For a school project,i rebooted the comic Venom setting it into a dark fantasy world. Eddie is a cursed knight and he's in a journey to hunt demons along with Peter who is a sorcerer. The project consisted into a brief character design and two illustration which i decided to make an original and one based on the comic cover “separation anxiety”.

Flood of the spyre

History’s a bitch ain’t it?    It’s been so long now, we, those from before, don’t really see them as we once did. A muted rainbow of smoke and other tiny particles, ropey and living it twists reminding one of a fuzzy eel. In its mouth a spiral of teeth (the only part that feels solid) in a circle reaching inward, a reverse accordion to better grind, swallow and burrow. Some are lucky to have it attached to a fleshy forward facing bit. The stomach is a good spot, the chest even better, but most people were not as lucky when the wave of symbiotic leaches were released. A pyroclastic cloud like swarm of them, they came at us, everyone, from every direction. In a feeding frenzy whipping and spinning with keenest instinct they bit into the first warm thing they sensed. Legs, heads, asses, my best friend has one coming out either ear. My mother lost an eye, well it’s still there, not too far from where it was eaten. If we could ever find the waste hole on one of these things we might get some of our parts and bits back. Mangled and chewed and smelling of shit, but still flesh. Still some bit of a person. Luckily i didn’t lose but a patch of hair on the back of my head during the flood. There were those who resisted, marched, protested, but when the governments announced “there are just too many…these symbiotic spyrants will live either way…this is our chance to save the human race from certain extinction.” It was over. The flood was not to be stopped once unleashed.  

 Mosquitos don’t go after warm metal. They go after two things to find their dinner. The sweet smell of our sweat, mixed with our carbon dioxide laden breath and the heat of the living. To have both is to be a target. The spyrants were looking for the same things, only attacking and claiming that which possessed both.  Just one? Nope, not a viable host.      

 At the onset, some spent the rest of their entire existence trying to remove the unwanted guests. Scaring themselves in the process and the thing only dug in further. If a person kept trying to extricate the spyrant, it gets in too far and spreads to all points delicious and vulnerable until there is no person left. These are the dead espers, mindless harvest and assembly workers. They do what they are shown and much like a machine, work until broken or shut off.    Others don’t mind so much the relationship, though it is not voluntary, they work with it. The benefits seem to outweigh the nuisance. Besides, for many, it’s all they have ever known. Some gain the trust and friendship of their personal overlord. The spyrants tend to like small sweet bits and music it finds soothing. It’s funny, no ears or echolocation can be seen or determined, but an irritant or pain experienced by the host can be satisfied or quelled by playing something orchestral and stringy. The spyrant then releases a generous dosage of serotonin and something a kin to an opiate excreted directly into the host’s bloodstream. Mine likes grapes, small coppery things, and some springy Mozart or Philip glass can make my day a little dreamy if not taken too far.    Everyone has their story. Mine doesn’t have much of a before. When the flood came, I was only 5, just a little boy, hiding under my bed, my hands hugging my pillow buddy and my face buried and away trying to escape somehow through the fabric. The spyrant who found me was attracted to the heat generated from what had been a rather aggressive virus and an accompanying fever that was making my head feel bloated and my skin sizzle. Its teeth ate and swirled until positioned rather like a rat tail braid at the base of my skull. So like I said, “lucky”. My spyre is considered almost stylish. Spyrants or “spyres” are a part of everything we do now. They are fashion. They are prestige. They are pleasure appendages. They are pets. They are us. We are them. There are laws and religions set to protect and exalt them and us with them. They do not control us, but limit our ability to react or process. They do this not consciously (as far as we can tell) but rather as a result of occupying space where that bit used to be…and the drugs. It’s just making a more comfortable and compliant home for itself. It can’t force you to do anything like kill someone or yourself and it can’t kill you. It doesn’t increase your intelligence and it doesn’t seem to have any desire to hinder your personal progress, so long as it’s safe and sated. The symbiont wishes no harm on the host, but when it comes right down to it, they will choose survival every time. They always have.  

The water is a window, the sphere is a door     An inter-dimensional rip appears as a sphere of empty space in the Arctic Ocean. It’s an anomaly scientists and theorists rush to examine. The first team to reach and measure it determined two things initially. It’s growing, the sphere itself is expanding, and it isn’t empty, there is something swirling inside. Not one thing but many. If you could merge dark clouds and a school of fish in constant movement, you would be close. They observed the sphere engulfing all it ran into or disturbed, except for the water and the ice. It was suggested to plant testing equipment in its path and remotely test what the sphere is from inside it, and maybe determine where it came from. What was the swirl was made of? What were those smokey wisps that seemed to be alive and hungry?  

  The scientists constructed a crawler base, which well, crawled under the sphere. Not right under, but just at a half a mile under, crawling on the ocean floor. Like an underwater space station on treads, the whole observation team and support staff lived and worked pacing the sphere seated a half a mile up.    

  After initial testing was successful, they were able to plot a growth rate of the sphere, but not where it came from, and also that the cloud inside was indeed alive and made up of now hundreds of thousands of eel like wisps. They swirled and swarmed, occasionally attacking each other. It seems they were territorial even when spinning in a circle. Due to this trait, having two or more spyres on any one person is very rare.  The only way for this to happen is if the spyres have no knowledge of each other’s occupancy. Further tests to the sphere also revealed the inside was pretty dry but the sphere itself, the walls were wet. The equipment sensed moisture from other objects residing in the sphere, but no pools or puddles. The walls of the sphere seem to be made up of three layers of membranous stretchy water, making it both solid and porous. During examination, it appeared to make choices on which to be and when. Each layer rubs against one another (creating a hypnotic hum) but also shifts into place like tumblers in a lock. When the right elements, minerals, proteins and molecules are lined up, it can let objects pass while continuing to repel the water all around it.  

  As its diameter grew, it just pushed through the water choosing not to let any pass through. Everything sent into the sphere seemed to do ok and nothing seemed to disturb the swarm, So naturally humanity wanted to send an animal into it. After much debate, they decided to send a dog. Kraken was trained to find holes and cracks in ships and subs. Sure, he had other abilities, but this skill in particular was the one that got him the job, in the sphere.      Kraken was anesthetized and sent up a rope in a bell. They slowed and stopped his ascent when he was in range of the sphere’s path. The rope became ridged and moved him closer. The dog kraken passed slowly through the wall of the sphere. Having no water to support him or the bell on the other side, they both fell through the wispy eels (which seemed to take no notice of him) and down onto a pile of debris and dead fish at the bottom of the sphere.  

 Kraken woke and the science team in the crawler cheered. When they announced their success, the press had a field day over the dog essentially being sent on a suicide mission.  I mean they had a point. He was sent with no food to an isolated place with no food.  There was a public outcry to “Save the Kraken!” Posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, graffiti, and kraken flags were seen pretty much everywhere.   Something had to be done. So a scientist from the team below by the name of Doctor Simon Jerry volunteered to be the first person to enter the sphere, face the swarm, save the dog and hopefully not die in the process. Suited up, DrJerry used the very same rope delivery system as the kraken in his bell. When he reached the sphere he just unhooked from the rope and swam to it. He passed through easily. Traveling from very cold low salinity water and now on the inside, he was surprised to find the sphere holding no significant amount of water (he and his colleagues had collectively assumed this reading was off). He also wasn’t prepared for the gut punchy smells of wet dog and fishy dogshit. He removed his ear plugs; there was a rushing sound the doctor attributed to the wisps above still circling and fighting. His wet suit squeaked slightly as he got to his feet and approached the dog. They were happy to see one another. DrJerry opened a zipper pouch on his front and offered the dog a mild treat and some water. The Doctor then gave kraken the command to search for a way out. “Search for a crack, find us a hole we can use to get home.” Kraken did search but found nothing. After checking and testing, DrJerry could find no flaw. There was no evidence he or the dog or anything else had passed through the walls and into the sphere, but here they were…trapped.  

 The sphere continued to grow and the swirling wisps never stopped.  DrJerry was succumbing to the stress of his predicament. So maybe it was just frustration because after 27hrs of testing and theorizing and reporting, he still came up with nothing, no possible let alone probable means of escape and now they wanted him to sit calmly for a friggin network tv interview? …or possibly because he just wanted the damn thing off his skin, DrJerry began taking off his wetsuit. His legs and feet were still very cold. His chest and arms were a little better, but only just. Then he took off his head piece. The swarm around him shuddered. And all at once the wispy eels took notice of the man and his steamy head. They shifted and went for him. The first to connect fought off all the rest and claimed its prize. DrJerry tried to fight the wisp but it wasn’t solid enough for him to grab onto. The thing had latched onto the top of his head right there where the hairline meets his forehead, dead center and while on a live feed with the crawler half a mile down.    So yeah…The first guy to get a spyrant attached to him has it positioned like a whipping unicorn horn on live tv. What are the odds really? After many hours where he desperately tries to cut the spyre from his head and takes to throwing himself against the sphere itself, he succumbs to his self-inflicted injuries.  Three days later the dog eats him. As kraken gets closer to the spyrant part of his meal, the spyrant itself wriggles free and joins the swarm once again. They do not die when the host dies. There is no known way to kill one. They vacate the host when it is no longer viable, and move on to the next host. No one has ever killed a spyrant, neither has anyone ever seen one die or reported a death.  

We gotta do what we gotta do   After the well documented tortured death of DrJerry, and with the sphere still growing, fear really set in and all efforts were considered in stopping this menace from reaching civilization. It was the aim of the decision makers that this “not blight humanity.” We were told, “If we cannot kill them, they must want to kill us” They didn’t want to send another person in. They studied the tapes of DrJerry’s fate and monitored kraken’s decline. They told the press the dog died in the attack that led to Jerry’s decent. Vigils were held and little girls cried for the German Sheppard/Labrador mix as he wasted to nothing while the powers of this world decided what position you and I would be forced to take.  

 Everything they sent into the sphere had no effect on the sphere itself or the growing swarm within. They tried explosions, acid, metal tools and drills. Nothing worked, until someone gave it air and sunshine. Just your typical oxygen nitrogen trace gas mix and our concentrated solar spectral distribution. Once applied, the sphere melted a little, but immediately reacted to the water around it and sealed up. It was like watching a hole evaporate into a solid wall. But now we knew the two things it needed to complete its task, and what most likely would happen next. It was all so clear now. It would continue to expand and the wisps would continue to multiply. When the sphere reached the surface, the air and sunlight would rip and melt the sphere away like a goddamned gelcap, releasing the wispy eel-things into the world, our world, now theirs. We were done for real.    It was a common concern that well if we can’t destroy the sphere because we don’t want to release the whatever those things were onto the world, then we need to stop it from growing or reaching through the water to the sky. Someone noticed the sphere didn’t like passing through ice. It actually can’t. It will do whatever it can to avoid it. A plan was hatched to freeze the water around it, and it seemed to work…at first. The sphere’s progress appeared to stop. The powerful corporations and governments patted themselves on the back and called the job done. They’re good at that…congratulating themselves and telling the world everything is ok, better than ok.  It was not.    The wisps continued to multiply and the force of the swarm pushed and stretched the sphere cracking the ice around it. Slowly at first, but like any flaw that is exploited, the crack became a gash and the ice broke away. The sphere now had only one direction to go and the path of least resistance was up. There was no more time. Humanity was going to face these things and we couldn’t stop them.    They sent in another volunteer. Since the wisps didn’t seem to want anything that wasn’t human, we needed someone to determine what they wanted with us, and to do that you just had to well, see what would happen. We needed a sacrifice, a well-paid volunteer. They found just what they were looking for in Filton Kenzy. Mr Kenzy’s family would receive a great deal of money for his sacrifice, and if he survived he would be not only a national, but a world treasure. “Citizen human” willing to sacrifice all for the good of humanity and lifetimes of security for his family….if we survived.  

filton kenzy, citizen human    Filton was rushed through equipment training for the task and briefed on what little we knew of what a spyre would do. The rest was for him to report back. Fully outfitted he was delivered to the sphere in style. No rope for Mr Kenzy. He got to enjoy the luxury of a two seater submarine with a bubble “encounter dome” its not usually recommended, but you can squish yourself into that bubble space, seal the compartment and unlock the dome to exit the sub in an emergency. And that’s how Filton did it. Out of the bubble, he swam for the sphere which was only 8 or 9 strokes away.   He met the outer wall with his back first in a spinning motion like a ball player trying to keep just out of grip of the other players. As he spinned, he breached the sphere, face forward and down. All at once the grotesque stinging cloud of smells emanating from the pile of dead and rotting kraken hit him hard. Choking back a wave of vomitus retching, he tucked, and rolled forward. He was slowed significantly by the squishy debris he found himself rolling over. He stopped, got up and found his footing. Filton removed the packs, excess gear and testing equipment he brought with him. He established communication with the crawler. He winced as he breathed deep and deliberate. One, two. Ok he had his orders, he was ready.    The running theory at play here is heat. Filton had been told he has a choice to make. The wispy smoke-eel will go for the warmest bit available. Depending on which part you expose, it can be lured to many different individual spots on the body, so what’s it going to be? Unfortunately for Filton, despite his calm exterior, he was scared and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of spyrants in the swarm. They moved so fast and they never stopped. He found himself swaying with the rhythm of the swirl. His attention was fixed. He didn’t want to move from this spot. To sit as still as possible was somehow everything. He might’ve stayed there and wasted like the abandoned kraken, but a pain shot through his chest. It was his lungs. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to breathe through the stale, thick stench of decay. As if particles were coating his insides making it harder to take in whatever amount of oxygen he was able to inhale. He shook his head. “This is it”.   When he got up to face the spyrants, he wanted them to come at him and get it over with. He took off his heated neoprene wet vest top. The swarm shuddered as it had when it felt the temperature slightly change around DrJerry. The reaction wasn’t fast enough for Filton. In his agitated state he began yelling, screaming at the swarm. They descended and the winner of Filton Kenzy dove directly into his open mouth and devoured his vocal chords. It thankfully sensed Filton’s distress immediately and began doping him almost on contact. Filton only managed a partial muted scream before the drugs kicked in and the chewing spyre silenced him.    Filton staggered and sneezed. The whipping forked tail of the spyre shot out his nose like a smokey mustache of tentacles, one from each nostril. He could no longer speak, but he was high as fuck and could type. Dreamy from the drugs, he thought of sign language, he was going to have to learn a new way to communicate face to face. What did he already know of signing? Not much. He wondered if anyone on the science team knew sign language.   And these were the first words in communication from Filton Kensy to the world as citizen human, the first successful living host to a spyre from the swarm. He smiled as he typed, “Does anyone down there know ASL?”

After two weeks of reports and on site testing he performed on the sphere, the swarm and on himself, it was determined that citizen human was apparently ok. Having made no attempts to fight the spyrant, he actually felt pretty good. Filton was rescued in a daring attempt where the team from the crawler sent a ropod into the sphere, but this ropod wasn’t the usual yellow bubble with arms remotely navigated to pick up marine samples, oh no. This ropod was modified and extended so as it passed into the sphere, Filton could open the forward hatch and quickly crawl in, press one button and he jettisons out the rear of the craft before it passes through and into the sphere completely.    Once back on the crawler, Filton was quarantined. However, they soon found out his spyre wasn’t a ravenous beast set on eating its way through humanity. It liked Filton and it wasn’t going anywhere. And HostFilton seemed happier and healthier than when he volunteered a month ago despite having his vocal chords eaten by an alien who now lived in his mouth and nasal cavity, not to mention basically sitting in his own filth with a rotting dog carcass for the past two weeks.     Yes, Filton Kenzy survived, but his family, most of them did not. When the flood came, they resisted the parasites. They spent their time and money destroying their bodies with the help of one extraction quack after another.    Citizen human and his spyre are in fact still alive. We had no way of knowing at the time, but it seems if properly cared for, your spyre can cure most ailments and less ravenous cancers. People aren’t dying. The new average life expectancy is 130, that’s when our bodies just give up, and the spyrant moves on to the next host.

Nowhere to hide     Bathed in yellowy artificial light, they held off until the last possible second. They did it in secret. For months now in the deepest bunkers and sitting around “the big table” they have been secretly debating the fate of the world. When the time came, when the sphere was a quarter mile in diameter and about to breach the surface and reach the sun, just as the cracks appeared and the sphere began to melt, they, the world powers and leaders of governments with their nuclear arms aimed at the Arctic Ocean, entered codes and pressed buttons. And in the greatest explosion this planet has ever seen, the flood began.  By then the number of wispy spyrants had grown from millions to billions. Unharmed by the blast they flew at a velocity no one at the time was prepared to measure. In seconds they were at the equator and seemed to get their bearings, the heat from the sun waking them, reminding them why they were here. To live, to find a home and they spread like a cloud of dust engulfing every horizon at once. Seeking, finding, and burrowing in.

 The rich and powerful were certain they were somehow immune. That the poor or “everyone else” would take the brunt if not the entire burden of host duties while the ruling class would naturally rise above and let the little people do the work, die in the struggle, and do what they’re told. They were expendable, that’s why they exist. They are seen as nothing more than flesh shields protecting the soft underbelly of privilege. The rich land owners, corporate slugs and lawyers who stink of old money have no idea how truly useless they are, but they are about to become of use.       The resistance was prepared. They took the obvious queues from DrJerry’s fate and opted to wear wet suits and other items invented to mask scent and body heat. They congregated and holed up in freezers and built houses of ice. They labeled their movement the Froggers. At first it seemed they had something going with their plan, but it didn’t last. Even lavish and well protected underground or underwater communities of the ultra-rich Froggers were infiltrated by the swarm eventually. You see, the spyrants can not only fly, they can somehow cheat what we know of physics and molecular density. They can pass through our walls. And the Froggers failed to understand a basic truth. It was the sphere that could not pass through the ice. The spyrants had no actual contact with the ice itself, just the sphere. The wisps could pass through ice quite easily. One by one the resistance were picked off and assimilated. Once someone in the community was infected, the community freaked out, locked down and outcast the victim. And so the resistance dwindled to nothing. It is believed there is no living person who is not host to our shared burden.     The flood did kind of level the field in a way, while other things stayed very much the same. There is no “bigger, better” symbiont to buy. Rich folk, and poor folk alike experience the same random placement and same health benefits. Although coma has become the preferred method of long term recovery and the rich are the only ones who can afford the maintenance.  

 Those born after the flood were saddled with the random placement just as those from before, but somehow more devastating and cruel. If you were infected, and procreated, the baby would be just as healthy as the genetic mixed bag of human traits and shortcomings would allow, but there was something new. A predetermined feeding and entry spot. A great circular scar which the first doctor to deliver the first infected baby thought would be a mark of resistance, a birthmark of superiority, proof we were better and that we would win. But no, all it really meant was we were the perfect host for this parasite. After exposure, our offspring are born fully outfitted to be a better host. Our very DNA liked the parasite so much it actually conformed to and supported it. Baby x and her adorable little spyrant port were soon met with a pupal spyre and both parasite and host grew healthily and happily for they knew no other way. This is what life brings us and these are the things we do now.  

 The espers and their handlers quietly, but globally cornered the assembly industries.  If pieces of something fit together to create something else, an esper is the fastest and cheapest labor out there. Their representation on the world stage is almost comically corrupt and they being a mindless but obedient mass of people, are a force when banded and therefore the “esperorg” is a feared organization. It is rumored they kidnap people, tie them up and aggravate the victim’s spyre until it burrows in far enough to create an esper. The org and its dealings are whispered to children and scary accounts of “this guy I knew” are shared around campfires under the stars and over beers in dive bars. Superstitions and cautionary tales weave in and out of what is and could be. so we lock our doors, and we walk a little bit faster.

There are spyre junkies. Their spyrant sways with the orchestral vibration blaring from headphones, releasing tiny doses which are just a topper for the junkie/hosts who are constantly hurting themselves for the reward. But the spyre can sense when the pain is not distressing and releases less, which in turn forces the junkie to do things more dire and more painful to get the goods.

 The spinning and circling of the spyrants in the sphere is a mating dance. (like a knot of snakes) That’s why they procreated so quickly. The hum from the sphere put them in a trance like mating state. Swimming and sewing the air, they were a great fluid knot of wispy in constant motion. Outside of the mating sphere, the spyrants breed only in the warmest climates on their warmest days and they do not need the knot of thousands it only takes six or so to get a good rhythm going and make a little spyre which is there immediately after the mating. Curled and immobile as if it were in an invisible egg it just sits there suspended in the center until the dance is over. The pupal spyre lazily wakes up, stretches it’s long forked tail and it’s off to find a newborn host. The pupal spyres can smell the new host offspring from quite a distance. The children never cry. No one has heard a child cry in over half a century. In the mating sphere, millions upon millions of pupal spyres were made. Hanging in the center space within the knot of the fully grown. A protective niche for the collection of pups. When they wake and stretch, the first and only motivation is food. And food is right there. They enter the swarm and latch onto the first adult they touch. One adult can support one pupil at a time. Every day the number grew, the sphere expanded and the knot continued to swirl and eat itself.  

The maple syrup kid Now that we have been relying on and held by these things for 66years, the maple syrup kid shows up and everything changes. There have been studies for decades, experiments where every wacky idea was thrown at the spyrants and their hosts. And in the 66th year of occupation a 13 year old girl is the first to remove her spyre. There is a way. It can be done, but now many don’t want to. Filton lobbys against it. Governments call the exhosts noncitizens of the global collective. A movement is started to release the espers from their captivity, which is a phenomenally bad idea. The only thing keeping any one of them from rampaging mindlessly is the constant monitoring by its spyre and the unending medication excreted from the same.

The idea of extraction was a simple one really. A symbiant will only vacate a host when it wants to. You have to get it to want to leave, if only briefly. The people who performed experiments based on this knowledge paid too much attention to the meal/home the parasite already had. The scientists tried influencing the spyre through manipulating its host. The spyrant merely compensated and adjusted and held tight. If you threatened or aggravated it, you would create an esper. Though it was considered to tempt it with another meal, the testers never really got what the spyre wanted or why. Like a child given this or that, it would get bored. The trick was to find something it could never get enough of. An irresistible treat, and the kid gave it a treat alright; one laced with something the spyre could not process. She made a mixture of maple syrup which most if not all spyres seem to favor, and cayenne pepper. The spyrant will go after the syrup and collect the pepper in a sputum sac. When it has enough pepper stored it needs to spit it out. This is revolutionary for two reasons. One, it was the first time extraction was successful without the host dying first. And two, the kid was born into host-hood. She had never known a life without her spyre. Which goes for the wisp as well. this was a 13year home and relationship the spyrant willingly detached from. This scenario in particular was one never imagined by present society. Yet the kid did it, and now humanity has a choice to make. each choice has consequences both known and unforeseen.