She woke choking.
No breath. No light. No time.
Only the wet.
Aelis Thorne opened her eyes and felt it first—not the pressure of air, not the warmth of a blanket, not the safety of her room—but the weight of slime draped across her face like rotted skin. It clung to her eyelids, thick as phlegm and warmer than blood. As she inhaled—reflex, panic—the stench shoved itself down her throat like a greedy hand. Copper Mold. Decay. Something sweet, like rotting fruit, curled beneath it all.
She gagged.
Her hands scrambled to her face, slipping across the viscous coating. It stretched as she tore it free, strands connecting her fingers to her cheek like the mucus of some gaping wound. The slime popped and broke, splattering her lips, dripping into her mouth.
It tasted alive.
Aelis screamed—though it came out hoarse, more gurgle than cry—and forced herself upright. Her back slid against a surface that pulsed. It moved. The walls weren't walls—they were muscle, or something like it. Wet and pink and veined, like the inside of a throat that had long since forgotten what it meant to breathe. Every inch throbbed. Something deep within the "room" gave a lazy gulp.
She was inside something.
Her feet dangled in fluid. She looked down—and her scream died in her chest.
The floor wasn't water. It wasn't even liquid. It was a translucent sludge, alive with undulating threads of darkness. Shapes moved beneath its surface. Pale, boneless limbs. One of them twitched. Another reached toward her ankle.
Aelis scrambled away, her knees slipping beneath her on the fleshy floor. Her skin burned where the slime touched it, as if the room itself resented her presence. Above her, the ceiling was not a ceiling at all—it was a membrane, semi-transparent, through which shadows slithered. They didn't walk. They didn't crawl. They glided, like nightmares without definition. No bones. No faces. Only outlines. Writhing. Watching.
There were no doors.
No corners.
Just endless, pulsating red-flesh and that reeking, oppressive dampness. The air was thick—so heavy with rot it felt like every breath peeled a layer off her lungs. Her teeth ached from the stench. Her ears rang with the distant sound of chewing. Wet. Slow. Gnawing.
And then—
Something moved.
Not the ceiling. Not the shapes beneath the ooze. Something with her.
A whisper of movement at the far end of the chamber. A shuffle. A slide. A squelch.
Aelis turned her head slowly—every cell in her body begged her not to.
It saw her.
A thing, tall and starved, skinless, its muscle exposed and twitching like it had just clawed its way out of a butcher's freezer. No eyes. No nose. Its mouth stretched vertically from chin to forehead—unzipped flesh, teeth crooked and screaming outward like the maw of some ancient trap.
It took a step.
The sound it made was the sound of tendons being snapped in half underwater.
Aelis stumbled back, slipped—her elbow landed in the ooze, and something gripped it from beneath. Fingers. Or tentacles. Or both. She screamed again, this time real and full, and yanked herself free, flesh tearing. Her skin hung from her forearm like chewed meat.
More shapes appeared.
More of them.
Crawling from the walls. Slithering from slits that hadn't been there before. Creatures with no symmetry. No logic. Teeth growing from foreheads. Hands with no fingers. Rib cages turned outward like twisted cages filled with eggs that pulsed as if about to hatch.
One of them opened its mouth.
Inside were eyes.
Dozens. All human. All blinking at her.
Run.That was all her mind screamed. Run, run, run.
But there was nowhere to go.
The room closed around her. The walls began to fold inward, convulsing like a birthing sac. The membrane above burst, raining down fluid thick as old soup. The things shrieked—not loud, but wet, a gurgling chime of a sound that buried itself in the marrow of her spine.
And then—it lunged.
The skinless one. Its mouth split open. Not vertically, no—that was just the first mouth. A second one tore across its chest like a grin splitting a corpse. Inside it was not a throat, but a hallway. A hallway of twitching limbs, flayed children, faces melted and stitched into the walls.
It reached for her.
Its fingers brushed her cheek.
Its touch was—
She woke.
Gasping. Covered in sweat. Her sheets wrapped tight around her like restraints. The air was dry. Her room.
Home.
Except—
Her fingers still smelled like copper.
And her arm—her left arm—was bandaged. Fresh. Red seeping through the gauze in a slow, steady bloom.
Aelis Thorne stared at it.
And she remembered.
That thing had touched her.
She hadn't imagined it.
She wasn't asleep.
Not really.