Part 2 is available here.

The Further We Soar Into Madness [Cosmic Horror/Sci-Fi] Part 3

Fifty yards ahead of them, Harold Jamison knelt in his H.E.T.E. suit. He was looking down at the tome he held to his knee and, dangling from his raised free hand, something glinted gold in the distance. Underneath the tycoon, the ice was smeared bloody in large swaths around the vicinity, with a few heaps of dark red piled here and there in the frost. Sat against the base of the pressure ridge behind Jamison was the drill tool box and, up against that, was another crewmember in a H.E.T.E. suit, facing out toward the expanse that opened up before them. The helmet lights were on and the crewmember's head was bobbing slowly. Phi assumed it was Sovikov as she was the only other one he could hear over the comms, still whispering her prayers, but he couldn’t be for certain from this distance.

“Jamison, what the hell are you doing?" Phi demanded. "What the fuck is going on?!”

“Agan’thurak, Agan’thurak!” Jamison chanted. “Fil tat Othuum! Agan’thurak, Agan’thurak! Fil tat Othuum!” His gloved fingers moved along the text in the tome’s pages as he sang the words.

Phi closed in, just a few feet away from Jamison, when he was able to make out what the heaps of dark red scattered around the area were. The first one was what was left of Jeffrey Winthrope’s face, smashed against the inside of his helmet’s faceplate. His legs were gone at the waist. His torso appeared to have been crushed in by some extreme force. The misshapen facial features and disconnected entrails were freezing in the frigid air and the man's blood was already petrified to the ice. Lying next to him was another heap, but the head and arms were missing from the torso. The suit’s tag had WINTHROPE, E. embroidered into it.

“What the fuck,” La Felios’ voice cracked over the whispering and chanting. “What the fuck did you do? What the fuck?!”

There was one other heap sprawled onto the shallow ice, out in front of where Jamison knelt. Around the gore were holes in the sheet of ice the size of oil barrels, like something had fallen in or broken through. The black water of the alien ocean underneath pushed up to the surface and shards of ice bobbed against the inside of the circular apertures like children's toys floating in bathtubs.

Phi turned toward the crewmember sitting against the pressure ridge wall and moved cautiously in a wide berth around the back side of Jamison. He reached the tool crate and saw that it was indeed Sovikov sat up against it. Her eyes were hysterically wide. Tears streaked her pale face inside the helmet she wore. Her mouth still moved in quiet whispers.

“Natalya,” Phi said, crouched over next to her. The left leg of her suit was completely smashed in, sodden with a deep red from the inside. Phi assessed it momentarily and thought it looked shattered beyond repair. There was a large pool of blood underneath, most of which had already frozen. “Natalya, can you hear me?”

Her lips still whispered. She stared out, beyond Phi and beyond Jamison, to the expanse of shallow ice. Her eyes wouldn't meet his. Phi reached a gloved hand out and set it on her shoulder. She did not seem to notice.

“Sovikov, we need to get you back to the ship and stabilize that leg. You’re losing too much blood.” Phi was certain she wouldn’t last much longer if they didn’t stop her bleeding. "I'm going to pick you up and it's probably going to hurt like hell but I need you to be strong, alright?"

She did not respond, her whispers having now devolved completely to barely audible sobbing. Her shoulders racked powerlessly.

Jamison was still distracted by the tome and what he read aloud. The glinting golden item he had dangling in his raised left hand, Phi could now see, was an amulet. It was the one encased in gold with the large red gem inside of it. Jamison had been wearing it earlier. Phi couldn’t tell if it was the sun’s distant glare or his imagination running off with him but the gem appeared to be producing its own unexplainable light.

“What the fuck did you do to them, goddamnit?!” La Felios yelled. Phi turned back to see him standing over the chanting Jamison, his ice axe slightly raised in his right hand. La Felios kicked a heavy boot out and knocked Jamison back onto his rear. The tome slid from the man's knee and its pages smashed into the ice. Jamison's raised left hand faltered to catch his balance and the amulet fell into the slush with it.

There was a rumbling sound, something pushing from below the ice they stood upon. It was underneath their feet, a massive churning in the depths.

Behind La Felios, out of the closest of the large holes in the ice, a black worm slithered slowly out of the water. It’s form tapered thicker as it revealed more of itself, appearing as a tendril of slick darkness as it uncoiled into the air. The rubbery skin glistened under Jupiter's illumination.

La Felios was facing Jamison with his back to the alien serpent, seemingly unaware of its presence. “You put all of our lives in danger, for what?!” He stepped even closer to Jamison.

“La Felios!” Phi called out. He still couldn’t make out what he was seeing when the thing rose up further into the air, as tall as a tree, behind his friend. Then, like stab wounds, slits opened in the tight skin all over the tentacle. They stretched and gaped open with a horrible tension. Rows upon rows of teeth, drenched in pearlescent slobber, gnashed in each one of the sores. They were mouths and there were dozens of them, chewing and salivating in the cold, sending tufts of alien breath floating into the air with each chomp.

“D!”

The flight specialist looked up toward Phi, who was pointing behind him, then turned around. The wriggling trunk of stretched black flesh slowly danced in front of him like a cobra. The mouths bit and gurgled. “Oh my god...” The ice pick dropped from La Felios' hand to the ground by his feet. “Oh my g—”

The rubbery thing whipped down onto La Felios so quickly that Phi almost didn’t see it. The creature had been leaning back and, in the very next moment, it had shifted and then returned to its slow upright dance, moving back and forth, but now there was a splat of blood on the ice where his best friend had been standing and bits and pieces of La Felios’ H.E.T.E. suit hung out of one of the mouths. It chewed. Inside, a cud of cloth, plastic and gore rolled around on its grotesquely flayed tongue.

All of the mouths chewed.

The very tip of the tentacle started moving separate from the rest of itself. It peered around, scanning the ice as if it could see with some hidden optical nerve buried within. When it pointed toward Jamison, who was shuffling himself back into the kneeling position after retrieving the tome, the thing rippled and moved into a different dance than it had before. Phi's reality was being turned upside-down. What he thought was real and wasn't real no longer held dominion over the display in front of him. The knots of his consciousness felt to be unraveling and yet, amidst the immediate shock of the deaths of his crew and of his best friend, the captain couldn't help but see it in that moment. He couldn't help but feel something beyond the rage and the nausea...

There was an undeniable beauty in the creature's dance.

The thing appeared about to strike once more, springing itself back again. Jamison raised the amulet into the air. Again, it glowed. The black serpent stopped mid-strike, holding taut for a brief moment. It uncoiled and seemed to relax back into its dance.

“Agan’Thurak, Agan’thurak!” Jamison began the ritual once more, reading through the wet pages of the book. “Fil tat Othuum!”

The serpent's focus was toward the chanting man, mesmerized by whatever its alien sight beheld from within the amulet.

La Felios... The realization that he'd just watched his best friend mauled by an entity of such otherworldly origin set in at that very moment for Phi. On the tail end of that stream of consciousness came the decomposed face again, the decaying putrefied features of his mother, so detailed that he thought them corporeal, filling his head as well as his reality. And then all the faces of the crew invaded his thoughts. A heavy sob escaped his lips, just one, before he turned back to Sovikov. "Jesus Christ," he murmured. "Jesus Christ..." Tears hung in the corners of his eyes.

Through the faceplate of her suit, Sovikov was quiet and still staring. She shivered and Phi couldn't tell if it was from the cold or what she'd been witness to out here. Her leg was in ruin and her pallid skin made it apparent that she needed to be stabilized and quickly. Phi could hardly think amidst the images that assaulted his psyche now but their shapes, saddening and bizarre, still paled in comparison to what was happening out on the ice.

He grunted as he hoisted Sovikov's body into his arms and stood, tears now running down his cheeks. Above, in the bulk of Jupiter, he saw D'Artagnan's mutilated body fading in and out of the colors, surfacing and submerging in the storms, and he could no longer see the stars that haloed the great planet before. It had all gone black as Death. When he looked back toward the dark serpent, it writhed and disappeared back through the hole in the ice and into the hidden waters below. Jamison appeared to have control of the thing or somehow stayed its murderous tendency with the amulet. Phi had no plans on sticking around to figure out how.

The captain took one soft step, then another, back around to the other side of Jamison and toward the trail of footsteps in the snow that led them here. “Stay with me, Natalya,” he said, picking up the pace. Sovikov's eyes were half closed now. Whether it was the blood loss or the shock that was making her skin so pale, the more porcelain it became, the more the dread in Phi's chest seemed to grow. He carried her through the opening of the cave-like canopy of ice shards that encompassed the break in the pressure ridge they had come through. Though the slope up to the other side was only about 5 feet long, it was steep. Judging from the angle, Phi realized he would not be able to ascend it without using his hands, which were currently holding a bloodied woman. He was going to have to take a run at it and hope to get enough momentum to reach the top without the use of his hands, or he could tie the straps from the oxygen tank under her arms and crawl up with her attached to his belt. One was fast, the other was safe.

The blood loss was the deciding factor. There wasn't any time.

Jamison still chanted, his voice taking on an almost musical tone. “Agan’Thurak, Agan’Thurak! Fil tat Othuum!”

Phi bolted from the slope. He turned in a half-circle that then looped back toward it and sprinted, Sovikov bouncing in his arms. Three long strides with momentum at his back pushed him up over the slope of steep slickness and he landed on the packed frost on the other side of the pressure ridge. With winded breathing heavy against the inner glass of his faceplate, Phi turned toward the ships and did not wait to start moving.

“Natalya, stay with me.” He looked down once more and Sovikov’s eyes were completely closed, her head leaned in toward his arm and shoulder. She moved occasionally though Phi couldn't tell if that was her own effort or from the rocking of his strides.

“Ha ha!” Jamison's laugh came through the comms. “And it is by this gift of my piety as well as this blood that I take from you, my dark Lord, and give unto myself the power of your ageless consciousness, the knowledge of your timeless wisdom!”

The retractable steps of the Artorius rattled as Phi ascended each step carrying the weight of two rather than just himself. His arms felt on fire and he could hardly brace Sovikov’s body before he set her down next to the outer airlock door. He stood and turned to the access panel. As he punched in the entry code, Jamison's voice continued to sound into his helmet.

“It is with this power that I shall subjugate the rest of these cattle, heralding a birth for you that is worthy of your entrance to Earth. Upon the mounds of bloated bodies, I will construct a throne of flies, a kingdom of anguish that even you, Oh Lord Agan’Thurak, Son of Othuum, would find worthy.”

The outer airlock door slid open and Phi crouched and picked Sovikov up once more to move the few feet into the airlock. He set her down against the steel plated wall and punched in the ATMUS commands to the inner control panel, causing the outer door to roll down behind them. The screen displayed that the five minute depressurization process had begun. Breathable oxygen levels would be available inside the airlock in two minutes.

“In the Eye of Blood, inside its core, I see the conflagration that oozes from your eyes, my Lord. In my mind’s eye, I can already see your ancient face and, in my bones, I can feel your pull.”

Phi crouched down next to Sovikov, trying to better assess the damage to her leg. Blood leaked onto the floor in a slow but steady drip. There was a trail of it, smeared and leading outside the airlock door and onto the steps from where he’d dragged her.

“I have spent my life’s gains, made it my life’s work, to be here at this very moment. I’ve killed, coerced, manipulated and done anything and everything I needed to in order to obtain that which was necessary. I even damned my own brother to his death by withholding that which I now... Ha ha! That which I hold in front of me! This is the symbol of my faith!" Jamison screamed. "I am the symbol of my piety! Open your dark eyes to me and give me that which I require, Oh Lord, and I will become the harbinger of your arrival!”

The ATMUS control panel displayed breathable oxygen levels at 98%. Phi continued to stare until it turned to 99% and then until it turned to 100%. His hands moved to the base buckles on his helmet and unlatched them, then turned the entire thing, removing it and exposing his head to the cool temperature of the airlock. After setting the helmet onto the floor next to him, he unlatched Sovikov’s and gently removed it, resting a gloved hand behind her head to stop it from hitting limply against the wall. He lowered an ear down next to her nose and mouth and listened.

He couldn’t hear anything, nor could he feel any sort of breath coming from her.

“Sovikov,” Phi said with tension. He twisted his right glove at the wrist, removing it and tossing it to the floor behind him. He reached two fingers under her jaw, at the jugular, and gently placed them against her skin.

No pulse.

Underneath Sovikov’s leg, the pool of blood had grown. The skin of her face and neck was pale, her lips blue. Her eyes had rolled back to half open but there was no life in the slack pupils.

Phi sat back against the inner airlock wall and slid to the floor, poorly bracing himself with his still gloved left hand. His eyes shifted from Sovikov’s chilling body to the dense glass of the outer door. He stared out at the other ship, the Acolyte, just a few dozen yards out, and then to the black sky above it. Only a sliver of Jupiter was visible from the angle he was facing but it was enough to send his mind sinking further into that darkness that had been overflowing into his existence. This series of events was swallowing him and all he could feel was this misery and a strange type of vertigo, as if he was slipping through those holes out in the ice right now and falling into the depths of the infinite oceans below.

Through the headset speakers of his helmet, buzzing on the steel floor to his left, the barely audible voice of Harold Jamison still spoke. Phi couldn’t make out what was being said but the incantatory cadence of the man’s words could still be heard.

The control panel light went green. A gentle warning pulsed as the inner airlock door hissed and began to open. Phi moved from it and stood, glancing to Sovikov once more.

She was dead. He was alone.

When the inner airlock had fully opened, he stepped onto the bridge of the Artorius. The familiar smell and feel of the place filled his senses, yet the tension in his muscles and the stress in his veins were unhindered by the reunion. He bypassed the captain’s chair and moved toward the Navigation panel, toward the station his best friend had held. He looked to the empty seat for a long moment, then typed in the launch codes and flipped a few of the initiation switches. The engines whirred with power. The charging of the ship's vertical lift-off thrusters began, joining the flowing chorus of life support and power systems.

Phi returned to the airlock to grab his helmet, then stepped back to the inner access panel and pressed the CLOSE key. The thick door slid shut. Through the small triangle shaped window, he could see Sovikov's body still sat there against the wall. He was going to leave her in the airlock, separated from himself and the rest of the ship... The body was going to begin rotting at some point on the way back to Earth. He could move her into one of the cryosleep vats, but God knows what six months soaked in that goop would do to a corpse. It also felt wrong entertaining the idea of leaving her body here on this block of ice with those things out there. Even in death, she didn't deserve that. None of them did.

Five of his crew were dead. Phi was sure Jamison would be the sixth.

As he analyzed the different facets of the deaths he'd witnessed, something started happening. From the borders of reality, a buzzing sensation crawled through the aether and wrapped itself around Phi's consciousness. He felt the tendons in his legs twitch and his ankles weaken. Somewhere in the back of his mind or his head, something wavered and eroded his vision over a few microcosmic seconds. Before he could understand what was happening, he'd stumbled over to lean against Le Felios' chair, staring ahead out of the viewport, up to the King of the Gods. Its radiance ebbed like a heartbeat. In his mind and his soul and in the very fibers that made his animus, he felt the power. Something was overtaking him. Jupiter was overtaking him.

He fell, then. His paralyzed body slammed against the cold metal floor. Things flashed in his vision, overlaying reality, and he closed his eyes but it did nothing to save him from what he was being shown:

The face of the frozen crewmember they'd found on the Acolyte...

D'Artagnan's brutalized expression, worming and rotting in a bed of flowing blackness...

His mother, her dead skin tight against her skull...

A writhing darkness out of which a porcelain face emerges, strange and doll-like, the mouth shifting and biting over and over again...

A radiant display of two galaxies dancing their destructive waltz with each other and a pile of organic blubber, with walls upon walls of endless twitching eyes, floating intently in the vacuum, patiently awaiting its destination within the chaos...

Under black waters and putrid sediment, something unfurling its infinite appendages and ascending, murderously propelling itself upward through the murk...

And then it was gone.

With a sharp breath, Phi opened his eyes. The floor was vertical in front of him. He blinked and felt the cold metal against his cheek, then pushed himself slowly up to a sitting position. "What the fuck..." With every breath he took, the latent tendrils of whatever brief possession had occurred peeled off of his soul like dead skin. The horrendous imagery had subsided from his mind but the fear still had its icy talons lodged into him.

There was vibration under the ship, beneath the ice. He felt it through his palms. It was deep and it was growing. While he could not see whatever it was that shook and moved, he knew already, that it was that snaking inhuman thing that had taken the lives of his crew, the abomination that lived in those foreign tenebrous oceans.

Something Phi couldn’t pinpoint drove him to witness the horrible serpentine creature again. He had to see. He had to try and make sense of it. Terror and astonishment bled into each other somewhere within the shock, seeming to fill his entire body, buzzing as the psychic episode did just moments before and electrifying in his fingertips. Logic and reason were postponed while his mind reflected on the horror and the events that led to this very moment.

He needed to see again.

Phi stood and moved to the navigation panel and stared out of the viewport. He couldn’t see Jamison’s ritual from here, blocked by the tall pressure ridge, but the grotesque serpent that danced out of the ice was seared into his memory. His heart pounded maddeningly in his ears. There were so many mouths, of which the teeth were chipped and always gritting and gnashing and grinding...

The captain returned to La Felios' chair and turned on the camera feed's monitoring software. The screen lit up and, in the main directory that the system logged into, there was a list of all active feeds. WINTHROPE, E. and WINTHROPE, J. were both black, cameras destroyed, as was LA FELIOS, D. SOVIKOV, N. was still active, but it faced a corner in the darkness of the airlock, with nothing to see but steel panel meeting steel panel. He typed in the fullscreen command on the one labeled JAMISON, H. The audio enabled in the speakers on either side of the monitor and the screen staticked as it connected to the live feed.

Jamison’s camera was directed toward the book on his knee. Phi couldn't make out the text and wasn't sure whether it was because of the writing's strange origins or the graininess of the video feed. The text had pictures drawn into the margins. They, too, were obscured by the low quality of the video feed though they appeared to be drawings of faces, squid-like and vaguely humanoid. Ancient-looking symbols were sketched in old ink in the top and bottom margins of the page and notes were scribbled in the spaces between paragraphs. Through its strangely innate illumination, the amulet that Jamison dangled created red prisms that projected down onto the pages of the tome. The alien markings appeared to come alive under the bizarre glare. Jamison spoke the eldritch language out loud as he read. It sounded ancient and almost unnatural for the human tongue.

Phi's eyes surveyed the console at his right.

Launch initiation was at 29%.

Jamison's chanting grew more intense. Deep underneath the Artorius, a dull crack echoed through leagues of ice and black ocean. The vibration from before had grown into tremors that rippled under the landing gear. Buckles, straps and loose knobs around the bridge jingled in unison with the throbbing, as did Phi's adrenaline, pulsing heavily in tandem.

Through the feed, there was a crash of ice. Jamison's voice quieted to a silence as the camera slowly panned upward.

The amulet swung gently back and forth in the center of the screen, radiating its vibrant ruby light. Beyond the amulet, coiling out of the ice, were more of those slithering black horrors. Their dances of ascension were mesmerizing and terrifying, beautiful and abominable. They totaled six, waving back and forth in unison, side-to-side, with their countless mouths slowly opening and closing, appearing almost to speak to each other.

It was a monstrous procession, one of strange haunting symmetry.

Phi shuddered, putting his fist up to his mouth. His stomach heaved. His anxiety flared. Never had he felt so vulnerable, so completely out of the realm of situations that he could possibly control. They had come to a place at the edge of the solar system, a place where humans did not belong, with a climate unfit for our lungs, entities unfit for our sanity. Coming here was a mistake. This was too far beyond the veil that, up until this point, had protected him from the uncompassionate creations of the universal machine.

In the feed, Jamison stood to his feet, the amulet still held out in front of him. He waited there a moment, silent inside the helmet. Then he took a step toward the tentacles, and then another.

The black things danced slowly, their infinite orifices jibbering and chomping. Jamison’s breaths were slow but tense as he moved forward. One of the swaying things passed by on the left side of the camera. Putrid amniotic fluid dripped from the slick swollen lips of the various mouths. Jamison had moved past three of them, then walked around the fourth, when the camera panned down toward the ice. Underneath the thin layer that he stood upon, maybe three feet separating him from the abyss below, a wriggling nightmarish mass squashed and turned and fluttered against the ice from below. There were hundreds of these mouthed eel-like things, furling and waiting just below. Phi’s heart sank in his chest at the horrific scene. He didn't know how he knew, or why, but the knowledge of what truly waited below came to him, then. Each of those things was part of one giant entity. They weren't separate creatures but tentacles of a thing that waited below, an allencompassing organism. He knew it like he knew the inevitability of Death.

This thing was Death.

It took a moment for Phi to pry his eyes from Jamison’s feed. Launch thrusters were at 58%. Once they engaged, he would set the Artorius to go. They would use the gravitational pull of Europa to slingshot the ship outside of Jupiter's grasp and back toward Earth, toward a place not so horrific as this.

Jamison's camera returned ahead to the dangling amulet and the final two dancing serpents. The light from the sun had diminished drastically and the video feed was getting darker as Europa moved into the shadow of its patriarch. The amulet continued to shine brightly on its own. Just beyond the two tentacles, sticking out of the thin ice, was the anomaly, appearing as a tapered black spike over the grainy video. Jamison maintained his slow careful steps toward it. When he passed the last pair of tendrils, gyrating in slow motion, the tycoon let go of a deep breath and Phi felt himself do the same thing.

Jamison reached the anomaly. The details of it became clearer through the monitor and Phi could see that it was a stone pedestal of some kind, sticking three or four feet out of the frozen crust. The sustaining red light of the amulet gave truth to its form. There were engravings carved up and down the sides of it, tapestries of dogmatic depictions and unearthly fables. Phi thought he saw one that resembled those inhuman faces, from the book Jamison had been reading before, but the shadows warped with the quality of the camera and he couldn't be certain.

The relief on the very top of the artifact, embedded into the upward facing plate, was a diamond shape with a thin crevice ascending to the peak and down the backside of it. Jamison ran a gloved finger along the form and then lowered the brightening jewel toward it. The amulet fit perfectly into the slot. He draped the chain over the top and behind and it fell into the thin crevice as if it were made for it. He stood breathing, waiting.

Phi's eyes flicked to the navigation panel. Launch thrusters were at 74%.

The pedestal appeared to drink the light coming from the amulet. Some plasma form of the same red glow then oozed from each crack and indentation on the artifact, setting to life the depictions carved into the alien stone.

There was a twinge of something, then. Phi felt it behind one of his eyes first, like the tickle of an oncoming headache. It started as a pulse but became much more within seconds. External of his body was a tectonic grinding of some sort, planetary in scale, its reverberations so massive that it seemed that reality itself was somehow breaking apart. The ship groaned against the movement and alarms started complaining off of screens on the port side of the bridge.

It was more than the physical world being shaken and tossed. Phi's sight warbled unnaturally. His thoughts melted into one another. His focus was caught by some extradimensional attribute to the quake. The possession was trying to take hold of him once more, that same intent that had shown him those atrocious images when it paralyzed him to the floor a few minutes earlier. The force pushed Phi back into the chair. His tight knuckled hands gripped the armrests savagely as the will that now besieged him cracked from the nothingness beyond into his mind, something sinister. Amidst the mental battle for will and for his soul, Phi saw it in the video feed:

The amulet’s radiance beamed from its spot in the relief at the top of the artifact. A pillar of light ascended to the sky like a beacon. The camera panned back toward the way in which Jamison had come. In the growing shadow of Jupiter above, the tentacles moved in unison, rippling and twisting and coiling and uncoiling as if being swept by some unseen current, flowing beyond the visible spectrum of the human eye. The mouths were all shut, the lips invisible in rubbery blackness.

A bright glow shone over the ritual from somewhere offcamera. When Jamison turned back, a rectangle of light had pulled open just beyond the artifact. It was a canvas of illumination, hovering a foot or so off the ground. Its brightness burned to look upon, even through the video. The images that possessed Phi's mind, clawing at his consciousness, melded with what he saw in reality. Twitching eyes manifested on and out of every surface of the control shelf, fluttering open out of the cold metal. Illusion became truth and the truth became obscured.

Overlaid by the haze of the nightmarish mental assault, the green digits on the screen next to the feed showed the launch thrusters at 96%. Phi screamed in his throat to move his hand over to the strap buckle on his left. Pain surged through his neck and ears and eyes and, finally, after stretching himself against the searing electricity that filled him, he was able to secure the belt around himself.

Through the din of the psychic attack and the thousands of eyes surrounding him, Phi could hear Jamison began to laugh over the speakers. It was maniacal and triumphant.

“Ha ha ha! Oh Master, you will be my transformation. You will be my enlightenment. You will be my salvation!”

When the Nav panel showed thrusters tick over to 100%, Phi screamed as loud as he could, gurgling out of the deepest parts of his soul. His muscles burned and the nerves in his flesh were firing, being played with by some unknown force of this place, something from the void that darkly blanketed the distance in all directions. It took all of his effort to move his hand to the panel of switches for launch initiation, every last bit of exactable will spent to push it just the final inch or two further. Finally, he was able to flip them and so he did, then slapped the fat blue button next to them labeled INIT.

The launch sequence initiated. The ship rattled and groaned as it thrusted off the ground. Phi grimaced at the psychic bombardment that peaked behind his eyes. His thoughts were ravaged and clouded and he breathed viciously from the efforts to regain some sort of control. The struggle to hold dominion over his own mind was a battle that cracked the very foundations of his consciousness and, through these cracks, simulacra of the dead peered eerily—D, his mother, Sovikov—and he saw tentacles twisting and creeping through their decayed eyes.

“Ha ha ha!" Jamison’s laugh grew louder over the comms. The eyes that made up reality blinked and twitched in unison with each hackle and Phi was drowning further and further into them. In the feed, Jamison move toward the gate of light, still laughing hysterically. Its brilliance had consumed the entire camera view. As the ship rose, Phi could see the shine of the doorway of light shimmering out over the pressure ridge outside the viewport.

Jamison took the last few steps to stand directly in front of the rectangle of light, then looked down, directing the camera toward his feet, to the godlike thing that pushed under the ice beneath him. He laughed and sobbed all at once, crying out in a shrill exaltation. "HA HA HA HA!" And then he stepped into the light.

Zzzt.

JAMISON, H. -OFFLINE- displayed in the bottom corner of the screen. The comms were silent. Outside, the red light over the pressure ridge had evaporated.

The eyes in the panels, saturating Phi's reality, were gone. He blinked, swallowed and breathed deeply. His body and will were his own again. The rigid fingers of neural paralysis had left him, leaving in their path a cold sweat on his brow, an ache in his temples and a feeling of incomprehensible violation.

The ship continued to rise. Phi watched the dark planet hanging in the abyss and the halo of sunlight over its horizon. In his mind, he saw the cluster of holes punched in the ice, small windows into the black oceans below. He couldn't help but wonder if the things still danced in the darkness like they did in his imagination, or if they'd retreated back into the deep waters. Somewhere inside himself, he still saw the writhing mass moving under the ice. His mind raced through the things he'd seen, both through Jamison’s camera feed and in the flesh, the monstrosities and horror that claimed the lives of his crewmembers and more than likely those of the Acolyte. Sovikov’s body was still in the airlock. So many had died. He knew D'Artagnan La Felios, as well as the rest of the crew of the Artorius, would haunt him forever.

The captain sank back into the chair. With the ship shaking around him and the celestial titan suspended in the cold void outside of the viewport, he closed his eyes and rode the turbulence through the atmosphere of Europa and through that which burned in the darkness of his mind.

[TWO YEARS LATER]

Edward Jamison opened his eyes.

His pillow was soaked in sweat. The alarm clock on the night stand read 3:07 AM in dim blue digits and the glow of the moon poured through the skylight above. The night was clear, looking cosmically stellar beyond the glass.

He pulled the blanket off of himself and rolled into a sitting position, rubbing the sweat from his eyes and coughing into his fist before standing. His bare feet smacked against the hardwood floor and his ankles cracked as he rounded the base of the bed and moved into the hallway toward the bathroom. The office was the first room on the left, the door of which was slightly ajar and, as Edward walked past it, revealed nothing but darkness inside.

He stepped into the bathroom and mumbled, "On." The lamp above came to life. The matching marble countertops and bathtub glistened in the moody light. Edward took the glass from the countertop and positioned it under the faucet and the sensors detected it, automatically pouring water.

"Off,” he said as he walked back out into the hallway. His throat was dry. The taste of sweat was in his mouth. The water felt good against his lips as he sipped from the glass, moving past the office door.

He stopped.

Light rippled from within the room.

Edward turned back toward the door, lowering the glass from his lips. Bright green flickered out onto the hallway floor. He stepped closer and reached his hand out. His fingertips grazed the smooth curves in the door's ornate carvings. He hesitated for a brief moment, then pushed.

Light pulsed from the north corner of the office. It glowed off of the stacks of loose books surrounding the cherrywood desk in the center of the room. Bookshelves of tomes, glasses and trinkets came to life in the eeriness. The luminescence came from a drawer in one of the bookshelves, beaming out of the cracks in the wood.

Edward approached. As he closed in on the bookshelf, there was an audible purr and a subtle vibration in the floor accompanying each pulse of the light. He reached out to the knob of the drawer and pulled it open. In the middle of the drawer space, half-hidden under a few printed documents, was the source. Swirls of some kind of smoke or mist, a microcosm of roiling elements, moved in brilliant torrents and radiated like an infernal heartbeat. It was the amulet, the one his father had left him, the one that he had called the sister stone to that which had accompanied the man to Europa.

The floor shook and the bookshelves and hanging lights rattled in the increasing vibration. Edward's gaze moved from the drawer to the thousands of eyes that were opening out of the walls and floor and from the curtains that covered the large window to his left. They twitched and shook, furious and emanating horrid gazes. They burrowed into his mind, slicing into it with the sharp focus they directed at him. They spoke into him of suffering to come, of a cosmic process set in motion.

The glass of water slipped from Edward's hand and shattered against the hardwood floor. Shards and droplets glinted in the green light as it exploded. The eyes beneath him blinked the glass into themselves and they stared with shredded corneas up at him.

Edward's heel sunk into one of the eyes as he moved to the window curtains and swung them open.

The light of technicolor fire rolled over his skin like the reflections of waves. His eyes grew wide at that which waited in the night sky. Immediate and overwhelming reverie on a level of which he could've never imagined swelled within him, some feeling unfathomable and unexplainable. His knees trembled and bent to it. He had read the letter a thousand times since he'd found it in the lockbox that day. He'd memorized it, every word of every line, and now his father's words seared within his mind's eye:

And make no mistake, Edward;

I will return.

END

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