BORNE

The beginning of Borne....

Jeff

I found it because I had to, on the flank of shudder-sleeping Mord, one leg larger than my entire home--within that brown fur jungle, matted and stinking of carrion and chemicals and whatever small creatures had hidden themselves there. Mord had leveled a soft building when he'd fallen to his slumber and the goopy pieces mashed out to the sides of him, given a new identity as asymmetrical cocoon. I found the thing because I had to take the risk, to eat, to survive. Even sleeping, Mord rose higher than many a structure, had fangs and claws that could eviscerate quick as thought, eyes like vast, fly-encrusted beacons of self-loathing, and a mind that worked on vast, cosmic scales. But at his flanks, all he meant to me was food. When he wandered out as Seether from his lair in the basement of the cracked and dysfunctional Company, all manner of food, tantalizing and ghastly, became entangled in that ropy, dirt-bathed fur, some of it coming free during his shambling walk. As he destroyed and reimagined the city for his own unknowable reasons, so too he replenished it, in his thoughtless way. Sometimes he bequeathed to us only the corpses of unrecognizable animals, their skulls burst of an internal pressure their little eyes bright and bulging. Sometimes we found the beetles you could put in your ears, like the ones my friend Wick made, and, within the explosion of mint or lime on the tongue, there would form visions of places that I hoped had never really existed; it would be too cruel to live in this city and know of such normalcy. Sometimes, it was just packets of meat, clear surplus from the Company's bowels. You never knew--and that is why Mord had a following, a posse, a ragged flinching train of the desperate. Many times Mord would turn, and turning all unknowing or with malice relieved one of us of our life. But you never knew, and so you followed, head down in simulated genuflection, hoping Mord would provide for you.

None of us knew why the Company hadn't tried to destroy Mord while it still could, but there was little chance of that now. Perhaps he still worked for them in his chaotic way.

By now, Mord could also levitate using some arcane and coiled concentration of mind, and many an explorer or scavenger, daring to climb up that flank after Mord had, in a formless rage, destroyed a city block or cornered some of us and literally devoured us, the remnant only a smudge of the foulest breath imaginable...many an explorer/scavenger would find themselves lifted up and then, unable to hold on, fall to their deaths, Mord unawares as he glided like a boulder over his dominion, his hunting preserve, the nightmare they call this city.