The apogee of happy circumstances in Pisodomatia, which was called the Backrooms, was the death of a certain cosmic parasite that used to haunt the realm for a century or two. They named this parasite “晦”, the Mare, the Black Knight. It was self-eradication; one of its oldest prophecies which it eventually came to fulfill. All the fierce efforts to wipe it out, arranged by prestigious colonies and outposts dispersed throughout the complex, proved to be wholly futile, no matter how much strategic planning or jargon and semantics were erected behind them. But the hell ended itself. Though, it did so with ulterior motives in mind.
The Mare had died, and it was forced to endure the throes of its dark essence being scattered across the continuum of existing realms, known and unknown. Its carcass, smoldering and barely recognizable, washed up on Level 1 with an invisible tide, giving men who were nearby a window of just about a minute to process and document what they had been seeing. Hateful, somber chunks of its body began to ascend, one by one, into the unknown, no-clipping through the ceiling of the warehouse, never to be seen in this compartment again. Within seconds, all that remained was the reddish cloth it was hitherto only rumoured to sport by many.
The Mare brayed and screamed as it was fractured across the Broken, billows of its crest and hooves distorting and meshing with the rest of the useless slag of mottled data as its frail ideational phenotype lost more shape. The Broken, with flashing, muddled molars, faintly gnawed at the edges of its form. The Mare grunted once in dissatisfaction, then again in agony as the Broken began digesting its pasterns.
The Broken took another bite out of its subject; a violent, gluttonous bite which took out a substantial chunk of its barrel, causing it to howl again in pain. This was the pain felt by its victims whenever their eyes were dislodged, whenever memories were wiped out, whenever airways were chafed as they breathed its essence in and out amidst possession, whenever synapses were damaged irrecoverably, whenever it galloped and cackled amongst them while they commiserated with each other and wept at those who were lost. Sufficiently dissolved, the being would then be yanked into a crevice in the “sky” of the Broken. It thought of its victims and felt no remorse, no pity, no penitence. It would have smiled had the Broken not already fractured its muzzle. Its plan was finalized from the very beginning—it would return to the cattle in due time, in another form, in a greater form, in a more noisome form. This wasn’t death, this was a revamp, and the flood was on its way to Pisodomatia already. Despite the dreary, excruciating purification process it had to undergo after its suicide, the Mare shined darker as it recalled this factoid.
The Mare’s essence, splattered all over the Broken’s maw, ascended again in three-hundred and twenty-four thin strands. Every feeble, wretched strand followed the host’s skeleton into the Higher Unknown. The strands, now subdivided, circumambulated it there. Fibres upon fibres of lunacy and malevolence that used to coat the Mare surrounded what was left of their host, contemplating it like a tombstone.
Then, as their first demonstration of power, the shards scattered across reality, blowing themselves outside of the Higher Unknown and planting themselves everywhere else. The nidation was sudden and painful, and Pisodomatia could have almost roared as every single one of its Levels received a noxious, evil piece of the Mare that it thought it had gotten rid of just now. The shards undulated and whirred to life, bloating and becoming more akin to leeches. Though, their function here was not extraction, but injection. Every piece of the Mare began to pump the essence of whatever dislikable idea it represented into the terrain of the Level it landed on, so that all that which is in it would succumb to that idea and begin to erode and change depending on the nature of it. Pisodomatia was falling terribly ill.
Having conducted this experiment, the Mare didn’t laugh, didn’t neigh, didn’t react. It couldn’t; the Broken had already subsumed and nullified the Mare as a cogent being during the purge. This purge killed it off completely, as there was nothing of it that deserved to be sustained for whatever purpose. The Mare was now a being operating in the form of ideas that were now separated by light years, each running its own program within its own domain. Pisodomatia protested and began to resist the intravasation. Every environment where there was a shard, there was resistance. Glacial, infernal, rural, urban, aquatic, terrestrial, pastoral, hypogean—they all closed in on the Mare-fragments and began to decompose them, burn them, freeze them, smother them in every way necessary.
There was a war. Chaos ensued as the ideas infecting the complex began evolving into large, swinging pedipalps, expanding their influence for a couple minutes, then retracting and faltering as the complex maimed their forms. There was friction on a cosmic scale, skirmishes all around the Backrooms that, ironically, never went into the records because every party involved saw to it that there would be no witnesses. Eventually, the harsh environments and fluctuations of stability began to overcome the structures and slowly revive the status quo. The structures, albeit undestroyed, were compromised to a tangible extent, lacking the energy necessary to proceed with the alteration of the complex.
And back in the Higher Unknown, the Mare winced back to life, irate at the pain. It drew in a silent breath of nothing, and whispered:
At this imperative, all of its soldiers retreated and recoiled back into the Higher Unknown, coating the framework of the Mare once again and allowing it to cheat the purge by continuing to exist. The being looked around itself, and there were three things: nothingness was the first. The second was bits of incoherent data and pseudo-entities floating without purpose, without meaning—they had ejected themselves outside of the Broken’s confines, but were kept suspended within the Higher Unknown. There was nowhere else they could logically proceed to; a sort of “softlock”. The third was a door—a white rectangle, well-defined by a soft luminescence.
With its teeth and legs reconstructed, the Mare swam through the dimension and began to amass the incoherent structures, one by one. No physics were applied here; the place simply bent itself to the Mare’s will, as no sapient structure here was more coherent than it. It stood in front of the gate and began to converge them together, arranging them into a semi-cogent form.
When it was done, the Mare looked at its creation: a dead, weak, forlorn starling. It was satisfied with this.
It went through the gate, and there was nothingness again. Nothingness and millions of yards of ceramic tiling, which it hovered over, carrying the despicable arrangement in its mouth with uncharacteristic care. In the white void, a disjointed eidolon began to form. Its eyes formed first, without pupils, observing the Mare as if trying to make sense of its presence, then the outline of an androgynous face began to surround the eyes. A sort of “rhizome” of ideas began to sprout from underneath its chin, and from that, a corpulent body—with limbs and a torso—burst into view. If you were to look at it, you would see lines; a mechanical pencil’s strokes, forming the contour of it, flowing in an endless loop.
Just as the Mare was an aggregate of evils aligned in the form of a beast, this eidolon was an aggregate of virtues aligned in the form a man; when humanity realized that it cannot abolish the tribulations of the Backrooms alone, it wanted something to modulate these tribulations. Lots were cast, and this phantom was chosen, and the lives of men were made easier through it. And this was the Sentinel of Pisodomatia; our White King.
“Cordial salutations,” said the Sentinel, its breath strained as it came to a halt. “My sincerest apologies,” it recommenced slowly. “It seems…”
The Sentinel couldn’t see the Mare in a form identical to its real essence; all it could see was a shifting mess of black polygons. The atmosphere crackled with consternation. “It seems I cannot process a lifeform of your nature,” it said reluctantly.
The Mare stepped forth, ignoring the Sentinel, then nudged it with its heels so as to sharpen its attention.
The Sentinel’s visage brightened up as the Mare spun its forked tongues within its jaws. “Thank you. What is this gift you bring? I promise you that I will cherish it—”
The Mare callously spat out the avian carcass, half-eaten. It landed on the floor beneath them with a resounding, damp thud. Within seconds, the bird disassembled into small shards of matter and disappeared. Horror subduing its posture, the Sentinel looked down at the small puddle of humidity the bird’s true death had left on the floor, then tilted its head towards the Mare (even now black squares to it), who said:
The Sentinel squinted its eyes. “What is the purpose of this?” it inquired. The Mare grinned.
The Sentinel nodded. “What do you wish to discuss?”
“Why reboot yourself?”
Naively, the Sentinel visualized the utopia that the being before it suggested. Though lacking crucial details and ignorant of the Mare’s affiliations, it did not demonstrate the healthy incredulity of a soldier by trade, even though it was forged to be one. “What a delightful undertaking,” it said meekly. “Why don’t you tell me about the specifics?” The Mare’s grin widened as it began to take on a more corporeal form.
The Sentinel’s countenance darkened at this description, and its defensive mechanisms, the instinctual hardening of the virtues that formed its essence in anticipation of an intrusion, flared up. The Sentinel felt its very purpose in jeopardy. “This is sick! This is cultish! Everything down to the essentials! Is this really your idea of—”
The Mare gestured towards a network of ambiguous, labyrinthine vertices and colors overlapping and pulsing in and out of view. This was the Backrooms, and it was the complex of assets that the Sentinel had virtually no other task than to guard and preserve. At this declaration, the Sentinel snapped, thrusting one of its large, unblemished limbs into the nothingness above the ceramic tiling and tearing a rift to the True Void just a few meters behind the Mare. “Let this be your final resting place,” the Sentinel commanded. “I cannot sustain a shard of what you propose.” Its command was met with nothing but the horrid cackle of a hundred voices.
The Mare possessed the Sentinel faster than its reaction time could be relevant, infecting its heel and hacking it off, scattering the ideas it represented apart. It sunk its teeth into its torso, tearing a sizable chunk of its virtuous vessels and mutating the surroundings. It took comely, beautiful concepts which sustained the Sentinel for years up to this point and eviscerated them, inhibiting their vital energy and rendering them useless, not unlike the data sludge in the Broken. The Sentinel muttered a piteous “please” before the Mare imbued its head, riving the eyes, and exercising just enough pressure for it to break off of the body.
The Sentinel was now inert. There was no more surveillance, no more regulation, no more agents to suppress the fires. There was nothing but a husk of embers, and the Mare arranged those embers into the centerpiece of what it would later become as it slowly began to reintroduce itself into the Backrooms. And for that matter, there was no Mare anymore; it had become a superpredator, a superparasite, a Supernightmare.
