HELL MINDS
Part I: The Mother Sleeps
The obsidian sky above Eridu, punctuated by the cold, unforgiving gleam of a thousand distant stars, mirrored the desolation in Priestess Ninlil's soul. High atop the ancient ziggurat, its sun-baked bricks crumbling at the edges like ancient bones, she stood before an altar that was more ruin than sacred stone. It was cracked down its center, a jagged fissure bisecting archaic carvings, and draped in a thick, crystalline crust of sea-salt, testament to its long abandonment and forgotten purpose. This wasn't the vibrant, active altar of Enlil, lord of the wind, nor the bustling temple of Nanna, the moon god, whose silver light now cast long, eerie shadows across the deserted courtyard below. This altar belonged to no recognized deity of the Mesopotamian pantheon. It was older. Unclean.
Ninlil was no stranger to gods. Her life had been a meticulous tapestry woven from invocations and supplications. She had knelt before the towering idol of Enki, god of water and wisdom, her voice hoarse from pleading for the life-giving rains to quench the parched fields, her fingers raw from offering intricate libations. She had performed fiery rites for Ishtar, goddess of love and war, her heart pulsing with the raw, carnal energy of desire, seeking passion or vengeance for her petitioners. She had sung lullabies to the distant, serene Nanna, praying for prophetic dreams and fertile sleep. She knew the language of the heavens, the intricate dance of devotion.
But Ninlil craved something deeper. Her devotion to the familiar gods had become a hollow echo, their blessings predictable, their power too contained, too human-sized. She saw their celestial squabbles reflected in the petty politics of the city, their divine interventions merely grander versions of mortal scheming. She felt a profound disillusionment with the structured cosmos they supposedly governed. Her ambition, a gnawing, insatiable hunger that gnawed at her spiritual core, yearned for the primal, unformed essence that existed before even the gods themselves drew breath. She craved the raw, untamed power that sculpted existence from nothingness, the very source of all creation, and all destruction. She desired the root, the primordial chaos from which all order had, by force, sprung.
Her gaze fell upon the cracked altar, its salt-encrusted surface shimmering faintly under the moon. This was it. This was the key to the abyss she sought. For weeks, she had studied ancient, forbidden texts, dusty cuneiform tablets hidden in forgotten vaults, scrolls brittle with age and ill-omened knowledge. She had deciphered glyphs that whispered of an era before time, before law, before the familiar heavens. She had traced the lines of forgotten incantations that spoke of a name no oracle dared whisper, no priest dared to utter above a hushed murmur, lest the very air curdle and sanity fray.
That name was Tiamat.
The primordial sea. The vast, undifferentiated chaos that existed before the universe as they knew it. She was the mother of the very first gods, born from her mingling with Apsu, the freshwater abyss. But when her divine children, too numerous and boisterous, disturbed her eternal slumber, she had spawned a monstrous army: venom-filled serpents, furious dragons, terrifying hydras, scorpion-men, demon-bulls, and raging storms, all to annihilate them. She was the monstrous genesis, the fount of all abominations, the ultimate force of uncreation. Her story culminated in the cosmic battle with the young, ascendant god Marduk, who, after a harrowing struggle, slew her, tore her vast, primordial body in two, and from her upper half fashioned the heavens, from her lower half, the dry land. Marduk had brought order from her chaos, creation from her destruction. He had imposed his will upon the cosmic void.
But Ninlil, in her blasphemous studies, had learned a chilling truth that few dared to consider: Tiamat's death was not the end. The ancient tablets hinted that the colossal, primordial corpse of Tiamat, though stretched and sundered to form the very sky and land, was not inert. In the deepest reaches of the deep, in the abyssal chasms of the primeval sea that still existed beneath the newly formed world, her unrotted flesh still stirred. Her monstrous progeny, though defeated, had not been utterly annihilated. They had simply retreated, festering in the unseen, forgotten crevices of their mother's vast, cosmically significant remains. They were dormant, but not dead. And Ninlil, in her boundless ambition, sought to awaken them, and through them, to touch the raw power of the primordial mother herself. She would not merely pray to the gods; she would commune with the very source of their existence, the chaotic womb from which they had been born, and which they had so violently subdued.
As the moon climbed higher, casting the ziggurat in stark, unforgiving black and white, Ninlil began her ritual. She had prepared a small, intricately carved alabaster basin, smoothed by the sea-salt of ages, shaped with eerie precision like a womb. Into this basin, she began to spill. First, her own blood, drawn from a deep cut on her palm, thick and warm, flowing freely into the cool alabaster. Then, handfuls of coarse sea-salt, gathered from the desolate shores of the southern sea, crystalline and bitter, mirroring the primordial waters. The mixture swirled, turning crimson and cloudy, a miniature, swirling cosmos of red and white.
She knelt, her eyes fixed on the basin, her breath shallow. Her voice, usually clear and resonant in her prayers to the Olympian gods, now dropped to a guttural whisper, raw and ancient, as she began to utter the forbidden syllables. These were not the elegant hymns of Sumerian temples, but guttural, resonant sounds from a forgotten tongue, sounds that seemed to vibrate the very air, rattling the deep foundations of the ziggurat. Each syllable felt alien on her tongue, yet deeply familiar, as if her very being remembered the primordial language. She invoked the Abyss. She invoked the Chaos. She called upon the Mother. The air around her grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and brine, as if the distant ocean was somehow gathering within the confined space of the ziggurat summit. A cold wind, not from the desert, but from an impossible, unseen depth, whipped around her, tugging at her robes.
As the final, elongated syllable reverberated in the still night, a low, ominous hum began to emanate from the cracked altar. It was not a sound audible to the ear, but a vibration that resonated deep within Ninlil's bones, a profound, internal tremor that seemed to shake her very soul. The salt crust on the altar's surface began to glow faintly, an inner, sickly green luminescence, pulsing with a slow, deliberate rhythm, like a monstrous heart awakening from a dreamless sleep. The cracks in the stone seemed to widen slightly, emitting a faint, almost imperceptible groan, as if the ancient edifice itself was straining against an immense, unseen pressure from below. The air, already thick with brine, now carried a faint, unsettling odor—not of death, but of primordial stagnation, of something vast and ancient stirring in its deep, dark slumber. Tiamat was not only hearing; she was responding.
Part II: The Spawn Rise
The air thickened, growing heavy and oppressive, no longer just with brine but with a cloying, organic stench—a sickening mix of stagnant ocean, wet earth, and something indefinably vile, like rot mixed with raw creation. The faint, internal hum from the altar escalated into a resonant throb, vibrating through Ninlil's very marrow, making her teeth ache and her vision blur. The sickly green glow intensified, pulsating faster, and then, with a deafening, grinding shriek that ripped through the night like the tearing of cosmic fabric, the ancient, salt-draped stone beneath Ninlil's very feet shattered.
The cracked altar violently convulsed, shards of ancient masonry exploding outwards. The ground split, not with the clean break of an earthquake, but with a horrifying, wet squelch, as if living flesh was being torn apart. A black, glistening chasm opened directly before her, a jagged, bottomless maw that yawned into the earth, revealing a void darker than the deepest night, reflecting no starlight, absorbing all light into its suffocating blackness. It pulsed, a rhythmic, guttural beat, like the immense heart of some primordial leviathan.
From the depths of that abyss, a sound surged upwards – not a roar of triumph or fury, but something far more disturbing, far more ancient. It was a chorus of wailing births, a symphony of monstrous genesis: mewling, screeching, gurgling, sucking, and tearing sounds, all blended into a terrifying, unnatural cacophony that seemed to vibrate directly in Ninlil's soul. It was the sound of life emerging where no life should be, of abominations being born from forgotten decay. This was the true sound of creation from chaos, and it was utterly, terrifyingly unholy. A sickening, viscous wetness followed, oozing from the chasm's edges, thick and black, with an oily sheen, smelling strongly of corrupted seawater and something profoundly organic, yet not quite flesh. It crept across the ancient stone, leaving behind a glistening, putrid trail.
Then, they came. Slowly at first, tentative, then with a horrifying, squelching haste, they began to crawl out of the chasm, pulling themselves from the inky blackness. They were the spawn of Tiamat's unrotted womb, long festering in the abyssal corpse that became the heavens, the forgotten abominations born from the primordial mother's sundered form.
Their forms defied description, violating every natural law. There were limbs that had no end, stretching and contracting in impossible ways, sprouting chitinous joints and grasping appendages with no discernible purpose. Eyes without faces, shimmering with a phosphorescent glow, dotted their writhing bodies, reflecting the infernal light of the chasm, lacking eyelids or pupils, simply staring with an ancient, blind intelligence. Maws that spoke in reverse, their tooth-filled orifices opening and closing in a grotesque parody of speech, emitting guttural, backward-sounding clicks and gurgles that grated against Ninlil's sanity, hinting at a language of uncreation. They were not merely monsters; they were embodiments of chaos, fragments of a primordial nightmare made flesh, born from the very fabric of the cosmos. Some were vaguely serpentine, others vaguely insectoid, some a pulsating mass of tentacles and pseudopods, but all were unified by their glistening blackness, their foul stench, and their utterly alien nature.
They crawled toward Ninlil, their movements fluid and unnatural, scraping against the cracked stone of the ziggurat. But they did not come to kill her, not in the simple, merciful way a mortal would understand. They came to claim. They came to possess. Their chitinous claws, tipped with an unnerving, almost surgical sharpness, ripped through the delicate fabric of her priestly robes with effortless ease, tearing them from her body, exposing her skin to the cold, slimy air. Their elongated, prehensile tongues, black and slick with the abyss's ichor, licked across her eyes, leaving a burning, stinging residue, forcing her vision to blur, to see the world not as she knew it, but as a writhing, decaying landscape.
They found her mind first. As the spawn swarmed around her, their alien forms pressing against her, their discordant wails echoing in her ears, Ninlil felt a terrible, invasive presence within her skull. It was not a thought or a voice, but a profound, unmaking force. They began to unwrite it. Her memories, her experiences, her sense of self – all began to unravel, to dissolve into a formless, chaotic void. The names of the gods she had once revered became meaningless sounds. The rituals she had performed, a forgotten sequence of movements. Her very identity, the culmination of a lifetime of devotion and ambition, was being erased, reduced to primordial nothingness, leaving her a vacant vessel. The horror of this mental disintegration was far worse than any physical pain.
And then, Tiamat's voice, vast and gurgling, resonated from the depths of the black chasm, filling the entire ziggurat, shaking the very foundations of the earth beneath it. It was the sound of the primordial ocean, of churning abyss, of monstrous digestion, yet it formed words that penetrated to Ninlil's very core, utterly indifferent to her terror, profound in its cosmic simplicity:
"You wanted my power, mortal? You called upon the chaos that birthed the cosmos? Then you are my daughter now. You are my vessel. You are my progeny."
The priestess screamed. A primal, guttural cry of utter despair and agonizing realization. But her cry, already distorted by the unmaking of her mind, quickly turned to a gurgle, a wet, choking sound that seemed to emanate not from her throat, but from deep within her stomach. Her belly, once flat, began to swell with horrifying speed, distending, bloating, as if filled with a rapidly growing, unseen mass. Her veins, visible beneath her now translucent skin, began to writhe and ripple, not with the flow of blood, but with the frantic, squirming movements of tiny, unseen things. The spawn, those horrific fragments of primordial chaos, had not merely claimed her. They had burrowed inside. Through her mouth, her eyes, her very pores, they had infested her, turning her body into a living, grotesque womb for their continued gestation, a perversion of her own female form. She was no longer Ninlil; she was a vessel, a grotesque continuation of Tiamat's unending spawn.
By dawn, when the first faint streaks of purple and grey bruised the eastern sky, the ziggurat of Eridu was silent once more. The air, though still heavy with the lingering stench of brine and rot, had lost its oppressive thickness. The great chasm in the altar had sealed, the cracked stone having flowed back together with an unnatural, seamless precision, leaving only a faint, glistening trail of salt crust. The ancient, salt-draped altar appeared as it had before, cracked and abandoned, save for the deep, unidentifiable claw marks etched into the surrounding stone, silent witnesses to the night's horrors. No body remained. No trace of Ninlil.
But sometimes, when the fierce shamal winds rise over the southern sea, churning its waters into a tempest, and the sky above Eridu turns a bruised, ominous purple, villagers who live near the ancient ziggurat speak of a haunting vision. They whisper of a woman-shaped shadow, indistinct and wavering, seen limping slowly toward the shore, her movements disjointed and agonizing. And as the shadow draws closer, the true horror becomes clear: hundreds of tiny, grotesque hands are pressed against her distended, rippling skin, desperately, frantically, trying to get out. Her agony is endless, her screams now internal, a constant, silent chorus of mewling births, trapped within her transformed, unholy flesh, forever bound to the chaotic womb that had claimed her.