The Feast of the Undermind [✱29]

Posted on Mon Aug 17th, 2026 @ 1:23am by The Undermind & Grandmaster M'Hum & Lieutenant Commander N'Tgni Creon & Senior Aerospace Specialist Mindo 'Riot' & Cadet Senior Grade Bellis & Crewman Thomas Callaghan & Captain Hadrian 'Sunshine' Palamas

1,582 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: UnderMind [4]
Location: Abandoned Underground Facility - Dreizhen III
Timeline: After 'Living Inventory'

A bank of dead Romulan wall panels along the amber-latticed side of the chamber flickered with a wash of static-white. Their surfaces had been half hidden beneath a sheen of resin and web-thin secretion; now thin lines of light forced themselves through the grime as old projectors awoke one by one. A low electrical hum joined the background throb of the bunker.

“Bellis, do we have a breakthrough?” Creon asked, turning away from her efforts to try and turn shards of the resin that coated the walls into some kind of stabbing weapon.

"I wish I could say yes Commander. But every time I get through one of their defenses something new gets in the way. This is not my doing." Bellis said, talking about the strange activation.

The display stabilised into a feed from another chamber somewhere deeper in the complex. The angle was high and slightly canted, as though the camera housing had been bent years ago and never repaired. The room it showed was broader than their pen and stranger by orders of magnitude. It had once been unmistakably Romulan - arched buttresses, recessed alcoves, a command dais in the old severe style - but almost none of it remained uncovered. The walls were swallowed beneath layered amber, scattered sand and dark nodules of compacted mineral. Thick organic cables as wide as a person’s torso ran from the ceiling into a central mound that looked, at first glance, like a malformed throne grown by the slow accumulation of dripping biowaste.

Then the mound moved.

Even through the distortion of the old monitor, it was obvious that the creature anchored there was no warrior, nor any other variety they had seen. It was vast and pale where the others were striped, its carapace stretched taut and wet-looking over impossible swollen folds of tissue. Its skintone was almost that of a Caucasian human, pale orange-pink flesh with exposed red regions, with sections of the face a necrotic black.

Great saclike lobes pulsed along the length of its abdomen with a rhythm too slow to be healthy in anything one might still wish to call an animal. Its forward body rose in layered adipose folds around a central face of empty black eyes and a single foul orifice, infected-red, revealing grasping palps that unfurled and furled with obscene delicacy. Smaller attendant bugs crawled over and around it, vanishing into hollows in its swollen body and re-emerging slick with translucent secretion. Below it, the largest of the attendant bugs seemed to support and carry it. Finger-like limbs either side seemed too small to function, and did not bother with the effort of the attendants.

Bellis felt every hair along her arms stand up. “By the Lights,” she breathed. “What is that?”

Callaghan did not answer. He had gone very still.

Palamas was dragged into frame a moment later. Not dragged - presented. The warrior bugs lowered him to a position directly before the immense thing, then pinned him upright with their forelimbs planted around him like the stakes of a ritual frame. Blood darkened the front of his already ruined uniform. He was conscious. Very conscious. Conscious enough to look straight up at the hulking intelligence before him and muster a smile that was all challenge.

M’Hum stepped into the edge of the image. One of the Order adherents adjusted a control surface built awkwardly into what had once been a Romulan wall console. The picture sharpened; audio followed a heartbeat later, the bunker’s ancient speaker system popping once before projecting his voice throughout the captives’ chamber.

“Attend,” M’Hum said, not only to the prisoner before him but to those forced to watch. “You have sought to understand what lies beneath this world. Observe, then, the answer.”

“This,” M’Hum continued, inclining his head toward the colossal organism, “is the Undermind. The living convergence of instinct, memory, and sacred purpose. Not one life, but the perfected harmony of many. Where lesser beings remain trapped within the prison of self, the Undermind gathers, orders, refines. It is the apotheosis of Divine Harmony.”

Palamas gave a ragged laugh that turned halfway into a cough. “That’s your god?” he asked. “Looks sick. Unhealthy sick, not cool sick.”

One of the warrior bugs slammed a forelimb down beside his head hard enough to crack the deck plating. He did not flinch nearly enough to satisfy it.

M’Hum regarded him with what might almost have been pity. “Your revulsion is a symptom of incompleteness,” he said. “You do not yet understand that individuation is not enlightenment. It is injury. Separation. Noise. The Undermind cures these ills. In time, all who come here in ignorance will be made whole.”

On the monitor, the huge pale entity had become more alert during M’Hum’s speech. Its palps stirred faster. The slow, sensitive tendrils emerging from the orifice in its foremass angled toward Palamas as though smelling him, or listening. Two glossy inner mandibles separated the sickly orifice with excruciating leisure. Something telescoped forward between them: a wet, jointed organ, sharp and utilitarian, precise as an instrument and nauseatingly intimate.

Mindo made a strangled sound and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Even now, with blood soaking his side and both legs giving out beneath him, Palamas drew himself as tall as the impalements allowed. “If this is your sales pitch,” he said, his voice hoarse but carrying, “you should know it needs work.”

The Undermind’s probing appendage touched the skin of Palamas’s temple first, as lightly as a physician testing fever. He jerked away on reflex, and the warrior bugs holding him adjusted with coordinated force, pinning his shoulders and head more securely. The appendage slid up into his hairline, searching, then pressed.

The monitors did not spare the watchers any of it.

Palamas held still for one impossible second, muscles jumping all through his neck. Then the brutal spike-organ rose, held for a moment, and suddenly came down with force. It punched through with a sickening, damp crack. His entire body arched against the restraints. The sound that tore out of him began as a yell and collapsed into something rawer, stripped of language.

Creon winced but did not blink. She watched every moment of it. She did not want to see it, but she refused to forget it. Her hands had closed into fists so tight the knuckles shone.

Bellis was silent. She could not turn paler, but she felt all the blood rush from her face.

The Undermind did not feed with frenzy. That was the worst part. It did its work with concentration. Rhythmic contractions travelled down the length of the appendage as though information itself were being drawn through it. The immense sacs along its length pulsed in answer. The attendant bugs around its throne clicked in rising, arrhythmic bursts that sounded horribly like excitement.

“Do you see?” M’Hum asked the room at large, his voice carrying through the speaker with serene conviction. “There is no death in this worth fearing. There is incorporation. Illumination. What is singular becomes shared. What is crude becomes ordered. Captain Palamas contributes now to a greater totality than he could ever have embodied alone.”

On the screen, Palamas’ thrashing weakened by degrees. Not quick enough to be mercy. The feeding organ seemed to hollow him out, drinking all that was within him. His hands, which had clenched so hard the tendons stood proud beneath the skin, began at last to lose their shape and open. His crowned brow sagged forward against the appendage buried in it. When the Undermind finally withdrew, it came free with a wet reluctance and a glistening thread that snapped as the captain’s body slumped in the cage of supporting limbs.

The warrior bugs did not let him fall.

M’Hum stepped closer to the body and placed two fingers, almost ceremonially, against the blood-spattered breast of the ruined uniform as though confirming some sacrament had been properly completed. “Thus,” he said softly, “Divine Harmony receives.”

M’Hum looked up then, directly into the camera, as though he could see through it into the chamber where the survivors stood.

“One of your number has already been brought understanding. What you once knew as Palamas is now a voice in the chorus of harmony,” he said. “The rest will follow when the Undermind is ready. Be at peace with your fear. It is only the self, recognising that its isolation is ending.”

The feed died to static.

"Damn them! Damn those bastard bugs and their Vulcan lickspittles to hell!" Callaghan said, smashing his fists against the amber coating the walls.

Bellis shook her head from side to side. She wanted to cry, but she was stronger than that, and swallowed against the pain in her throat of what she felt.

Mindo made a noise then, not loud, but wounded in its own way. She turned her face aside and pressed the heel of one hand against her mouth, fighting for composure and nearly winning. Her expression was unchanged, but her eyes were wide and she was trembling.

“Remember this.” Creon said. “We all need to survive so we can bring these bastards to justice for what they’ve done.”

"Aye, Commander. I won't forget. I won't forget this as long as I live." Callaghan said, trying to control his breathing. "I'm going to kill that pointy-eared son of a bitch."

"Get in line." Creon said.

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