An Adamant Attachment

「”An Adamant Attachment” is a prequel short story to my novel, Phenotype: Stage One. It contains minor spoilers for the premise and characters of my novel and relies on some mechanics of these stories’ settings that are explained in more detail within the novel. As a result, it is not the ideal entry point for my fiction on this site, but it can serve as a good introduction for the world of Phenotype. It also contains profane language and graphic descriptions of violence. Therefore, it may not be suitable for younger readers.」

Part One

 
 
     Hiram watched two bodies be devoured by the olenchyme. The first was feathered, with the commonly held proportions of two legs, two arms, and an upright torso. Their bright plumage helped conceal a razor-sharp beak and talons that could pass through flesh as easily as air. They died from a slash to their spinal cord, one that nearly bisected their body. The blow that caused this wound was intended for another. The avian sacrificed their flesh to protect them, only for them to now both feed the olenchyme: the organism that enclosed the world.
     Hiram turned his gaze to the other body, whom the first bought a few more moments of life. Glittering scale armor coated their serpentine form. Their top half sported fanged jaws and three pairs of suckered tentacles. They were decapitated while ushering the remaining residents of the building toward the back entrance. The olenchyme had already crushed their skull like aluminum foil and was now absorbing its contents.
     Hiram heard the weak slap of flesh hitting flesh and brought his long neck upward. He saw two more bodies hit the floor. The closest to him was a small quadruped. Black hooves and smooth, blubbery skin had given them great speed. The rows of barbed quills sprouting from their back provided even greater defense, yet that hadn’t prevented a narrow blade from piecing them head to tail when they sprinted for the door.
     The final corpse lay on their back, curled like a dying pill bug as the olenchyme engulfed it. Navy-blue chitin plated every inch of their body. A set of four legs had supported their massive torso from the back as two arms like a gorilla’s kept the front upright. Their flat head, one that once hosted compound eyes and scissor-like mandibles, was now cleaved down its middle, exposing a lime-green brain.
     Each of the four corpses had a different shade of blood. Their bodies were as similar as apples to coconuts. Yet Hiram knew nonetheless that they were family.
   
                      Years in the Past
  
     Hiram lay asleep in his home, coiled like a dragon in its largest open chamber. His eight tentacles, each more than thirty feet long, wriggled across the floor like the roots of a tree. His torso formed their trunk, and from its broad shoulders emerged enormous, membranous wings, tipped by deadly claws. His mouth was long, crocodilian, and exclusively filled with canines. Behind his snout was an enormous cyclopean eye, its pupil slit and its iris a bright green.
     A blaring chime roused Hiram from his slumber, the sound of his frequently employed doorbell. His head groggily raised, he slithered through the barren halls of his home until he arrived in front of a grandiose set of keratin doors.
     They split apart at his prompting to reveal Hiram’s second-in-command: Shona Levann. Her body was fluid; an amorphous, amoeba-like blob that refracted the noon sun. She currently had her form stretched to half Hiram’s height, turning her into a thick column of slime. Several brown orbs floated throughout her body. Hiram understood them to be her true organs, but Shona never told anyone what their individual purposes were. He’d met her before she’d created the name she now wore, back when she served a greedy revisionist who would end up literally drowning in his own work.
     “Hey boss,” she gurgled, wriggling her ectoplasm as the vibrations of her words traveled through it.
     “What is it, Shona?”
     “One of our clients, Azar Minassio, linguist. Collector went out to take his fees; Minassio refused to hand them over, says our prices have become too steep. I came over to try and negotiate, but he said he would only talk to you. Do you want me to give him an ultimatum, or what?”
     “… I’ll go,” Hiram decided.
     “O-Oh, okay,” Shona stammered back, clearly surprised. Hiram didn’t blame her for the disrespect. It had been weeks since he last emerged from his home. Every other recent request for his input resulted in delegation or flat-out refusal, but he knew he had to return to the world at some point. This was simply the first time he’d worked up the courage to do so.
     “Let’s walk. He’s just by Carther’s Quarter, right?”
     Shona imitated a nod, and the two began to creep down the city’s streets. Hiram spent the first minutes of their trek reacquainting himself with their locale. The sky was obscured by a white wall of clouds, assailing the landscape below with constant snowfall. The olenchyme absorbed the frozen water as soon as it melted on its goosebump-riddled surface, but a light sheet seemed ever-present on the winding roads and low-lying buildings of Uvaagnik city. There were no lanterns in Uvaagnik; all the light people needed came from below. A constant dull orange glow, like the shine of a flashlight pressed against a finger, constantly permeated the olenchyme’s skin. It was brightest at the center of streets and city squares, lessening within buildings. Residents liked to call it the heart of the olenchyme, despite the over thirty locations in the world, six of which Hiram had visited himself, that had similar features.
     Hiram’s tentacles glided through snow as Shona squirmed her way overtop the street. Hiram noticed two of their customers, twin masses of white fur with an indeterminate number of limbs hiding underneath and red chitin masks covering their faces, ahead. They manned a fruit stand. Hiram recalled that they were relatively new to the city and went so far as to hire protection before setting up their business.
     “Hello! Uzil and Azil, yes?”, Hiram asked as he approached.
     ““Correct, sir,”” they answered in tandem, bowing.
 He laughed. “You don’t need to address me like that. I’m a business owner just like yourselves.”
     “One of great success,” Azil commented. “And deserving great respect,” continued Uzil.
     “Well, I shouldn’t argue with praise, I suppose. But what about you two? How’s business been?”
     “Increasingly profitable,” Uzil replied with a raised thumb. “Our fruits grow more delectable by the week,” Azil elaborated with another.
     “Glad to hear it. Can I try one?”
     ““Absolutely!”” They scurried to the recesses of their store. A short tree with a grey, spiraled trunk grew down from the ceiling. Its branches ended in chains of oval-shaped leaves dangling toward the olenchyme’s bright heart. Between their foliage hid plump cyan fruit, each the size of a newborn baby and veiled in wispy strands of silk. Azil stood on Uzil’s back and plucked a fruit from its stem. They offered it to Hiram like tribute to an altar, each placing a palm on the fruit’s underside and slightly lowering their heads.
     Smiling awkwardly, Hiram accepted their gift in his tentacle. The fruit offered zero resistance to the force of his powerful jaws, filling them with sweet ichor as its silken casing dissolved on his tongue to impart a salty tang. He devoured the entire thing.
     “Delicious. How much do I owe you?”
     “Nothing, it’s on the house,” Uzil said with glee. “Please take it, and many future tributes, as a sign of our condolences,” Azil clarified.
     Hiram stared at them, his spirit instantly diminished. Shona slid out from behind him and furiously commanded, “Don’t think you can buy your way into good favor. You aren’t—”
     “Shona, it’s fine. Thank you. I might just take you up on that offer.”
     Hiram swiftly turned away from the stand and resumed his path. Azil and Uzil nervously tittered. Shona rapidly flashed them with a threatening display of the warmer colors of the spectrum before returning to her boss’s side.
     They proceeded in silence through a few more streets. Restaurateurs, revisionists, musicians, auctioneers, and their customers greeted them with reverence, yet after the third marketplace they’d passed through, Shona couldn’t bear it anymore.
     “Boss? Can we talk about what happened with the fruit sellers?”
     “I’d prefer not to right now.”
     “… But we haven’t even acknowledged it at all, not since the fight was over.”
     “I don’t need reminding,” Hiram snarled.
     “Talking should help, right? … You, for obvious reasons, don’t have anyone else to do it with right now.”
     “Shona! They may have been on thin ice with that fruit for pity bullshit, but you are diving into the ocean right now!” Hiram stopped and fully bared his teeth at his employee.
     “I—! … You’re right. I’m being stupid. Sorry boss, I just don’t want you to think you can’t talk if you want to.”
     “I know … Thank you, Shona.”
     They resumed silence for the rest of their walk, soon arriving at a small building hidden off to the side of a bustling marketplace. Its two floors each resembled a spinal vertebra growing up from the ground. The first was decorated by red advertisements of the various languages the owner could imbue his customers with, while the second extended forward to form a wide balcony. One of Hiram’s lower-level employees, a tall, quadrupedal man encased in pangolin scales with a mouth of slimy tendrils, stood next to Azar Minassio.
     Azar was one of Hiram’s oldest customers, yet that did not make them friends. He was a shrewd businessman with little patience for others, more invested in cutting costs than building a good relationship with the rest of the city. His body was humanoid from the waist down, with long legs plated by brown chitin keeping him spry, but the torso those legs supported was a squirming mess of innumerable mandibles and pincers, all covering a massive, gibbering mouth where his chest should be. A dome-shaped head topped this mess, its chitin protection only yielding space for two tiny yellow eyes.
     Hiram’s employee met him as he approached. “H-Hello boss. Shona.”
     “It’s Liam, right?”, Hiram asked.
     “Correct, sir.”
     “Have you made any progress with him?”, Shona asked.
     “None. He won’t give us anything. Claims he was threatened into handing over five lexicons by a thug who waltzed into his store. He thinks that entitles him to skip his payment this week and pay less from now on.”
     “If he’s telling the truth, maybe he’s right,” Hiram replied optimistically before heading toward Azar, who stood under his balcony.
     “You actually showed your face,” his disgruntled customer greeted tiredly.
     “Shouldn’t ask for people to do things you don’t expect from them,” Hiram replied, only able to fit his head under the balcony.
     “Sometimes you have to take chances. Even I know that.”
     “There’s not much of a chance to be had in pissing off my employees. You weren’t even willing to negotiate?”
     “Not with lackeys, no.” Azar walked back to his door and looked up at his sign, “I have a reputation to uphold.”
     Hiram heard a slight creaking sound yet dismissed it in his focus. “I don’t mean to offend a linguist of your skill, but your reputation is shit. Angling to argue money out of me won’t change that.”
     “You’re right. Nothing will change so long as your group has its claws imbedded in Uvaagnik,” Azar declaring, pressing a mandible to the front surface of his store. The door pried ajar. Hiram’s outstretched tentacle was too late to stop him from slipping inside. A shiver ran down Hiram’s spine as the combined threat and sudden retreat that Azar just performed distilled in his mind. As soon as that shiver reached the end of his back, a thunderous boom rang out from above his head. Hiram craned his neck back to see Liam’s tendrilled head burst into a purple mist, its skull now resembling a jagged flower of fragmented bone.
     “Sniper!”, Hiram screamed to Shona, although she didn’t need to be told. She spread her amorphous body overtop Liam’s and used his remains to protect her cores from the next volley of shots the sniper loosed. Before retracting his head from underneath the balcony, Hiram thrust his weight upwards into it, knocking whoever stood above him off balance.
     When he tried to raise his body to look overtop its rim, a weight slashed through the membrane of his right wing. He turned his eye toward the source of the blow and found his first assailant.
     “Hey, ‘boss’,” she snarled through rigid lips, “Want to meet your family?” Her body was humanoid in shape, aside from a long, barbed tail and a height approaching twelve feet. Bark replaced every inch of her skin. Green leaves covered her back, while thorns crept out of her shoulders, thighs, and neck. Held horizontally below her waist was a great axe, its handle the same material as her skin and its head carved from thick bone.
 Hiram didn’t waste words with her. He slashed the claws of his damaged wing at her face. She ducked under the blow and charged toward his main body. Three tentacles lashed out to meet her. The first received a blow from her axe. The second was perforated by the rapid attacks of her tail. The third succeeded in its mission, barreling through to her chest where it sent her flying away from Hiram.
     He turned to check on Shona. She still hid behind Liam’s body, but the sniper had descended from their perch. They were a serpentine person, orange in color, scaled, with a cluster of keratin tubes of different lengths for a face. One of these tubes continued to lob slugs of metal into Shona’s cover as their owner steadily lessened the gap between them.
     Hiram wanted to help, but the sniper was out of his reach, and his battle wasn’t over. The axe wielder approached Hiram, maintaining a steady pace with none of the reckless abandon of before. Hiram sent his tentacles to attack her once again, but a dance of axe swings and tail swipes kept her advance going. Hiram retracted his tendrils and replaced their assault with slashes from his wings. These proved similarly ineffective; being dodged and blocked with relative ease.
     But this did not trouble Hiram as much as it inflated his opponent’s ego. She progressed until the point he desired. Hiram then used his tentacles to extend his torso straight into the air. He towered over her, nearly rivaling Azar’s shop in height. The woman appeared baffled over how to approach this change in her target, standing on edge within his shadow. She did not have to wait long for an answer, however, as Hiram spread his wings and fell forward, his massive body set to crush her own. She was barely able to dive out of his trajectory. She rose to her feet in front of Hiram’s shoulder. He regarded her with pity out of the corner of his eye as his neck lay straight outward. She raised her axe over her head to strike its vulnerable flesh, yet Hiram retracted the wing she stood next to, and snuck its thumb around her foot.
     Her focus on perceived victory robbed the warrior of her better judgement. Hiram ripped her off her feet. As she tumbled, his jaws lashed out to clamp around her ankle. He twisted his head like a crocodile, tearing her lower leg from its thigh on long strands of green muscle. She screeched in pain. Hiram spat out her leg, lifted his torso, and set the claws of his wing to rest at her throat.
     “Did Azar hire you alone?!”, he yelled through a mouthful of blood.
     A guttural shriek was the only reply she gave as she continued to clutch at the stump of her leg.
     Hiram prepared to repeat his inquiry while threatening to remove her other leg. However, another scream interrupted him. He turned back to Shona’s location only to find her in front of the sniper, engulfed in the flames being spewed from one of their nozzles.
     She must have tried to jump them as they closed in. A good plan in theory, were it not for them happening to possess one of the natural counters to her formless nature.
 As she writhed in pain, the sniper fired into her body. He hit a core, shattering it, and began targeting the rest.
     Hiram couldn’t bear to watch another friend die. He began to charge toward them but felt a blow bite into his back as soon as he did. He looked behind himself to find the warrior with her hands weakly clasped to her axe as its blade hung in his flesh. The fury in his green eye was enough to make her release the handle and cower in fear. Hiram’s mind, blank except for his goal and the wealth of combat experience residing within him, prompted him to wrench the axe from his body. He then hurled it through the air and directly into the side of the sniper’s head.
     They spasmed before dying, only after they had already destroyed three out of Shona’s five cores. Hiram rushed over to the puddle that remained of her. A soft voice confirmed her survival, but it was too weak and distorted to make out.
     “Can you move?”
     The puddle tried to compress into an upright state to no avail. Hiram twisted his wing around to serve as a makeshift vessel and ushered Shona to squirm inside. Hiram knew of a doctor who he could trust, knew their location in the city, and could vein hop there this instant. However, he hesitated. Azar and the axe wielder were still alive; they could slip away forever if he let them. He knew saving Shona was more important than revenge, yet as he looked at the female warrior crawling away while grunting like she intended to survive this, like she could do what his family was denied, Hiram knew he had to do something. 
     He reached down and pried the axe from the sniper’s sinking corpse. He then hurled it back at its owner. It tumbled several times through the air before planting itself in her skull. Once her twitching ceased, Hiram let himself and Shona sink into the olenchyme.

「This is a work of fiction. Any references to real places, real people, or historical events are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.」

Copyright © 2021 Matthew Cammarano
All rights reserved.