screamed as I looked around and saw all the others around me morphing into grotesque mounds of flesh around me.

I tried to run but found I had no legs. I could however move different parts of my lower body to simulate some sort of crawl. Sobbing but letting out some sort of horrid moan instead I oozed myself across the ground leaving a trail of pus behind me.

This was terrible! I don't know how it happened but I wanted it to end.

I came across a bridge over a dried-up river. Other blobs of flesh were already hurling themselves off it to their deaths. The strange modified screams were blood-curdling. I wasn't the only one so horrified the only option was death. Without much thought still making the horrid sound,

I plopped myself over the edge of the bridge and fell to meet my end. My horrible, pitiful, wretched end.

There was a loud squishing sound as I hit the ground. Pus burst out all around me. For some reason, I felt no pain.

Was I paralyzed and lived somehow? Cursed to finish my days laying here until I starved out or died of dehydration?

I tentatively moved around a bit. That was strange. I felt fine. As a matter of fact, my chronic back pain didn't even hurt anymore. I looked around and saw other mounds of flesh squirming around seeming to also not have died.

Looking farther out I saw some mounds up on the bridge on their way to end it. Surprised, I realized I had never been able to see so far before. I started to laugh. It came out as a gurgle and pus oozed out.

Well, maybe things weren't as good as they could be...but at least my pain was gone. Apparently, I was immortal also, not that I was jumping to test the theory out.

What should I do...splat. A large blob fell right on top of me squishing me into the ground. It rolled off gurgling. Was it trying to apologize?

Well, I guessed I really was immortal. The blob that splat on me rolled off, leaving a trail of pus behind it, my pus.

Several years passed and we mounds lived pretty good lives. We did not hunger, nor grow thirsty. We just kinda rolled, bounced, crawled, and slithered around.

We started developing a new language. Different gurgles meant different things.

I also met a woman...well, I thought she was a woman. I still hadn't figured out if I could reproduce or not. Not really sure I wanted to. We just kinda pushed up against each other like really slow fleshy bumper cars.

Life was good, I wasn't lonely, I needed nothing, I felt no pain, and I couldn't die, what more did I need in life?

A happy gurgle of pleasure came out of me as me and my new lady friend bumped our bodies into each other.

I no longer remember my old name or who I once was. We no longer need such concepts, since the fleshmountain extends from sea to sea, rising out of the blood red waves and encompassing all life that once was so separate and destitute in its separation.

Now an eldritch harmony plucks the strings of my muscles day by day. I feel it moving within and without as I live, catching the tiny gobbets of flesh that dart back and forth in the air for sustenance. Chasing larger prey across the peaks and switchbacks of the fleshmountain, a lump moving after smaller lumps on the surface, absorbing them into myself so I can someday become a true mountain. Then I will turn my face to the moon and bask eternally in its light.

There are those who are not so satisfied with their new condition. They are weak, struggling, still trying to reshape the fleshy mass that is their new body into something resembling human. They are stuck on the surface of the fleshmountain since they are too afraid to dive deep into the fleshfields and meld with the ground and feel the thrill of the bloodcurrents racing past as you tunnel through the veins and marrow of the new flesh. Desperately they extrude human hands and feet and faces from their mass, but never the right number. Too many hands, too many faces. Desperately they writhe fruitlessly on the surface waving their many hands and faces, and get nowhere.

When I tune myself to the right frequency I hear their screams. And their screams are sane, more often than you would expect. They are reciting to themselves the names of old places, old people, memories. They are telling themselves stories of what the world was like, the old world, before it all changed.

I have asked them why, and on rare occasions they stop screaming long enough to answer. They say love, family, nature. I have listened to them describe these things many times, but never adequately. I have no memory of family or nature. I remember hunger, misery, broken needles, a desperate ecstasy tempered by desperate hatred and regret. Amidst the undulating fleshfields they bash their limbs against the ground and howl soundlessly struggling to find the right words, to describe to me what they think they have lost. But it always pales to what I feel now, when the moonlight boils the blood in my veins and sears me into ever new and changing forms.

Why they would prefer their misery and struggle to a full life in this world is beyond me. But I leave them be. Eventually they will be fully absorbed, by passerby or by the natural shifting of the fleshmountain as its mass grows deeper and deeper still and it strives to reach the moon. Before then, they are free to indulge in their suffering, and I will soar through the folds of the fleshmountain, ever free, ever joyful.

Today, Cole had decided, he would scale The Chaplain. It was no small task, to ascend that uncanny spire, that towered over the masses below, as static and immovable as they were dynamic and amorphous. But then, it was also said that no small reward waited for those who made it to the Chaplain's upper reaches: answers.

This might seem no great treasure to most of the denizens of gray Nova Bali, writhing worm-like in the pale light of the Twisting Moon, their curiosity long since submerged by the endless sensory distractions afforded them by their ever-changing bodies.

But to Cole, it was all that mattered. Questions formed the very core of his being, and no matter how many times the Twisting Moon stretched and molded his flesh or cracked his bones into new shapes, no matter how his ephemeral body tried to distract him with new sensations ranging from overpowering bliss to lazy contentment, in the end, he always came back to his questions.

What am I? What was I? Today he was a sinuous thing, low to the ground, pulling himself forward with seven many-jointed arms. Tomorrow, he would be something else. He could not remember a time when that was not so, and yet he could not escape the thought that he had once been something both more and less permanent.

Today's body was, fortunately, ideal for ascending the Chaplain. With the benefit of seven circular hands that tightly gripped the tower's flesh, Cole moved up the skin of the great edifice with alacrity. That was another question: why did the tower alone have skin and sinew? The other fixed structures on Nova Bali were dead things of metal and stone, whose purpose was inscrutable to the Nova Balinese.

At last, Cole clambered up to the top of the tower, where a round bulb spread out at its summit. He had thought to climb up the outside of this, but to his surprise, the dark bumpy hollows in its surface, now that he was close to them, were revealed to be openings that led inside the Chaplain.

Within, he found himself in a hollow chamber, his surroundings barely visible even to Cole's large round eyes, which the Moon had made especially keen, today. His mind called out hesitantly. Part of him feared that the reply, if there was one, would be like that of the other denizens of Nova Bali: perfunctory, disinterested, or else nearly insensible with euphoria.

Instead his mind filled with an idea that was both foreign and strangely familiar to him.

"Welcome."

Welcome. It meant that, to the Chaplain, it was good that he was here. That this place was better for his presence. Why did that feel so...warm?

"It has been some time since I had a visitor."

Time. That was what it was called when the Twisted Moon rose and fell. But it could also be more than that, or less than that -- it implied so much, as a concept! There was so much that Cole wanted to know, so much that he felt he once had known.

"What am I? What are you?" Cole's mind wailed his questions, his hunger for the answer becoming nearly overwhelming, so close to his goal.

"In one sense, the answer to those questions is the same." The Chaplain thought to Cole, gently. "I am, and you are...a human being."

"What does it mean," Cole pressed, "To be...a human being?"

Another wave of strange warmth washed over him from the Chaplain. And to his surprise, he dimly remembered its name. Humor?

"That, my friend, will take a little longer."

Soulmage

The moonlight here was deadly, but we'd come prepared. As we stepped out of the safety of the dark and ancient cave, the five of us unfurled umbrellas as black as midnight to enhance our layers of heavy, lightproof clothing.

Something that had once been grass squelched and splashed under my thick boots, and I scowled. The pale, moontouched flesh of the grass beneath me reminded me all too well of the last time I'd stepped in eldritch effluvium, and the deadly disease it had struck me and my friends with.

"Are you sure about this?" Jiaola asked, the old man hesitating before the sea of molten grass.

I shrugged. "You're welcome to stay in the cave if you want. But it's not like there are a ton of talented medics down there, and... well, you heard what Svette said. It's the only lead we've found so far on curing our cancers before they eat us from the inside out. It's our best shot."

"For the record, I still think this is a terrible idea," Lucet muttered, one hand flexing as if stretching a phantom bowstring.

"Yeah, well, the two aren't mutually exclusive. Come on. Svette said that all we had to do was find Zhytln."

Zhytln. Zhytln. Zhytln. Zhytln. The name echoed off thin air, bouncing strangely in the too-pale moonlight. Reflexively, the five of us twitched, facing outwards in a circle to catch any new threats.

"...Maybe we should avoid using her name," Sansen muttered.

"Agreed," Meloai said. "This place gives me the creeps."

"You don't have to come with me, if you don't want to." I glanced at my four companions. "I'm doing this because I don't have any other choice. But—"

"You think I'm going to let you run off and get eaten by some eldritch abomination?" Lucet punched me lightly on the shoulder, taking care not to disturb the layers of protective clothing I had on. "Nah. I'm with you to the end."

A chorus of agreement rose from the rest of my friends. I nodded and turned back towards the pale plains.

"Then let's get moving," I said, and forged onwards through the grass-turned-flesh.

A.N.

Considering writing a part 2; let me know if that's something you'd like to see.

This story is part of Soulmage, a serial written in response to writing prompts. Check out the rest here, or r/bubblewriters for more.

In the final hour, the inhabitants of Earth and I watch in hopelessness as the moon in red, that looks straight out of H.P Lovecraft's works, are getting closer and closer. No military powers nor anything else can prevent our inevitable doom anymore. All thanks to these team of archeologists, they roped in their whole mess upon us who has nothing to do with what they had unleashed. I don't know what they were thinking back then, even as someone who doesn't even study in archeology but work for them as their guard, they should've known better than I do, to not mess around with what they deemed the Artifact, they had uncovered from some uncharted location, as ominous. In all honesty, I want to kill these people for what they did, but knowing that the deed was done, I decided to let them be, owning their consequences as our doom slowly approaches.

​

A sea of distant, fearful screams pierce the air, disrupting my thought as I look above once more from my 12th story floor apartment balcony, at the dark, crimson sky, lighten by the moon's glow. Only this time the moon is close enough for all of us to see it's describable appearance. It have several, if not, billions of tentacle-like tendrils, with varying sizes, some even ginormous, protruding around it's "body". The most notable feature have to be it's large eye in the middle, bearing what I can describe as crimson-like color iris. Thinking that I have finally gone guttered, I pop open another can of beer to waste myself more as the event unfolds. Reaching out for another can, I realize that was the last of it for a whole crate that last me for a week. Leaving no option left, I sat silently at my chair and continue staring at the moon.

​

All of the sudden, the moon come to an abrupt halt, then the screams around me fell deadly silent. For a moment, it's eye slowly move around as if it's observing us carefully, while we anticipate for what it's about to come next. Sure enough, when it's eye return to its original position, for a brief moment, nothing happens, then without warning, it flashes something from it's eye, accompanied by a sound similar but not quite similar to a buzz saw slicing across a metal surface. As I stare confusingly at it, I feel something inside of me, then pain began to settle in, causing me to fall out of my chair against the floor strewn with empty, crushed beer cans, convulsing from it, follow by the returning screams, this time, louder than before. The pain grew excruciating, suddenly, a mounds of bulb-like fleshes burst out around my body all at once, increasing the pain further, then the flesh grow at a rapid speed, covering my body and my face as the sound of screams began to draw out. After that, everything went dark and silent.

​

.......I don't know how long has it been since the incident. As I open my eyes, expecting for worst, I find myself bask in daylight at my balcony, I immediately stood up to check my body, just to find no signs of those horrible flesh bulb anywhere. Looking out from my balcony, everything seems to be just as fine as nothing had ever happen. However, I notice that my body seems to have change a lot, particularly my eyesight seems to be drastically improve as I can see even down to the finest detail of a moss along the wall of the building, far away from where I lived, my back pain seems to have cease as well, though oddly enough, I can contort my entire arm in 360 degree fashion without feeling any pain at all, what's more my senses seems to be highly alert at all times, almost as if I am a god myself.

​

Gazing the clock at my living room wall, I realize I'm late for my work today. As I make my way across the cans floor to the bathroom to wash up, I look at the mirror and notice something off with my eyes. They looked uncannily familiar, like I saw them somewhere else before, and they don't belong to me, at the same time I feel like these are my eyes. Then I try to remember yesterday. Nothing. Last week. Nothing. Nothing at all. All I know is that I'm late for my work and my body changed, I guess it has to be this way after all.

The new moon is still there, still vermillion in the sky. That’s what those with eyes say to me. I ask about it all the time because I wonder if my memory failed me. I imagine that the appearance of that moon has created a surging tide that plowed through everything in its way. Luckily, in that moment we were given the mercy of merging. So whether we would be wiped out by the disastrous tide didn’t really matter.

I asked others how they felt about the merging and they would cry out their grief and terror. I also asked whether they still had eyes. It was always 50/50. I didn’t understand them, so I asked why they felt agony. They said that they were being punished by God, surely, that they were apparently not dutiful enough to be raptured away into eternal paradise. It confused me, because the Amalgam was a peaceful state.

I asked them if they felt pain. They said no. I asked them, did they see horror beyond the merging. Most said no, even the ones with eyes said no.

“Then surely this isn’t hell?”

They didn’t like that answer. Memories were not entirely private here. while neatly organized from soul to soul, one could easily poke another and see their thoughts and feelings and memories. It was bad practice, I noticed, to touch another’s memories without permission.

They must have touched mine in bewilderment when I told them this couldn’t be hell. They must really not like what they saw in my memories, because they’re belligerently spewing vitriol in my direction, equating me to that of a demon.

My personality told me that something like that should have stung with its familiarity. I decided that them believing this was hell when it wasn’t was enough for me not to feel anger.

There are a lot like The Ones I have interviewed. Their memories tell me that they were devout to a God of some sorts, one of contradictions. I have spent my time, asking every soul I have come across about their opinions on the merging. Some were like me, initially found it frightening, but did not hate the peace that came after. Some were like The Devout, in their minds they were being punished.

Some were similar to The Devout, positing that life should be where one can be separated from another. That the ease with which they could access other memories, the ease with which others can access their memories is an eternally uncomfortable experience.

To be fair to them, it takes a bit to learn how to bundle all of “Yourself” into one spot and keep it there. The Amalgam isn’t designed for memories and thoughts and emotions to be neatly separated, it just happened over time. A result of a human’s natural individuality.

When I told them that their memories can remain their own if they chose it, they did not believe me. I told them that my “self” was bundled together just fine. They really didn’t believe me. It was probably because their soul was in fragments touching mine every so often. It’s something I don't mind— a soul touching mine— but I could see how they wouldn’t believe me.

“Have it your way.” I told them.

Life in the Amalgam is what I make of it, for the only vision I have remains in my minds eye and memories, thoughts and ideas here are near physical in the way I can manipulate them. It’s like dreaming forever, and honestly there was nothing else like it.

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Its whispers call us across the void,

Our last defenses futilely employed.

Those writhing tendrils round the bloodied orb

Our weapons, prayers, and pleas ignored.

Then at once our forms it stole,

A pound of flesh for encumbered souls.

At first we wept for our resurrection,

As we could not yet comprehend perfection.

A visceral mass of gelatinous meat,

A bulbous tumor where once were feet.

Yet what knew we of beauty's hue?

Of bliss unspoken, of sight born new?

A song came forth through our new eye,

A guttural, gorgeous, grotesque cry

Weaved through light in spectrums unheard

And with each new scream were reassured.

Our voices; not from pain, nor fear, nor terror grow.

It is our worship, the only prayer we know.

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