Down, the Serpent and the Sun
by Chandler Groover (2015)
Genres: Surreal

The feathered serpent coils before you, greater than any god or any monster. Maimed warriors are crushed beneath its claws. The sun will never rise again.

action: %
response: The walls are smashed. Fires roar in the forest below and the
night fluctuates as an incendiary mirage, each star molten, the moon dripping like fat from some roast animal spitted above a pit.

The sun will never rise again.

Down, the Serpent and the Sun

The feathered serpent coils before you, greater than any god or any monster. Maimed warriors are crushed beneath its claws. The shrines nearby have been reduced to rubble.

Steps descend on every side into the city, and on every side flames lap their blackened stones.
action: You check your inventory
response: You are carrying:
a blade
action: Go downwards
response: Your flesh blisters from the heat. You must turn back.
action: You examine the forest
response: The land is an inferno stretching into the horizon.

Its quills quivering with metallic rattles, plumage outspread around its head for an apocalyptic hood, the serpent rises to strike.
action: Stab Serpent
response: Your blade splinters against your foe.
action: You look at moon
response: The night fluctuates as an incendiary mirage, each star molten, the moon dripping like fat from some roast animal spitted above a pit.
action: You look at the Serpent
response: Its body lithe with hieroglyphic scales, its talons gold, its whiskers living flame, its feathers incandescent, there is nothing above the sky or underneath the earth more terrible. The priests could not kill it with spells and the warriors could not kill it with arms. Even now, after the ultimate banquet, its appetite cannot be satisfied.

With its jaws unhinged, the beast lunges, fangs snapping shut around you as inevitably as a thunderclap follows a lightning strike.

There is no pain.

There is only darkness, more complete than an evening without stars.

You can see nothing, but the air is fetid, hot. Warm dribblings drizzle from above. The ground is spongy underneath your feet.
action: You feel the ground
response: It is too dark to see anything properly.
action: Go downwards
response: Enormous crimson globules leak along the walls, running in channels between numberless gemstones embedded in the rubbery muscle.

A glow radiates from somewhere deep below, its faint brilliance ensnared in the faceted gems like fireflies imprisoned in amber.
action: Go downward
response: Vaulted with bones. No mortal architecture has ever been more colossal. Mottled webbing between the ribs contracts as though some vast organ were expanding and deflating on its opposite side, pressing against the malleable tissue.

Light streams from a cavity leading below.
action: Go west
response: Shot through with rainbow light. The breathing walls are panelled in stained glass.

You walk on air, weightless, dizzy. The atmosphere is supercharged with oxygen. Playful colors dart around you like dolphins.

An opening slashed through the tissue nearby leads back to the ribcage.
action: You look at the glass
response: The stained glass is patterned abstractly. Its panes are fused together with hard cartilage. Light streams through the ceiling above.
action: You breathe
response: Your mind opens as your own lungs flood with air as pure as innocence, your bloodstream cleansed, your body awakened. Everything has meaning now and hopelessness no longer has meaning.
action: Go east
response: (first opening the tissue)
You will have to use force.
action: Descend
response: Bubbles lazily develop and combust in a lake roiling with thick acidic sludge. Its shoreline is littered with corpses and ambiguous organic detritus. Your eyes sting and your brain throbs from the noxious odor.

One skeleton, arm outstretched, fingers dug into the swampy ground, seems nearly to have climbed free when the acid claimed its life.

Emerging from the lake's corrosive mire, its broken orb half-sunken, is the sun.
action: You search skeleton
response: If you want to search something, you should examine it.
action: You examine the skeleton
response: Its skull rotates to stare at you. It is not living, but neither is it dead.
action: You talk to the skeleton
response: Perhaps you should ASK the skeleton ABOUT something.
action: You ask the skeleton about the skeleton
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...my sorceries were useless against it... all my studies wasted... my magic impotent... except to bind my soul to this dead husk... although I did not plan to die when I first wove the binding years ago..."
action: You ask skeleton about the sun
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...I saw it swallow the sun... it rose and closed its jaws over the sun... now the world is plunged in darkness and the sun will never rise again..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the Serpent
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...unkillable... perhaps unkillable... it came from farther than the farthest horizon... from somewhere deeper than the deepest trench... it has always existed... and it will never stop eating..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the binding
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...what I am now... what I experience... is not living..."
action: You look at the sun
response: Its circle has collapsed. Little flames leap and dart across its fractured shell. Now that the serpent has consumed the sun, it will continue to degrade until its embers perish and its warmth has been absorbed into the beast.
action: You ask the skeleton about yourself
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...even a warrior like you has... joined us here in this... unwholesome pit... nobody can conquer the serpent..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the lungs
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...even the sturdiest armor... has flaws..."
action: You ask the skeleton about gullet
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...jewels displayed for nobody... vestigal artifacts from its ancient fabrication..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the lake
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...the acid... eats what the serpent eats... perhaps if you could cross it... with some bridge..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the bridge
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...revenge... would be the sweetest thing... my comrades... my arcane studies... might still possess some little use... for you..."

Its fingers twitch. The acid quagmire churns as bloated deformities buoy to its surface, reanimated by some necromantic urge originating from the skeleton. Its fingers clench into a fist; the floating corpses crush into a mass, a bridge whose length spans the lake toward the sun.
action: You ask the skeleton about the maw
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...teeth sharper than any weapon... do not remind me..."
action: You examine the bridge
response: Its bricks are bones; its mortar, gore.
action: You cross the bridge
response: The sun has been shattered. You enter its hollow interior.

The walls shimmer with scales smoldering orange. Fiery tongues rush upward toward great vents smashed in the ceiling. Liquid gold has pooled into puddles alight with flames whose tendrils beckon like seductive hands.

Through a fracture above, the bridge spans the surrounding acid, and a fissure cracked into the floor opens toward a sphincter visible below.

You are unbearably hot.
action: Go downwards
response: More humid than any jungle and flourishing with intestinal flora. Acid trickles from the sphincter overhead into a meandering rivulet. The walls throb and grumble, occasionally opening their pores to pump bile into the digesting morass.

Feeble sunlight from above casts a tropical glow across the mucosa; the ileocecal valve yawns below.
action: You examine bile
response: The bile has joined with other fluids to produce a loathsome stew, clotted with decomposing bodies, foamed with brown and yellow froth.
action: Go downwards
response: Stalagmites ascend from the floor. Stalactites descend from above. Fibrous bundles somewhat like cocoons are lumped together in masses, slowly sliding downward toward a dank chasm fringed with palpitating stalks.

The atmosphere is rank and stygian. The walls bulge with sacs and depressions.
action: You examine the bundles
response: When you examine the bundles, you discover undigested bones enmeshed in a syrupy lacing. One projecting femur seems especially slathered in the substance.
action: You take femur
response: You wrench the femur loose.
action: You examine the femur
response: Covered in a syrupy lacing.
action: Go downward
response: You can see nothing, but the air is fetid, hot. Warm sludge seeps from above. The ground is muck beneath your feet.

A draught wafts from below.
action: Go down
response: You slide outside into the night, dripping with putrefaction.

The feathered serpent coils before you, greater than any god or any monster. Maimed warriors are crushed beneath its claws. The shrines nearby have been reduced to rubble.

Steps descend on every side into the city, and on every side flames lap their blackened stones.
action: Go upwards
response: Bubbles lazily develop and combust in a lake roiling with thick acidic sludge. Its shoreline is littered with corpses and ambiguous organic detritus. Your eyes sting and your brain throbs from the noxious odor.

One skeleton, arm outstretched, fingers clenched into a fist, seems nearly to have climbed free when the acid claimed its life.

Emerging from the lake's corrosive mire, its broken orb half-sunken, is the sun. A bridge molded from crushed bodies leads toward it.
action: Go up
response: Vaulted with bones. No mortal architecture has ever been more colossal. Mottled webbing between the ribs contracts as though some vast organ were expanding and deflating on its opposite side, pressing against the malleable tissue.

Light streams from a cavity leading below.
action: Go west
response: Shot through with rainbow light. The breathing walls are panelled in stained glass.

You walk on air, weightless, dizzy. The atmosphere is supercharged with oxygen. Playful colors dart around you like dolphins.

An opening slashed through the tissue nearby leads back to the ribcage.
action: You ask the skeleton about the femur
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...it might serve... for a torch... if it were lit..."
action: You descend
response: The sun has been shattered. You enter its hollow interior.

The walls shimmer with scales smoldering orange. Fiery tongues rush upward toward great vents smashed in the ceiling. Liquid gold has pooled into puddles alight with flames whose tendrils beckon like seductive hands.

Through a fracture above, the bridge spans the surrounding acid, and a fissure cracked into the floor opens toward a sphincter visible below.

You are unbearably hot.
action: Light femur
response: Flames caress it until its laced coating blazes.

You are sweating profusely, throat parched.
action: Y.
response: That was a rhetorical question.
action: Go up
response: A gargantuan mouth crammed with fangs sharper than swords. The air is fetid, hot. Warm dribblings drizzle from above. Beneath your feet is a tremendous tongue.
action: You take the fang
response: You pry the tooth loose from its diseased gumline.
action: You look at the teeth
response: Jammed together into a carnivorous vertical jigsaw, festering with mold, yellow with plaque. A bloody socket gapes in the gumline.
action: You look at the tongue
response: With every step, its squishing surface yields, saliva pooling around your ankles.
action: Cut tissue
response: You slash through the tissue with the tooth.
action: You hit the glass
response: You smash through the glass panels overhead with the tooth.
action: You go upward
response: You crawl through the smashed glass into an organ valved and veined. Its chambers are empty. Its tissues are shriveled with age. Dead leaves drift and rustle across the gory floor.

At its center is an altar.

On the altar beats a human heart enchained.
action: You look at the altar
response: A soapstone grotesquerie sculpted with obscene tableaux wherein animals and humans, death and birth, are represented with deformed organs and visages ambiguously ecstatic or terror-stricken. The altar is soaked with spilled blood.
action: You look at the heart
response: Neither larger nor smaller than the heart beating in your own chest. Iron chains fastened with iron stakes anchor it to the altar, where it disgorges blood with each laborious contraction.
action: Heart
response: SAVEOk.
action: Stab heart
response: You plunge the tooth into the heart.

A bloody spout erupts.

The chains clench but the heart expands and bursts, a crimson geyser rising. Its chunderous outpouring is unstoppable. Carnage splatters the ceiling, crashes against the walls, the heart spasming as more blood gushes from its core.

A shock travels through the anatomy, organs convulsive.
action: Go downward
response: Gore pours through the shattered ceiling. The stained glass is awash with blood as the lungs brim with its rising tide.

An opening slashed through the tissue nearby leads into the ribcage.

The beast rumbles.
action: Go west
response: Vaulted with bones. No mortal architecture has ever been more colossal. An alien language carved into the ribs glimmers with indigo phosphorescence.

Light streams from a cavity leading below.

The walls contract spasmodically.
action: Go downwards
response: Your eyes sting and your brain throbs. The acidic lake has begun to boil, scorching the skin surrounding it, blood streaming from the ceiling into its corrosive stew.

Emerging from the mire, its broken orb half-sunken, is the sun. A bridge molded from crushed bodies leads toward it.

A shock travels through the anatomy, organs convulsive.
action: Go downwards
response: The sun has been shattered. You enter its hollow interior.

The walls shimmer with scales smoldering orange. Fiery tongues rush upward toward great vents smashed in the ceiling. Liquid gold has pooled into puddles alight with flames whose tendrils beckon like seductive hands.

Through a fracture above, the bridge spans the surrounding acid, and a fissure cracked into the floor opens toward a sphincter visible below.

The beast rumbles.

You are unbearably hot.
action: You go downward
response: The intestinal flora shriek and thrash along the walls, struggling to remain above the rising swamp. You must paddle and dive; there is no solid footing; you feel an undertow dragging you down into the sanguine depths.

The walls contract spasmodically.
action: Go downwards
response: Bundles bob, bumping the ceiling, as more blood continues pouring from each pore. The light is almost gone. You swallow mouthfuls and sputter with panic, but there is nowhere to dive save deeper down.

A shock travels through the anatomy, organs convulsive.
action: Go downward
response: You are immersed in darkness and in blood.

You hold your breath.

The beast rumbles.
action: Go downward
response: You slide into the night, newborn in blood. It is all you can smell, all you can feel, all you can taste. The pyramid is slippery with gore as you scramble to distance yourself from the feathered serpent.

It has risen to an impossible height.

The star-strewn sky is its deathbed.

Bloody teardrops well out from its eyes, striking the pyramid below like cannonballs. Its whiskers are drenched crimson, its plumage saturated, its talons raking canyons through its belly as it claws to fight its traitorous body.

Its scales dissolve. Its skin dissolves. The serpent is a slashed artery running through the universe, and from its broken vessel blood explodes in a diluvian cascade. The fires in the forest hiss and die in the deluge; the landscape streams and steams with its slaughter; and scarlet raindrops drizzle from above.
action: About yourself
response: You are too exhausted to move.

The night is still, the serpent dead, the city soaked with sacrificial blood.

You can see, shimmering in the downpour, a small flame amongst the wreckage.
action: You take the sun
response: You lift this last sunshard and cradle it between your hands.

It is all that remains from the devoured sun.
action: You put the sun in the sky
response: (first taking the small flame)
You lift this last sunshard and cradle it between your hands.

The flame gutters, and fizzles, and fades.
action: Inventory
response: You are carrying nothing.

You close your eyes and let the blood wash over you.
action: Heart
response: Ok.
action: You hit the chains
response: Not even the serpent's tooth could break these fastenings.
action: You examine chains
response: Crusted with blood.
action: You listen
response: It throbs, and throbs, and throbs.
action: Unlock chains
response: What do you want to unlock the iron chains with?
action: Go down
response: Shot through with rainbow light. The breathing walls are panelled in stained glass.

You walk on air, weightless, dizzy. The atmosphere is supercharged with oxygen. Playful colors dart around you like dolphins.

A hole has been smashed in the ceiling above, and an opening slashed through the tissue nearby leads back to the ribcage.
action: Go west
response: Vaulted with bones. No mortal architecture has ever been more colossal. Mottled webbing between the ribs contracts as though some vast organ were expanding and deflating on its opposite side, pressing against the malleable tissue.

An opening has been slashed into the webbing.

Light streams from a cavity leading below.
action: You ask the skeleton about the heart
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...its heart... yes... its heart... if its heart were destroyed... it is impossible... and yet it might not be impossible..."
action: You ask the skeleton about the altar
response: The skeleton mumbles, "...an unholy pedestal... a holy pedestal..."
action: You descend
response: The sun has been shattered. You enter its hollow interior.

The walls shimmer with scales smoldering orange. Fiery tongues rush upward toward great vents smashed in the ceiling. Liquid gold has pooled into puddles alight with flames whose tendrils beckon like seductive hands.

Through a fracture above, the bridge spans the surrounding acid, and a fissure cracked into the floor opens toward a sphincter visible below.

You are unbearably hot.
action: You go to the west
response: There is no passage through that anatomy.

You are sweating profusely, throat parched.
action: You go to the east
response: There is no passage through that anatomy.

Your skin is blistering.
action: Go north
response: There is no passage through that anatomy.

Red droplets well out from each pore as your crisping flesh contracts.
action: Go south
response: There is no passage through that anatomy.

Your blood is boiling, your flesh roasted, smoke pouring from your nostrils and your mouth as you collapse. First one and then another spark ignites on your body, combusting as your brittle skin blazes, your fingers melting candles crowned with undulating flames.

You can smell and taste nothing but charring meat; you can hear nothing but your own screams; you can feel and see nothing but fire; and then you know nothing at all.
action: Go east
response: (first opening the mucosa)
You will have to use force.
action: You hit the mucosa
response: You slash through the mucosa with the tooth.
action: You go to the east
response: You step into a cavity enamelled in soft pearl. Twin basins, gilded silver and fashioned from alabaster, are teeming with monstrous gametes. Platinum tongs are cradled in a stand nearby.

An opening slashed into the membrane behind you leads back to the small intestine.
action: You take the tongs
response: You remove the tongs from their stand.
action: You examine tongs
response: An arm's length, elegantly wrought from platinum.
action: You look at the gametes
response: Like tadpoles as large as children, squirming and thrashing and outfitted with gnashing razor teeth.
action: You take the gamete
response: You lift a spermatozoon from the basin with the tongs.
action: Go west
response: More humid than any jungle and flourishing with intestinal flora. Acid trickles from the sphincter overhead into a meandering rivulet. The walls throb and grumble, occasionally opening their pores to pump bile into the digesting morass.

An opening has been slashed into the nearby membrane.

Feeble sunlight from above casts a tropical glow across the mucosa; the ileocecal valve yawns below.
action: You check your inventory
response: You are carrying:
a spermatozoon
the tongs
a tooth
a femur (providing light)
action: Go upwards
response: The sun has been shattered. You enter its hollow interior.

The walls shimmer with scales smoldering orange. Fiery tongues rush upward toward great vents smashed in the ceiling. Liquid gold has pooled into puddles alight with flames whose tendrils beckon like seductive hands.

Through a fracture above, the bridge spans the surrounding acid, and a fissure cracked into the floor opens toward a sphincter visible below.

You are unbearably hot.
action: Go upward
response: Bubbles lazily develop and combust in a lake roiling with thick acidic sludge. Its shoreline is littered with corpses and ambiguous organic detritus. Your eyes sting and your brain throbs from the noxious odor.

One skeleton, arm outstretched, fingers clenched into a fist, seems nearly to have climbed free when the acid claimed its life.

Emerging from the lake's corrosive mire, its broken orb half-sunken, is the sun. A bridge molded from crushed bodies leads toward it.

The spermatozoon wriggles free from the tongs, hissing as it jerks and slithers away into some hidden recess.
action: Go east
response: You step into a cavity enamelled in soft pearl. Twin basins, gilded silver and fashioned from alabaster, are teeming with monstrous gametes.

An opening slashed into the membrane behind you leads back to the small intestine.
action: You look at the basins
response: The basins are shaped to resemble great clamshells. They are brimming with sparkling water.
action: You take the sperm
response: You lift a spermatozoon from the basin with the tongs.
action: You put the sperm in the bile
response: You had better keep that.
action: Go downwards
response: Stalagmites ascend from the floor. Stalactites descend from above. Fibrous bundles somewhat like cocoons are lumped together in masses, slowly sliding downward toward a dank chasm fringed with palpitating stalks.

The atmosphere is rank and stygian. The walls bulge with sacs and depressions.
action: You go west
response: (first opening the sacs)
You will have to use force.

The spermatozoon wriggles free from the tongs, hissing as it jerks and slithers away into some hidden recess.
action: You cut the sacs
response: You slash through the intestinal lining with the tooth.
action: You go to the west
response: The walls are bubbled with pearlescent pods, warm milk trickling between them to collect in a reflecting pool. Above this pool, suspended from the ceiling by silk threads numbering in the billions, hangs an ovum.

An opening slashed into the lining behind you leads back to the large intestine.
action: You look at the pool
response: Its white still surface is a perfect mirror.
action: You look in the pool
response: If you want to search something, you should examine it.
action: You touch the pool
response: It sticks to your fingers like sap.
action: You go east
response: Stalagmites ascend from the floor. Stalactites descend from above. Fibrous bundles somewhat like cocoons are lumped together in masses, slowly sliding downward toward a dank chasm fringed with palpitating stalks.

An opening has been slashed into the intestinal lining.

The atmosphere is rank and stygian. The walls bulge with sacs and depressions.
action: You put sperm in ovum
response: With a keening scream, the gamete assaults the ovum, shredding through its mallow gauze with a piranha's frenzy.

The silk threads twist above; the ovum sways; the gamete burrows gleefully into the wound its teeth have torn apart, disappearing with one last contorted flourish into the violated flesh.

There is silence.

The ovum no longer resonates; the pods along the walls no longer hum; the beast's internal organs no longer pulse and grumble. And then there is a light -- gold, small, and bright -- within the gauze, which suddenly erupts as an engulfing conflagration.

The silk threads melt. The ovum falls blazing into the pool, whose liquid lights as readily as kindling while the pods burst from the mounting temperature. The chamber has become a bonfire.

You are drenched in burning sweat.
action: You go to the east
response: The stalagmites are fiery columns, the stalactites dripping heated mercury, the bundles charring as the intestinal lining radiates with steaming pockets prepared to combust. Around the chasm below, the stalks are flailing as they roast.

You choke on smoke and cinders in the air.
action: Go downwards
response: Every membrane is magma. Crisping cells crack to expose igneous metals boiling underneath. A draught from below fans the fires inside even higher.

Your flesh blisters from the heat.
action: Go downwards
response: You plunge outside into the night, your skin scorched and smoking. The world is cold and dark and you stumble across the pyramid's level top, seeking refuge amongst the rubble as the feathered serpent writhes.

Its scales are whitehot irons and its feathers streaming flames, its talons glowing pokers and its eyes liquid rubies. It is coiling and recoiling with its teeth sunk in its tail, as though it would seek to tear out its anguish and feast on that emotion like a predator upon its gutted prey.

In its agony it has forgotten everything.

It shreds and shreds itself apart, snapping, ripping, roaring until its muscles are tinseled ribbons. With one tremendous tug it yanks its head back from its flesh, its jaw trailing sunbeams and sinews, and in that moment everything is gold, its form unformed, as its coils break and crash across the pyramid in molten waves.
action: Wait
response: Time passes.

The molten metal cools, the pyramid gilded, and the fires in the forest below are dwindling.

The serpent is entirely dissolved.

Where it once towered, poised to consume the world, something else now uncoils and flickers.
action: You examine the snake
response: The serpent is entirely dissolved.

It is another serpent, newly hatched. Its feathers are yellow with yolk. Its scales are still unhardened, translucent, and through their glass an inner brilliance shimmers like a candle in a lamp.

It chirps and surveys the surrounding landscape, cocking its head now and then with inquisitiveness.

At last it stares into the sky.

Called by some ancient instinct, it sinks one claw, then the next, into the darkened space behind the stars, and gradually begins to climb into the airy vault above.

As it ascends, the stars demurely dim, the moon draws its invisible cloak, and another dawn blushes from the horizon.

You cannot see it clearly anymore. It is too far away, and far too bright.

You shield your eyes against the morning sun.