Chapter 2: Gutted and Cored

Monday, March 6th, 5:45 AM

Twin Lakes Neighborhood

Santa Cruz, California

When my fingertips brushed against the stone’s surface, it glowed a deeper blue. I was assaulted by a ruthless, tingling feeling of pure ecstasy—eclipsing the towering release from moments before. It shot through my arms, then billowed like a cloud to fill every extremity.

The presence returned, swelling with renewed vigor while I fell forward to my knees and elbows. My vision swam as I cooed aloud and squeezed back against every satisfying surge. It picked up the pace, rocking my frame so hard that nothing seemed to exist aside from a soul-dissolving pleasure and the alluring gem that I clutched in my white-knuckled hands.

My logical mind gave up control, allowing the eager, animal portion of my brain to revel in every second of toe-curling bliss as my grasping sex was savaged. I opened my mouth to moan but couldn’t tell whether I’d succeeded.

It didn’t matter.

Serpentine runes entered my field of view and scrawled their way across the ethereal canvas of sea-green light that bathed my location. One after another, each secured a place for itself within my psyche.

After every sequence of the runic script was completed, I desired more.

Intense, electrifying pressure built within my tender anatomy while I ascended toward heaven itself.

With the conclusion of a final written line, my tension peaked. The symbols twinkled as the dam broke and I cried out.

Rhythmic, sensual muscular contractions on a whole new level wracked my frame when a second, mind-numbing climax erupted through my body and, inexplicably, also through the stone, as if that were somehow part of me.

I gasped, squeezing my thighs and hands together.

The runic symbols strung themselves into long, irregular lines that reminded me of computer code.

I’d suffered through decades of shame, insecurity, social anxiety, and rejection that culminated in me remaining a virgin at 42. But in a few minutes, this stone had changed everything.

I tasted forbidden fruit at long last, and I hungered for more.

After that thought, I suffered a moment of ruthless clarity. The glyphs ceased, along with my pleasure.

I became aware of the dire feeling that my ego had nearly been consumed by the stone I held in my hands.

A stone that held me as well.

Blinking a few times to clear my vision, I coughed and spat to eject a partial mouthful of sand I’d acquired from writhing on the beach with my jaw open.

I dropped the gem to scrape the sand from my tongue.

Rather, I tried to drop it.

My white-knuckled fingers maintained a death grip, and that was that.

I propped myself onto my knees, glaring at my disobedient digits while spitting like mad.

You’re my hands, and you will open! I commanded.

They refused while my other voice chuckled in amusement.

Between my fingers, the soft glow of the gemstone mocked my inability to resist when pleasure built for a third time. My vision blurred, but my mind rebelled as I stared into its depths.

No!

With considerable effort, I looked away at the dark, fog-shrouded ocean. Although the tingling disappeared, I reveled in my small victory.

At least some of me is still under my control. It’s time to get these damned hands working for me again.

So I said.

But, try as I might, my fingers had a mind of their own. Each time I glanced back to the enormous gem, the pleasure resurged with a vengeance, and it was difficult to ignore.

Screams from the city had faded back to yelling, though the chorus of sirens continued apace.

The stone pulsed and called out. My mind answered without permission, and my eyes locked onto the gem.

Instead of the carnal pleasure desired by my hungry wetness, some unseen force flowed over me, tousling my wavy, shoulder-length auburn hair and erasing the sand from my mouth.

I felt clean, inside and out. Cleaner than I’d ever been in my life.

The wave passed, and I regained control of my eyes.

The clammy ocean breeze felt intimate as if nothing shielded me from the damp coastal air. A lump caught in my throat when I shifted my weight and I couldn’t feel my jacket. Or my pants.

This is wrong. Something’s—

With a start, I found myself within a thinning cloud of fibrous fluff.

My garments had dissolved away, exposing my pale Irish skin to the deep, penetrating, humid cold of the marine layer. Yet somehow, my body experienced only the slightest chill.

What the hell is happening?

Fine hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and my breathing accelerated while a wave of anxious panic crashed home.

The symbols returned with a vengeance, overwhelming my vision and my mind as I was transported beyond reality.

I beheld a fantastical scene, unlike anything I’d ever imagined.

A scorpion with four pincers instead of two skittered in pursuit of a centipede with something that looked like an Anglerfish’s lure dangling from above its head.

The centipede flowed like water over rocks and across patches of mushrooms as it fled through a dimly-lit cave system. The scorpion leaped forward with surprising agility and accuracy, landing atop its intended prey and deftly pinning it down with its four grasping limbs.

A brief but violent struggle ensued, during which the centipede tried and failed to bite through one of the scorpion’s armored pincers. The much larger hunter racked the centipede out, stretching its body like an accordion. Then it arced its stinger overhead and drove the sharp telson deep into the soft flesh between armored plates on the left side of the centipede’s body, just behind its head.

The victim struggled violently for a moment, then writhed and shuddered. Its lure flickered for an instant before winking out as its body seized up and the scorpion began to feed.

The scenery shifted, and I felt dizzy as my awareness took to the sky.

Beneath the pendulous Mammatus clouds of a mature supercell that sent a ghostly-white hail shaft down a few kilometers away, a tremendous silver bird of prey swooped down, following close behind a bolt of lightning that had struck a herd of deer who were running through a verdant plain.

It plucked a sizable pair of electrocuted animals up from where they lay convulsing, then carried its hapless victims toward a stand of skyscraper-sized coniferous trees set against a foreboding range of snow-capped mountains.

My vision swam once more, and I beheld a steaming jungle.

Cottony cumulus clouds muted the sun’s rays while a six-eyed snake shifted its chameleon-like pattern to match the leaf litter, where it waited. Its forked tongue flicked out to taste the air.

Its breathing quickened and its coils tensed. A moment later, a line of furry, ratlike rodents with enormous ears stepped into view.

They paused just outside the serpent’s reach and fanned out. Rather than avoiding the scaled hunter, they closed in as one, with the lead rodent stalking ahead of the rest.

The snake struck with surprising speed, but the rodents’ leader disappeared along with the rest of its kin, leaving the snake’s quadruple folding fangs to close on naught but the humid jungle air.

The furry critters appeared alongside the serpent, opened their cute mouths to reveal massive canine teeth, and pounced. As one, they held the unfortunate snake down and set about tearing it to pieces.

My awareness returned to my dream’s reality, where I knelt on the beach. The orange glow of street lamps through the fog was consumed by an oppressive darkness.

All my body hair stood on end, and a deep, primal fear took hold of my gut. My attention was drawn toward the sky.

The ethereal visage of a reptilian head that dwarfed even the largest of mountains loomed high above. Its scales of slate gray and twisted horns of deepest black pulsed with energy that banished the morning fog for miles around, while casting a deathly crimson light across Monterey Bay.

Two massive eyes focused scornfully on me as the titanic creature met my terrified gaze with glowing, star-shaped pupils that burned with hellish inner fire.

Screams of terror rose from the city once more when the immense head smiled, brandishing a huge set of black crystalline teeth.

<<Pligita niiz Urthem.>>

An impossibly loud voice spoke from the dragon-like being’s mouth. Its speech shook the air, the sea, and even the Earth. Those brief words were sufficient to smooth away tiny hillocks of sand kicked up by human feet, leaving the beach as smooth as glass.

The unknown words crashed against my ears and mind like a runaway train, but somehow I understood.

“Prepare the Earth,” it said.

My head snapped back, and I gasped. The earsplitting voice chuckled, and shockwaves from its amusement wracked my body to its core.

All my senses grew hazy as they ran together, and my consciousness blurred.

The monstrous reptilian apparition disappeared, but the echoes of its laughter still shook the sand under my knees.

Every hair on my body stood tall as torrential energies flowed into me.

My eyebrows climbed in alarm when I felt with the sand beneath my body. I sensed the sand beneath my legs, but I could also feel my legs with my sand.

Something about me had changed, in some fundamental, disorienting way.

Without warning, the world around me slowed to the point where even the crashing waves appeared still and unmoving. Millions of drops of seawater sparkled in place, as if reality had been paused.

It was all too much for my disbelieving mind and I felt my awareness fade.

---

I awakened to a brilliant flash, thousands of times brighter than the sun even as it pierced through my closed eyelids. The light heralded an intense, searing heat that cooked all the flesh away from my body. Blood and other bodily fluids erupted into gouts of steam and ash while somehow, my consciousness continued to watch in horror.

Okay. At least now, I know this is all just a dream. It has to be.

I calmed down after noting that I was viewing my own vaporizing remains from the outside, something that was impossible.

It’s a dream. A disturbing dream.

My charring skeleton glowed, and I noticed its surface had been scrawled with innumerable, tiny, luminous runes, matching those I’d seen in my rapid-fire visions.

For an instant, the alien script upon my bones glowed bright enough to rival the huge fireball expanding in the sky. Then my blackened remains winked out of existence.

But my perception remained, and a titanic surge of visual information distorted my senses as it flowed into me.

The fireball in the sky continued to grow, looming like a miniature sun as it incinerated my entire neighborhood and the city beyond. Steam flashed off the waves, exploding upward amid the altered time of my dream, while oppressive radiant heat bore down.

The charring surfaces of nearby buildings danced with flames.

Twigs and leaves exploded into ash, while permanent shadows and collapsing skeletons marked the places where people once stood, walked, or ran; a scene out of hell itself.

The sand’s surface melted into a thin coating of glass lava. I found, quite by accident, that I could manipulate the liquefied surface by pushing and pulling on it with my mind.

I yearned to wake from this terrible nightmare and return to reality.

My perspective shifted outward a short distance when I thought of looking for my body, but I beheld only the beautiful, glowing gemstone descending toward the liquefied sand.

The scenery around me grew clearer and sharper as everything snapped into greater focus. My vision took in the world in 360 degrees—all at once, and I was spellbound despite horrors occurring in every direction.

With a bit of focus, I could discern the details of tree branches that had ignited across the Santa Cruz mountains in the distance. Flames licked outward from stems and leaves as their sap flashed to vapor and ignited.

The fireball’s intensity had ebbed by the time a tremendous shockwave slammed down from above, displacing and sculpting the surface of the molten sand and the ocean’s waves on impact.

Burning buildings and houses alike were crushed in semi-slow motion, flattened by the savage power of the pressure wave.

My new gemstone “body” settled against the lava-coated beach, kicking up a ring of ejecta as my senses quickly registered that, despite its considerable heat, the molten layer I’d landed in was far colder than the punishing radiance bearing down from above.

Even after my body burned away, and despite the extreme conditions and the massive temperature differential, I hadn’t felt the slightest pain throughout these events.

Because it’s just a dream. I smiled and reassured myself despite the continuing nightmare.

The submerged portion of my crystalline body felt safe under the liquid sand. By contrast, I became aware of how naked and exposed my upper half was and I wanted; no, I needed to be hidden.

The intense fireball had run its course at last, though fires raged all around.

With no small amount of horror, I focused upward and beheld the early stages of a towering mushroom cloud forming above the shattered and burning ruins of my city.

In the absolute finality of that moment, as I suffered through the worst of my fears in excruciating detail, a single string of words occurred to me.

W-worst. Dream. Ever.

But at least I knew it was all a dream. Most of the events that had occurred were impossible. I should know. I’m a scientist!

I focused my mind on burrowing down into the Earth, where I would be safe, where I belonged.

My crystalline body sank smoothly below the surface, which was also somehow part of my body. As that happened and the horror of the surface world disappeared, a warm, soothing feeling spread through me.

I rejoiced that my consciousness faded along with the light, because it seemed my nightmare could finally end.

The world went dark, and I knew no more.