Not all who are swallowed are forgotten. Some become the mouth itself.
Elias awoke underground.
Not beneath the floor of his home—this was deeper. Much deeper. The air was thick, metallic, and warm. It smelled of blood and wet leaves. His limbs ached. His vision blurred. He was lying in a bed of roots, slick with pulsing fluid, wrapped around him like fingers too afraid to let go.
He couldn't remember falling asleep. He couldn't remember how long he'd been here. Time felt like something chewed up and spat out.
He sat up, gasping.
A voice answered.
Not a voice with sound, but pressure—sliding into his skull like a hand into mud. It was intimate, ancient, and hungry.
"Awake... child of bark and bone. Awake, because you must see what you've grown."
Elias turned. What passed for light in this place came from the walls themselves—organic surfaces pulsing with bio-luminescent veins, dim and red. They formed shapes. Scenes. Memories not his own.
A boy in the woods. Following shadows. A man at the mouth of a tunnel. A mother digging into her own chest, feeding roots that writhed.
He stood slowly.
His skin had changed. Pale. Translucent. Veins thick like roots bulged beneath the surface. His nails had blackened. He touched his face—and felt more than bone.
He felt growth.
Fungi. Moss. Small tendrils of something alive.
Something was growing out of him.
Then he heard her.
His mother.
Singing.
From the next chamber.
And the walls... began to open.
The floor beneath him softened, then pulsed. It opened like a throat, a yawning wet corridor of flesh and bone. With nowhere else to go, Elias stepped forward, each footfall squelching beneath him. The walls quivered with his breath, as if they were listening.
The tunnel narrowed, then widened again, then pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. A low groan came from deep within, like tectonic plates grinding, like something enormous shifting in its sleep.
He reached a vast chamber.
A cathedral of meat and memory.
Towering pillars of bone spiraled toward a ceiling shrouded in hanging roots and glowing sacs. Inside the sacs, shapes twitched—human shapes, some curled in agony, others still, faces distorted by terror or ecstasy or both. The air buzzed with flies the size of fists. A choir of whispers sang from somewhere unseen.
In the center, a throne.
Made not of stone or wood, but bodies—melted together, their faces frozen mid-scream, fused by a resinous sap that glistened like black honey. Upon it sat a figure draped in skins, its head wreathed in antlers, its eyes two pits of burning fungal light.
And at its feet—his mother.
Her body had become a conduit, roots sprouting from her mouth, her spine bent unnaturally, her limbs webbed into the soil. But she was alive. Her eyes met his. They were full of sorrow... and hunger.
"You came back," she whispered, mouth flowering open.
Elias fell to his knees. The pressure in his skull increased. The figure on the throne raised a hand. It did not speak aloud, but its will entered Elias's marrow.
"You were born from this rot," it said. "This place remembers you. As the forest remembers every drop of blood it drinks."
The walls changed.
He saw more visions.
A boy offered to the woods in winter. Bones buried under trees. A pact forged between an ancient thing and the desperate. He saw his father, young, carving symbols into bark with a bone-blade. He saw his mother—pregnant—drinking from a cup of rootmilk. Whispering in her sleep.
"You are the seed," the throne-creature declared. "You will sprout into hunger."
"No!" Elias screamed.
But the growth had already begun. His chest tore open—not with pain, but inevitability. His ribs curled outward like petals. Beneath, where his heart should have been, something pulsed. Something watched.
The floor split again.
A scream echoed from below—not his, not his mother's. Something else. Something young.
He peered over the edge.
Another tunnel. Deeper still. The walls made of mirrors that weren't glass, but wet membranes. In them, he saw versions of himself—feral, monstrous, crowned in rot, walking through forests painted in gore. Each reflection reached for him.
One of them smiled.
"Come," it mouthed.
Elias was pushed again.
He fell for what felt like hours.
He landed in a chamber colder than anything he'd known. Black frost coated everything. Dead trees sprouted upside down from the ceiling, dripping icicles shaped like fingers. The ground was made of bone powder and frozen roots.
Here, there was no sound. Not even breath.
Until he moved.
Then the roots awoke.
They surged from the walls, grasping him, lifting him like a prize. They didn't crush him. They read him. Probing into his mind. Every secret. Every fear. Every moment of shame. They devoured it all.
And then they whispered:
"Not enough."
A doorway appeared.
At the threshold stood a girl.
She was beautiful. Ethereal. Her hair tangled with leaves, her eyes glowing with a dim golden rot. She did not belong here. But she had been here.
"Run," she said.
Elias didn't ask who she was. He ran.
Behind him, the chamber collapsed. Roots lashed. Bones shattered. Something screamed with infinite lungs.
He burst through the membrane door and found himself back in the tunnel. The original tunnel. Snow drifted in behind him. Trees clawed at the sky outside.
He was home.
He turned back.
The tunnel was gone.
Only snow.
Only forest.
Only the whispers that never truly stopped.