The sand cracked beneath our boots as we crossed the dried basin of what once must have been a lake. Bones, long stripped of flesh, jutted from the earth like crooked fingers trying to claw back into life. The air here didn't move—didn't breathe—and my own breath felt borrowed, as if permitted only for a time.
Aleya walked ahead of me now, her crimson scarf fluttering like an omen. Behind us followed the new ones: Jonah, who smelled of iron and never blinked, and Rae, who spoke to shadows as if they might answer. I didn't trust them, but trust had long ago drowned in me.
We came to a hill made entirely of tusks. I say "tusks" because that's what they resembled, but they pulsed faintly beneath our touch. Warm. Alive. Aleya knelt, placing her hand against the surface.
"They're not bones," she whispered. "They're teeth. The earth's teeth."
Then it began.
A groan surged from beneath the ground—deep and slow, like a god stretching after centuries of sleep. The soil cracked open. Dust rose like incense. Something moved below. A tongue of flesh, too large and too wet, pushed upward through the cracks, dragging with it a mass of muscle and limb.
We ran.
The creature that emerged had no face, only a spinning maw of bone. Its body was a worm, but armored in rusted iron and broken statues. A cathedral twisted around its spine. And it sang—not a melody, but a choir of screams. Voices stolen.
Jonah charged first. I saw his blade pierce the worm's flank—then saw his body flung a hundred feet away, limbs spinning like autumn leaves. Rae began whispering—chanting words from no tongue I'd heard before—and from her fingers fell sigils of light, symbols that tore open the creature's skin like paper. But it wasn't enough.
I lifted the Scythe of Death.
It had been days since I used it. Maybe weeks. The blade hummed. My own ribs cracked from the sound.
I slashed—and the world bent.
The creature staggered, and I saw for a moment the thing inside it: a bound figure, nailed to its innards. A child, eyeless and grinning. Whispering something I could not hear.
The scythe's arc cleaved a portion of the beast, and from it spilled a slurry of limbs—human, animal, and other. So many faces in that mess. Some I thought I recognized.
We did not kill it. But we wounded it, and that was enough.
The ground swallowed the worm again, along with the hill of teeth. We stood panting, bleeding, but alive. For now.
Later, around the fire, Rae spoke without looking at us. "That wasn't just a monster," she said. "That was a warning."
Aleya nodded. "We've entered something's domain. Maybe we always were in it."
Jonah didn't speak. He just sharpened his blade with something too smooth to be stone. His fingers bled with each motion, and he didn't seem to mind.
I stared into the flames, remembering the child inside the beast. Why was it smiling?
We walked again the next morning. The land shifted. Trees with skin grew in place of forests. We saw the remains of an abandoned village. Every house had a single red circle painted on the door. No bodies. Just silence. As if the place had been peeled.
Rae found a well in the village center. She peered in. "Something's still down there," she whispered.
We didn't ask what.
That night, dreams returned. Not memories—dreams. A sea of eyes, blinking in sequence. A voice calling me by my true name, which I did not know. And a staircase made of living people, stretching up into a mouth in the sky.
I woke with blood on my tongue.
We continued north. We don't know what's north, only that the stars shift differently there. We follow instinct now. Or maybe we're being led.
The world grows more fractured with each step. Time loops. Birds sing backward. I saw a version of myself nailed to a tree, whispering things I can't repeat.
Aleya began marking the trees with blood to keep track. Even so, we passed the same stone altar five times in a day. On the sixth, it was gone.
We met a hunter who had no face—just a mirror. He spoke without moving. Told us he hunts "what hunts thought." When I asked what that meant, he just raised his blade, smiled with my smile, and vanished.
We're not in a world anymore.
We're inside something's thought.
And it's dreaming.
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Question for the Reader:lf the world you knew was only the surface of something sleeping... would you wake it, or leave it to dream forever?