Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 4 - The Living Pearl (Formerly Snakehead. Never speak that cursed name again.)
A psychedelic mystic odyssey of wonder: A living Vantablack worm the size of a cathedral that absorbs light and dignity. Bring sunglasses, a strong stomach, and your singing voice.
Arkion and Eysin stumble along the sandy catwalk, still riding the high from the chase.
She’s laughing her socks off.
She’d been warned about the worm’s intensity—the visions, the echoes, the existential weirdness.
Right now? Nothing funky. Just Arkion delivering every possible innuendo about worms and snakes.
“It’s black. And I mean—” He stops, eyebrows climbing. “It’s huge.”
Eysin wheezes, doubled over, barely walking.
“I’m just saying,” Arkion continues, “when people ask what we did tonight, I’ll tell them we went deep inside a massive, pulsating—”
“Stop!” She’s gasping, tears in her eyes.
“—cathedral-sized organism that swallows you whole and shows you the meaning of—”
Eysin makes a sound like a dying squeaky toy.
Arkion nudges her forward when she stops. She takes three steps, collapses against his arm, shaking with giggles.
“…but now that you say ‘living worm the size of a cathedral’ out loud,” he muses, “I see a 1980s Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker fever dream. Just us, deadpan staring at a sixty-meter glowing phallus-worm while you try not to laugh-cry into your marzipants.”
“Stop,” she wheezes. “I only brought one pair!”
“I’d offer mine but they’re full of—”
“Arkion—”
“—sand. I was going to say sand. What did you think I was going to say?”
She shoves him. He grins, nudges her forward again.
Arkion (grinning wider): “Don’t worry, it’s a gentle entry… unless you’re into the whole ‘sliding in sideways’ thing. Then it gets interesting.”
That felt a touch too long I bet! Arkion grumbles to himself.
They keep walking. The jokes continue—something about “getting to the head of the matter” and so on—until Eysin can’t breathe and Arkion rides the runner’s high where everything is funny and nothing hurts.
Then the catwalk ends.
They see it.
Or rather—they don’t.
The night swallows the worm’s head like a hole cut from reality. No moonlight reflects. No stars shine through. Just absence, vast and breathing.
Eysin stops laughing.
They take a few more steps. Slower.
Heat arrives—body-warm. Living.
The darkness moves.
A slow, tidal breath. In. Out. Patient as mountains.
Eysin’s breath catches. “Oh.”
The worm is there. Has been the whole time. Waiting.
Dù-dug… dù-dug…
It has a heartbeat.
Eysin’s voice is quiet. “Nice worm.”
A beat.
“Thank you,” Arkion deadpans. “I just had it stuffed.”
She whispers as she passes, “Don’t hold back.”
Arkion smiles, “Watch your step.”
*
The worm inhales them.
Eysin’s specs go berserk—cicada-swarms of neon green, a freight train of static until everything is one smeared emerald blur.
She rips them off with a curse.
Reality blooms.
Golden sand sighs underfoot. Darkness folds, velvet lungs. Then—light.
Beads ignite overhead—red, green, blue, pink, white—slow galaxies in honey-rot breath.
The darkness isn’t gone. It’s full.
They’re walking inside a living galaxy.
Walls blacker than Vantablack, yet pouring starlight. Constellations crawl across the ceiling like friendly graffiti. Bioluminescent rivers drift overhead in lazy auroras. The floor feels like the surface of a quiet nebula.
Arkion, ten paces ahead, glances back and grins at the look on her face.
“Done in the cave?” he asks, voice soft in triplicate.
“What do you mean, this is the cave.”
Cave—cave—cave—cave—
She feels movement on her suit.
She freezes.
Arkion waves a hand. “Just housekeeping. Let’s go.”
The invisible things retreat, chittering in frequencies that tickle the back of her skull.
He lays a palm on the wall.
“Pick a color you love today. Mean it.”
Mean—it—mean—it—mean—it—
The wall drinks the wish.
A shard peels away like fruit rind, hovers, waiting.
“What’s up with thisss… Echo?”
Echo—echo—echo—echo—
And the tune?
Arkion sings the instruction in runosong, voice rolling in three-part harmony with itself:
“Hand on the wall, heart on the hue—
wish for the color that’s truest to you.
The worm reads the wish, the glove starts to sing—
and the mountain gives back what your soul wants to bring.”
They walk deeper, trading verses like children trading secrets.
Arkion reaches the final chamber when he feels the magnetic pull.
One firm knock startles Eysin ten paces behind.
She watches.
The Grand Red Oyster opens like a second sun and pours over him—coronation in molten forgiveness.
The echoes make it look more impressive than it is.
Eysin watches him grow eight feet tall, crimson cubes orbiting like Saturn’s rings made of blood and mercy and something old and unbreakable. Light that says I stood between the glass and the world, and the glass blinked first.
“I’ll remember this forever…” she whispers.
Forever—forever—forever—forever.
Arkion chuckles, voice echoing in triplicate:
“You’re remembering this even now.”
Even—now—even—now—
He turns, ready to leave. The red dims, sinks back into his zerk like wine into cloth.
He passes Eysin—
Her scent hits him like a warm blade under the ribs.
Green tea. Apples. A stolen good-bye kiss. The letters. The unanswered question. The way she laughs when surprised by her own joy.
His heart stumbles.
Every nerve lights up. Hands ache to touch, to pull her close, to taste that mouth again and find out if reality is better—
The wall beside him bulges.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Crack it like an oyster!” Arkion blurts at Eysin.
She blinks.
He turns his back, keeps walking. Bites his knuckle hard enough to taste iron. Looks anywhere but at her.
Eysin stops at the wall, Kaestus-covered palm trailing.
A living cluster—malachite and chrysocolla braided into translucent, singing light—pulses under her touch.
She knocks, playful. Curious.
Crack.
The marble splits like an oyster that’s been waiting centuries.
Liquid aurora explodes, streams up her arm, drinks into the zerk like it was thirsty.
Her armor ignites: peacock, mother-of-pearl, living sky, colors that shouldn’t exist weaving through silver like stained glass in motion.
The chamber floods with green-tea dawn.
Light pours from her like she swallowed a star.
Somewhere far away, in a mansion no one is watching, every lace curtain in the Baltics flushes deep green and giggles like a drunk bride who just got proposed to by the color chartreuse.
On Eysin’s wrist, beneath the zerk, the third ring—silent for so long—hums like a marmot. A whisper. A polite warning that something wants to wake up.
Arkion, halfway to the exit, looks back despite himself.
The light paints her silhouette into something sacred—statue, galaxy, laughing child discovering magic—all at once.
She stands there, glowing, absorbed in the beauty. Lost to the song. Lost to the colors. To the worm’s strange benediction.
Not thinking about him at all.
Somehow that helps.
The fever cools. Just enough.
He watches her the way you watch birds at dawn. With wonder. With distance. With the knowledge that some things are too lovely to hold.
The echo catches the hunger in his eyes, delighted:
Bite—back!—bite—back!—
Better crack an oyster than an eyeball, boy—
Arkion mutters through blood and grin: “Come on, Miss Green Tea. Time to get OUT!”
Eysin, still glowing, trailing phantom lace and wonder: “Lead the way, cheeky wolf—”
Wolf—wolf—wolf—wolf—
Arkion growls at the ceiling: “This place is driving me nuts!”
Nuts—nuts—nuts—nuts—
He throws his fist in the air. “Shut the—UGH—UP!”
UP—UP—one—UP—
Eysin slips on the echoes of her laughter, lands flat on her back in stardust, still giggling.
Arkion hauls her upright by the wrist—drags her toward the exit while the housekeepers keep the funk alive, chittering in layers.
Then the pearl itself speaks—ancient Thule Spirit rolling like warm thunder over funk organ and wolf-howls, sacred and silly and true:
The moon belongs to us—yahu!
we guard the archon sleep;
garden apples crunch—yahu!
amber deep and sweet;
pinecone in the bag—yahu!
love’s the glue we keep;
fight for toothless wolves—yahu!
don’t let the oldies weep;
let the children howl for joy —
forgiveness, love, and peace!
They emerge blinking into ordinary night, armor still glowing like swallowed galaxies.
Behind them the living pearl sighs, content, and folds the song into their bones.
“Awoo, yahu, and peace—it was talking to us…” Eysin sounds awed. She didn’t know that could happen.
“These were echoes,” Arkion points out, voice neutral. “And the echo never quite lets the joke die.”
“Hm… What’s the joke?”
Arkion: “You know, the good old… What they say: big worm, bigger problems. Like… where do you even find pants that size?”
One day, on a nomadic armada-town under lightning and watermelon haze, someone will beat those same eight beats against scrap metal and all the wolves will answer as one living chord.
A howl of One.
Thirty.
Three Hundred.
*
Somewhere across the deep darkness of the Baltic Sea, where the Sampo Tree glows and snaps against the starless sky, a fax machine turns on.
The machine whirs. Mechanical. Patient. Ancient by modern standards but still faithful.
Paper feeds through, line by line, thermal ink burning patterns into existence.
A message from Hel.
An update on the Anomaly Chart.
The page shows a graph—time on the horizontal axis, magnitude on the vertical. Most of the chart is calm: gentle waves, predictable fluctuations, the normal breathing of a world that knows how to behave.
Then: the Peak.
Black. Massive. A spike so high it breaks the top margin of the page, continues onto a second sheet that curls as it prints.
Every scholar in the region has been trying to make sense of this one. World-ending potential. Cataclysmic territory.
But now—
A new peak appears. After the black one. Smaller. But still outstanding.
Coloured red.
The fax machine stops. Silence settles like dust.
Three veils left, my glowing catastrophes.
Next time: a rust-red factory and bison hugs, hammocks pretending space is enough, and dreams that taste like goodbye kisses returned.
Don’t touch that dial, star-children. The apples are watching.
Continue reading:
Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 5 - Breathing the Same Damp Air Between Heartbeats
The sci-soul takes a whiff of slow-burn romance of exquisite restraint on top of a Kraken and Warring Sounds. A night of polite distance, apple-ripe dreams, and silence that screams.
E-pub/book: Aiming for 2026 February.