The cavern shook with each beat of the Heart. The chanting children pressed themselves against the walls, their white eyes fixed on the fissure splitting open beneath the pulsing mass.Something was rising.
At first, I thought it was more of the fleshy cords that held the Heart aloft. But then they bent and moved with purpose. Limbs. Too many of them. Their surfaces glistened with a film of dark fluid, veins glowing faintly beneath the skin. Each ended in fingers far too long, scraping across the ground with wet clicks.
The fissure widened, and a torso dragged itself upward. Not human, not even animal—an amalgam of both, skin stretched thin over shifting muscle. Its chest rose and fell in time with the Heart’s beat, as though it were not a creature at all, but an extension of it.
Then came the head.
If it could be called that. The shape was vaguely human, but melted, features drooping and reforming with each pulse. Eyes opened and closed at random places across its face, some weeping, some blind, some fixed directly on me. A mouth split wide where none should have been, and a voice like a chorus of hundreds bled into the chamber:
“YOU RETURNED.”
The sound threw me to the floor. My skin crawled, and for a moment I thought I could feel roots worming through my veins, threading into me.
The creature dragged itself closer, each step squelching against the living floor. It leaned down, eyes rolling, mouths stretching, its breath hot and rancid.
“YOU ARE THE SEED.”
Hands grabbed me from behind—the children again, their strength impossible, pinning me in place. I tried to fight, thrashing, screaming, but my voice drowned in the chanting. The thing’s mouth opened wider, splitting its face down the centre.
Inside was not a throat, but a tunnel of teeth and flesh, pulsing with light.
And it leaned closer still, as if to swallow me whole.
That was when I heard something new. Not chanting, not humming. A whisper.
It came from the fissure, from below, soft but urgent:
“Run.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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