Work Text:
Statement of The Distressed Student, regarding a certain unsateable hunger. Original statement given November 22nd, 1899. Phonograph recording by Johnathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins:
Imagine, for a moment, the most mournful sound you can think of. A child crying over the loss of their parents. A wolf cub attempting to desperately howl, shivering, separated from its pack, alone out in the cold. The guttural sobbing of a wife being cheated on by the man she loved with all her heart and soul. Perhaps then, you will have some idea as to what I heard that day.
I have no explanation as to why I heard it. I suppose, knowing what I do now, that perhaps it might’ve been related to my exploration into some of the more esoteric matters that the Sommerset University offered, back when I was a student there. Correspondence, mostly. It’s a strange and I suppose dangerous language, if it even really is a language, although much more so than I’d expected. Some strange symbols, only a few of which have known meanings, and none of which we know the origin of. They have some peculiar grammatical rules that can be catastrophic if not followed, but I always was always careful to do so. All I’d heard about was just singed hair, and if you were really unlucky, a nasty encounter with a Sorrow Spider. I didn’t think that the Correspondence work I was doing would become so deeply troublesome. The work was esoteric, and potentially dangerous, yes, but it’s not exactly like I was getting involved with Parabola. I took some caution around mirrors, yes, but I certainly wasn’t visiting the dream world and taking tea with the snake kings.
Now, mind you, I still never did that, exactly. But, in my research, I found something I might have been better off not finding. No, no. I take that back. There is no question I would’ve been better off without ever finding it. But… I can’t fully say that I regret what I learned. It was a book. Old, leatherbound with a black metal trimming on it that never quite seemed to warm up, now that I think about it. Always kept getting colder. Anyways, it was titled “Deiphagia”, essentially meaning “god-eating”. I’d assumed that the book was just some heretic piece talking about the Eucharist, and I fully intended to bring it to the Bishop of Southwark to make a final judgement on it, but, intending just to skim the reading, I realized that it in fact had nothing to do with Christ. Nothing to do with Him at all.
Instead what I’d found was a book that seemed to be about one of the old fallen cities. When a city is taken by bats, there are prices to pay, things that are gained, yes. But as I read, I learned that the rulers of the Third City gained something… tremendous, in exchange for their city. They’re very infrequently mentioned in some restricted access history texts, so it’s a wonder I even remembered this term, but they were called “God-Eaters”. And they were called this, it seems, because in exchange for their city being dragged down into the Neath and crushing the Second City, they were fed the flesh of an immensely powerful being. A Master. And I know I said that this book was about the old fallen cities, and that’s certainly what it seemed like at first, but the more I read it, the more detail it went into them consuming it. At first, the description was just “and then he was Eaten,” but it didn’t stop there. Page after page, the description of what happened repeated again and again, each time in more detail. The book became a sickening, visceral description of this Master being cut into many pieces, carved like an animal, eaten bit by bit. More of some organs than I would expect in a person. Organs that I didn’t recognize were present. Organs that I would’ve expected were missing. Writhing, and knives, and blood dripping down sinister grins.
And all through this. Perhaps the most disturbing bit through it all, was that through all this, the Master being consumed, who we now know as Mr. Eaten... was alive. They never died, really and truly, in the sense that they never met with the Boatman, never moved to the Far Shores. And throughout their being consumed, they cried out desperately to their siblings for help, for salvation, and they simply watched on. None of them had anything to say. None of them stopped what was happening. Of course they wouldn’t. They had orchestrated it. Mr. Irons even smiled through it all. He always did enjoy brutality in a way his siblings did not. And once it was over, the betrayal did continue. They didn’t bury him in any civilized, proper manner. He received no ivory or peace with the Boatman. Instead, his still living body, having been mostly eaten alive, was thrown down a well, unceremoniously. No care or consideration for their suffering sibling. Only betrayal, in every act they carried out.
For many sleepless nights after I read this book, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Eaten. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had endured, and how there was no one who treated him kindly, and no one who even remembered his proper name. Mr. Eaten was just a title, and a title not freely taken, mind you. It was forcibly given. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine being eaten alive by complete strangers, and knowing that your siblings actively allowed and encouraged it, because it was to their own benefit? Because I can. I absolutely can, after what happened to me. And I suppose what is still happening to me. I am being made to feel this pain myself.
One day, after I read the book, I felt… I felt inexorably drawn to the Forgotten Quarter. It’s damn near impossible to map out, and I certainly didn’t take anyone with me that day, but through a combination of university knowledge, what felt like a strange perversion of the draw towards food you can smell from a ways away, and that deep, sonorous, agonized cry, I not only made my way through the Forgotten Quarter, but to one particular old well within. It was tucked away in an out of the way corner, but once I walked up to it, it felt sickeningly unique.
Down the well was no rope, no bucket, but a deep, yawning void. There was no feeling of vertigo, as there was no feeling of being planted on the ground at all anymore. I did not feel as though I was falling, as I did not feel as though there was any physical thing any longer from which I might’ve fallen. And while I was lost, deep within this well, while I physically was still no doubt standing in place staring down a hole, I felt something. Something calling to me. I don’t know what it was, and I still don’t know. I’m not certain I’ll ever know. But I have my guess, and I’m certain you do too.
And that night, when I finally went to sleep, I had dreams like I’d never had before. I could see nothing, but there was a voice coming from nowhere, speaking in a language I’d never heard spoken, burning me all over with its words and leaving me with a deep, dark hunger.
And now, I’m here. I don’t know what I am anymore. I may not be a person, fully. Human, perhaps. Although not a person. Not anymore. You’re writing this down and I don’t give you much credit as a sketch artist, so you’ll be happy to note that I have scorch marks around my face, and am missing several of my teeth. I don’t hug anymore, lest my interlocutor notice that I’m more hollow than you might expect. At night, I dream. I dream, and I fast, and I meditate. My home is lit only by candles. I dare not share more. But know this, Archivist. You will not stop me, nor will the Constables, or the Masters. I will go North someday. And there will be a reckoning.
End statement.
I must say, that was. Deeply troubling. We’ve certainly heard of people with similar stories. Seekers of the Name, they call themselves. They all ascribe a deep desire to destroy themselves, much in the same way this enigmatic “Mr. Eaten” figure was destroyed. It’s unclear just how long this has been persisting, but there’s no evidence that this group is prelapsarian in nature. The Admiralty and Constabulary had warned the people of London of new threats amidst the Neath, but we didn’t imagine them manifesting in such gruesome fashion. What worries me now, however, is that we have recovered, in the past, many texts that had similarly supernaturally harmful effects on their readers.
Sasha and Timothy, and Martin, as well, have been able to track down and obtain others of these books, and spoken to some academics who seem to be knowledgeable on the subjects, including one Jurgen Leitner, a strange young fellow who’s taken to collecting and safeguarding these books to the best of his ability.
He’s suggested that these books are all tied to fears. With an f in raised case. These Fears, these entities, appear to be manifestations of deep, primal causes of, well, fear, within humans. A fear of being watched. A fear of being buried. So on and so forth. And two of them are the most relevant to this discussion.
The Spiral represents a fear of madness, of losing control and one’s hold on reality, being condemned to the likes of those within the Royal Bethlehem. And The Flesh is the fearful reminder that we are all simply meat and bones; a denial of the supremacy of Man that the Church preaches, if you will.
It seems as though these wells, this book “Deiphagia”, and these so-called-Seekers all seem to be tied together to one thing. A madness, but a madness that manifests in deep hunger for flesh, and the use of one’s own flesh and bone as materials for rituals that only harm the soul, while bringing them closer to this Mr. Eaten figure.
Previous cases of Seekers seem to demonstrate that this manifests in strange and disturbing ways, usually involving the consumption of the self in some way. It’s believed that The Distressed Student had already attempted to bake their face into a pie, and had eaten several of their teeth. Follow-up cases with Seekers being tracked by the Constables seem to show that this escalates into removing one’s own organs.
Some artifacts have been recovered, instances of strange “candles” that appear to require powerfully harmful rituals to manifest, and may be part of a greater ritual still. We fear they might be involved in a summoning ritual of either this “Mr. Eaten” character itself, or something greater still.
We have reason enough to believe, at this point, that these phenomena and rituals are not in service of one of the Fears already known to us on the Surface, but an altogether new Fear. A Fear of being consumed and betrayed. Of the disintegration of the bonds that hold us together, as a communal and familial species, abandoning those things for power and vengeance. For the time being, with this Mr. Eaten marked as a strong candidate for a potential candidate of an Avatar to this new Neathy Fear, we shall refer to it as the result of The Spiral and The Flesh: The Hunger.