There was no waking anymore.
Only blinking—and discovering the nightmare had shifted form.
Aelis didn't remember escaping the nest. She didn't remember running. Her body just was—on a rusted hospital gurney, wheels missing, half-sunk into an ankle-deep pool of coagulated blood. The room wasn't a room anymore.
It was a mouth.
Ceiling arched like a palate, walls streaked with stretched skin pulled taut over muscle—flesh stitched into tiles. Lights flickered overhead, but they weren't bulbs. They were eyes. Hundreds. Embedded in the ceiling, blinking in slow, disjointed rhythm. Watching her. Studying her. Learning.
And the walls… they breathed.
She moved.
Pain greeted her like an old friend.
Her arms were pinned—not by straps, but by veins. Pulsing cords of tissue coiled around her wrists, threading into the skin like eager roots. Her fingers twitched, but they didn't feel like hers. They were too long. Too thin. Like something had copied the idea of her hands—but didn't get it quite right.
She looked down.
She shouldn't have.
Her belly moved.
Not the way skin shifts with breath—but like something was inside it. Sliding. Turning over in thick, syrupy amniotic fluid. The skin was stretched glass-thin, so tight she could see the ripple of ridges. Claws? A spine?
No. Not possible.
But it was.
Because it pressed against her stomach.
From the inside.
A face. Flattened. Skinless. It pushed against her belly like a fetus begging to be born with its teeth. It opened its mouth against her flesh—and bit.
Aelis screamed.
No one came.
But something else did.
A figure entered—drifting, not walking. Its form shivered at the edges, like the air couldn't make up its mind if it was a person or a wound. No eyes. No mouth. Its face was a mirror—a wet, skin-coated mirror—and when she looked into it, she saw herself.
Not now. Not before.
But after.
Skin hollowed. Jaw slack. Eyes crawling with insects. Smiling.
The figure reached out—and split down the middle.
No blood. Just black fog and chittering limbs. It peeled open like a coat, and something stepped out of it.
It looked like a child.
Almost.
But too tall. Limbs too long. Teeth too sharp.
No eyelids.
Just wide, glistening eyes that never blinked.
And they knew her.
"Hello, mother," it said.
Its voice wasn't sound.
It was a vibration in her teeth. A scraping inside her bones.
She sobbed. Shook her head. Denied it.
"You gave me breath," it whispered."Now give me your face."
Its fingers touched her cheek—and where they touched, the skin peeled away like plastic wrap. No blood. No pain.
Just… absence.
She watched her own face unstick itself. Strip by strip. Until nothing was left but raw, red waiting. Her reflection above smiled. Its teeth split sideways. Its smile opened into a second mouth, and from that mouth came flies. Thousands. Boiling out in a thick black cloud.
They dove into her open mouth.
Her eyes.
Her skinless cheeks.
She couldn't scream anymore.
Her lungs were full of wings.
The last thing she heard before the world folded inward was her own voice, echoing through the swarm—not pleading, not begging.
Laughing.