Bee Swallowed - SCP Foundation

by Ethagon

It was midnight when Angelo noticed something was wrong.

It was a nagging feeling, keeping the boy from falling asleep. He turned around, his body facing away from the window. His pillow served the same purpose for his ears, keeping the noise of the night out. And yet that feeling would not go away. A small tremble built up in his stomach and did not let go. It grew more and more intense in small waves, spilling over from stomach to gullet until finally his whole body was shaking.

The little bee was standing on a flower, collecting nectar for the hive. It was unaware of the danger lurking in the pond beneath it. Already the creature was making waves, its eyes parting the water. Yet, for now, both remained in their separate domains.

He stood up.

Angelo sighed and went downstairs to get himself a glass of water. Hopefully, that would be the end of that and he could go back to sleep. While he slowly worked his way through his refreshment, he glanced out of the window. It was a starless sky on a new moon night. Still, when he concentrated, he was sure he could locate the moon on its firmament. It had a clear outline in his mind's eye.

He still felt uneasy.

Angelo decided to go wake up his parents. He thought for a moment about whether or not he should wash the glass so the kitchen would stay clean. Ultimately he decided against it and put it on the kitchen board. He did remove a black hair that had fallen on the table before he left. Less evidence.

When he was making his way up the stairs, his stomach complained again. The further he got, the more it shook through his body. As he crossed the final steps, he looked up and realized that he could still see the outline of the moon despite there being no window in the hallway.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

His full attention was now focused on the moon in his mind. The moon, in turn, was focused on him. The boy was paralyzed. The trembling had stopped, with the purpose of its warning now laid bare.

The predator was fixated on its target, its eyes a piercing glare. The little bee was nervous. The unwanted attention had not escaped it. The predator was tensing its muscles, preparing for the moment.

He stood this way for a minute, maybe ten. At some point, a door creaked and the spell was broken. Angelo quickly looked to the side to locate the sound before glancing back at the moon. The Moon in his mind's eye had grown thrice its original size. Angelo stumbled backwards, tripped on the stairs, and fell.

He never reached his floor. With an enormous quake something jumped out of the sky and the world was askew.

He lifted himself up from the foreign soil, body lighter than possible and sprinted towards the gate in front of him. Three steps turned into half-jumps and then full jumps brought the boy to the opening.

Outside there was no ground. Only sky and sky-reflected. And something was coming closer.

He ran and he turned to the left and then to the left and then to the left and then to the left. But four lefts don't make a right so he was again at the maw that had spit him out. The maw of the house that was his house in another house, but there was nothing there besides a two-faced door, which could not be trusted, no way for him to get back to his parents, and so he ran.

There were other houses not existing. Just like his, they had gone to never be and been replaced with concrete wood clay that was crumbling into itself and he thought about his clay parents that now would never wake up again to see that he had not washed the glass on the kitchen table. The last thought of his would-have-been-parents, would they have existed still in the morning, would have been about how the boy just would not learn to clean up after himself.

Angelo ran with his yellow pyjamas sticking to his skin. He could see that not all of the village was affected. There was a clearing of normal life, but it was broken away from this long world he now inhabited and it might as well have been light years away and besides, the moon was standing between them.

The moon in his mind's eye was still at the cracked ceiling. It was pulsating and its rift-like veins were spreading across space as above so below.

The rift-veins were arcing like lightning towards places beyond humans, which did not help, because the people were panicking. From these tears in space came a strange foam that worked like a blender on contact.

It took a while for the realization to hit. There were other people. His only slightly raised spirit dropped again when he realized that he did not know these people. They looked like they were from the area, but their clothes were strange, like a mismatch of long outdated outfits and some he'd never seen before. There were other shards of space like the one he was living behind and in these other shards, he could see other not-anymore-villages just like his. He wanted to run into the safety of community, but he did not know these people. He hesitated.

The people were running. Angelo was still unsure if he should join the group, but if they knew a way out of this, then he should follow.

And so he went. At first slowly, because the ground was filled with leaves and boughs, but as it started to fill up with more and more leaves and then later rain worms with no end, they ran.

As he looked downwards he could see how the foam had evolved a taste for blood. When first it had spilt out of the tear in all directions, now it leapt towards anyone near it. He could only catch glimpses of the foam forming two legs before he shook it off and focused on the path in front of him again.

The little bee had joined a small swarm in its fear, but it did not matter. After the creature had leapt out of the water, there was only very little time left for the small insect. The beast released its tongue.

Now he could see what the group had been running towards. There was a narrow path over the not-sky that would bring him directly above the safe parts of the village. The other people still had to climb up a hill to get to the path, while Angelo was almost right in front of it. For the second time he thought about joining the group, but the foam was still on their heels.

He ran towards the path. Close behind him were the first of the group. The path was uneven, so they elected to crawl. Every four steps or so the path began to crumble. He and the group paused for a moment each time before continuing. That was until they heard them.

"Bleigh, blough agh uh gooing blergh!"

The foam had formed into full people, wearing the clothes the other townspeople had worn before, but still being made of foam, except they weren't entirely separate people. Sometimes it was foam per clothing and sometimes one foam wearing five people and they had consumed everyone not already on the path. Now they were making their way up to the rest of them

The dwindling group and the boy started to crawl faster.

The foam did not crawl in its entirety. It crawled, it climbed, it collapsed then flooded, sprinted and fell, losing about a third of its mass to the cliff, all while trying and failing to look human.

There was no illusion that they could make it. The foam was just too fast. Already it had caught up to them, one of its semi-people surrounding them and demanding "Blorgh", trying to drag the group back with them, only each time it grabbed at skin it reached through arms, shredding them away in the process. The foam was confounded by this all while ignoring the people's screams and it did it again and again and again, until the foam just walked through the group and they were gone, Angelo only being spared the same fate by the path now collapsing.

He could fall into the not-sky below him or try to reach up to the remaining path, but gravity was not keen on letting people decide and pulled him downwards, while the foam had to stay.

From the not-sky he was falling towards, it emerged just opposite of the moon in his mind's eye, except it did come from the moon, because the lightning tears had raced past the earth, a continent, or so he thought at first, but it was living ground in the process of becoming something, just like the foam had become and gravity was dragging him to it.

The tongue reeled in, the little bee was swallowed whole.

Angelo was drowning in a sea of mud that was slowly, but surely eating away at him. Still, he struggled, trying to delay the inevitable, but it was no use.

The mud would dissolve him and then take on a vague form of him as the foam had done without understanding what he truly was.

As the mud was ingesting him, so was he ingesting the mud and it brought him just brief moments of clarity. All the shards broken off the village again and again had been reft asunder, but the village in large parts had been left alone afterwards every time until this different kind of flood by the moon in his mind's eye would hit again.

For now, the chaos was receding and with it the mud and its loot. Here the boy struggled again. Would that the mud not fail to take his body, but rather fail to take his mind, its structure be whatever else as long as the boy could stay with his village.

When the thing had swallowed the little bee, it had stung its predator in panic. No matter that the bee was small, its poison would still spread through the beast.

Some thing made of mud was moving against the tide, trying to follow a will it did not understand. As the tide proved too strong, it could not go whence it came. With only shards of shards remaining, it could not pull against the current.

Off to the side, among the hindmost shards, there was a calling. Pursuing the calling would shape the thing like the will of the dead boy would, but the thing did not care. It crashed through the gate and landed.

The first words the creature heard were from its summoners calling out its name. Palaka Dagat, the ocean guardian.

When the frog landed, it was not the same animal it had been before. One thing was for certain; it would not hunt bees again.