The ship was breathing.
Not with the hum of engines or pressurized vents—but a slow, wet inhale that rippled through the corridor walls. They weren't metal anymore. Not quite. Kiran pressed his gloved hand to the nearest panel. It gave under his touch—fleshy, warm. Something pulsed beneath. A vein?
He recoiled.
The overhead light stuttered, not electrically—but as if something unseen had blinked. The air smelled faintly of copper and something sweeter, rotting beneath. A humidity had crept in, slicking every surface with condensation that collected in the grooves like sweat in skinfolds.
"Deck four," he whispered into the comm. "There's... something wrong with the hull. It's soft."
But nothing came back. Not even static. Just the low thrum of the ship's breath, in and out, in and out, like waves breaking against the walls of a ribcage.
He moved forward.
The passageway narrowed—just slightly—but enough to make his shoulders graze the sides. He passed what used to be a viewport, now sealed over by a thin translucent membrane that twitched when he drew near, like a stitched eyelid trying not to open.
The wall shuddered beside him. A ripple. Like something inside had shifted its weight.
He kept walking.
Around the next bend, the floor changed. It was no longer the textured alloy tiling laid down by engineers on Earth, but something soft and fibrous. It gave beneath his boots with a sound like damp paper tearing.
There were no lights now—just bioluminescence. Threadlike growths curled from the corners, glowing faintly in pale blues and sickly yellows. They waved without wind.
Something dripped ahead.
He moved toward it, crouching. The fluid was warm. It stuck to his gloves like yolk.
Then a noise behind him—quiet, but deliberate. Not footsteps. A drag. Something being pulled.
He turned.
There was nothing there.
But the corridor was shorter than before.
And narrower.
Kiran turned back the way he came. Took two steps.
The corridor twisted—visibly, like muscle flexing beneath skin—and now the way he'd come was gone.
The walls around him pulsed. The ceiling arched down, breathing with labored cadence.
"Kiran," said a voice behind him.
He spun.
A woman stood there—barefoot, skin pale, hair damp with sweat or seawater. Her eyes glinted green, too green, unnatural, but not synthetic. Animal. She was barefoot, but made no sound when she walked.
"You shouldn't be here," she said softly, not in warning, but in disappointment.
"Who are you?" Kiran asked.
She tilted her head, eyes moving across him like a predator sizing up a wound.
"This place… it doesn't like you yet," she said, almost sadly.
"What is this place?" he asked.
She didn't answer. Just turned and walked deeper into the corridor. He didn't know why he followed, only that the ship would punish him if he didn't. The walls were listening. He could feel them shifting behind his back.
The woman moved like she knew every pulse and rhythm of this place. Her hands touched the walls like old friends, and they pulsed back in acknowledgment.
"I came aboard a vessel. I didn't sign up to walk through someone's lungs," Kiran muttered.
She stopped. Turned. Her eyes now black, reflecting only the movement of the walls.
"This isn't a ship," she said.
He stared at her.
"Then what is it?"
She didn't respond.
Behind them, the corridor groaned—sagged—as if something vast had rolled over in its sleep. They both turned.
A low rumble built in the walls. Not a sound, exactly. More like pressure. A presence swelling in the bones of the structure. The floor beneath them grew wet. A trail of fluid leaked in a serpentine path behind them.
"We have to move," she said.
"Back the way we came—"
"There is no back."
She grabbed his hand, her fingers ice-cold, and they ran.
The corridor contracted behind them, swallowing space. Ahead, the air shimmered—thicker now, like breathing underwater. The walls bent, tilted, became ribbed and warped and biological. Every surface seemed alert.
Then—a chamber. Wide, circular, beating faintly like the inside of a womb.
A dead end.
"We're trapped."
"No," she said. "It's just waiting."
He turned toward her. "You still haven't told me your name."
She laughed - a humourless cackle that ricocheted through the timber walls and beyond.
The chamber darkened. A hole opened in the wall—not a door, a wound. A gash peeled open, wet and glistening, the edges quivering.
Beyond: snowfall.
They stared.
Kiran took a step forward. The chill bit through his suit.
"What is this?" he asked.
Her voice was steady. "Somewhere else."
He looked back. The chamber was pulsing faster now. The corridor behind it collapsing, consumed by the ship's own closing throat.
They had no choice.
"Together," she said, holding out her hand again.
And as he took it, stepping into the snowfall beyond the wound, the ship gave one last, shuddering breath.
And then closed its eyes.
--
The snow fell sideways.
Not blown by wind—there was no wind—but drifting with the soft, deliberate motion of ash. Each flake landed without melting, clinging to his suit in fractal filaments. Too intricate. Too symmetrical. Not natural.
Kiran blinked.
The wound in the wall behind him had closed. Seamless now. Gone. As if the ship had never been there. As if it had exhaled them from its lungs like phlegm it no longer needed.
He turned to the woman. Her bare feet pressed into the white crust without leaving prints.
"Where are we?" he asked.
She didn't look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the horizon—if it could be called that. It bent. Folded. Like distance had been warped by something too large to see directly.
"This place doesn't have a name," she said at last. "Not one you'd survive hearing."
He studied her. Pale. Unaged. Hair stiff with frozen salt. Her eyes weren't human. They only wore the idea of being human. The same way parasites wear their hosts.
Kiran swallowed the rising panic in his throat.
"Is it alive?"
The land stretched out into ridges, soft dunes of snow and bone. Great spine-like protrusions arced from the ground in slow, looping curves, half-buried. Some hummed—low vibrations that vibrated the enamel of his teeth.
The woman turned.
"You ask the wrong questions."
"Then tell me what the right ones are."
She didn't.
She began walking.
Kiran followed, his boots crunching where her feet didn't. The light—if there was a source—was constant, directionless, a silver haze that made it impossible to tell if it was morning or midnight. The sky was the color of molted skin.
Up ahead, a structure—if it could be called that. Not built. Not engineered. Grown.
It rose from the snow like the stump of a great molar, roots still raw with sinew. A cathedral made of cartilage. Pulsing slightly.
The woman approached and laid her palm on its surface. The walls responded, parting not like doors but like eyelids.
Inside: warmth. Moisture. The smell of old teeth.
Kiran hesitated.
She was already stepping inside.
"What is this?" he asked, wiping snow from his visor.
She looked back. Her face unreadable.
"Shelter," she said. "Or a mouth. Depending how long we stay."
No choice.
He stepped in.
The walls closed behind them—wet, fibrous, sealing with a sigh. The air tasted metallic, and thick veins climbed the interior walls like ivy. In the center, a pit. Wide. Circular. Shaped exactly like the memory of a scream.
"Rest," she said, settling by the edge of the pit. "You'll need it."
"I don't need—"
But he did. His limbs were beginning to shake. Not from cold. From something deeper. A weight. Like the gravity here was heavier, but only on his thoughts.
He sat.
The silence was alive.
Then: a noise.
From inside the pit.
It was not a roar. It was not a voice. It was the sound of remembering—something old and buried trying to scratch its way out of the folds of his mind.
Kiran leaned forward.
"You hear it too?" he asked.
She nodded. "It knows we're here."
"What does?"
"This land. It has no god. It is god."
Kiran stared down into the pit.
Shapes moved there—softly, writhing under a film of translucent membrane. Limbs half-formed. Eyes without sockets. Teeth with no mouths to belong to.
"Why bring me here?" he asked.
She was quiet.
Then, "Because it called you."
He met her eyes.
"That's not an answer."
Her gaze was calm. Like she was waiting for a storm she knew couldn't be stopped.
"No," she said. "It's a beginning."
Then the walls began to throb.
And the pit opened its eye.
A wet, blinking thing with a slit pupil that mirrored the silver sky.
It had seen him.
All of him.
Kiran froze.
The snow outside began to fall upward.
He didn't know it yet—but the land had accepted him.
And that was far, far worse than being rejected.