Chapter Text
Everything was burning.
Not the field — that still swayed gently beneath the dim glow of distant streetlights — but her nerves, her lungs, her bloodstream. Fire threaded through her veins like it had always belonged there.
Copper filled her mouth. At least her senses were as sharp as ever.
The grass beneath her was soft. Recently cut. The scent of summer clung to it — clover and damp soil and the faint sweetness of something blooming nearby. It was the kind of place kids played tag. The kind of place parents watched fireworks.
The kind of place nothing monstrous shouldn't exist.
Sam stared at the familiar outline of her hometown sky. No dimensional rifts. No glowing fractures. Just stars.
I'm dying.
The thought was simple. Clean.
A deep gash stretched from her shoulder to the opposite side of her ribs, blood soaking into her white shirt in spreading constellations of red. Warmth clung to her hairline, slid behind her ears, pooled in the hollow of her neck.
And yet—
Move.
Something inside her refused the stillness. It scratched at her bones. Snapped at her muscles.
Move.
"Such a tiny, fragile little thing."
The voice didn't belong in this field.
It clicked when it spoke. Wet. Inhuman. Like teeth rearranging themselves mid-sentence.
A shadow loomed over her. Tall. Crooked at the joints. Its silhouette barely fit against the familiar backdrop of telephone poles and distant houses.
An elongated claw dragged lazily through the blood soaking her shirt.
It licked the smear.
"Your spirit is weak," it murmured, almost disappointed. "Barely worth the effort."
The insult stung more than the wound.
If she weren't paralyzed by whatever venom now slithered through her veins, she might've tried to laugh in its face. Or spit blood at it.
Instead, her limbs felt submerged in tar.
Had it only been moments since it struck her?
Time felt stretched thin — like gum pulled too far.
"If you're still conscious," it continued, lowering itself until its face hovered just above hers, head tilting with a sharp, unnatural crack, "then you must be clinging to something."
Its breath was cold.
"People only endure when they have something."
Clinging to something.
Her thoughts drifted — slipping past the pain, past the fear.
Her brother's voice over the phone.
The way his calls became shorter.
Then fewer.
Then gone.
The empty mailbox.
The silence that followed.
I'll find you.
That had been the promise.
Her fingers twitched in the grass.
The creature paused.
The wind shifted.
The blood soaking into the earth beneath her trembled — subtle, almost shy — like it had heard its name.
"...Ah," the creature breathed.
Her pulse beat once.
Harder.
The copper taste thickened.
The fire in her veins didn't feel like death anymore.
It felt like something waking up.
And in the quiet, peaceful field of her childhood hometown — under stars that had watched her grow up — something ancient and hungry began to stir in response.
Sam wasn't done yet.