The Curse of the Golden Puffle

Written by KiItanon

The chill here has a tone, and it whispers in the rustle of moving snow, a melody of emptiness. I’ve heard it for too long. My realm—a frozen city sealed beneath a cover of unending dusk—is a bell jar, and a disease is flourishing within it. It started with the vast Armies, the arrogant, reckless battalions that provided structure to our existence. The Water Vikings with their deep blue daring, the exact, methodical arrangements of the Special Weapons and Tactics. They stood as our monuments, our proof that we were more than mere flesh huddled against the endless white. Currently, they are the origin of the decay.

It is a fresh belief, a wicked and parasitic religion they refer to as the Cult of the Golden Puffle. I first noticed it not in a manifesto, but in the expression of my closest friend, Scars. We had matured side by side, two young ones in a realm of rigid processions and timed assaults, our hearts pulsing in sync with the drum-majors. I discovered him one evening, keeping watch outside a small, irregular igloo that glowed with a subtle, phosphorescent illumination.

“Scars,” I said, my breath a faint whisper between us. “Leave this location.”

He turned, and the penguin I recognized had vanished. In his gaze was a lifeless, mineral calmness, as if the vital spark inside had been snuffed out and substituted with quartz. “You perceive just the exterior,” he murmured, and his voice resembled the noise of a fracture forming in dense ice. “The Armies shine their buttons and tally their ranks, oblivious to the structure of this world.” They don’t look for the tendons, the connections under the surface. The Cult carries out its activities. “We have discovered the galvanic key.”

He referred to the Golden Puffle not as an animal, but as a concept. An object of dreadful, unnatural existence. He referred to it as a contemporary Prometheus, a creature crafted not taken from the deities, but from the deep, resonant essence of the cosmos itself. He grasped my flipper—his own felt like frozen stone—and guided me down, into the core of the icebergs.

The atmosphere became dense and vibrating, buzzing with a tone that made my teeth ache. The cave we stepped into was an affront to nature, its walls shiny not with moisture, but with a thick, inner radiance. And then they appeared, the members of the congregation. They had discarded their vibrant fabric symbols, their identities, appearing pale and uniform under the pulsating glow. Their chant was not a language but a rhythmic noise, the pulsating of a malfunctioning engine. It was a childhood song from a fallen star.

And in the middle, on a platform of compressed snow, it lay.

It was gold, yet the gold of a decayed limb, of a covered corpse. Its shape resembled a puffle’s, yet it was a deception, a mockery crafted from falsehood. It did not exist as we perceive life; it endured, with a dreadful, motionless certainty. Its calmness was not tranquility, but a deep and watchful anticipation. Its eyes were not merely eyes; they were gateways to an absolute zero void where no thought, no love, no memory could endure. I sensed it tugging at the borders of my very soul, a terrifying attraction that threatened to erase my existence.

“Behold the new Adam!” Scars wept, his tone now a twisted resonance, the wail of strained metal. “We are its makers, and it will lead to our downfall and our elevation!”

The twisting movements of the acolytes were a ghastly imitation of life, a jarring spasm in a dead body. At that moment, I grasped the horrific reality. This was not a victory. It was an alternative. They hadn’t called upon a deity; instead, in their hubristic excavation of the world’s hidden realms, they had created a new reality, and this furious, metallic entity was its core. It was the opposite of our delicate bodies, the void to our total.

I flinched, my body reacting involuntarily, like a marionette with severed strings. Scars pivoted his head, a movement so smooth and surreal it was like a splash of acid on the idea of bone and joint. The noise resembled a dry, internal crack.

“The world is being rewritten,” rasped the entity that was once Scars. “The text is undergoing examination.” We will all unite as one. “Everyone will become… Gold.”

I escaped. I have escaped. I remain in the cramped space of my room, the walls my sole observers. The world beyond my window is unraveling. The snow is changing, every flake a small, metallic fragment of this pervasive illness. I listen to them outside, the wandering echoes of the Vikings and the Tactics, their collective hum the sole melody remaining in existence. They are not my people anymore. They are elements. They are the complete, flawless, and lifeless offspring of a dreadful new genesis.

And the radiance, that terrible, sickly light from the core of the Iceberg, is intensifying, a sunrise I do not want to witness. The hum resides within my head now, a perpetual, whirring noise, and within its vibrations, I can nearly discern the sounds of my own name, being gradually, carefully, wiped away.