Soso, the far-sick norn

(Note; the following story is a darker themed story based upon creatures. I wanted to try something different than speculation. If violence or occult themes frighten you this might not be for you.)

Soso had felt the pull of the blue swirl when he was young. From his first steps he knew that in a way, it would mean freedom if he would resign to it. He learned though, that the choice was permanent. No norn that stepped through ever returned.

His kind were an umber gray and quite like their tawny blond neighbors; a hardy race. Not a generation ago the land held grendels. Grendels, his kin told him, were a needlessly baleful kind and the last ones were hunted down to relieve coming generations.

It was a shame, soso thought as he grew into adolescence. Cheerful deep brown norns filled the lands, finding the boreal woods pleasant and fulfilling now the challenges had been overcome. Though little conflict came of it, the land quickly became overcrowded.

His fear of the unknown lost it to his frustration. In a fit of boredom, crowdedness and unrelieved anger he hiked to the portal. As he came to the moss covered but still shining machine, his young mind found no doubts or reasons to retreat, and he stepped straight in.

The endless sea of trunks, ferns and moss he had known all his life fell away immediately. His limbs became like the trees and rocks he knew so well, and he seemed to go faster than falling could be. 

What was happening to him was quite beyond his understanding. Time went both faster and slower to him and from the edges of his sight he saw things that were entirely alien to him. Moments of fear, horror and then anger shot over him, as these things giggled and shimmered just beyond his vision and reach.

With his body tardy like the growth of a forest is he was entirely helpless, and endured with a reluctant, simmering patience. Periodically clear visions came to him. Though the scenes seemed strange, the actions often did seem natural. Living a sort of disjointed life through the eyes of others and learning patience and self control when he felt watched and mocked, sosos mind matured.

Soso had fallen for an eternity, for what had seemed thousands of norn lifetimes. He regretted his hasty youthful action endlessly. Sensibly he had always thought that his experience was a unique one, it would not be reasonable for such a magic door to exist if it would not take you somewhere. It was as if a door was closed from both sides while passing through it.

His thought was cut short. An immense sense of vertigo and nausea washed over him as the falling had ceased utterly. The dim blue constant glow that had grown accustomed too was gone and a damp darkness was all around him. As his confusion waned somewhat he stumbled a few steps to find support on the wet rock, a wall of the dark place. 

His heart galloped with mirth, he moved! Not in the pace of seasons but that of living nornir. He dared not quite to get his hopes up, it could have been another vision. The wetness of the stone soaking his shoulders fur felt quite real, and so did the smell. Soso concentrated on the smell and though there was no recognition it made him tense. 

The place was full of filthy smells, that of decay, viscera, fungus, dampness and one smell in particular he could not quite place. A beastly, raw smell that came to his nose like an oath made in anger or a shouted curse. He breathed the thick air until his constitution steadied and when nothing came and the darkness remained his wariness also subsided a little. This was no place for a norn and he had to find a way out.

The floor was as wet and slimy as the walls were and not too level. He tried not to think what the squelching mud consisted of that sucked at his feet with every step. The damp air was warm around him like a slow breath with no real direction to its flow. The echos did not seem to carry far, the dripping sounds from the walls came to his ears twisted. 

As soso slowly walked on his gladness for his regained control and his wariness both subsided somewhat. His feet found blind purchase on a more level path and followed it as best he could. The wetness remained as did the darkness, but at least he had a direction now.

The more rancid smells lessened as he made his way, or perhaps they appeared to do so, but the unknown smell only became stronger. Soft, confusing echoes accompanied the smell and seemed to come from all directions. The path branched off frequently but soso tried to follow the widest trail best he could. As he was feeling his way around another crossing he thought he picked up a flickering, a dim shining from behind some corner.

The savage smell and the rushing and babbling echoes also seemed stronger, but light meant some hope for freedom to him and he was too proud to carefully stumble through the pitch black if some brash attempt at the light could at least give him some control back. With his hair and fighting spirit up he strutted into the chambers.

The sputtering greasy flame from the fat candle was only barely enough, even to his light starved eyes. The room it lit up was irregularly shaped, blanketed with filthy matted furs where there were no fetid muddy pools. Some small items sat on the pedestal the candle stood on, little carved fetishes, teeth, two more candles. The greasy pools were only dimly lit, but something moved in there. A bubbling and writhing took his attention and in the filth some bald creatures moved like worms or maggots. While still smaller than him, these things elevated his alarm immensely and recognised them as the source of the savage smell that had puzzled him so.

Bald and pale with needle-like teeth. Dark, blind bumps overgrown with skin where eyes would be. An instinctive hatred came to Soso, the creatures were an ancient enemy beyond their repulsive appearance. 

The realization of what he was looking at inspired a savage thought in his mind, but pride and a sense of honor made him reluctant to act against these infants, blind and harmless wallowing in filth. On a pile of muddy furs he noticed some leathery eggs and teared into them with the hunger of a norn that has not eaten for decades.

With his hunger sated and his hesitation overcome with the voracious deed, sosos hatred turned again to the pale fatty things in the mire. As he reached for a heavy rock, Soso finally noticed the echoes that had been coming closer while his stomach controlled him. Quickly he turned to the sounds, but the concern had come far too late. Before him in the waning light of the candle stood a large crimson being.

Great anger possessed the crimson devil. With its scabrous hide and crown of horns it looked nothing like the pale things in the slime, and even less like the scaled evils his elders had described grendels as, but he knew them all as one and the same. The grendel whispered crude words and the room lit up with red symbols and sigils. Despite the powerfully slowing and paralyzing effect it seemed to have, sosos fire burned with ancestral heat as he brought the rock down on the grendel.

His warp-gained maturation forgotten and exchanged for instinct driven adolescent anger and madness, Soso fought. Both in pain and anger he remembered only flashes. Violence and anger, survival and death. The candle went out in the melee, though the red glow of the impure symbols grew brighter with every grendel that joined in. Though a haze of fatigue soso felt the scraping floor under his hurt back as he was dragged along. As he fazed in and out of consciousness he could sometimes hobble along, other times he would be pulled along.

The march of his hideous captors went ever on, it seemed. But as the tunnels wound on they passed light more often and suddendly a flash of cold air and a starry night above awakened him again. A conical mountain of rough hewn rocks towered above him and his captors, and the path turned upwards. The grendels continued their silent slog and with each turn of the spiral his unease grew until at the last twist to the summit an impossible thing came into vision.

The spire was crowned by an enormous orb of viscera with a single eye peering out of it. The globe was made of writhing norns, grendels, unidentifiable mass and floated but a little above a carven altar. Sosos captors chanted as they placed him on the altar and held him down while the cyclopean eye focused on him. Slowly a dim glow came into the iris, sosos mind went almost blank with horror before one flicker of memory came to him. He grabbed the greasy reserve candles with a free arm and flung them straight in the flaring eye like a snowball made of fat! 

The brightly glowing eyeball dulled, glazed over with a gray greasly sheen as it tried to blink it off. As the pupil went out of focus so did his captors reach for their own eyes in panic. The eyeball’s glow flared up and turned inwords with heat. Soso took hold of the moment to escape the pyramid, leaving behind a scene which lit up the night like a moon. A piercing scream echoed from the mount and the pits below, as if hundreds howled as one and with a great rumbling cloud of dust the monument and the hollowed out land below crumbled.

Soso woke up. He had slept a wounded sleep and had rested for longer than he ever had in his life. He crawled out of the debris and dust that covered him. Around him he could see a wide shallow crater in the dim light of stars. He now noticed how the stars and emptiness outside were separated from him by a seemingly endless dome overhead. As he wondered for its meaning and origin the bright blue pulsing of a portal gadget broke his concentration. Perhaps this time with the stars having witnessed his acts, the swirling door would take him to freedom.