Author’s note, today is day 60 of the 100 days of Writing Challenge!
The air crackled around me, alive with the nervous chatter of children who were anything but. My stomach churned a bit more with every passing second, but not from fear. It was that peculiar mixture of nausea and anticipation, the kind you get when you’re about to do something you know isn’t right but might be necessary.
My name is Xyimi. Not the strangest name you’ve ever heard, but strange enough to set me apart in a place like this. My world, the way I knew it, was contained within the confines of the Settlement, a meticulously planned collection of housing blocks, training facilities, and the grand central Chamber, the beating heart of our society. I was twelve, a crucial age here, on the cusp of something monumental–yet not for me. Today was Tattoo Day.
The ink wouldn’t take on my skin. It was a fact as simple and irrefutable as the sun rising. Every child since the dawn of the universe received the mark. I was… different, and difference wasn’t tolerated here. The technicians had tried when I was small, hoping my skin would change its mind, but it never did. Instead of flowing into my forehead in the prescribed patterns, the ink sat in stubborn beads, then rolled off as though repelling some force they couldn’t see.
My lack of a tattoo meant no access to full citizenship. No entry to training facilities, no proper rations, no chance at a chosen vocation when the Elders deemed me ready. My life was, by design, small and constrained. But while they could marginalize me, they could never fully control me.
I learned to be a phantom within the system, observing more than participating. With no formal training, I taught myself to read, deciphering old, discarded data-pads found in the dusty corners of the settlement archives. Curiosity was a dangerous trait, the elders said, a sign of rebellious tendencies. But how can you stifle the urge to ask ‘why’? Our world had been deliberately shaped, that much was obvious, but I longed to understand its blueprint.
***
Tattoo Day was a spectacle. Grim-faced technicians, their white robes a stark contrast to the intricate tattoos snaking up their arms, ushered the six-year-olds to their stations. The children were a mix of resignation and manufactured excitement, fed a cocktail of soothing drugs and stories about the mark’s importance since they could first speak. It was a rite of passage, they were told, protection for their minds, their souls.
“Do you want to watch?” The Technician, a woman with stern eyes and a voice like the crack of a whip, looked down at me with open distaste.
“No, thank you,” I replied, keeping my voice flat. Her disdain was a familiar cloak, one I’d learned to shrug off.
I escaped into the suffocating quiet of the lower archives, a labyrinth of relics and forgotten lore. Dust hung heavy in the air, each mote a testament to the relentless march of time. The scent of decaying paper, sharp and acidic, clung to my skin like a shroud. It was forbidden territory, but knowledge had always been a dangerous temptation.
The shelves groaned beneath the weight of forgotten worlds. Sometimes, I’d run my fingers along the faded spines, a ghost of a touch across the buried histories. An unsettling thought niggled at the edge of my mind: with each passing day, the chasm between them and us grew wider. One day, my own life would be just another layer of dust in this fossilized record of existence. And with a jolt of morbid fascination, I wondered, would they even bother to record my name – the girl with no mark, the anomaly in their perfect design?
The day wore on. The cries from the Chamber, usually muffled to a low hum, spiked for a brief, horrible moment, then all was quiet. I imagined a child too weak to bear the mark, a loss the settlement could easily hide. We were many, but not endless.
A shadow stretched over the data-pad in front of me. I should’ve been startled, but fear was a fleeting visitor in my life. I looked up at an old man, so old that the fine lines of his tattoo had blurred almost beyond recognition. They’d let him grow old? That was unusual here.
“You are Xyimi, yes?” he rasped, his voice barely a whisper.
I nodded silently. No one else ventured here.
“You mustn’t think your difference a curse, child. There’s a purpose in everything, though we rarely glimpse it in our own lifetimes.” His eyes, watery blue, held a strange light.
“What is your purpose then, old man?” I asked, boldness making my voice a touch louder than usual.
His smile held a hint of sadness. “In the old times, before the marks, before the Settlement, I was called a historian. I know things the new order wishes forgotten.”
“Things about… the tattoos?” The words stuck in my throat. The very act of questioning them was forbidden.
“And far more, little one. Things that might scare you, and perhaps even things that might make you stronger. Would you hear them?”
Here it was – an echo of the same choice offered by fruit in an ancient tale. Knowledge was power, I knew that much. But power was dangerous, especially here. Yet, something about the old man, the air of faded grandeur around him, whispered that his knowledge, unlike the empty promises of our leaders, might hold real answers.
“Yes,” I said, the word a defiant exhale. “Tell me.”
***
The old historian spoke in conspiratorial tones, his words weaving tales of a world billions of years before the tattoos, before the Settlement, before what they called The Great Sundering. I learned his name: Elias, a relic of a different time. He spoke of an ancient, cosmic entity known as Xmiyioloth, a being of boundless power that existed in the spaces between worlds, a creature of shadow and hunger.
“Xmiyioloth threatened to devour the very fabric of reality,” Elias rasped, his eyes glittering with an unnerving intensity. “The founders, the ones we revere, they found a way to bind the horror, to seal ourselves away. The tattoos… they aren’t just a mark, they are the seal itself, spread across every mind in the Settlement.”
My head spun. Cosmic horrors? Ancient bargains? These concepts felt too fantastical, even as a strange unease settled within me.
“If I have no mark…” I began, the words feeling heavy and significant in a way I couldn’t fully explain.
“The seal has no hold on you,” Elias finished, a strange reverence in his voice. He leaned closer, his next words a barely audible whisper. “There are others like you, child. They hide, afraid, but they exist. You have a resilience beyond your years. Find them.”
The others. That word resonated more than the stories of cosmic horrors. I wasn’t alone. My isolation had been a self-imposed choice; perhaps there was another way.
Elias, sensing my shift in demeanor, retreated into the shadows as quickly as he’d appeared, leaving me with more questions than answers. But within those questions, I recognized a spark. Purpose.
The days that followed were a blur. My thoughts raced to catch up with the possibilities swirling inside me. I moved through the Settlement observing the marked with new eyes. Were they simply citizens, or unwitting links in a cosmic chain? Each tattoo seemed to hum with a malevolent energy I’d never sensed before.
Sleep brought not respite, but nightmares. Not nightmares in the usual sense, but… visions. Flashes of strange, inhuman landscapes, whispers on the edge of understanding, and a sense of something vast and terrible straining against unseen bonds. In the waking world, a flicker of my own reflection would sometimes show a different face – fleeting, monstrous, and achingly familiar. I blinked, and it was gone.
Word reached me, as whispers tend to, that I’d been seen with Elias. My small freedoms were revoked. Confined to my quarters, the oppressive weight of the watchful eyes of my community closed in. I wasn’t sure how much time I had before harsher actions were taken. Yet, an undeniable sense of urgency was replacing the fear.
***
I chose a night when the rain slashed at the settlement walls, a night when the guards would be huddled and miserable. Slipping out was alarmingly easy. The oppressive atmosphere of the settlement only fueled my growing defiance.
I relied on the old, forgotten maps I’d discovered in the archives, navigating through abandoned tunnels, places the founders had once used then sealed away. They led me out, beyond the meticulously planned order, into what we called the Wastes – the ruins of whatever world had existed before. It was a desolate expanse, a testament to past destruction.
I don’t know how long I wandered. Just as I began to despair, I saw it: a flicker of light within the carcass of a crumbling building.
Moving cautiously, I peered inside. It felt not abandoned, but… waiting. A group of figures, unburdened by the marks, sat around a makeshift fire, their faces a tapestry of ages and origins. In them, I recognized a sense of defiant spirit that felt like a balm to my long-smothered self.
One woman, her hair a fierce tangle of gray, stepped forward. “Xyimi, we’ve been expecting you.” She spoke with an authority I instantly recognized.
“You…” I stuttered, “you know me?”
“We know of you,” she corrected. “Your difference is not a flaw, child. It is a key. Your very existence challenges the order, the seals they rely on. And it is in that challenge that true power may lie.” She paused, her eyes seeming to bore into my soul. “The question is: will you claim it?”
***
Her query echoed like a death knell through my mind. The woman’s intensity, the unwavering acceptance in the eyes of the others… it both terrified and exhilarated me. All my life, I’d longed for a glimpse of something larger than my small, regimented world, and now it lay before me, monstrous and beautiful all at once.
“Yes,” I choked out, the single word tasting like a declaration of war.
A hush fell over the ragged group, broken only by the crackle of the fire. The woman’s face softened a fraction before she turned to address them. “It is time.”
Reality became torturous. I learned what it truly meant to be unbound by the seal. The visions in my sleep intensified. No longer were they fragmented glimpses, but rather an immersive torrent of knowledge and power drawn from the depths of Xmiyioloth’s blocked consciousness. It was overwhelming, a constant onslaught of alien perspectives and terrifying insights into the true destructive nature of the universe.
Yet, there was comfort within the horror. The woman, whose name was Xololia, explained that my difference stemmed from a connection to Xmiyioloth that surpassed even the founders’ understanding. I wasn’t merely resistant to the seal; I was a vessel for the horror, its essence given human form to live unknowingly among them as a safeguard. The mark, the tattoo – it wasn’t a shield, but a shackle against my true nature.
With Xololia’s guidance, I learned the true nature of my power, a symphony of alien will and human corruption. The Wastes became my perverse canvas. Stray animals, drawn by some unseen hunger, were the first subjects. Bones twisted and flesh bubbled beneath my touch, reshaping themselves into nightmarish parodies of life – limbs too many, eyes where they should not be, mewling cries that echoed the cosmic horror within me. When the outcasts came, lured by Anya’s promises of purpose, their forms proved no less malleable. Their bodies warped into grotesque testaments to Xmiyioloth’s terrible power, twisted hymns of flesh and bone dedicated to a new, monstrous divinity. And with each abomination birthed from my hands, the line between horrified spectator and eager creator blurred a little more.
When they deemed me sufficiently damned, we emerged from the Wastes, not as outcasts, but prophets of something more true, something far more ancient. We moved through the shadows, infiltrating the Settlement with terrifying ease. The guards and technicians, their minds imprinted with the seal, were helpless puppets before my will. They surged forward, predictable and pathetic. But their screams, once a source of satisfaction, now rang hollow. These were not sacrifices worthy of Xmiyioloth’s terrible majesty.
With a cold focus, I reshaped their forms, not with grotesque parody, but with a horrific, alien elegance. Limbs elongated, becoming sinuous extensions of their bodies. Flesh shimmered, taking on an iridescent sheen. Their expressions, once contorted in terror, froze into masks of serene rapture. They writhed, yes, but in a hideous ballet orchestrated by my will. These were my offerings, not broken and whimpering, but transformed into vessels of perverse beauty, fit tributes laid at the feet of my loving god.
The Chamber became my stage. As the elders gathered, full of their usual pompous declarations, their words dissolved into screams as I ascended the central dais. Each tattoo in the room seemed to burn like acid against my skin, their forced order an unbearable offense.
Power thrummed through me, not controlled, but unleashed. The very air warped with the echoes of Xmiyioloth, tendrils of shadow seeping from the floorboards, reaching for those who had held dominion for so long. Their meticulously planned society unraveled in glorious chaos. Walls crumbled, carefully constructed hierarchies collapsed. Screams filled the air, a horrific cacophony that was its own dark music to my ears.
Xololia stood beside me, not in horror, but a grim satisfaction. “It is not the mark alone that binds them, Xyimi,” she’d said earlier. “It is the belief in their own order. Strip that away, and their defenses are worthless.”
And strip them away, I did. I was no longer the outcast girl, cowering on the fringes. I was retribution incarnate, an echo of the cosmic horror they had foolishly sought to control. With each act of destruction, something beautiful blossomed within me. It was the joy of righteous fury, of undoing the world that had rejected me. Yet, it was tainted with an emptiness, a chilling realization of my own capacity for darkness.
The symphony of screams faded into a ragged silence, punctuated by the wet rasp of my own breath. The settlement sprawled before me, a canvas painted in ruin and the viscous sheen of blood that mirrored the alien sky. Billions of years of order, of carefully constructed restraint, shattered and reformed under my touch. The bodies – were they even bodies anymore? – seemed less like meat, more like grotesque sculptures testifying to forgotten laws of physics.
The survivors… their eyes bulged, mirroring not only terror, but a horrifying recognition. That same alien understanding bloomed within me, a sickening epiphany. My hands, slick with more than just blood, trembled as the last vestiges of power receded. I stared at them, not with horror, but a disquieting sense of completion. There were no more gods here, old or new. Only remnants… and the beginning of something terrible, something vast, taking shape within the confines of my unmarked skin.
Does God Exist? 