1.02-Leeches of Dreams

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]There’s a data scrawl wrapped in a dried skin binding beside my bed. The first dreams in there are pitiful things. I’ve tried selling them but no mediums will pay. I thought of hanging them up as tourist curios, but then again they were dreams of ugly things.There’s a couple gaps in the data scrawl. I sometimes wonder what they’ve birthed. Unfettered to my head, they’ve gone off, radiating away in the void. Get enough of that gathered in one place and things start to climb through from the other side. I’ve seen a couple doorways open. Iridescent holes in space. Sometimes it’s a curtain, a hatch, a mouth, a wound. Anything that can let something pass through.Then they come crawling out. Little pieces here and there, but I can tell they belong to something bigger on the other side. It just can’t quite fit through. Maybe if they had more time, but the breaches shut quick. It cuts off parts of them. Wriggling, squirming, they pupate into smaller critters. Ticks.You see them on the bodies of stars with a Wrot Worm gestating inside. You can see the lines of Hod getting sucked out of the Star Womb if you use a coronagraph. Milk-white bleeding from a proto-god. The communes hate to see it, of course. I was on Yuush-Vidal when they tried to cleanse their Wrot. They took off their skin, washing themselves in oils and ashes. The stuff set like stone, growing harder around their bodies, seeping into their muscles and lungs. Soon I was standing in a field of columns. Like a cloud, their Will and Agency gathered overhead. Some wind born out of fate carried out to their star covered in those dream-born ticks. You can’t hear in space, but everything vibrated. The entire solar system whited out as the Wrot awake and scattered the ticks.One caught a ride on my ship, probing through the vitro-plastic steel of the hull into my sarcophagus. I woke right before I latched on, eyes and mandibles, in my face. Then that iron ball from Calradio started glowing. The tick screams, starts ripping itself apart. Ain’t no blood and guts inside, just more light until that too was gone.