The Mercy Ward
Notes from Our Settlement's Final Days
Part One: What We Called Home
The kitchen wasn't a kitchen anymore. Baik floated there most mornings, her skin gone translucent like rice paper held to light. You could see everything working inside—or failing to work, depending on how you looked at it.
"Tea?" she asked me yesterday. Or was it today? Time moves strange here.
I'm Kai. I track weather that doesn't exist anymore. The tea tastes like batteries now, but we drink it anyway. That's what you do when someone offers—you accept, you swallow, you pretend it helps. We've gotten good at pretending.
The walls breathe with us. Not metaphorically—they actually expand and contract, some kind of fungal growth that got into the structure years back. Ziegler says it's spreading through our nervous systems too. He would know. He documents everything, though I wonder who'll read his notes when we're gone.
Part Two: The Changes
You should understand that nobody chooses their transformations anymore. Baik woke up Tuesday with compound eyes. Wednesday, she was eating her own fingers and thanking God for the privilege.
"It's not pain," she explained, her mouth full. "It's... recycling."
We found Chen after the floods. His partner didn't make it—got absorbed into the walls during the last rain. The walls keep saying she's happy in there, but walls lie. Chen carries water in his lungs now, drowning a little bit every day. He says it's peaceful. I don't believe him either.
The children adapt fastest. Woozy Pupil (she picked the name herself, age seven) discovered she could make concrete feel pain. Now the whole settlement screams when she sings. She thinks it's beautiful. Maybe it is. Beauty's negotiable these days.
Part Three: The Wisdom We Inherited
The old women knew this was coming. My grandmother left instructions written on the inside of her skin—had to peel her like an orange after she died to read them. They said:
"Persistence is punishment. Nurture while dissolving. Transform into nothing while staying awake for it."
Baik embodies this. Her DNA's all mixed up—rabbit genes for fertility, axolotl for regeneration. She can't die properly. Takes months when the engineered ones finally go. We had to watch Vera decompose for half a year, conscious the whole time, telling jokes that got worse as her brain dissolved.
Part Four: What Asha Became
Asha used to run the nursery. Now she's spread so thin you can barely see her—like mist with opinions. She feeds us electromagnetic nectar that makes you experience dissolution secondhand.
"I milk the void where stars used to be," she told me, matter-of-fact as discussing groceries.
I asked what void-milk tastes like.
"Like forgetting, but sweeter."
Part Five: The Weather Report
My equipment reads emotions now instead of pressure systems. Today: grief at 30.2 inches, falling. Hope holding steady at denial. Tomorrow's forecast: backwards rain that steals moisture from soil, returning it to clouds that never existed.
Baik's transformations follow weather patterns. High pressure, she's almost human. Low pressure, she's sixteen different things at once, screaming in harmonics that make birds fall from the sky. Except we don't have birds anymore. Just things that used to be birds, walking on too many legs.
Part Six: Zara's Gallery
Zara paints with materials that shouldn't exist. Yesterday—or last week, time's negotiable—she used brushes made from Baik's molted skin. The painting moved on its own, showing all Baik's forms failing simultaneously.
"This is what God's mercy looks like," Zara said, crying and laughing, or maybe just crying. "He loves us too much to let us die. Too much to let us live properly either."
The painting ate three visitors before we locked it in the basement. We can hear it singing down there. Hymns, mostly.
Part Seven: The Lesson
Baik taught the children yesterday (her vocal cords were dissolving, made her sound like a broken radio):
"Women must give everything to their children. Hold nothing back. Become the empty glass, then shatter."
The kids nodded like this made sense. Maybe to them it does. They've never known different.
I wanted to argue, but my throat was full of tomorrow's rain, falling upward.
Part Eight: Documentation
Ziegler keeps writing everything down. His hands don't change—only part of him that doesn't. He watches Baik cycle through forms: jellyfish, praying mantis, water bear, combinations that don't have names.
"Someone has to witness," he says.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because if no one watches, did it happen?"
"I hope not."
He laughs. It sounds like crying.
Part Nine: The Gender Weather
Baik's gender changes with her forms. Male on Mondays, female on Wednesdays, everything on weekends. Thursday she's nothing at all—just potential, waiting.
"It's God's way of teaching us not to get comfortable," she explains, growing new organs while we watch.
Comfort's a myth anyway. Like safety. Like the time before the walls started breathing.
Part Ten: What Persists
The settlement continues because it can't stop. Momentum, maybe. Or spite.
Baik floats in her kitchen-prison, glowing with fever that never breaks. Chen drowns repeatedly, getting better at it. Asha spreads thinner daily, feeding everyone emptiness disguised as nourishment. Zara paints horrors and calls them prayers. Woozy Pupil teaches architecture to suffer.
Above us, three dozen things that were birds circle on too many wings. They cry acid rain that burns what it blesses. We stand in it anyway. The burning feels like something, and something's better than the nothing that's coming.
Part Eleven: The Truth
Here's what they don't tell you about mercy: it's indistinguishable from cruelty if you apply enough of it.
God loves us. That's the problem. Loves us too much to let go, too much to hold gently. We're crushed by divine affection, transformed by aggressive care.
We were supposed to be more. That's why He's making us less—to fit us back into whatever box we climbed out of.
Epilogue: My Throat
These words were stuck in my throat for weeks. Had to cough them up like hairballs, each sentence wrapped in bile and yesterday's rain.
I don't know if this is true. Truth's negotiable, like beauty, like pain, like the difference between ending and beginning.
The settlement's still here. We're still here. Still transforming, still failing, still thanking God for the privilege of becoming worse.
Tomorrow I'll probably grow wings. Or lose my fingers. Or discover my bones have opinions.
That's the mercy of it—the not knowing. The only guarantee is change, and change is just another word for dying slowly with style.
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Final note: If you find this, run. Or stay. It won't matter. The transformation finds everyone eventually. At least here, we suffer together. That's almost like love, if you squint.
