Consciousness didn't arrive like the flip of a switch. It came in waves—slow, nauseating waves that brought with them the certainty that something had gone fundamentally, irreversibly wrong.
Elijah's eyes opened to the same sterile room. Same chair. Same harsh fluorescent lighting that made everything look flat and lifeless. But the restraints that had held him down were gone now, leaving angry red marks around his wrists and ankles. The massive overhead apparatus—that mechanical spider of needles and scanning equipment—had retracted into the ceiling like a bad memory trying to hide itself.
The masked figures were nowhere to be seen.
For one beautiful, desperate moment, hope bloomed in his chest like a flower fighting its way through concrete. Maybe it had all been a nightmare. Maybe he'd passed out from the stress and fear, and his mind had conjured the whole horrific scenario. Maybe he was still at the academy, still just a kid trying to survive in a world that had already taken everything from him.
Then he tried to turn his head.
Pain exploded at the base of his skull—sharp, localized, and completely unlike anything he'd ever felt before. It wasn't the dull ache of a bruise or even the clean hurt of a cut. This was internal, invasive, as if someone had driven a white-hot needle directly into his spinal column and left it there to burn.
He gasped, the sound thin and pathetic in the empty room. His hand shot up instinctively, fingers scrambling across the back of his neck, searching for blood, for stitches, for some explanation of this foreign agony.
There was nothing.
No bandage. No wound. Just smooth skin, maybe a degree or two warmer than it should be. But when his trembling fingers pressed down, he felt it—a small, hard ridge beneath the surface. No larger than a grain of rice. Seated directly against the bone of his spine, as if it had always been there.
As if it belonged there.
"No," he whispered to the empty room. "No, no, no—"
Voices filtered through from somewhere beyond a translucent curtain he hadn't noticed before. Clinical. Satisfied. Terrifyingly casual.
"Subject Epsilon shows full somatic integration. Zero rejection markers detected."
"Biometric synchronization is... remarkable. Better than we projected. The uptake is essentially instantaneous. The vessel isn't just accepting the implant—it's actively bonding with it."
"Make sure that's logged. Phase two is a complete success. The conduit is live and responsive."
Conduit. Vessel. Subject Epsilon.
The words wormed their way into Elijah's consciousness, each one a small violation. They weren't talking about him like he was a person. He was a container. A tool. A thing to be used.
The pain in his neck changed. The sharp sting evolved into something worse—a deep, rhythmic throbbing that pulsed in time with his heartbeat but somehow out of sync with it, creating a horrible discordant sensation that made his stomach turn.
Then the crawling began.
It felt like insects—thousands of them—moving beneath his skin. Not on it, where he could brush them away or scratch them off, but under it. Deep in the muscle tissue of his neck, spreading upward into the base of his skull, downward between his shoulder blades. Tiny legs made of static electricity and needlepoint sensations, burrowing, exploring, connecting things that should never be connected.
The scream that tore from his throat was high-pitched and boyish, stripped of any pretense of bravery or strength. It was the sound of pure, animal terror.
As the cry left his lips, something changed in the air around him.
The space near his head shimmered like heat rising from summer pavement. From the implant site at the base of his neck, energy began to discharge—not electricity exactly, but something else entirely. A spectrum of reddish light, faint and ghostly, bleeding into the air in thin, twisting tendrils. It cast strange shadows on the white walls, making them pulse and writhe like living things.
The crawling sensation pushed deeper, invading not just his body now but his mind itself.
The room began to fracture.
The clean, sterile lines of the laboratory didn't vanish—that would have been a mercy. Instead, they bled like watercolors left in the rain, dissolving and reforming into something else. Something that existed in the same space but shouldn't, couldn't, defied every law of reality Elijah thought he understood.
He was in two places at once.
Still strapped to the chair in the laboratory, but also—
—standing on cracked black soil that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Jagged rocks the color of dried blood thrust up from the earth like broken teeth. Above him, a sky that wasn't a sky churned with reddish clouds, lit from within by a source that provided no warmth, only a sickly illumination that made everything look diseased.
The air tasted metallic. Thin. Wrong.
A low hum vibrated through everything—through the ground, through his bones, through his teeth. It was the sound of vast machinery grinding away somewhere just beyond perception, or maybe it was the sound of reality itself coming apart at the seams.
This landscape was alien in the truest sense of the word. Its geometry was severe and hostile, designed—if it was designed at all—without any consideration for human comfort or comprehension. It was a place of profound desolation, and looking at it made something deep in Elijah's hindbrain scream that he didn't belong here, that nothing living should be here.
But he wasn't alone.
In the space where the monitoring console had been in the laboratory, something stood. Something that wore the shape of consciousness the way a human might wear a suit—ill-fitting and wrong.
The Parasite.
There was no other word for it. No better description. It stood on too many legs—six, eight, maybe more, he couldn't force his eyes to count them properly. Each limb was jointed wrong, covered in chitinous plates that gleamed with an oily sheen, like a nightmare fusion of insect and crustacean that evolution had never intended.
Its central body was a pulsating sack of semi-translucent flesh. He could see things moving inside it—dark shapes shifting and reorganizing, as if it was digesting something even now. Thorny protrusions jutted from its surface at random intervals, and thick, cord-like tendrils emerged from underneath, writhing with independent purpose.
It had no face in any recognizable sense. Just a shifting region of clustered dark pits that might have been eyes—or might have been something worse. And below that, a ragged maw that constantly reformed itself, the edges of it dripping with a silvery, viscous fluid that hissed and steamed where it hit the black soil.
Then it smiled.
The gesture was an arrangement of shadows and tension around that maw, a terrible pantomime of human expression that radiated malice so profound it felt like a physical cold seeping into Elijah's bones.
He tried to scream. Tried to run. Tried to do anything except stand there and stare at this impossible horror.
But in both worlds—the laboratory and this nightmare realm—his body refused to obey. He was paralyzed, trapped between realities, able only to shake with a fine, relentless tremor that started in his core and radiated outward until his entire body vibrated with pure, undiluted terror.
The Parasite's voice filled his skull.
It wasn't a sound—not in any conventional sense. There were no words traveling through the air, no vibrations hitting his eardrums. Instead, it was a direct impression, a pressure behind his eyes that felt oily and ancient. It slithered through his thoughts like something alive, leaving a residue of wrongness in its wake.
"Little piece of food..."
The words themselves were almost gentle, almost kind. But the intent behind them—the vast, hungry consciousness that shaped them—perverted that gentleness into something vicious. It was the voice of a predator speaking softly to prey, savoring the moment before the kill.
"Do not fear the teeth, little morsel. Fear the digestion. It will be slow. Exquisite. You are a fresh spring, a well of delicious, untapped potential just waiting to be consumed."
The crawling sensation in Elijah's neck and spine intensified, becoming something more than just discomfort. It was a pulling now, a drawing sensation, as if something was actively siphoning the life force from his body one drop at a time.
"For now, I will use you. A symbiotic piece in a much larger game. You will walk your world, live your little life, face your little challenges. And all the while, you will feed me. Your struggles, your triumphs, your pain, your growth—all of it converts. All of it becomes Aetherflux, flowing through that beautiful little implant we've given you. A sweet, endless trickle for me to sip at my leisure."
Elijah's mouth moved, trying to form words, trying to beg or curse or plead for this to stop. But no sound came out. He was voiceless in his own body.
"The strength you accumulate,"* the voice continued, taking on an almost ecstatic quality, *"the resilience you build using my race's gift—the Orrhion flowing through your veins—it all marinates you. Makes you richer. More potent. More delicious. You'll fight and strive and overcome, never knowing that every victory makes you a better meal."
The Parasite leaned closer, its massive form blotting out the churning red sky. Those dark pits that might have been eyes bore into him, and Elijah felt something inside his mind begin to crack under the pressure of that gaze.
"And when the time is ripe... when you are fat with power and purpose, when you've accumulated all that lovely potential... I will find you in the dark between worlds. And I will unspool you. I will swallow the symphony of your being whole, every note and harmony, every discord and resolution. Your light will quench a thirst you cannot possibly comprehend."
The thing's maw opened wider, impossibly wide, revealing layers of teeth that spiraled inward into darkness. Elijah could see himself falling into that darkness, dissolving into nothing while something vast and terrible fed on the dissolution.
Then the Parasite's presence slammed into his mind with the force of a physical blow.
It wasn't sleep that came for him. It wasn't unconsciousness or even madness—though madness might have been kinder. Instead, it was a forced reprogramming, a scrambling of his brain's ability to process what had just happened. The terror, the pain, the implant, the voice, the nightmare realm—all of it was being wrapped in layers of mental fog, labeled as dream, as hallucination, as the fevered imaginings of a stressed and traumatized mind.
The memories were still there—he could feel them, solid and real—but they were being pushed down into the deepest, most inaccessible vault of his psyche. Locked away where conscious thought couldn't reach them. Where they would fester and rot in the darkness, influencing him from below the surface of awareness.
The world dissolved into a roar of static and red light.
And somewhere very far away, or maybe very close, a boy named Elijah screamed into the void and received no answer except the echo of his own terror.
When the darkness finally took him, it felt less like mercy and more like a brief intermission before the real horror began.