89 - Liminal Coil [Cherno]

Four scrolls in, she found what looked to be a document penned by someone after the fact specifically for the purpose of making Barzai’s tortured writing legible. Much of it described how he repeated himself and reiterated what Krahe had painstakingly extracted herself. That scroll also came with a second, smaller scroll, in a case locked by a five-digit combination lock. The Fourth Scroll contained it, right below a warning of the sigil that was supposedly a potent mental attack glyph, able to cause near-phobic fear of the Liminal Coil and to prevent itself from being remembered.

“To those who would follow in my steps: Beware the singing. Beware. Listen not to the song of the depths, and neither to that of the open sea. Go not beyond the Gulf, dive not out of sight of the surface. Reach not into the Silt. The wise one of Lake Hali warned me; I heeded not his warnings, so I plead with you, heed mine. The Deep takes a piece and replaces it with something else; a gnawing blackness that sings of alien skies.”

A stretch of fragmented lamentations with vaguely nautical, thalassophobic connotations followed. Then, another paragraph that was mostly coherent.

“Call not upon the names of those dreadful things that dwell in the Deep, where the dead drown before washing up ashore another isle of existence. Eidolons, they are not, and obey the command of Man, they do not. I did what was necessary, yet I wonder still if I have doomed myself all the same. The Things in the Deep take a piece of you and fill the hole with gnawing blackness. I shall never find true union of soul and body so long as this accursed Coil resides within me. Perhaps one who knows not what I know shall be shielded by ignorance.”

Some skim-reading later, Krahe reached what seemed to be the rather lightweight functional description, or rather a transcript of Barzai’s version. Again with the diving, something about going beneath the surface and out of reach, and vague allusions to other, undescribed powers that Barzai warned against, once more returning to thalassophobia.

Another stretch of incoherence. Then, the end of the scroll, or at least the part of it that translated Barzai’s writings.

“I must fashion a blade with which to excise this corruption. Cut it out. Burn the wound. Perhaps heal. Perhaps not. Better to be maimed than a twisted thing of the deep. Cut it out. Drive Them from our shore back into the Deep. Silence Their song.“

The scroll went on to specify that no corruption of any kind was found to be present in the Liminal Coil itself, and thus, it concluded that whatever Barzai had encountered was a result of his own misuse or overuse of the graft. After all that, having gone through all but one scroll, she came upon something remotely approaching a technical description of the graft’s functionality. It was thinner and noticeably newer than the others, both in design and writing. The author expressed frustration and fascination with the graft in equal measure, likening it to a signal amplifier and protective cage for the host’s own soul. In the line immediately afterwards, the author denounced those descriptions as insufficient and inaccurate. A deluge of esoteric jargon followed, and Krahe managed to sift through some of it to extrapolate a rough idea of its real functionality… Which once more lined up with Barzai’s own writings.

“...possibly enables resonance between the Physical and Astral Body (the “Material Soul”)? Beyond the expected effects, one could become able to Dive or Skim unassisted. With the correct voidkey or other dive-enabling equipment, one could dive abnormally “deep” for abnormally long periods of time. Potential hazards of such deep dives are poorly understood; past forays into the territory yielded wildly disparate results and incidents. Interaction with higher-order kenomaic entities yields high risk of archonic intrusion. We must heed Barzai’s warnings.”

Sighing, she took the small scroll case and entered the code. Inside was the scroll fragment, and she untied it, and looked upon the sigil. It dragged at her eyes and, for a moment, she felt as if insects marched beneath her skin and tendrils writhed where her intestines ought to be, as if he eyes were to be pulled from their sockets, as if mouths opened all across her skin and the table and the walls and tentacles erupted forth from them, the world spun and she was on the beach of an island in a boundless sea inhabited by monstrosities and the tide was rising and the instant the black waters touched her the ribs erupted from her chest as though fangs… Then it all stopped. Krahe was right there, a blink of an eye later, and the sigil just looked like a bizarre tangle that pulled at her eyes and hurt to look at, but was nothing more than that. Any memory of that brief hallucination quickly faded from her thought, and the only clear image from it that she could recall was the Wound-like Grin in the blackness of her closed eyes. She knew she had forgotten, she knew the sigil had made her forget, but she felt neither aversion nor fear towards the prosthetic, so she nonetheless decided to go for it. If worst came to worst, she could just not use any of its special features, or have it replaced just like Barzai. If that came to pass, she would be sure to record what was actually wrong with the damn thing. She had some amount of experience in deciphering a psychotic or delirious episode induced by malfunctioning cybernetics.

Even with her choice more or less made, she still decided to go over to the Molted Vestige and read through its documentation. It more or less lined up with what Firminus had guessed, and with a bit of uncomfortable stretching, she got a glimpse at two tiny brains at the top of the spine. Though Krahe knew it was the better choice for guaranteed straightforward functionality, she just couldn’t help herself wanting to know what the Liminal Coil did.