Chapter 9
The Trial of Blood the next, I was standing in a shallow sea of blood stretching in every direction.
The sky above was blocked out by a canopy of interwoven bones. All knitted together like some grotesque cathedral ceiling. I could see organs through cracks in the bones… massive, building-sized hearts and lungs, contracting and expanding.
I wasn't just in a Trial dimension. I was inside something. Something alive.
In the distance, maybe a mile away, was a building that made me go cold. Our apartment. And around it, shambling through the blood sea, were creatures that moved with jerky motions. From this distance, they looked almost human. Almost.
"...What kind of blood is this?"
I lifted my foot, and thin crimson strands stretched between my leg and the surface, snapping only when I pulled hard enough. When I was halfway there, I got my first good look at one of the creatures. And it wasn't human.
It wasn't even humanoid.
It was a collection of floating bones in the shape of a human, and held together by strands of white, writhing worms. The worms threaded through the bones, connecting them, pulling them along in a grotesque parody of movement.
The thing had no face, just a skull with empty eye sockets where worms crawled in and out freely. I somehow knew that if they caught me, they would wrap their worms around my bones and add me to their collection.
"Fuck this!" I said, breaking out into a sprint.
I reached the apartment building just as the first wave of Bone Puppets closed in on me. There were maybe a dozen of them. I ran for the door, and nearly slipped in the blood sea.
The door opened as I got close. I leaped through it, tumbling onto the floor as the door slammed shut behind me.
The inside was a nightmare version of our apartment.
The layout was the same, but everything was constructed of bone, sinew, and organs. And everything was bleeding.
"Welcome home, brother."
The voice froze me in place. It was the voice Rell… only it was her as a child, maybe six or seven years old. The voice was coming from the kitchen.
Child Rell was sitting on the kitchen table, swinging her legs cheerfully. Wearing a yellow sundress. Her hair was in pigtails and tied with yellow ribbons.
She looked normal except for her empty eye sockets that were filled with writhing white worms.
"You're late… I've been waiting for forever to play with you."
"You're not Rell."
"Of course I am silly. I'm the Rell you let die. Do you want to play with me? We have to play a game."
"What kind of game?" I asked cautiously, taking a step back.
"It's called Piece by Piece. I need new parts, you see. Mine got all eaten up."
She hopped off the chair and skipped toward me, clapping her hands.
"First, I need an eye. You have two, and that's not fair when I have none."
She reached for my face with her small hand; the movement was unnaturally fast. As her fingers brushed against my cheek, they left a burning trail.
"Don't be a spoil sport. If you don't play, you can't move forward. And if you don't move forward, you'll never get strong enough to kill Daddy."
The word Daddy made my blood boil. This thing knew. Of course it knew. The Trial was constructed from my mind, my memories, my trauma.
"What happens if I give you an eye?"
"Then we move to the next part of the game, and then the next, and the next. Until I'm all better or you're all gone." She giggled. "Whichever comes first."
This was a test. A sick, twisted test, but a test nonetheless. And tests had rules. Patterns. Solutions.
"How do I know giving you parts won't just kill me?"
"Oh, it will hurt. It will hurt very, very much. But you won't die unless you give up everything. And you wouldn't do that, would you? Not when you need to get strong enough to kill Daddy."
She reached for my face again, and this time I didn't pull away. Her fingers—cold, so cold—touched my right eye.
"This one, I think."
Pain exploded through my skull as her fingers sank into my eye socket. I screamed, and fell to my knees as she pulled.
I felt it tear free with a sick pop, and suddenly I could no longer see out of it. Through the pain, I watched as she held up the bloody eyeball.
"Perfect!"
She popped the flesh ball into one of her empty sockets. "Now I can see what you see. All the fear. All the hate. All the helplessness."
I remained on my knees, panting, one hand pressed to my now-blind right eye. The pain was already fading.
"Good job, brother, you've passed the first test. Now you can move deeper into the house."
She patted my head and then skipped away down the hallway, disappearing into the darkness.
I struggled to my feet, swaying slightly as I adjusted to my new vision. The apartment seemed more pronounced, the sinew thicker, the blood flow had increased. Like it was responding to my sacrifice.
I followed child-Rell down the hallway, moving cautiously.
Rell's bedroom door… was open just a crack, a soft light spilling out. I pushed the door open, bracing myself for another horror.
Child-Rell sat on the bed, legs crossed, playing with something in her hands.
"Do you remember when we used to play in here? Before Daddy started his experiments?"
"He chose Mommy for her genetics. Raised us carefully, lovingly, like prize pigs."
She looked up, blood dripping from the stolen eye making her face ghoulish.
"And you never noticed. Never suspected. Even when I tried to warn you."
"I'm going to kill him…"
"With what power? You're nothing. Weak. Useless."
She held up what she had been playing with: a small bone doll. It was a perfect miniature of me, down to the prison clothes I still wore.
"But you could be something, if you're willing to pay the price."
She snapped one of the figurine's arms off. And pain broke through my left arm; I felt it go numb, then cold, then absent. I looked down in horror to see my arm dissolving into white worms that fell to the floor.
"Oops," child-Rell giggled. "Looks like you're disarmed."
"What the fuck! What did you do?!"
"I told you, we're playing Piece by Piece, I need parts. And you have parts. This is how the game works."
"This isn't a game, this is fucking torture."
"No, brother, this is your trial."
She broke off the doll's right leg. My right leg dissolved into worms, and I collapsed to the floor, now missing an eye, an arm, and a leg.
"Stop!"
"But we're just getting started, I need so many more parts. A heart that isn't broken. Lungs that can breathe. Bones that aren't hollow."
She stood from the bed and walked toward me. Kneeling beside me, the doll held in her small hands.
"Unless, you're willing to make a different trade."
"What... kind… of… trade?"
"Your memories, the happy ones. The ones of me, of us, of the family we thought we had. Give those up, and I'll let you keep your physical form."
Trade my memories of Rell? The real Rell, not this nightmare version?