Weirdcore vs. Dreamcore
Weirdcore vs Dreamcore
In the acrid prelight mist of an ancient morning, Weirdcore awoke, shaking off the decades of growth that had collected in the joints and crevices of its elephantine skin. As it flexed its long-dormant muscles, the roots of small trees and shrubs shook loose and fell to the ground below in a rain of dirt clods and clumps of grass. Primeval birds and simple beasts scrambled to escape nests they had long before constructed in the titan’s folds.
Cracks appeared across the crusted mud on Weirdcore’s hide and broke apart into geometric scales. Its vague and indefinable mouth opened, ingesting clouds and revealing gnarled teeth like stalactites. Its stony face shifted with disapproval at the dawning light.
It marched across the landscape, slowly discerning the reality of the environment and the reason for the disturbance of its long sleep. It remembered the long nightmare of sleep: unrelenting visions of a pestilence of forms, of piercing and painful soundshapes echoing across years, of colors which refused to resolve, of torments nesting in the veins.
The creature arched its back and let out a bellowing war cry, sensing that its eons-long nemesis was somewhere near. The trees shook with the thunder of its rage.
On the horizon, the sun struggled to summit the mountains. As it arose, its orange and pink rays began to coalesce and sing. Inside a long exhale of light, the shimmering shapes of Dreamcore emerged, accepting the entirety of the sky into their formation.
As Dreamcore stepped out of the silhouette of the sierra, its faces changed expression like Noh masks in the warmly flickering light: squinting, laughing, mocking, cowering, wondering. Tendrils from its lobes curved out and looped down through its spine as its flowing robes unfurled into glorious wings of peach and teal.
Weirdcore marched forward toward the glowing giant, crushing a grove of fruit-bearing trees beneath its bulk. Its howl was bloodlust.
In the valley, apelike beasts darted to the relative safety of nearby caves. As the ground shook, they cowered, each fascinated and awed but still wishing to hide behind the others as they watched.
Weirdcore’s four arms and razor claws slashed forward toward the heart of Dreamcore. Where they struck the rival’s flesh, blisters bubbled and leaked, the fluid inside winding out like purseworms. The sinewy worms wrapped around Weirdcore’s paw, and with a sucking acidic slurp, severed it at the joint. When the wriggling tentacles unclenched, Weirdcore’s wound released a golden powder which buzzed upward in a spiral. Weirdcore howled with anguish and confusion, but within mere moments, the missing limb began to regenerate as a shark-skinned quirt.
Weirdcore narrowed its onyx eye slit. It staggered backwards, finding support against a cliff edge. An angry snoring vibration emanated from its diaphragm, and this croaking rhythm manifested as an ever-growing series of dark and light rectangles, the mirrors of shadows and the shadows of mirrors, which radiated forth and entangled Dreamcore in a eucalyptus hexahedron.
Dreamcore rippled and contorted itself within the daggerous cube, calmly transmuting the mirrors into transparent waterglass, within which appeared the infinitely serene and sterile minimalism of an open grass field. Lemongrass voles swayed in a directionless breeze, their barbs swatting at diamond dragonflies, abuzz and drunk on absence. A haint blue sky draped over the field innocently, daring souls to gaze too long and linger.
In defense, Weirdcore suddenly was a barren room. A darkened vestibule stood still and windowless in the sky. There were no entrances and no exits, and in fact, no conveyance for air. The dark vacuum of it taunted the cholera nesting of Dreamcore’s placid and unassuming mirage. The staredown threatened to become timeless.
Late into the morning, Weirdcore blinked. Expelling musical ribbons of tin from its pores, Dreamcore seized the moment and plunged deep inside Weirdcore’s spider-web gullet, revealing its earthly physical form and turning its massive body inside out.
A spleen-shaped organ from within Weirdcore transformed unexpectedly into a glass raven. The solemn bird opened its beak and vomited a torrent of fire ants at the fragrant field which was Dreamcore’s disguise. Worker ants assembled and dug into the fraying elements of the fantasy, carrying away parts of it into the ground while warrior ants punished the skin beneath with savage bites.
Dreamcore closed its immense wings around itself for protection. Still, the hateful colony of marauders attacked, biting and raising pustules on the webbing between the toes of its bare and tender human feet. Dreamcore collapsed like some boneless thing from the deep dark.
Weirdcore’s body inflated and deflated in a display of victory. Between the mountains, it turned slowly away like a ship maneuvering in a tight harbor, leaving the limp, gelatinous lungfish behind it to smolder and be consumed by the insect horde. At once, it froze in place, unable to take another step forward.
With a glandular reflex, a cyst bloated with Dreamcore’s ideas invaded fugue space and swiftly metastasized in Weirdcore’s REM cycle. Dreamcore used dreamstuff contradictions to assault Weirdcore’s rudimentary, instinctive psyche. First, it instilled a cat’s memories of a failed hunt, creating a hungry nothingness at the enemy’s core. Then, feeding on that weakness, it enveloped its adversary with a fear of falling forever through the core of a recurring hole. When this attack met resistance, it changed tactics and terrorized its opposite instead with an eternity of sleep paralysis. Shaken, Weirdcore stumbled then crumpled.
Weirdcore buckled but was not broken. It gathered strength from nearby life sources. Apes and insects and birds and beasts for miles were drained powder white and died in agony, fueling Weirdcore’s power. The aura it exuded became an expanding field of noxious green gas that spread out and captured Dreamcore as well. This bubble of psychosis formed a calloused, hard and slippery skin around both of them. Weirdcore was immune, but Dreamcore screeched deliriously, lashing out with a flurry of lightning and barbs. Weirdcore wrapped around its foe with iron cockroach legs and squeezed hard. The bubble held.
For weeks, Weirdcore chewed on Dreamcore like mulch in the cud of an ox. One day, when Weirdcore was tired and its anger simmered, it slipped for a moment into sleep. Though Dreamcore was almost fully devoured, it took its opportunity, and embers from its gristle floated up past Weirdcore’s dozing mind and through osmosis, pierced the bubble. As Weirdcore rested, the fireflies turned into flying fish and darted to a narrow escape between the clouds.
As years passed, the desolate landscape again grew silent. Weirdcore’s rest turned to deep slumber. It curled like a pill bug in the valley hollow. Once, under a sunset, it oozed slowly back into the skin of the world like lotion on a harlequin baby.
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