All Seth Collins wanted was some inspiration to escape his writer's block. Now trapped in body of Herve Keats, he must survive the gritty, victorian-inspired streets of Backlund with only the whispers of the beyond to guide the way.
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Demon of Knowledge - Book 1 - Mystery Pryer
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Chapter 1
New
sey
Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2022
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Hi there folks.
First time posting on QQ so apologies if it's not that great. A friend recomended I try posting this here instead of FF, so consider this an experiement of sots.
For context, this is a Lord of Mysteries Fic with an SI OC. He'll mostly be doing his own thing, but will eventually meet up with the main cast eventually.
Fair warning, I'll be playing a little fast and loose with the lore for certain things, as there will be crossover elements, albeit integrated to fit the setting.
Constuctive criticism is appreciated. Please enjoy.
It was the pain he felt first.
It wasn't a dull, hollow ache or a sharp stab; it felt as though every single atom in his body had suddenly been set on fire and was screaming in unison. His nerves were a grid of white-hot agony, vibrating with an intensity that should have torn a scream from his throat—if he could have drawn the breath to make one.
Indeed,while he found himself acutely aware of every part of his body, paradoxically, he found those very extremities completely unresponsive, as if his muscles had been transmuted into lumps of pure lead, without affecting his ability to feel pain.
And beneath the pain, lurking on the edge of his consciousness, a strange sense of emptiness, as if something something had reached into his very soul and scooped out everything of substance, leaving him to bleed out on the ground like a discarded carton.
'What the fuck happened?'
Such were the first conscious thoughts of Seth Collins, aspiring novelist and full-time customer-service agent as he found himself lying face-down on the floor, unable to move or even blink, forcing him to gaze blankly at a ceiling he couldn't quite focus on.
His last memory, prior to blacking out, had been mundane enough. He'd been browsing occult literature references online whilst listening to a podcast, hoping to find something that might help inspire him to shatter the writer's block that had been holding him hostage for months now.
He was dimly aware of opening a new tab on his laptop, following some link that had caught his eye, only for his vision to abruptly white-out like some asshole hit him with a flash-bang, the world seeming to tilt sharply to the side before he found himself facedown on thefloor, unable to move.
'Shit...did I have a stroke?'
Unbidden, his mind drifted back to that one winter almost a decade prior, when he'd woken up to the sudden, terrifying reality of half his face refusing to respond to his commands courtesy of a, thankfully brief, bout of stress-induced Bell's Palsy.
He'd recalled the frustration he'd been forced to endure during the recovery period, how the Doctor assured him it was simply due to stress and that if he simply took the chance to improve his lifestyle, get more exercise, cutt out the snacks, all the usual shite, he wouldn't have to worry about a repeat occurrence.
And in all fairness, Seth had done his best to comply. No, honestly, he'd taken up swimming on weekends, tried to eat healthier and burnt out his stress via hobbies. But habit is hard to break and his lifestyle had always been mostly sedentary, spending both his work-hours and free-time behind a monitor, fueled by Energy drinks & spite.
'That thumping...is that my heart? Shit...it's so slow...'
Worse,as he lay there, a prisoner in his own flesh, unable to draw breath into his desperate, burning lungs, he dimly realised that the the dull echo in his ears was slowing down, each second between thumps draining more colour from his vision as he continued to gaze into the void.
And yet, as the agonizing seconds ticked by, until it almost seemed minutes would pass between beats, the panic didn't come. Instead, a wave of profound, surprising calm washed over him, almost as if he were watching the scene happen to someone else.
'So...this is how I die...face down on the floor after Forty Years with nothing to show for it...'
Alright, maybe 'okay' wasn't the right word, but it was almost comical how chill he was about all this. Then again, he'd never been the type to lose his shit over something that couldn't be changed. When most people lashed out, whined or tried to get their way by making a scene, he'd been the type to simply shrug, go back to what he was doing and try find a workaround.
Sadly, there wasn't a work-around for Death outside of fiction or divine intervention, and last he checked God stopped making House-calls sometime after the Romans nailed his golden boy to a cross, so what the hell would losing his shit even do in this situation?
Panicking would only burn through whatever precious, residual oxygen his brain had left. There was quite literally nothing Seth could do to change the outcome, so what was the point of wasting his final moments screaming into the void?
Nah, if it really was time for him to punch out then he wasn't going out like a bitch. If the reaper truly was coming for him, he'd probably shake the fucker''s hand because at this point anything would be better than feeling this agony for all eternity.
In truth, his only real concerns was how devastated his mother was going to be when she heard the news. As much as they drove each other up the wall, the woman had always had his best interests in mind and had been the driving force behind his lifestyle changes after the Palsy scare.
'Assuming I'm not bound for the hand-basket express, I'll put in a good word for you, Mum.' he vowed, smiling internally as he recalled all the times the woman had driven him absolutely mental 'Though full disclosure, if there's any truth to coming back around again, I'll be 100% coming back a wizard, so i will.'
And so he lay there, counting down the seconds between beats as the steady rhythm slowed, taking with it the pain as the numbness seeped in from his extremities, the silence a comforting blanket, waiting to tuck him into the void...until it was ruthlessly ripped away.
The words did not give him the common courtesy of passing through his ears. They were simply there, birthed directly inside the meat of his brain, burning like white-hot needles against his consciousness, his mind convulsing as a second verse clawed its way through his thoughts, dripping with a terrifying, ancient weight.
It was a recipe, chanted by a voice that wasn't a voice, but rather a chorus of a thousand maddening whispers overlapping until they were indistinguishable, violently vomiting their cursed knowledge into his skull, expanding his mind until he felt his sanity begin to fray atthe edges.
'What the hell is going on-?!'
His panic was understandable, if somewhat comical given his earlier acceptance of his mortality. It certainly didn't help that the information brought with it the phantom smell of bitter herbs and the sickening, oily texture of something foul coating his tongue despite his mouth remaining dry and locked shut.
And yet, despite the sheer absurdity of it all, despite the terror seeping through his soul by the whispers and the sheer revulsion of the flavour assaulting his taste-buds, Seth found an urge rising within him, an all-consuming thirst and desire to consume the accursed concoction.
It would appear that the universe was refusing to accept his surrender on any terms but it's own, forcibly inscribing the formula for a dangerous rebirth directly onto the canvas of his dying mind, demanding that he listen, demanding that he remember and above all else demanding that he crawl back from the edge to brew it.
And all the while the whispers grew, clawing at the inside of his skull,refusing to let him drift into the dark, the maddening chant an agonizing hook dragging through his mind, violently hauling his consciousness back from the peaceful edge of the void.
To make them stop, he had to brew and consume the potion.
'...Fuck it, déanfaimid é-!'
If the universe wanted him to live, even if it was out of spite, then he was hardly going to refuse, especially if it meant he had to deal with this cacophony of shite in his brain for all eternity. And so, despite the silent darkness calling out to him like a lover's embrace, he turned his attention to his ruined, unresponsive vessel.
'Breathe!' he screamed inside his head, using the weight of the voices to visualise the thought surging down his spine, like an electric shock focussed on his chest, or at least, the area that felt like his chest, repeating it ad nauseum as he stubbornly tried to force the frozen muscles in his diaphragm to drop 'Breath you fat fuck!'
After what felt like an eternity, the chorus growing ever louder, his lips parted with a sickening wet rattle as his his lungs forcefully expanded, filling with air that tasted like dust, copper and bloody vomit.
It was the sweetest breath he had ever taken.
With that first, shuddering gasp he turned his attention to his heart, the once reliable engine laying cold and dormant like a stone in hischest. With a surge of will, he imagined a spectral hand reaching out to gently grasp it, squeezing the muscle through sheer, desperate intent once....twice...
A gasp escaped his lips as he felt his heart kickstart like he'd been kicked in the ribs by a mule, his back arching off the floor as a wave of pure agony flooded his senses, each renewed beat sending a sudden, violent rush of stagnant blood surging through his veins like liquid fire.
That sharp, white hot agony that had been blessedly on the verge of fading into the dark returned as the oxygen from that first, precious gasp of air was delivered straight to his dormant nerve endings via veigns that were being forced back open with every beat.
His eyes cracked open, his vision blurry and bloodshot, unable to make out anything in the dark save for his twitching fingers, the joints popping like dry twigs as they clawed desperately at the hardwood floor like skittering spiders.
To no-one's surprise, the eldritch choir from the darkness hadn't been silenced by his return to the world of the living, though thankfully for his sanity it had seemingly regressed to mere whispers at the base of his skull, lurking behind his eyes with the persistence of an eye-floater, but manageable, for now.
And so he lay there, face down on the floor, his cheek pressed against something that smelled of bloody bile and shame, simply focussing on the mundane task of breathing while the malfunctioning piston that was his heart continued to pump cold, stagnant blood through vessels that had already begun to settle.
By every law of medicine and nature he was a corpse. His skin was the gray of a winter dawn & his muscles locked in the early grip ofrigour mortis. But his mind, sparked by the maddening friction of the whispered recipe, refused to let the system shut down.
Hissing with exertion, he pushed past the pain of his failing nervous system to dig his bloody fingernails into the floorboards. His limbs didn't obey fluidly, moving in jarring, erratic twitches, like a puppet being yanked by coarse twine.
Planting one palm flat on the floor, he took a breath to brace himself before dragging his upper body forward, a hiss of agony escaping his teeth as his spine popped with the dry, terrifying sound of snapping kindling as he forced his left knee to bend and slide forward.
The gravity of the room felt immense, a physical weight trying to press him back into the ground where a dead man belonged. His thighs trembled violently, the dead muscle fibres tearing under the sudden, unnatural strain as he heaved his torso upward, leaning his weight against what felt like a bed-frame.
For a long, agonizing moment, he just hung there, his lungs drawing in ragged, whistling breaths that served only to clear the dust from his throat. His vision washed out into fields of static, the world tilting violently as his oxygen starved brain was forced to fire up again.
'Stand up you bastard.' he commanded, a harsh rattle escaping his throat as he gripped the bed-frame for support, driving his heel into the floor and slowly inching himself off his knees until they locked into place with a sickening click, allowing him to stand unsupported.
And so he stood there, swaying like a newborn calf in a gale, his hands hanging limp at his sides, blue-tinged and trembling. He was a monument of pure defiance, a dead man standing on his own two feet, glaring through bloodshot eyes at his surroundings.
'...Where the actual fuck am I?'
His confusion was understandable, as the room he found himself in was not the small, comfortable bedroom he'd been sitting in what felt like mere moments prior. There was no sign of his laptop, his gaming setup, his closet full of comfortable clothes nor the custom mattress he'd obtained to deal with his aching back.
Instead, he found himself standing in a small, cramped, dust filled attic room, lit by the stray beams of crimson light filtering through the thin curtains over a cracked window. The bed-frame he'd been leaning against for leverage was a rusted relic with a miserable, tattered mattress that stank of sweat, piss and booze.
Between the bed and the only door was a cabinet and a small chest of drawers. To the side of the cabinet stood a dressing mirror with two cracks and a pipe extending up the wall, connected to a strange mechanical device with exposed gears and bearings in several places.
An old, cast-iron coal stove sat in the rightmost corner of the room near a desk covered with discarded papers and what looked to be an ancient monster of a typewriter, the kind that had keys you actually had to push if you wanted to type anything rather than the sleek, modern remakes you could buy off the internet.
In short, the only thing this hovel had in common with Seth's bedroom was the fact they both had hardwood floors, though his was in decidedly better condition, smooth and clean whereas the one he currently stood upon was old and coarse, littered with papers, glass bottles and a puddle of dried black vomit he'd been lying in.
"That can't be healthy..." he rasped in disgust, only to freeze, his claw-like hand snapping clumsily to his throat at the sound of a strangers voice emerging from his chapped lips, the motion causing him to temporarily lose his balance, stumbling towards what appeared to be a basin by the window.
"Fuck-!" he swore aloud, his uneven stride rattling the floorboards as he barely managed to grab the counter the basin rested on to keep from falling, leaning desperately against it until the wave of vertigo settled, his deadweight causing the water in the basin to ripple.
"Keep it together Seth..." he ground out in a stranger's voice, taking a few deep breaths to steady his nerves before bringing his gaze up tofinally look out the window, only to feel the pit drop out of his stomach and the breath catch in his throat at the sight of the massive crimson moon hanging high in the night sky.
"What the actual fuck..." he croaked, any concerns about his voice lost as he gazed out at the the unfamiliar surroundings where the Irish countryside should have been, the scarlet light of the moon washing over cobblestone streets and towering town-houses like something out of a Victorian period drama.
"Oh fuck me sideways..." he whispered, the hammering of his heart the only other sound in the room as he stared out the window "I'm not in Yharnam am I? Christ Almighty please tell me I'm not after being dropped into Yharnam."
The only response he received was a single bead of cold sweat dropping from his cheek to the basin below, the sound causing him to look down only to find himself locking gazes with the haunted, bloodshot eyes of the stranger reflected on the water's surface.
Now it should be noted Seth was never what you might call vain by any stretch of the imagination. If anything he'd long since embraced that between his weight, premature baldness and general lack of faith in humanity, he was about as unattractive as you could possibly get to pretty much anyone without highly specific tastes.
However, even he was forced to admit that, to the truly desperate and possibly blind members of the fairer sex, he probably would have been seen as an absolute catch compared to the man staring back at him from the murky water of the basin.
For starters, the poor bastard looked like he'd endured a prolonged, waking nightmare, his face impossibly gaunt, his skin a sallow, translucent parchment tightly stretched over a sharp, angular skull. Long, matted strands of dark, messy hair fell wildly around his face, sticking to the cold sweat on his forehead.
The eyes were the worst part however, bloodshot and sunken deep into their sockets, framed by heavy, purplish-black shadows that looked like permanent bruises. His cheeks were hollowed out, carving deep, dark valleys beneath his high cheekbones, making him look like someone who hadn't eaten a proper meal in weeks.
'Or perhaps,' a darker part of his mind whispered in a voice he barely recognised as his own, a chill settling in his bones that had nothing to do with the air of the room, 'someone who had been slowly starving to death in a dark room'.
Therewas a profound, haunted emptiness in that reflection, a visage scarred not by violence, but by a deep, systematic erosion of life. And yet, as he stared into those unfamiliar, deadened eyes, a spark of recognition seemed to ignite within them.
"That's...me...?"
No, that wasn't right. He was Seth Collins, 40-years old, born in Magherafelt, County Tyrone...and yet, as he continued to gaze into those broken, haunted eyes, he found himself 'remembering' a different life altogether, one that belonged to him...or rather, to 27-Year-old Hervé Keats.
"FUCK!" Seth roared, gripping his head as the occult whispers, which had been present but blessedly silent until now, suddenly ramped up their intensity, cutting off the deluge of Keats' memories by forcing the recipe back to the forefront of his mind "Ah, fuck this altogether!"
Apparently the universe didn't much care for his little walk down memory lane, which was actually perfect as he'd been so drawn in by Hervé's memories he'd almost forgotten who he was supposed to be, or who he used to be as it were.
The room spun in a greasy, sickening wheel of yellow candlelight and coalsmoke as he gripped the edge of the washbasin for dear life with his free hand, his knuckles turning a stark, waxen white and his throat burning with the phantom taste of iron and vomit.
"Hervé Keats is dead..." he declared, as if by saying it aloud he could ground himself against the tidal wave of foreign memories that had roared into his consciousness, nearly tearing his sense of self to ribbons, the moment he'd locked gazes with the dead man's reflection "He died and I moved in."
Yet despite his attempts at affirming his identity, Seth simply couldn't bring himself to separate his forty-years of life from Hervé's twenty-seven, the names and faces of people he had never met, places he had never seen, blurring together with the familiar memories of home.
'I need to get my thoughts in order.' he realised, forcing himself to tear his eyes away from Hervé's haunting, sorrowful gaze in the basin, turning his attention to the desk in the corner, the floorboards groaning as he forced his right foot forward on legs that felt like wet clay.
About two-thirds of the way there his knees buckled, forcing him to stumble and slam his shoulder into the peeling wallpaper to keep himself from pitching forward. A sharp lance of physical pain shot through his arm, though it only served to further ground him in the present.
"Move."he hissed, glaring at the Typewriter as he staggered forward, leaning against the wall as support, Hervé's shaky legs finally giving out as Seth lurched across the few remaining steps to the desk, collapsing heavily into a creaking wooden chair with an impact that rattled his teeth.
The desk before him was littered with the frantic detritus of a desperate man, the dark grain of the wood mottled with ink stains and haphazardly scattered papers covered in a looping hand he dimly 'recognised' as Hervé's, bearing words that took him a second to translate as Loen Script, the national language of the Loen Kingdom.
Ignoring the mechanical beast that was Hervé's type-writer, he instead reached out with a trembling hand for a pair of cheap spectacles, pulling them on and sighing in relief as his vision, which had been blurry as all hell this entire time, cleared somewhat, though it did little for his headache.
Now able to see clearer, he turned his attention to the rest of the desk, one hand snagging a relatively clean sheet of rough parchment, while the other located a tarnished fountain pen and inkwell, the kind that had fallen out of use save for try-hard hobbyists once the ball point pen was invented.
"Beggars can't be choosers." he reasoned, placing the gathered items before him, only to grimace as the moment he made to put pen to paper, his mind seemed to roil, causing his grip on the instrument to falter, the nib scratching a sharp, jagged line across the paper before hecould even ink it.
"Calm the fuck down." he hissed, closing his eyes & gripping his wrist to block out the vertigo. He needed to anchor his thoughts. He needed to separate himself from the ghost of Hervé Keats, to try and figure out precisely what fresh hell he'd woken up to...and how, if possible, he was to get home.
And so, after taking one last breath to steady his nerves, Seth Collins opened Hervé Keats' eyes, dipped the dead-man's pen into the ink well and forced their uncooperative fingers to write by the scarlet liightof an alien moon.
First chapter and Seth is already thrown into the deep end. Let's see how well he does.
Irish Translation - déanfaimid é: Let's do it!
(He's basically saying 'Fuck it, we ball!')
First time posting on QQ so apologies if it's not that great. A friend recomended I try posting this here instead of FF, so consider this an experiement of sots.
For context, this is a Lord of Mysteries Fic with an SI OC. He'll mostly be doing his own thing, but will eventually meet up with the main cast eventually.
Fair warning, I'll be playing a little fast and loose with the lore for certain things, as there will be crossover elements, albeit integrated to fit the setting.
Constuctive criticism is appreciated. Please enjoy.
Chapter 1:Scarlet Moon.
It was the pain he felt first.
It wasn't a dull, hollow ache or a sharp stab; it felt as though every single atom in his body had suddenly been set on fire and was screaming in unison. His nerves were a grid of white-hot agony, vibrating with an intensity that should have torn a scream from his throat—if he could have drawn the breath to make one.
Indeed,while he found himself acutely aware of every part of his body, paradoxically, he found those very extremities completely unresponsive, as if his muscles had been transmuted into lumps of pure lead, without affecting his ability to feel pain.
And beneath the pain, lurking on the edge of his consciousness, a strange sense of emptiness, as if something something had reached into his very soul and scooped out everything of substance, leaving him to bleed out on the ground like a discarded carton.
'What the fuck happened?'
Such were the first conscious thoughts of Seth Collins, aspiring novelist and full-time customer-service agent as he found himself lying face-down on the floor, unable to move or even blink, forcing him to gaze blankly at a ceiling he couldn't quite focus on.
His last memory, prior to blacking out, had been mundane enough. He'd been browsing occult literature references online whilst listening to a podcast, hoping to find something that might help inspire him to shatter the writer's block that had been holding him hostage for months now.
He was dimly aware of opening a new tab on his laptop, following some link that had caught his eye, only for his vision to abruptly white-out like some asshole hit him with a flash-bang, the world seeming to tilt sharply to the side before he found himself facedown on thefloor, unable to move.
'Shit...did I have a stroke?'
Unbidden, his mind drifted back to that one winter almost a decade prior, when he'd woken up to the sudden, terrifying reality of half his face refusing to respond to his commands courtesy of a, thankfully brief, bout of stress-induced Bell's Palsy.
He'd recalled the frustration he'd been forced to endure during the recovery period, how the Doctor assured him it was simply due to stress and that if he simply took the chance to improve his lifestyle, get more exercise, cutt out the snacks, all the usual shite, he wouldn't have to worry about a repeat occurrence.
And in all fairness, Seth had done his best to comply. No, honestly, he'd taken up swimming on weekends, tried to eat healthier and burnt out his stress via hobbies. But habit is hard to break and his lifestyle had always been mostly sedentary, spending both his work-hours and free-time behind a monitor, fueled by Energy drinks & spite.
'That thumping...is that my heart? Shit...it's so slow...'
Worse,as he lay there, a prisoner in his own flesh, unable to draw breath into his desperate, burning lungs, he dimly realised that the the dull echo in his ears was slowing down, each second between thumps draining more colour from his vision as he continued to gaze into the void.
And yet, as the agonizing seconds ticked by, until it almost seemed minutes would pass between beats, the panic didn't come. Instead, a wave of profound, surprising calm washed over him, almost as if he were watching the scene happen to someone else.
He was dying...and he was surprisingly okay with it.
'So...this is how I die...face down on the floor after Forty Years with nothing to show for it...'
Alright, maybe 'okay' wasn't the right word, but it was almost comical how chill he was about all this. Then again, he'd never been the type to lose his shit over something that couldn't be changed. When most people lashed out, whined or tried to get their way by making a scene, he'd been the type to simply shrug, go back to what he was doing and try find a workaround.
Sadly, there wasn't a work-around for Death outside of fiction or divine intervention, and last he checked God stopped making House-calls sometime after the Romans nailed his golden boy to a cross, so what the hell would losing his shit even do in this situation?
Panicking would only burn through whatever precious, residual oxygen his brain had left. There was quite literally nothing Seth could do to change the outcome, so what was the point of wasting his final moments screaming into the void?
Nah, if it really was time for him to punch out then he wasn't going out like a bitch. If the reaper truly was coming for him, he'd probably shake the fucker''s hand because at this point anything would be better than feeling this agony for all eternity.
In truth, his only real concerns was how devastated his mother was going to be when she heard the news. As much as they drove each other up the wall, the woman had always had his best interests in mind and had been the driving force behind his lifestyle changes after the Palsy scare.
'Assuming I'm not bound for the hand-basket express, I'll put in a good word for you, Mum.' he vowed, smiling internally as he recalled all the times the woman had driven him absolutely mental 'Though full disclosure, if there's any truth to coming back around again, I'll be 100% coming back a wizard, so i will.'
And so he lay there, counting down the seconds between beats as the steady rhythm slowed, taking with it the pain as the numbness seeped in from his extremities, the silence a comforting blanket, waiting to tuck him into the void...until it was ruthlessly ripped away.
...A Cornea from a Nightmare Evil Eye...
The words did not give him the common courtesy of passing through his ears. They were simply there, birthed directly inside the meat of his brain, burning like white-hot needles against his consciousness, his mind convulsing as a second verse clawed its way through his thoughts, dripping with a terrifying, ancient weight.
...Seventy Millilitres of Evil Eye Pus...
It was a recipe, chanted by a voice that wasn't a voice, but rather a chorus of a thousand maddening whispers overlapping until they were indistinguishable, violently vomiting their cursed knowledge into his skull, expanding his mind until he felt his sanity begin to fray atthe edges.
'What the hell is going on-?!'
His panic was understandable, if somewhat comical given his earlier acceptance of his mortality. It certainly didn't help that the information brought with it the phantom smell of bitter herbs and the sickening, oily texture of something foul coating his tongue despite his mouth remaining dry and locked shut.
...A piece of a Cursed Crystal...
...Ten Grams of Cursed Crystal byproduct...
...Ten Grams of Cursed Crystal byproduct...
And yet, despite the sheer absurdity of it all, despite the terror seeping through his soul by the whispers and the sheer revulsion of the flavour assaulting his taste-buds, Seth found an urge rising within him, an all-consuming thirst and desire to consume the accursed concoction.
...Thirteen drops of Rosemary Essential Oil...
It would appear that the universe was refusing to accept his surrender on any terms but it's own, forcibly inscribing the formula for a dangerous rebirth directly onto the canvas of his dying mind, demanding that he listen, demanding that he remember and above all else demanding that he crawl back from the edge to brew it.
...A Page of Other People's Secrets...
And all the while the whispers grew, clawing at the inside of his skull,refusing to let him drift into the dark, the maddening chant an agonizing hook dragging through his mind, violently hauling his consciousness back from the peaceful edge of the void.
To make them stop, he had to brew and consume the potion.
To Brew The Potion...He Had To LIVE.
'...Fuck it, déanfaimid é-!'
If the universe wanted him to live, even if it was out of spite, then he was hardly going to refuse, especially if it meant he had to deal with this cacophony of shite in his brain for all eternity. And so, despite the silent darkness calling out to him like a lover's embrace, he turned his attention to his ruined, unresponsive vessel.
'Breathe!' he screamed inside his head, using the weight of the voices to visualise the thought surging down his spine, like an electric shock focussed on his chest, or at least, the area that felt like his chest, repeating it ad nauseum as he stubbornly tried to force the frozen muscles in his diaphragm to drop 'Breath you fat fuck!'
After what felt like an eternity, the chorus growing ever louder, his lips parted with a sickening wet rattle as his his lungs forcefully expanded, filling with air that tasted like dust, copper and bloody vomit.
It was the sweetest breath he had ever taken.
With that first, shuddering gasp he turned his attention to his heart, the once reliable engine laying cold and dormant like a stone in hischest. With a surge of will, he imagined a spectral hand reaching out to gently grasp it, squeezing the muscle through sheer, desperate intent once....twice...
...Tha-thump...
A gasp escaped his lips as he felt his heart kickstart like he'd been kicked in the ribs by a mule, his back arching off the floor as a wave of pure agony flooded his senses, each renewed beat sending a sudden, violent rush of stagnant blood surging through his veins like liquid fire.
That sharp, white hot agony that had been blessedly on the verge of fading into the dark returned as the oxygen from that first, precious gasp of air was delivered straight to his dormant nerve endings via veigns that were being forced back open with every beat.
His eyes cracked open, his vision blurry and bloodshot, unable to make out anything in the dark save for his twitching fingers, the joints popping like dry twigs as they clawed desperately at the hardwood floor like skittering spiders.
To no-one's surprise, the eldritch choir from the darkness hadn't been silenced by his return to the world of the living, though thankfully for his sanity it had seemingly regressed to mere whispers at the base of his skull, lurking behind his eyes with the persistence of an eye-floater, but manageable, for now.
And so he lay there, face down on the floor, his cheek pressed against something that smelled of bloody bile and shame, simply focussing on the mundane task of breathing while the malfunctioning piston that was his heart continued to pump cold, stagnant blood through vessels that had already begun to settle.
By every law of medicine and nature he was a corpse. His skin was the gray of a winter dawn & his muscles locked in the early grip ofrigour mortis. But his mind, sparked by the maddening friction of the whispered recipe, refused to let the system shut down.
Hissing with exertion, he pushed past the pain of his failing nervous system to dig his bloody fingernails into the floorboards. His limbs didn't obey fluidly, moving in jarring, erratic twitches, like a puppet being yanked by coarse twine.
Planting one palm flat on the floor, he took a breath to brace himself before dragging his upper body forward, a hiss of agony escaping his teeth as his spine popped with the dry, terrifying sound of snapping kindling as he forced his left knee to bend and slide forward.
The gravity of the room felt immense, a physical weight trying to press him back into the ground where a dead man belonged. His thighs trembled violently, the dead muscle fibres tearing under the sudden, unnatural strain as he heaved his torso upward, leaning his weight against what felt like a bed-frame.
For a long, agonizing moment, he just hung there, his lungs drawing in ragged, whistling breaths that served only to clear the dust from his throat. His vision washed out into fields of static, the world tilting violently as his oxygen starved brain was forced to fire up again.
'Stand up you bastard.' he commanded, a harsh rattle escaping his throat as he gripped the bed-frame for support, driving his heel into the floor and slowly inching himself off his knees until they locked into place with a sickening click, allowing him to stand unsupported.
And so he stood there, swaying like a newborn calf in a gale, his hands hanging limp at his sides, blue-tinged and trembling. He was a monument of pure defiance, a dead man standing on his own two feet, glaring through bloodshot eyes at his surroundings.
'...Where the actual fuck am I?'
His confusion was understandable, as the room he found himself in was not the small, comfortable bedroom he'd been sitting in what felt like mere moments prior. There was no sign of his laptop, his gaming setup, his closet full of comfortable clothes nor the custom mattress he'd obtained to deal with his aching back.
Instead, he found himself standing in a small, cramped, dust filled attic room, lit by the stray beams of crimson light filtering through the thin curtains over a cracked window. The bed-frame he'd been leaning against for leverage was a rusted relic with a miserable, tattered mattress that stank of sweat, piss and booze.
Between the bed and the only door was a cabinet and a small chest of drawers. To the side of the cabinet stood a dressing mirror with two cracks and a pipe extending up the wall, connected to a strange mechanical device with exposed gears and bearings in several places.
An old, cast-iron coal stove sat in the rightmost corner of the room near a desk covered with discarded papers and what looked to be an ancient monster of a typewriter, the kind that had keys you actually had to push if you wanted to type anything rather than the sleek, modern remakes you could buy off the internet.
In short, the only thing this hovel had in common with Seth's bedroom was the fact they both had hardwood floors, though his was in decidedly better condition, smooth and clean whereas the one he currently stood upon was old and coarse, littered with papers, glass bottles and a puddle of dried black vomit he'd been lying in.
"That can't be healthy..." he rasped in disgust, only to freeze, his claw-like hand snapping clumsily to his throat at the sound of a strangers voice emerging from his chapped lips, the motion causing him to temporarily lose his balance, stumbling towards what appeared to be a basin by the window.
"Fuck-!" he swore aloud, his uneven stride rattling the floorboards as he barely managed to grab the counter the basin rested on to keep from falling, leaning desperately against it until the wave of vertigo settled, his deadweight causing the water in the basin to ripple.
"Keep it together Seth..." he ground out in a stranger's voice, taking a few deep breaths to steady his nerves before bringing his gaze up tofinally look out the window, only to feel the pit drop out of his stomach and the breath catch in his throat at the sight of the massive crimson moon hanging high in the night sky.
"What the actual fuck..." he croaked, any concerns about his voice lost as he gazed out at the the unfamiliar surroundings where the Irish countryside should have been, the scarlet light of the moon washing over cobblestone streets and towering town-houses like something out of a Victorian period drama.
"Oh fuck me sideways..." he whispered, the hammering of his heart the only other sound in the room as he stared out the window "I'm not in Yharnam am I? Christ Almighty please tell me I'm not after being dropped into Yharnam."
The only response he received was a single bead of cold sweat dropping from his cheek to the basin below, the sound causing him to look down only to find himself locking gazes with the haunted, bloodshot eyes of the stranger reflected on the water's surface.
Now it should be noted Seth was never what you might call vain by any stretch of the imagination. If anything he'd long since embraced that between his weight, premature baldness and general lack of faith in humanity, he was about as unattractive as you could possibly get to pretty much anyone without highly specific tastes.
However, even he was forced to admit that, to the truly desperate and possibly blind members of the fairer sex, he probably would have been seen as an absolute catch compared to the man staring back at him from the murky water of the basin.
For starters, the poor bastard looked like he'd endured a prolonged, waking nightmare, his face impossibly gaunt, his skin a sallow, translucent parchment tightly stretched over a sharp, angular skull. Long, matted strands of dark, messy hair fell wildly around his face, sticking to the cold sweat on his forehead.
The eyes were the worst part however, bloodshot and sunken deep into their sockets, framed by heavy, purplish-black shadows that looked like permanent bruises. His cheeks were hollowed out, carving deep, dark valleys beneath his high cheekbones, making him look like someone who hadn't eaten a proper meal in weeks.
'Or perhaps,' a darker part of his mind whispered in a voice he barely recognised as his own, a chill settling in his bones that had nothing to do with the air of the room, 'someone who had been slowly starving to death in a dark room'.
Therewas a profound, haunted emptiness in that reflection, a visage scarred not by violence, but by a deep, systematic erosion of life. And yet, as he stared into those unfamiliar, deadened eyes, a spark of recognition seemed to ignite within them.
"That's...me...?"
No, that wasn't right. He was Seth Collins, 40-years old, born in Magherafelt, County Tyrone...and yet, as he continued to gaze into those broken, haunted eyes, he found himself 'remembering' a different life altogether, one that belonged to him...or rather, to 27-Year-old Hervé Keats.
...A Cornea from a Nightmare Evil Eye...
"FUCK!" Seth roared, gripping his head as the occult whispers, which had been present but blessedly silent until now, suddenly ramped up their intensity, cutting off the deluge of Keats' memories by forcing the recipe back to the forefront of his mind "Ah, fuck this altogether!"
Apparently the universe didn't much care for his little walk down memory lane, which was actually perfect as he'd been so drawn in by Hervé's memories he'd almost forgotten who he was supposed to be, or who he used to be as it were.
The room spun in a greasy, sickening wheel of yellow candlelight and coalsmoke as he gripped the edge of the washbasin for dear life with his free hand, his knuckles turning a stark, waxen white and his throat burning with the phantom taste of iron and vomit.
"Hervé Keats is dead..." he declared, as if by saying it aloud he could ground himself against the tidal wave of foreign memories that had roared into his consciousness, nearly tearing his sense of self to ribbons, the moment he'd locked gazes with the dead man's reflection "He died and I moved in."
Yet despite his attempts at affirming his identity, Seth simply couldn't bring himself to separate his forty-years of life from Hervé's twenty-seven, the names and faces of people he had never met, places he had never seen, blurring together with the familiar memories of home.
'I need to get my thoughts in order.' he realised, forcing himself to tear his eyes away from Hervé's haunting, sorrowful gaze in the basin, turning his attention to the desk in the corner, the floorboards groaning as he forced his right foot forward on legs that felt like wet clay.
About two-thirds of the way there his knees buckled, forcing him to stumble and slam his shoulder into the peeling wallpaper to keep himself from pitching forward. A sharp lance of physical pain shot through his arm, though it only served to further ground him in the present.
"Move."he hissed, glaring at the Typewriter as he staggered forward, leaning against the wall as support, Hervé's shaky legs finally giving out as Seth lurched across the few remaining steps to the desk, collapsing heavily into a creaking wooden chair with an impact that rattled his teeth.
The desk before him was littered with the frantic detritus of a desperate man, the dark grain of the wood mottled with ink stains and haphazardly scattered papers covered in a looping hand he dimly 'recognised' as Hervé's, bearing words that took him a second to translate as Loen Script, the national language of the Loen Kingdom.
Ignoring the mechanical beast that was Hervé's type-writer, he instead reached out with a trembling hand for a pair of cheap spectacles, pulling them on and sighing in relief as his vision, which had been blurry as all hell this entire time, cleared somewhat, though it did little for his headache.
Now able to see clearer, he turned his attention to the rest of the desk, one hand snagging a relatively clean sheet of rough parchment, while the other located a tarnished fountain pen and inkwell, the kind that had fallen out of use save for try-hard hobbyists once the ball point pen was invented.
"Beggars can't be choosers." he reasoned, placing the gathered items before him, only to grimace as the moment he made to put pen to paper, his mind seemed to roil, causing his grip on the instrument to falter, the nib scratching a sharp, jagged line across the paper before hecould even ink it.
"Calm the fuck down." he hissed, closing his eyes & gripping his wrist to block out the vertigo. He needed to anchor his thoughts. He needed to separate himself from the ghost of Hervé Keats, to try and figure out precisely what fresh hell he'd woken up to...and how, if possible, he was to get home.
And so, after taking one last breath to steady his nerves, Seth Collins opened Hervé Keats' eyes, dipped the dead-man's pen into the ink well and forced their uncooperative fingers to write by the scarlet liightof an alien moon.
My name is Seth Collins...
First chapter and Seth is already thrown into the deep end. Let's see how well he does.
Irish Translation - déanfaimid é: Let's do it!
(He's basically saying 'Fuck it, we ball!')