Genesistial Aberrance

Content warning: horror, body horror, and violence

Genesist Catalurgists use the blood of dead gods to fuel their magic of creation. However, a rare sickness afflicts these powerful individuals, and sometimes they wind up creating their own worst nightmares. The power of creation is not always best left in the hands of fragile humans.

"This isn't you," I swallowed my dread and choked the words out as I chambered another round.
"You're not yourself."
My worst nightmare gurgled up at me from the floor. Atrophied muscles writhed under slack skin that hung loosely from ill-formed bones. The Aberration lay within a pool of its own sick, leaking bodily fluids from somewhere in its abdomen where I had shot it once moments ago. It was the fourth one this week, and my mental state was frayed beyond repair at this point.
Its eyes gazed at me without focus, confusion blurring them, the mess of a face contorting into a mask of concern and terror. It gurgled again, blood splashing forth, as it choked out a word, a gut-wrenching question in single syllable.
"Son?"
I pulled the trigger a second time and watched as my father's body ceased its terrible movement. It began immediately decomposing; flesh sloughed off and added to the ever growing pool of horror beneath the unnaturally still mass. I turned away. I know I'd have to clean it up, but it was too painful to go through seeing my father waste away again.
See, he'd died 6 years prior. Back before I'd become a Catalurgist. Back during the hard times, when food was scarce and sickness ravaged our town. He'd held on a long time -- suffered for a long time, I bitterly reminded myself. His body was terribly strong and held onto life with a steel-trap grip, despite the daily agony he'd felt. His mind gave out long before his body ever did. It's all I could really remember now, an impression so painful that it tainted all the good memories I'd built up of him during my childhood.
And then, two months ago, he came back. But it wasn't really him.

~

The first appearance was horrific. He- it? The Aberration, it knew something was wrong the moment it appeared. I'd been walking home from the bar, another long night of trying to regain my humanity. I shuffled through the dark streets, body full of unnatural warmth from self-medicating my pain away, when it stumbled around the edge of a building and collapsed. My father looked up at me from the dirty street, looking at me for the first time in years, and begged me to help him.
"What... what's wrong with me? I can't... my body feels wrong, my memories... what is going on?" he pleaded. Blood flecked the sides of his mouth and his eyes darted around, seeing things that weren't there. He tried to prop himself up on one arm but it shattered under him the moment he put his weight on it, and he cried out in pain.
"Father?"
I breathed out that one word. I thought I had to be seeing things. I thought it was my nightmares finding some new sadistic way to torture my already traumatized mind. This wasn't real, this could not be real. I dropped my bag and rushed over to the trembling form cowering in the shadows. Laying broken in what I thought at the time was a puddle of rain water.
Its brows furrowed as the thing wearing my father's face tried to understand what was happening to it.
"You... look different? But then... where am I?" It panted.
I placed a hand on it and was shocked at how cold the body was. My mind was rapidly generating excuses and rationalizations for how this could be possible. For how my father came back into being. Was it actually his body we buried? Did someone steal him from his death bed? But that was years ago and this body in front of me hadn't aged a day. I recoiled slightly, and long strands of slime stuck to my hand, pulling away from his shoulder. A bloody red palm print was left behind where I had touched him, but he didn't seem to even notice.
"Am I... sick? Don't remember... what happened to me..." His voice was fading as his attention focused on something behind me. I began to panic, trauma reawakening as I realized I was experiencing the loss of my last family member all over again. I reached out and grasped his bicep -- was his arm always that long? -- but I squeezed too tightly and felt the bones crumble under my grip.
His eyes focused on mine finally. They were a perfect shade of brown, without any of the gray flecks that had plagued them on his deathbed. Like deep mahogany, polished and rich. Darker than I remembered, actually. Dad's eyes were more like a dark oak. The dissonance sent chills down my spine. This wasn't my father. The sudden memory of his casket being buried and my final goodbye to him came thundering back to me. It made me feel sick.
"Please..." The sound was barely a whisper. It breathed it out in one long painful exhale, then began to convulse. I stepped back in utter terror as the body tore itself to pieces with the violence of its shaking. Within moments, all that was left was a pile of gore in a vaguely human shape.

~

I should explain something about myself; after my Father died, I had no one left. Nothing to tie me to any particular place, no one to share my successes or fears with, no reason to do anything, really. I spent a couple years purposeless, nearly giving up entirely.
Eventually salvation came, but it arrived in an entirely unexpected manner; it was granted to me in the form of surgery in a government lab. It was given to me as the gift of Catalurgy. I had accepted the monster inside of me and turned my life over to the blasphemous act of using Ichor to do magic. At the time, I didn't really understand what I was signing up for. I didn't know what I was about to go through. But, I'd been told that with this power I could do great things.
I became a Genesist Catalurgist. We're a type of specialized Catalurgists, experts in creating something from nothing; in visualizing an object, feeling the Ichor pump into our body with the familiar heat of burn, and then materializing it. Most of the time, the new object was temporary, vanishing when you lost concentration or crumbling into dust within a few hours. If you were really good, you could put enough of yourself into the object to make it permanent. If you survived the burn of such effort, that is.
I wasn't good enough for the permanent stuff. I was, however, good at making a lot of tiny things that last a short time. My government recognized my potential and I was sent to the front lines of war. Part of the "munitions generation" department -- after all, bullets aren't really all that hard to visualize. I spent two years out there, creating box after box of ammunition. I got a front row seat to a scale of death I'd never thought possible. I helped bring create this death. I helped kill thousands. The monster inside of me grew.
It was not the purpose I was looking for. It sent me over the edge. I nearly burned out, and got so sick they needed to send me home. Something had broke in me out there. The ichor had tainted me. Become part of me. I just never realized it until later.
I was discharged from the military. Unfit for service -- which was a lucky stroke, to be honest. See, when a Catalurgist breaks, they really break. Some simply flare out and combust from the inside, usually with whatever spell they cast running amok. Others suffer total organ failure as their Thymalladus, the implanted organ responsible for the magic, turns cancerous and mutates their body. That's usually the worst option, as the resulting monster can cause incredible damage.
Some though, are like me. The ones who seem otherwise fine, but have their Catalurgy turn sour. Rotten. I didn't know it at the time, what exactly had happened to me. I didn't know this sickness was a possibility; that other Genesists had gone through the same thing that I was about to experience.
Of course, no one ever talked about it, really. How could they share? It's such a personal pain -- having people from your memories unconsensually rendered into the world. Brought into existence incomplete, missing their essence. Having their biology be hopelessly warped. These sad painful simulacra could not last -- they weren't real, not in the true sense of the word. They were physical, but broken. They were melancholy and longing and loss mixed into a human form for a brief moment of exquisite pain. Nostalgia given fragile form.
They were an aberration.
I'd have to experience it for myself to finally learn.

~

The bottle thunked clumsily against the kitchen sink as I dropped it. A pile of empties had grown, brown glass glittering like a wretched stain in the dim glow of the streetlights outside. I wiped my face, finally noticing how dirty my hands were -- I rubbed them on my pants, trying to erase the stains only I saw. The reds and browns and deeply concerning black stains I saw everywhere, now. The stains of flesh turned slime, of partially formed bodies rapidly breaking down.
The latest mess pulled at my attention, seeping into my floor in the corner of the kitchen where my father used to like to sit. Where we would enjoy a dinner together, and play cards long into the night. He always sat with his back to the corner, leaning into it for comfort. I could still see the discolouring of the walls where he'd always lean. It was directly above the sickening mass.
I bent down to grab the bucket from under the sink. It was in a truly awful state, a disgusting thing that no matter what would never come clean; but I was beyond caring at this point. Nothing would ever be clean again in here. The entire cupboard under the sink reeked, covered in a layer of grime I swear wasn't there hours ago. I felt my gorge rise, and my body temperature spiked as I fought to keep my sickness under control. The bucket felt stuck to the bottom of the cupboard, so I got down on my hands and knees in order to pry it out.
As I leaned over, I felt a clammy hand press down onto my shoulder. The sickening heat that moments before filled my body instantly turned to cold fear. I felt the wetness of the handprint seep into my shirt.
"What...?" The word was slushy, like the thing speaking it was trying to relearn how language worked.
"Looking for... something?" it asked, with such an innocent inflection to the question that it sent waves of emotional pain over me. Like this broken thing truly wanted to help. As if the kind and thoughtful spirit of my father was once again here to provide assistance in whatever way possible. I wretched, and jerked away, slamming my head into the bottom of the sink. The world went sideways for a moment, before I turned myself around and tried to crawl backwards from the stunned form of my father's aberration.
"I... do wrong?" it frowned, half recognizing the fragmented manner in which it was speaking. "Why I can't... think clearly?"
The thing looked at its hands, skin already beginning to bubble around the knuckles where it had been stretched too thin. Blisters forming as the minutia of tendon friction and skin elasticity had been improperly accounted for in the creation of this monster. Fear was clearly visible on its face as it stared at the mess that was its hands. A terrified whimper rose from within the tortured body standing pitifully over me.
It filled me with immeasurable guilt.
My father had nothing to do with this; the endless incomplete recreation of his memory served no purpose. He didn't know what was going on, there was simply no way for it to have that knowledge. It was the victim. It wasn't the things fault. It was mine, for being broken.
His voice trembled in fear, and I heard the liquid in his lungs bubbling out as he asked for help. As my long-dead father asked me to fix what was wrong with him. Pleading with me to tell him what was happening. Begging for answers.
I'm sorry Dad, but there's no fixing what's broken this time.
I put my head into my hands and sobbed as his form shuddered to the ground into a pile of gore for the second time tonight.

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