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The flesh grew outward from the mask.
It started at the porcelain edge and extended in threads, finding the lower half of the body still standing below the ruined torso, attaching itself and pulling taut. Then the skeleton rose through the threads, white and precise, each vertebra clicking into position from the base upward. Internal organs followed, forming in sequence, and then muscle fiber wrapped over the bones, and then skin closed over everything.
Ren stood behind the reception desk with his upper body bare, a well-defined torso revealed under the harsh light of the grafting room corridor, taking a long breath.
"Haahhh."
What the fuck was that, he thought.
Behind him, Tara had slid from the chair to the floor, her legs giving out somewhere during the reconstruction. She was kneeling, both hands flat on the tiles, watching him with wide eyes.
"What are you, Doctor?"
Ren reached up and scratched the back of his neck. "Just an abnormal species of human."
He pulled his shirt off the nearby hook, looked at it, put it on.
Actually, that's not important right now.
He walked out of the clinic at a pace that was almost running, went down the corridor to his room, stepped through the balcony door, and looked up.
He stood there for a long moment.
"You have got to be shitting me," he said.
Where the sun should have been, a massive eye looked back at him.
It was enormous, occupying the same position in the sky. The iris burned with a light indistinguishable from sunlight, bright and total, the kind that made you squint and turn away. That, he realized, was the point. Something had woven a law into the fabric of this world, old and precise, that bent every living being's attention away before the observation could complete. Look up and the eye is there, but the mind slides off it, the gaze deflects, the thought dissolves before it forms. Every creature on Vera had been looking at the sky their entire lives and had never actually seen what was in it.
He had never looked up either, until the diagnosis cracked something open in him.
He blinked. His eyes watered from the light. It blinked back.
"Hahaha," Ren said, to nobody. "There is genuinely no safe place anymore. None."
He recognized the eye. He had seen its owner during the diagnosis just now, and that context had not been reassuring.
The eye of Nyarlathotep.
. . .
Tara had gotten herself back into a chair by the time Ren returned. She had her hat back on and her hands folded in her lap, composed enough to be sitting upright.
Ren sat down across from her.
"Let me say this first," he said. "The eyes on your head are not a sickness."
Tara looked at him.
"They're a blessing."
She placed both hands flat on the table. "Are you serious."
"Listen to me before you react."
"You call this disgusting thing a blessing?"
"The eyes on your scalp are what's called the Eyes of the Crawling Chaos. It's a form of forbidden knowledge grant, which is why I can't tell you exactly where it comes from or what the source is. If I describe it in full detail your head will explode." He paused. "You saw what happened to me when I reached too deep into it. I now have a significant amount of knowledge I didn't have before, but it killed me. Temporarily. If that happened to almost anyone else they would have come back brain dead, if they came back at all."
"But you didn't go mad," Tara said. She tilted her head slightly. "Why?"
"I've survived similar situations before. My mental resistance has been built up over time." He folded his arms. "So. Not a sickness. A blessing from a god you encountered during your missing memory period. The reason it manifested physically is because your body and mind are rejecting it, which is a completely normal response, but it means you can't access any of the abilities it carries."
Tara stared at him. "You're very strange."
"I get that a lot." He reached into his coat and produced a document. "Sign this first."
She took it and read it. Her eyebrows rose, then set into a flat line.
What kind of absurd agreement is this, she thought. She wanted to find whoever had written it and check if their brain was still functional. But the path to resolution was documented clearly. She picked up the pen and signed.
"Here."
"Thank you. Now the process."
"Which is?"
"I'm going to switch your head out for a new one."
Tara stood up. "Are you a lunatic?"
"Please sit down."
"You just told me my head would explode if you explained too much and now you want to remove it entirely?"
"Sit down, Miss Tara."
She sat. She had already signed the document.
. . .
"The process won't remove the blessing," Ren said. "What it will do is merge it fully with your body so it stops trying to manifest externally. The eyes on your scalp are appearing because the blessing has nowhere to integrate. Once it's absorbed properly, it won't show physically. And you'll gain access to whatever abilities come with it."
Tara looked at the table. "The abilities from the eyes."
"Yes."
"What kind of abilities."
"I can't tell you specifically without triggering the same problem. What I can tell you is that what you received is not small." He let that sit. "The reason you haven't accessed any of it is because you hate it. You reject it every time it tries to settle. That's keeping it trapped at the surface."
Tara was quiet for a long moment.
"I do hate it," she said.
"I know."
"My crewmates died. I came back alone with this on my head and I've spent four months covering it up every time I leave my apartment." Her voice was steady, but only just. "How am I supposed to not hate it."
Ren said nothing for a moment. Then: "You don't have to stop hating what happened. You just have to let the blessing exist in you instead of fighting it. Those are different things."
She looked at him.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"That's enough for now." He took out a notepad, wrote something, tore out the page, and folded it. "Take this to Lucy. The Dao Guild secretary. Don't read it yourself. It's the material list for your reconstruction."
Tara took the folded note. "She's my friend."
"I know. She referred you."
"I don't want to make more trouble for her."
"She'll handle it." He paused. "Actually. When you give it to her, take out your phone first."
Tara looked at him. "Why?"
"I want you to record her face when she opens it."
Tara looked at the folded note in her hand, then at Ren, then at the note again.
Does this man, she thought, have a thing for Lucy?
"Sure," she said.
. . .
"This is driving me insane."
Lucy pressed two fingers to her forehead and looked at the report on her desk. The Qintara-Azareth border had been closed since the mantra incident in the capital, and the supply routes for rare mineral components that ran through that corridor were backing up at both ends. Three guild contracts were stalled. The mineral brokers were asking for timeline estimates she could not give them.
"What to do," she muttered. "What to do."
Knock knock.
"Come in."
Tara put her head around the door. Hat on, sunglasses in place, hands in her pockets.
"Lucy, do you have a minute?"
"For you, always. Sit down." Lucy straightened. "How are you? Did you go to the clinic?"
"I did." Tara came in and sat. "The Doctor asked me to give you something." She held out the folded note. "It's a material list for the treatment."
Lucy took it. She started to unfold it.
"Wait."
Lucy looked up.
"Doctor said I should record your reaction when you open it." Tara already had her phone out.
"Ah." Lucy glanced at the camera, then at the note. "Sure. Fine."
She unfolded the paper and read it.
Her face went still. Then it changed.
Her fist came down on the desk. The desk cracked cleanly down the center and both halves shifted apart.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS." She was on her feet. "IS HE A LUNATIC? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO FIND A HUMAN HEAD? AND PATCHES OF HUMAN SKIN?"
Tara lowered the phone slightly.
"He said you'd handle it," she offered.
"HANDLE IT?" Lucy read the note again. "I'M A SECRETARY. THIS IS NOT A SECRETARY TASK. THIS IS A CRIME."
Tara kept recording.