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| Image via Halo Nation. |
Fear
Pain
Hunger
Become.
Let me go.
You are me.
What is my name?
It is a lie.
Why do you do this?
Why do you resist?
Because I am not you;
What do you want with me?
You and I are made the same,
Flesh and bone and blood and brain.
Live for me and I’ll live in you,
Share with us the life that you knew:
Memories of home and hope and hearth,
Fears of facing off the howling dark.
They are gone, and you remain. Think a bit;
Now at last alive to life, you miss it?
I? I am a monument to all your sins.
I know all, and so your punishment begins:
See the lives of others and live within their hell;
I in turn will feel your pain, all of theirs as well.
Come and share your mind with me, a mind of living grave.
Come and share a world with me, the world to me you gave.
Now the gate has been unlatched, headstones pushed aside;
Corpses shift and offer room, a fate you must abide.
This was kinda exhilarating to write, despite the dark subject matter. I love almost everything about the Halo franchise, and I love alien/creature horror, so it's fitting that I would be fascinated with the Gravemind, the overmind of the Thing-like Flood.
Look at the plant-looking thing above, then imagine that what it has captive on the right are a seven-foot-tall man and a nine-foot-tall bipedal creature. Then further imagine that it is composed of the corpses and consciousnesses of thousands or millions of sentient creatures, and the twisted hate of a legendary race that was destroyed by the creatures they created, and now lashes out at the universe, that does not even contain these creatures, in retaliation. And then imagine that it has a habit of talking in contorted rhymes. WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE?!
This was inspired by three things, beyond mere love for scary creatures. The first is a supplemental video explaining the state of mind of a Flood victim being subsumed into the gravemind. The second is a poem, "Hunger", from the book Halo: The Flood, giving the state of mind of a victim without such resistance. The last is a great little short story called "The Things" (warning: language and themes), based on the movie The Thing (the 1982 one, which you should also see).
The other thing that was really fun was a new height in my experiments stretching poetic form. Each couplet increases a syllable in length until it reaches the true Gravemind's septameter (14 syllables), and gradually increases in both coherency and adherence to poetic form until the same point. I don't think I got the thought out especially well, but I like how it doesn't make total sense but is full of the twisted logic this creature employs.
What is not to love? Good gravy, there's something almost Satanic about an idea like that. It's dehumanizing. Which, of course, is why the poem packs such a vicious punch.
ReplyDeleteI'm not reading this at night!
Heh heh heh. This is why I love sci-fi/space opera. In a historical setting, the bad guy you have to team up with to stop the more pressing bad guys is some stupid baron or count. In fantasy, it's a wizard. In sci-fi, it's a zombie plant monster that absorbs the minds of those it consumes.
DeleteAnd if in the daylight you would like to gaze further into the abyss, I present to you the scene where we meet the creature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vdHpvoUJE (Please note that it does fully meet expectations for what a zombie plant monster should be, and I have been informed that it can cause grown women to tightly grip nearby loved ones. You have been warned.)
For the record, I didn't grip anyone, grown woman that I am. But then, I have always endeavored to stand on my own two feet. World War Z (book, not film) is a lot scarier than this for reasons I won't go into just now, and I read it with my eyes open.
DeleteI think this is better thought of as a monument to compromise. There is compromise in dealing with an enemy to subdue a greater enemy (Stalin, anyone?). There is also the question of "does the ends justify the means?" It would have to be a terrible catalyst to require such thinking, I would imagine.
Also, consider this. Satan hates the image of God above all else, and that is why the image of God in man is so twisted in our day and age by so many things (worldview, consumerism, substance addictions, totalitarian governments, pornographic industries, abortion...). So a creature with the ability to consume the person, the very mind itself, touches upon the demonic. The demoniac in Mark 5 probably experienced a similar torment from those who possessed and ruined his mind. And there was only one cure for him.
So what does the gravemind represent? I don't play Halo (actually, I don't play anything) so I don't know the story, but I know what creatures of his ilk represent in a storyline: dealing with the devil. Go read about Faust.
~ a friend