1. Who’s There?

The bathroom is humid. The mirror over the sink is foggy. A woman stands before it, a pale robe tied over the curve of her pregnant stomach. Her hands rest on her belly, not softly. They press down, like she’s testing the firmness of an unripe fruit. Inside her, the baby moves. The woman doesn’t smile. Her eyes in the glass are flat and cool. She looks tired, and something else. Resentful, maybe. Afraid. The light above the sink buzzes, flickers for one second, and goes steady. She turns off the light and leaves the room.

The point of view pulls back. Fast. You are outside the house on a quiet, damp street. The upstairs light goes out. You are rising fast into the sky. The street shrinks, becomes a map, then a cluster of lights. The city becomes a glowing patch on the edge of the land, then the land itself is just a blue-green ball hanging in black space. The ball shrinks to a dot, then to nothing.

Now there is only the dark and the stars. And something else. A shape, blacker than the space around it. A jagged, porous rock that doesn’t reflect light but eats it. You are pulled toward a crack in its surface. Inside, the walls are smooth and strange, like polished bone. They glow with a faint, sickly purple light that has no source. The air smells wrong: like electricity and rotting flowers.

In the center of the cavern, something floats. It looks like a woman made of black smoke and old grief. Its form shifts and wavers. Long strands of darkness float around its head like hair. It is facing a shelf in the rock.

On the shelf are four small figurines. They are not toys. The first figurine is of a stiff elderly woman with a stern posture. Its face has no features, but it feels judgmental. The second figurine is sharp, with geometric angles. Its face looks like that of a woman in her early 40’s. It is holding a tiny black mirror. The third figurine is faint, almost see-through, with a grey smudge on its cheek. The fourth figurine is flashy, covered in specks of glitter, standing defiantly. Next to the figurines is a small heap of molding material. Why was she making these figurines?

The smoke-woman extends a wisp of itself toward the first figurine. “You will not be its mother. You will be its maker. You will be its judge. You will force it to be perfect, so it can never judge you back.” As the voice speaks, the stern figurine changes. Lines of permanent disapproval appear on its blank face. Its hand curls, as if now holding a tool.

The wisp moves to the sharp, angular figurine. “You will be born into a quiet house full of rules. The first thing you will learn is how to be measured. The second thing you will learn is that you are wrong. You will look for love and find a checklist. You will try to pass the test. You will fail. You will always fail. Then you will stop trying to pass. You will take the checklist. You will become the test-giver. You will find someone else to fail.” The sharp figurine hardens. The black mirror in its hands seems to swallow the little light in the room.

The wisp moves to the faint, translucent figurine. The touch is slow, almost gentle. “You will enter a war you did not start. Your first feeling will be confusion. Your second will be guilt. You will learn that love is something you earn after a correction. You will learn that silence is better than making a mistake. You will learn to make yourself small, quiet, empty. You will love the voice that tells you what is wrong with you. You will think it is the only one that cares.” The grey smudge on the figurine’s cheek darkens, becomes a stain.

Finally, the wisp flicks at the glittering figure. You are the mistake. The unwanted color. You will be sent away to be unmade. You will not break. You will learn to steal. To steal light, space, attention. You will build a shield out of everything they hate. Your survival will be your revenge.

The smoke-woman seems satisfied. Faint threads of glowing blue light now connect the four figurines, making a small, complex web. A circuit. A low hum fills the chamber. The smoke-woman is chanting in a language that isn’t words. It is the sound of a spell cast. The smell of a curse. The feeling of a door being locked. It is planning. It is giving the sharp figurine a name: Vivian. It is telling the stain on the faint figurine to grow. This is its garden. These are its seeds. It is watering them with poison, waiting for the harvest.

A jolt of pure fear goes through you. The humming stops. Everything is still. The smoke-woman turns its head. Slowly. It is searching. The purple light winks out. A new light blooms from its core. It is a deep, angry red light scattering in all directions, and towards you. In the red light, the figurines look like raw wounds.

“Khalath’rel?” it calls. Silence. The figure trembles with rage. It knows Khalath’rel is not here. Someone else is. Or something else is. The chamber holds its breath. You hold your breath.

The demon’s form coils in on itself, a nest of agitated shadows. It tries again, the command sharper, laced with a threat:

“GHAUL-VRETH... K’SHAI!”

Nothing. No familiar, chilling counter-presence. No sly, oily laughter in the dark. Khalath’rel, its rival, its sibling who usually visits, is absent. This intrusion is not his. A new sensorium is engaged. The demon casts out a finer, subtler net, not for demonic signatures this time, but for the biological spoor of lesser realms. It tastes the air of its own chamber not for magic, but for chemistry. Will the trial and error work?

And there it is. A faint, fleeting tang. Adrenaline. The sharp, coppery scent of cortisol. The humid, salty puff of a sudden, sweating fear. And beneath it, the rhythmic, vulnerable thump-thump-thump sound of a mammalian heart in distress, a pulse echoing in a space with no blood. It was so small. So warm. So... alive.

You were so scared. Your heartbeat gave you away. The demon’s shock was absolute. A human? Here? In this realm? This was not just an intrusion; it was a desecration. A blasphemy. An impossibility. The raw, pulsing stuff of a mortal consciousness was leaking into her sacred, curated dark like a stain.

The rage that followed was incandescent. The Demonese words died in her throat, rendered useless. This was not a matter for the celestial tongue. This required a language the stain would understand. She forged the words in the furnace of her wrath. The shift was violent. The grinding, multi-layered static of Demonese collapsed, replaced by a single, focused, and savagely articulated shout in the language of the intruder:

“WHO IS THERE?” The voice is a physical force, shaking the cave. The words are in English, but warped and ugly.

“HOW DID YOU GET HERE?”

The red light becomes a beam, slicing through the darkness, searching. It passes over you. A cold so deep it burns your thoughts. You freeze. The demon is looking for you. Its voice is still ricocheting on the walls of the cave.

The smoke-woman begins to dissolve into a cloud of buzzing red particles. The cloud fills the cavern, searching for you, hungry and intelligent. The red cloud rushes forward. It is everywhere. There is no escape. Only the final image: four figurines on a shelf, connected by glowing threads of energy.

You wake up from the dream. You read on...