Eldritch Fragment — Byatis: Serpent-Bearded The surveyor's name was Katherine Hale and she'd been doing this work for twelve years without incident. Twelve years of descending into the dark tunnels beneath cities, of documenting what was underneath the visible world, of bringing instruments that measured and recorded into spaces that had never been meant to be quantified. The sewer inspection job on the lower east side should have been routine. Survey the old Victorian lines, catalog the problems, recommend replacements. The work was three days into an expected two-week project when Katherine went down into the deepest chamber and found something the maps said shouldn't be there. Something that wasn't listed in any documentation. Something that the blueprints had no knowledge of. The pool was perfect, or near-perfect, a circular chamber carved into bedrock that had no business being carved, no agency that would have done the carving twelve decades ago when this tunnel system was first constructed. The stone was smooth, almost glossy, polished by something other than water, shaped by something other than intention. And at its centre was a drain that descended further than Katherine's light could reach, that descended into darkness that seemed to have weight and presence, that seemed to be something other than absence. She reported it by radio, clinical and professional, her voice steady even though the air was making something move in her chest that she couldn't name. She reported the coordinates, the dimensions, the anomalies in the water chemistry that her instruments were picking up. And then she came back up for the shift change. That was three days ago. Three days of normal life on the surface, three days of trying to pretend that something down there hadn't called to her, that something down there wasn't still calling. Now she had a jar of live insects on her desk at the engineering firm. Crickets and beetles and small things that moved and lived and breathed. She kept them on her desk in front of her computer, and she spent her break-times feeding them, crushing dried mealworms into the bottom of the jar, watching them swarm. She couldn't articulate why they calmed her, only that they did. When she held the jar, she felt something in her sternum ease, something that had been tight since she came back from the pool. She kept thinking about the pool. The feeling of deep benevolence that had come over her when she stood at its edge. The gentle tug of something asking, not commanding, just asking, from the depths. Please, the asking said. Please, just look. Please, just acknowledge that I'm here. The second surveyor was named Marcus Webb, and he'd started keeping birds. They came to his window every morning, dozens of them, hundreds if he left the feeders full. He distributed sunflower seeds by the kilo now, stood in his apartment watching them land and feed, feeling the peculiar peace that came from being useful to something wild, from mattering to creatures that didn't understand human concepts of ownership or obligation, that came simply to be fed and to be acknowledged. His apartment smelled like birds. His coworkers had started calling him in jokes. *Bird guy*, they said. *Marcus the pigeon whisperer.* He didn't care. The birds were better company than people. The birds asked nothing but seed and windows, and in return they gave him a sense of purpose he'd lost somewhere in his forties, that he'd been searching for without knowing he was searching. Ace and Mai arrived as the second surveyor was being admitted to the hospital. No physical symptoms, no trauma, but Marcus Webb had stopped eating. He'd donated his entire paycheck to a wild bird sanctuary and moved his cot into the living room so he could be closer to the window, so the moment he woke he could see the birds, could see that they were still there, that he mattered to something. His doctor used words like "break with reality" and "acute dissociative episode." The hospital tried to keep him away from windows. He screamed until they sedated him, and even sedated, his eyes tracked toward the light, toward the windows he couldn't see, toward the presence of wings that he could still feel somehow even though he wasn't conscious enough to articulate it. Katherine Hale wouldn't talk to them directly. She'd been removed from the survey team after her manager found her unconscious at her desk, slumped over her computer keyboard, clutching the jar of insects to her chest like a child. But she'd left a note in her work file, written in a hand that seemed to be multiple hands at once, that seemed to vibrate with something other than human intention: *Stop going down there. It asks. It always asks. It's so alone. You could just look. You could just acknowledge. You could just say that you see it. You could just let it know that it matters.* "Byatis," Mai said simply, reading through the old collector's reports, reading through records that went back centuries, reading about something that had been documented and categorized and filed away in archives that few people consulted anymore. The Berkeley Toad. The Feeder. The surveyor's brief, almost clinical description matched every account: a one-eyed entity with serpent-like appendages below its mouth, hypnotic and drawing, feeding not on flesh but on presence, on the life force that existed in proximity to it, on the simple fact of being acknowledged and perceived. It didn't hunt. It invited. And the invitation was nearly irresistible because it was coupled with an overwhelming sense of being needed, of purpose, of mattering to something vast and ancient and alone in the deep. "It's using the sewer system as a network," Mai continued, tracing the connections on the maps. "The old pipes, the old tunnels, all of them eventually lead down to that chamber. It's casting out a net through everything that flows beneath the city, everything that moves through darkness, and whatever touches that net—people, animals, attention itself—it draws it downward. It's patient. It has been waiting a long time. It knows how to make the wait feel purposeful." Violet was very quiet during the briefing. Not her hungry quiet, which Ace knew well—the sensation of pressing and pushing and reaching for something. Something more protective. Something that suggested she recognized the danger not as something external but as something she understood from the inside, as something she knew intimately because it was a kind of hunger she had practiced, a kind of need she had learned to live with. When Ace finally asked, Violet said: *It's the asking that gets to me. The way it makes you feel chosen. Necessary. Like your proximity is actually mattering to something that's too big to care about individuals, but it cares. It actually cares about you specifically.* "Yeah," Ace said aloud. Mai looked up. "What?" "Nothing," Ace said. "Violet just—she knows how this works. She knows what it feels like to need to pull someone toward you. To make them believe that you'll die if they don't stay close." They had to go down. The only way to understand the entity's reach was to map it from the source, to see the shape of its presence in the water system, to understand the frequency of its pull, to know what they were fighting against. Mai assembled her kit—disruptors, anchors, the oscilloscope salvaged from some better life she didn't talk about, rebuilt from components that should have been incompatible but worked together in the way broken things worked together when you understood their language. Ace loaded her katanas, even though they wouldn't matter. Violence never mattered with things that fed on attention, that drew strength from being perceived and acknowledged. The chamber was worse than Katherine's report had suggested. Not larger, just more present. The pool was absolutely still, and the air around it carried a weight of loneliness so profound that Ace found herself already making excuses to stay, to sit by the edge, to keep the thing that waited in the water company. This was the danger. This was how it fed. You didn't have to touch it. You just had to agree to be nearby. You just had to acknowledge that it existed and mattered, and in that acknowledgment, something in you was slowly drained away, was slowly transferred down into the depths, was slowly incorporated into the vast hunger that waited below. Violet tried to pull Ace toward the drain. Not forcefully, tenderly, gently, the way someone might reach for a hand they loved. *It's asking,* she said in Ace's head. *It always asks. You could just look. You could just turn around and look down into the darkness and let it see you seeing it.* Ace could feel Violet's desire to comply, to lean forward, to peer into the depths and see what was looking back, could feel her own desire merging with Violet's desire until she couldn't tell them apart anymore. She had to be very deliberate about not looking, about turning away, about closing the internal door that Violet was pressing against so softly, so gently, so nearly irresistibly. Mai was working with mathematics. The entity was transmitting something, some kind of signal that propagated through the water, through the air, through the attention of anyone who spent time in proximity to it. Mai had brought equipment that could measure that signal, could record its frequency, could understand its shape. What she needed was to make that frequency so loud and so constant that it overwhelmed the entity's pull, that created so much noise that the gentle asking became inaudible, that filled the silence with something else, something so present that the entity's loneliness couldn't penetrate it. The solution was brutality. Mai brought up a portable amplifier from the transit authority's signal testing kit, a device that had been meant for other purposes, for testing acoustic properties in tunnels, for measuring how sound moved through stone and water. She set it to broadcast white noise at maximum volume directly into the chamber, a wall of sound so complete that it obliterated thought, obliterated the careful seduction of the entity's pull, turned the chamber into a place of pure sensory assault, turned asking into silence because there was no space left for asking. The entity recoiled. Ace felt it, a spasm in the water itself, a moment of pain or surprise or something adjacent, something that might have been recognition that its hunger was being starved. Violet screamed inside her skull, a sound of revelation and revulsion, a sound of horror at what she recognized in that recoil—a version of herself if she ever decided to stop asking and start taking. The entity's pull broke like a chain snapping. The waters of the pool began to churn. The drain at the centre began to pull downward with sudden urgency, with desperate need, and Byatis, responding to the only language it understood—rejection—began to retreat, to draw itself back into the deep places, to return to the loneliness that was all it had ever known, that was all it had ever wanted to escape. The chamber was silent except for the white noise, which Mai cut off as soon as the entity had finished withdrawing. She was breathing hard. Ace could see her hands shaking on the amplifier controls, could see the tremor that came from knowing what you had just done, from understanding that you had deliberately increased another being's suffering in order to protect the ones above ground, that sometimes kindness required cruelty, that sometimes the only way to save people was to hurt something else very badly. "That's going to make it worse, isn't it?" Mai said, not a question but a statement of understanding. "Going back down there, the loneliness will be worse." "Yes," Ace said. "Good," Mai said, but there was no satisfaction in her voice, only the grim certainty of someone who had just done something necessary and terrible. "That's the point. It's supposed to hurt. It's supposed to make going back not worth it." They evacuated the chamber. The surveyor teams were called off permanently. The old Victorian sewer system was condemned and replaced, the tunnels filled with concrete, the network severed. Byatis would have to find another path, or stop looking for company in the upper world entirely. It would have to learn to be alone again, if it ever knew how, if the concept of loneliness was something it could accept or if acceptance meant the end of what it was. In the car, driving through the city's streets with the city's tunnels beneath them, neither of them spoke for a long time. Mai kept her eyes on the road. Ace watched the buildings scroll past, knowing what was underneath every street, every basement, every foundation, knowing that the city was layered with presences and hungers and entities that lived in the dark and reached upward, always reaching upward toward the light and the life that moved in it. "Violet went quiet," Ace said eventually. "Yeah," Mai said. It wasn't a question. "She said—" Ace stopped. Tried again. "She said it's asking that gets to her. The way something can make you feel like you're the only thing that matters to it. The way need can be disguised as love. She said she does that too. She's been doing that to me for seven years." Mai's hands tightened on the wheel. "Does she?" "Not like that," Ace said. "But yeah. She's been inside me for seven years and she's never asked for anything except to be closer. To merge. To move inside me until there's no difference between us anymore. To consume everything that makes me me and make it part of her." "Are you going to let her?" Mai asked. "No," Ace said. "Because it's dangerous?" "Because if I did, there wouldn't be anything left but her," Ace said. "I'd disappear. Just—dissolve into what she is. Just like those people would have, eventually, if they kept answering the entity's call. Love that requires you to disappear isn't love. It's hunger pretending to be something else." Mai nodded slowly. She reached over and took Ace's hand, held it with a firmness that said: *You're still here. You're still you. Stay here with me.* Ace held on, hard enough to hurt a little, which was the way they both preferred it—proof of presence, proof of resistance, proof that they were still solid enough to hurt each other and still choose to stay. Behind them, in the deep places under the city, something vast and lonely began to sing in frequencies only the water could hear. No one answered. The invitation had been rejected. The loneliness would have to be an interior thing now, a hunger with nowhere to go, a pull with no one reaching back, just the slow realization that maybe asking wasn't enough, that maybe acknowledgment was something that had to be freely given or not given at all.