The light from the tear spread across the forest floor like a sheet of white fire, bleaching the ferns and casting long, warped shadows. Marla threw an arm over her eyes, blinking through the painful brilliance.When the glow dimmed, something stood where the tear had been.
At first, Marla thought her vision was still swimming, because the shape didn’t stay still. It flickered—its outline stuttering like a corrupt video frame. One second tall, the next hunched; one moment vaguely human, the next stretched into angles no body could make.
Andrew gripped her hand so tightly she thought her bones might crack. “What… what is that?”
Garrison’s voice was a broken whisper. “One of the ones that didn’t come from here… or from us.”
The creature—or whatever it was—tilted its head, its shifting form settling briefly into something humanoid. A face surfaced from the shifting static of its body, pale and blurry, as though viewed through thick water. Eyes too dark. A mouth too wide.
Then it spoke.
Not with sound—but with memory.
A voice bloomed inside Marla’s head, intimate and cold.
Marla.
She staggered. The thing took a single step forward, its foot not quite touching the ground, skimming it instead—as if gravity wasn’t fully committed to holding it.
Garrison shouted, “Don’t listen to it!”
The creature’s body jittered, and suddenly its face changed.
It was Marla’s.
Not as she was now—older, hardened by fear and sweat—but younger. The version of her from a decade ago, smiling warmly, lovingly.
Andrew recoiled as if slapped.
“Stop it!” Marla shouted, hands over her ears. “Get out of my head!”
The creature flickered again. The younger face dissolved like mist.
And then it became someone else.
A woman none of them knew: ragged hair, a twisted expression, eyes wide with terror. Her mouth opened in a silent scream.
Garrison went sheet-white. “That’s one of ours,” he whispered. “She walked into the tear. She never—she never came back.”
The creature twitched violently, as though trying to hold that form but failing. Its body erupted into long, spidery limbs that bent at impossible angles. It turned toward Garrison, and for a fraction of a second, a glint of recognition—hunger—crossed its blurred features.
Then the forest shook with a thunderous roar.
The ground heaved beneath them. Trees snapped. Birds exploded from the canopy. Whatever monstrous thing had been pushing through the forest finally broke into view—a massive predator with jaws like a bone saw and scales the colour of ash. Its eyes burned with raw, feral intelligence.
Marla didn’t know its name, but the fear it stirred was primal.
Garrison shouted, “Move! MOVE!”
But the creature from the tear lifted a shifting arm—if it was an arm—and the forest around them warped. The air became thick, heavy, humming with unnatural energy.
Andrew grabbed Marla and pulled her backward. The massive dinosaur lunged at the flickering creature with a roar, snapping its crushing jaws.
The creature didn’t move.
Didn’t flinch.
The dinosaur’s head passed through it.
And then the giant beast shrieked in agony—its roar twisting into something wrong, its body spasming as if its nerves were being rewired.
Marla screamed.
Andrew hauled her down the slope.
Garrison called after them, “Don’t look back! Don’t—”
The forest behind them erupted in light and sound as the two horrors collided—one of flesh, one of something that didn’t belong in any world.
And the tear behind them pulsed again… growing wider.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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