The Dark Somnium - "How to survive in Hell" Creepypasta | Scary Stories from Reddit Nosleep

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

This creepypasta scary story is from the nosleep subreddit, written by Ratrotted--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/darksomnium/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I woke up in a birthing sack, panicked and choking on amniotic fluid, I clawed at the fleshy walls, fighting with all my terrified strength to free myself. With a wet, ripping sound, I was dumped onto the muddy cobblestone of the street below, twisting my ankle as I landed. Cold rain blasted my naked body clean of the sacks liquid. I tried and failed to get to my feet. The street was alien to me, an insane medley of architecture ranging from the modern to the prehistoric.

The sky above boiled with storm clouds, illuminating my surroundings with non-stop flashes of lightning. A man walked over to me. His hair was matted with filth and the rain streaked down his mismatched leather clothes. He said nothing. Just watched me squirm on the floor. Please. I gasped.

Help me! He answered by slamming a foot down onto my face, breaking my jaw and making my vision real. He moved on to my limbs. Stamping and tugging until he heard the bones snap, crippled, naked and screaming, there was nothing I could do to defend myself when he started to eat me alive. My introduction to hell wasn't unusual. Very few people survived their first hour, let alone their first night. When they die, they go through the same thing again, emerging from a new birthing sack in another part of the city. Eventually, they learn to attack the first person they see, and if they're lucky, they'll

be able to kill that person. That's the one rule in hell, the strong take from the weak. Get used to the idea, and you might just make it through the afterlife. I'm going to give you a helping hand. Consider this your handbook to hell, a primer on the inferno. Make no mistake, though. I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. When you die, you'll owe me one.

Don't worry about trying to find me. I guarantee you will run into each other eventually. Eternity is a long time. So, it's a matter of when, rather than if. Do as I tell you, and you'll have a better chance than most of avoiding my own nasty introduction to the pit. Welcome to hell. Some people swear they saw a light at the end of the tunnel when they died.

To my mind, those people either hallucinated or they're lying. Most of us just wake up in a birthing sack a few minutes after death. The buildings of hell are covered in the things, yellow-brown pimples growing out of the brick. I've already mentioned that the first thing you need to do is claw your way out and get ready to fight. This is where the real bitch of the situation comes into play, since not everybody has the strength to break through their sack's flesh. You get the body you had just before you died, see? So, let's say you were born a cripple, or maybe you died too young or too old. Tough shit.

You're going to have a rough eternity drowning in birthing fluid over and over. If you manage to break free of your sack, don't waste time moping around, wondering what happened. Get on your feet and get ready to defend yourself. Chances are good that the first person you see will be hungry. There are no plants or animals in hell. So, cannibalism is your only option if you don't fancy starving to death and having to start over.

Aim to kill the first person you see. It might take a few tries. Most of Hell's residents have been fighting for survival a lot longer than you. They might have armor made from tan skin, scavenged metal, and bone. They'll almost certainly have a shiv, club, or axe. All of that will be useful to you if you can take it from them. The next thing to do is to find shelter. It never stops raining in hell, and pneumonia is a shitty way to die.

Luckily, you'll have a selection of buildings to choose from. Ever wanted to live in a run-down Victorian manor with half a roof and no furniture? How about an ancient Egyptian mud-brick hovel? If people have built it, you can find a crumbling version of it in hell. Pick a building, kill any squatters you find, and move in. The best houses are the ones that come with a supply of scrap metal and timber. Not only are these good for making weapons with, they're also vital for getting drinking water. I learned the hard way that hell's rain is teeming with disease.

It has to be boiled before it's safe. So getting a fire going and something to make a bowl with is necessity. So we've killed our first man and found a home. Things are going well. Get that far and you're going to want to hang on to what you have forever. You won't. Something will kill you eventually, and you'll have to start over. My record is a year.

If you want to beat that, you'll need to understand hell and its denizens. The damned. The people of hell can be grouped into two categories. The first, the fresh meat, are those who just climbed out of a birthing sack. It's kill or be killed when it comes to fresh meat, always has been. The newly birthed want clothing and tools and will kill to kill. to get a hold of them. The second category, the residents, view fresh meat as a quick and easy supply of food, leather

and bone. Residents have an easier time of it for sure, and all of them will fight to retain their residence status for as long as they can. Make no mistake, though, residents victimize each other just as much as they prey on fresh meat. If you're a woman, for instance, well, you better get over any hang-ups you have about rape. get raped in hell far more than men, it's just a fact. If you're not one of those bodybuilders or warrior women, do the smart thing and prostitute

yourself for protection. Self-respect doesn't keep you breathing. Remember how you get the body you had just before you died? Well, that fact forms the core of hell society. The truth of the matter is that throughout history, it's usually been men who die in battle. That means that in hell, there are a lot of men who die in battle. with young, strong bodies fit for war. Don't like it?

Tough. Those are the guys who call the shots. If you can't fight them, you better do as they tell you. If you live long enough and fight well enough, you might get invited into one of the resident tribes. These are groups of people who band together for the sake of safety and numbers. Believe me, being part of a group makes things a lot easier in hell. However, keep in mind that you're only part of the tribe for as long as you're a group.

resident. Get yourself killed and it's back to being fresh meat. Tribes offer the closest thing to civilized society you'll find in hell. If you're part of a tribe, you have people on your side who probably won't kill you unless shit gets rough. Doesn't sound like much, but that's about as good as it gets. My own survival record was thanks to getting into a tribe. Life was good for a while there.

We had about 50 soldiers and plenty of girls to fuck. could touch us in the men abided by an honor code, so the usual fear of being stabbed in the back by one of your friends wasn't too much of an issue. I could have spent my eternity in reasonable comfort, but hell has a way of fucking over good things. Human flesh and boiled rainwater doesn't exactly make for a balanced diet, and sooner or later even the strongest resident dies of malnutrition. I did well to last a year on it, though the last few months were agony.

If I believed in God, I'd swear he designed hell in such a way that nobody stays on top of the food chain for long, the city and the wasteland. Most of the damned live in Dis, the city of Hell. That's where all the fresh meat is born, and considering the size of the place, coupled with the short life expectancy, a lot of people will spend eternity without ever setting foot outside of Dis. Take my advice. Do not leave the city.

are rough on the streets, that's true, but trust me when I say it gets a lot worse if you try to leave. This is surrounded by a wasteland called Gahena. At first glance, it doesn't look like much, just an empty expanse of gray stretching out into infinity. Sometimes the damned lose that fire in the belly, the will to survive, and set off wandering into Gahena. Most of them never come back.

I made the walk myself once, a long time ago. I don't care how hard you think you are, spend enough time in hell, and it starts to break you down. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm a good person who never deserved this. Nobody can say that and not be a liar. I'm not evil though, or rather I wasn't. Not until I got to hell. You murder, rape, and torture because you know they do the same to you.

They're murdered, raped, and tortured because they know you'll do the same to them. Give it long enough and you just don't want to face it anymore. That's when you take the walk into Gahena. The first couple of miles I walked were nothing special. The rain stopped after a while, the sludge beneath my feet giving way to gray ash, and I caught my first glimpse of hell's sky beyond the clouds. It was a flat gray with a white sun, completely devoid of beauty or warmth. I trudged on.

While walking through Gahna, I lost any urge to eat, drink, or sleep. My body started to waste away, but I didn't care. Even when my skin started to peel away and my bones were exposed, I didn't care. The further I walked, the hollower I became in mind, body, and soul. I don't know what would have happened if I kept going. Frankly, I don't want to know. Some part of me still wanted to live, so I turned back. I'd walked for days, maybe weeks, yet when I turned around, this was only a few steps away.

I stepped back into the city and my body finally fell apart. When I emerged from my birthing sack, I swore never to step foot into Gehenna again. Escaping from hell. There are ways to leave hell. That should be obvious, otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you, would I? the living get it into their heads that they want to talk with the dead. They get their crystals, incense, and spirit boards, and hopes of reaching their loved ones. Most do nothing more than trick themselves into thinking they've made contact.

They smile or cry, convinced their beloved granny is playing the harp on a cloud somewhere before getting on with their lives. A few have the skill to actually reach us, though. They can open a gate between hell and the world of the living that we perceive as a pillar of fire, stretching down from the clouds. As soon as one of those pillars shows up, the damned scrambled to be the first to get to it. You haven't seen the true nature of man until you've watched thousands of the damned swarming over each other, kicking, biting, clawing to be the one who escapes.

Contacting the dead always results in a bloodbath. Even the most civilized tribes fall apart, the instant it becomes clear that only one of them can leave. I've left hell twice now, left my body behind and ridden that pillar of fire up into the clouds. Some people believe that you can be possessed by demons. Let me tell you something. Demons aren't real. What the living see as demonic possession is just one of the dam testing out their new body. Let's face it, if you fought your way through hell to get back to the world of the living, you're not going to be on your best behavior for long.

Sooner or later, we take things too far. Our host dies or their family caves and recruit an exorcist, then we're fresh out of the birthing sack and onto the streets again. By now, you should have a good idea of what you can expect from hell. You know to kill the first person you see when you fight your way out of a birthing sack. You know to find clothing, food, and shelter. You know that no matter what you do, how well you do, someday it's back to being fresh meat.

This is the biggest city you can imagine. Tribes fight and die for territory, and taking a wrong turn is a fucking death sentence. You'll get a feel for where you should and shouldn't go eventually. Develop the kind of street smarts you need to stay a resident for more than a day. Even so, there are places in Disse that you should know about. Let's do a little sightseeing tour of hell. Maybe the advance warning will do you some good. Skin Street.

Allow me to tell you about the first time I saw Skin Street. I dropped out of my birthing sack onto the road, stood straight back up and got myself ready to fight. Nobody was there. Not a single person was out on the street that stretched for miles in either direction. I relaxed a little and took a look around. Most of the streets and dis are a labyrinthian network of buildings. You spend most of your stay in hell paranoid that just around the next corner there's some

ready to beat you down. Skin Street isn't like that. It's a single straight line with only the rain and the darkness to hamper visibility. I felt more vulnerable there than I felt in any other part of this. You ever walked into a wide, empty space and suddenly felt exposed? Yeah, imagine also being naked, unarmed, and in hell. Still, I knew what I was supposed to do. The first step was to find some clothing.

That's where I learned how Skin Street got its name. Every building, every busted streetlight and gas lamp was decorated with flayed skin. I'd been in hell long enough by that point to not be freaked out, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't affect me. In a fucked up kind of way, it reminded me of Christmas, you know? People hanging wreaths and lights from their houses, that sort of thing. I remembered the time I'd spent with my family, with my kids on Christmas Christmas morning.

Feelings like that get you killed. I pushed them back down and pulled some scraps from the nearest building. If somebody was going to leave clothing material lying about, I may as well take it, right? I didn't know it at the time, but every step I took on Skin Street was being watched. When the attack came, I didn't even get a glimpse of the guy. Whoever hit me went for my eyes the second I hit the floor, stuck his fingers right into my sockets. I was blind and crying like a baby when he started to peel away my face.

my skin. Here's the thing. Some people are fucked up even by hell standards. The loners, serial killers, stalkers, and psychos all make their way to Skin Street in the end. Most of the damned used the whole body of a kill, but the Skin Street people like to take trophies. They leave their ornaments out as bait for the ignorant, skulking in the shadows and waiting for the best moment to ambush. If you find yourself on Skin Street, you're going to have to think fast.

Forget clothing, just grab a rock, a piece of wood, or anything else you can use as a weapon. Stay out of the shadows, keep checking behind you and get out of there as quickly as you can. Perdition Farms You're going to be chased in hell, that's unavoidable. At some point you'll stumble into somebody bigger than you or you'll find yourself outnumbered. Forget about a fair fight. If somebody can take you down without you fighting back, you bet that's what they'll do. It's easy to lose focus when you're running for your life.

You can forget to pay attention to your surroundings. That, my friend, is a big mistake. The outskirts of perdition farms are littered with billboards. They promise free food and safety to anybody fucking stupid enough to believe them. The tribes that fight over that particular territory like to herd people off the streets and into the industrial complex they call home. The good news is that those tribes won't kill you. The bad news is that they're big fans of taking people alive.

They've got a project, you see, been working on it for as long as I can remember. I couldn't tell you who originally decided that hell should have organized food production. Only that the idea stuck and that over the years, countless tribes have taken it upon themselves to try to make that dream or reality. Get yourself captured by them and you can look forward to a bit of slave labor. For the most part, the perdition farms tribes try to make use of the birthing pods as a source of food. They force their slaves to harvest them from the walls, grind them up in industrial vats,

mix them with blood, body parts, rainwater, and anything else that could conceivably make a broth. The life of a slave is short, brutal, and disgusting, particularly when those slaves are then used as guinea pigs for the latest concoction. You see, amniotic fluid can be drunk if you're desperate, though drinking too much is guaranteed to make you empty your stomach from every available orifice. The flesh of the sacks is a different matter, though. I couldn't tell you exactly what the birthing sacks are.

Some people say they're actual flesh, while others swear they're more like a fungus. What I do know is that they repair themselves over time. Eat some of their flesh, and over the next few days, you'll grow a new birthing sack inside you. It's a small mercy that you won't live long enough to see it break through your skin. You'll be dead shortly after your stomach bursts. If you're lucky, your days as a slave will end when the tribe decides they want some real meat. They're not stupid enough to test their broth themselves, not when there's no shortage of slaves in hell.

Look, I can't force you to stay out of perdition farms. I can only offer advice. In my opinion, if you think you're being hurted there, it's better to take you to take you. whatever's to hand and cut your own throat. I'd take fresh meat status a hundred times before spending another day on the farms. The Boneyard. So maybe you're thinking to yourself, Hey, I'm the kind of nut job who'd join a cult. Is there anything in hell for me? If that sounds like you, the Boneyard has you covered. You see, there's a certain kind of religious fanatic who really does belong in hell. I'm not talking about the old dears who bake cakes to raise money for the

the new church roof here, I'm talking about the guys who went to war because God commanded it, who burned women for supposedly consorting with demons, and who saw nothing wrong with fucking the odd kid. When those people get to hell, they're too thick-headed to make sense of what happened. Why face reality when you can just pretend it's all just a test of faith? They find like-minded folk in the Boneyard. I'm told that at one time the Boneyard was a cathedral surrounded by a place. a cemetery that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Maybe that's true, I don't know. These days, it's a shanty town of temples and churches built from materials scavenged from the streets. Everywhere you look, you'll find wild-eyed zealots preaching their own twisted version of redemption and gangs of masked men on the prow for fresh converts. Mortification of the flesh is the main pastime in the Boneyard. If you listen to the cacophony of sermons, you'll be informed of how the flesh is wicked and must be purged of sin.

How lucky we are to be given such a holy duty. How fortunate to be given the opportunity to redeem ourselves before God. The people of the Boneyard have had a long time and plenty of fucking practice when it comes to mastering torture and degradation. I am not a good person. I've killed, raped, and cannibalized, but I can honestly tell you I'd never be able to dream up some of the shit that goes on in the bone yard. I wandered in there by accident once, and I've never been able to get what I saw out of my brain.

I watched a woman, naked and bound, forced on her knees and violated by iron rods. A preacher sewed his own eyes and lips shut in front of a crowd before sawing off his manhood with a piece of slate. A boy, maybe 14, was publicly crucified. A girl was drowned in shit. An older man had sharpened flint pushed under his fingernails. I could list off a hundred other atrocities done in the name of redemption. Stay away from the Boneyard.

The people there decided that hell just isn't hellish enough for their liking. Forget about redemption. Forget about God. The only way out of hell is by riding a pillar of fire and taking over a living body. Focus on that if you want to escape. The damned can't offer you salvation. The damned only offer pain. I have to leave you soon.

If I'm going to make the most of life on earth, I'm afraid I'm going to have to skip town. While I've had plenty to keep myself entertained, this body just isn't suitable for a run-in with the police. It's only a matter of time until some nosy neighbor thinks to pick up the phone. With the humidity over the last few days, my roommate is already pretty ripe. Here's something you have to understand. is a big place. I've given you fair warning about a few of the locations I myself have run into, and that will have to do. Even if I wrote a library's worth of novels solely dedicated to mapping

out the distinct locations within Diss, I couldn't tell you everything about the city. What I can do is give you a bit of information about some of the damned. The Slaughter Man. Take a moment to think about all the celebrities you know. How many of them do you reckon would do well in dis? Not many, I'll wager. Perhaps none. Fame and fortune on earth doesn't count for shit when you're dead.

Very few people are strong enough, mean enough, and downright psychotic enough to earn a reputation in hell. Those few who have what it takes are people you never want to meet. The Slaughter Man is one of hell's legends. A huge bearded man with filed teeth, bloodshot eyes. and foam on his lips. Rumor has it that the day he first emerged from a birthing sack, he was unlucky enough to land at the feet of a slaver tribe.

Well, those tribesmen chuckled to themselves and readied their clubs and whips, only too happy to take some fresh meat captive. Outnumbered a dozen to one, naked, unarmed, and brand new to hell, most people wouldn't stand a chance. If you believe the stories, the slaughterman shrugged off the clubs battering against him and whips cutting into his flesh as though they were insect bites. He picked up the first slaver, put his hands into the man's mouth, and pulled his jaw right off his skull.

He moved on to another and then another, tearing them apart with his bare hands until the survivors turned and fled. Nobody knows for sure who he was in life. I've heard theories, though. The most popular one being that he was the berserker of Stamford Bridge. Supposedly, a single Viking who held up the English army single-handedly. It didn't matter that he could never win, that he was outnumbered, that his enemies had better weapons and armor.

He stood on that bridge and fought. By the time he was brought down, he'd killed no less than forty men. I don't know how true any of this is. I've never seen the slaughter man for myself, and I don't fucking want to. What I can tell you for sure is that people don't become legendary in hell without good reason. I'd guess that the only one who knows the truth is the slaughter man himself, and he isn't saying anything. Since the day he arrived in hell, he's only spoken once.

The fleeing slavers heard it as the slaughterman tore their tribe apart. Naked, bloody, and surrounded by corpses, the slaughterman looked up to the storm-racked sky and bellowed a single word. Valhalla. Hellhounds. How about a little story? I wasn't new to hell. I'd made myself some clothes in a wooden club, found shelter, and had a big slab of meat

roasting over a campfire. The only thing I didn't have was a tribe. The area I'd been birthed in seemed slummy, even for dis, all half-collapsed hovels and mud huts. Iron was scarce, barely enough to make myself a water bowl. All in all, not a good spot for a tribe. My plan was simple enough. I'd have a decent meal, carve myself a shiver. or two in case I lost my club, then find somewhere more or less dry to sleep.

After that, I'd set off to look for a tribe. Even the mildest tribal initiations result in a few scars and a broken nose, so I wanted to be as well rested as I could be. Sleep in hell is both vital and dangerous. There's a knack for finding somewhere that's simultaneously sheltered, hidden, and with access to an escape route. Then you never get more than a few hours at a time. In hell, the slightest suspicious noise should scare the shit out of you.

A low, throaty growl definitely counts as a suspicious noise. I leapt out of my impromptu nest of skins in wood, raised my club, and returned the growl with one of my own. A woman had crept into my building and was staring at me with dilated pupils. She looked to be in a bad way, skinny, naked and covered in weeping sore. Her lips peeled back to reveal broken and jagged teeth. It took me all of a second to size her up. She'd been living rough for days or weeks, judging from her protruding ribs and bloating stomach.

She was well on her way to dying of starvation, so she was weak, hungry, and didn't even have a weapon. I've already eaten, I said, relaxing a little and giving my club a few practice swings. No sense in letting you go to waste, though. I took a step toward her and she bolted, just turned right around and scampered away in a strange animal gate. I took off after her, certain that I could outpace her. Even if there wasn't much meat on her, bones can still be useful.

I chased her through a few streets, struggling to keep my footing on the muddy ground. When I finally got close enough to swing my club, she stopped dead. The suddenness of it caught me off guard and I tripped over her, losing my club as I fell. howled in triumph, a sound that was echoed by a dozen other throats. That day I learned two things about the hellhounds. The people who lose their minds and become little more than beasts after enduring centuries in hell. Firstly, they have the necessary animal cunning to hunt as a pack.

Secondly, human teeth and fingernails are perfectly capable of ripping flesh from the bone. The surgeons. Modern doctors rarely thrive in the brain. hell. Academia and reliance on technology don't leave you in the best state to endure the endless violence and brutality. There are exceptions, though. The people who learn to sew their friends back together amid the machine gun fire of the

Somme. Shaman, witch doctors, and holy men who endured famine and warfare. Survivalists who knew how to cauterize their own wounds in the middle of a forest. Those are some of the people who might just be strong enough to play. their trade to the damned. After all, working knowledge of basic medicine is just one of those things that's beyond a lot of the meatheads roaming dis. Most of hell's surgeons find a tribe as soon as they're able. Their tools might be crude, but they soon learn to make do. Flint, slate, and shards of glass serve as their scalples. They make thread from human hair and needles from slivers

of iron. Whenever a member of a tribe has an infected sword, A surgeon will be the one to drain the pus. A tribal surgeon could save your life, but they'll do it without anesthetic. Then there are the freelance surgeons, the people who try to go it alone. They make themselves a uniform, the theory being that the damned will recognize them if they all look alike. It doesn't really work, but then you can't expect much logic from people who've lost count of how many times they've died.

For one thing, fashions change over time. I'm told that freelancers wore headdresses and bone necklaces at one point. The current trend is to mimic Venetian plague doctors by donning a beaked mask and wearing a long coat of fire blackened skin. Freelancers are rare, very rare, in fact. You'll see thousands of damned for every freelance surgeon you come across. When you do come across one, be fucking careful. Firstly, surgeons don't get a free pass in hell.

The damned are more likely to attack a freelancer than they are to barter their tools, clothes, or slaves in exchange for his services. You can't be certain if the man in the bird mask and black coat is really a surgeon or somebody who murdered a surgeon and took his clothes. Perhaps they made the outfit themselves in order to draw the weak and the wounded clothes. Advertising doesn't always work as intended in this. If the freelancer turns out to be genuine, that's a realtor. That doesn't give you an excuse to drop your guard.

Freelance surgeons aren't usually the most stable people. Put another way, freelancers are usually sadistic fucking psychopaths. Sure, they might stitch you back together and send you on your way. They might also decide it would be more interesting if they stitched you to somebody else. They might think paying an arm and a leg for their services should be taken literally. They might turn out to be some wannabe serial killer who is yet to find their way to Skin Street. For each freelancer trying to do a tough job in a tougher place, there are a dozen or so mangolas who want to try out their toys on somebody too injured to fight back.

Stick with your tribe surgeon if you're lucky enough to have one. Failing that, learn to patch up your own wounds. Trust me, if you're able to read, you've already got the intellectual advantage over a lot of hell's residents. Freelancers aren't with the risk. Cambians. I'll be honest with you. here, I don't know if Cambians actually exist.

What I'm going to tell you is something that somebody else told me. It's up to you to decide if it's true or not. Personally, I really fucking hope it isn't. People rape one another in hell. It happens a lot. If you're not strong enough, it'll happen a lot to you. The good news for the ladies out there is that damned men fire blanks. You'll almost never be impregnated.

I say almost never, because if you believe the story, you'll be. There's an incredibly slim chance that a couple of those little swimmers will be awake and looking for an egg. Just to put this into perspective, we're talking conjoined twins' levels of unlikliness here, and that's just conception. The chances of a pregnant woman surviving the full nine months in hell are probably conjoined triplets' level of unlikely. You're talking about a perfect storm of beating the odds here, but this is eternity. A monkey randomly mashing keys on a typewriter will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare

if it goes at it for eternity. The result of that perfect storm, of those monkeys in their typewriters, is a Cambian, a child conceived and born in hell. I'm not saying they exist, okay? I'm saying I've met somebody who swears it's true, and that he's seen a Cambian for himself. You see babies in their birthing sacs from time to time. It's just a body.

Occasionally you see one drowning. Most of the damned ignore them. They wouldn't survive a day on the streets, even if you could afford to devote your full attention to them. Better to leave them be. It's only the really fucked up people who cut through the sacks, and yeah, I'm not going to finish that thought. I'm getting sidetracked, so this Cambian who may or may not have existed apparently looked

like a normal child. He cried, it's shit, it sucked its mother's tits just like a regular baby would. The mother was part of a tribe and they'd been able to protect her throughout her pregnancy. Couldn't tell you why? Curiosity, perhaps? When it was born, the whole tribe gathered around to have a look. Among them was the man who told me this story. Somebody I'd met years later and eventually killed.

This man cut the baby's cord and lifted it up to his face. man in the tribe had raped the mother at one point or another and wanted to see if the child looked anything like them. The Cambian looked like a normal child in every way but one. Its eyes were dead, lifeless like a doll's. Sure, the kid was alive, it wriggled and cried like a normal baby. Those eyes were wide open, though, not scrunched clothes like a newborn's eyes should be. Wide open, empty doll's eyes.

If that story is true, I don't blame the tribe for killing the child. Something like that shouldn't exist. Right. I'm done. I have to go. This is the point where people like to have things nicely tied up. A few dragons slain, a few maidens saved. At the very least, you could expect some kind of moral lesson to think over.

I think that in this case, that sort of thing is missing the point. There are no dragons to slay. No morals to learn. We do not live happily ever after. There's no grand revelation, no clever twist, no purpose, no redemption, no hope. There's only eternity among our own kind.