The creature awoke to metal teeth gnawing at the abyss.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Not footsteps—something hungrier. He coiled among the rocks, his gifted gold skin flickering like a dying star.
The humans had returned.
But these were not the same.
Through the cracks of his hiding place, he watched them pass:
Three figures shrouded in thick, fibrous hides, faces swallowed by bone masks. No fire-torches—only crystal spheres bleeding cold blue light.
One halted before his crevice.
The creature stopped breathing (since when had he learned to do that?).
The human raised its sphere. Light licked the walls as it spoke:
"Fresh markings here. Kharis larvae. We move before the Upper City scum arrives."
A voice like wet silk, not a growl.
The creature's claws dug into stone.
I need to hear it again.
They pressed onward, their alien words weaving patterns:
— "Kharis" (fingers brushing bioluminescent veins).
— "Vermis" (as crystal husks cracked underfoot).
— "Nyx" (a whisper to the void below).
The creature followed in liquid silence, learning their rituals:
— The raised fist that meant stop.
— The way they traced their masks before sipping from hidden flasks.
— The quick, shallow breaths that meant fear.
Then—the smallest one fell behind.
Thin as a cracked bone. A fractured mask revealed one eye:
Green. (Like the glowing veins in the walls? Like poison?)
The boy knelt by a puddle, set his light-sphere aside, and pulled something from his satchel—
A crystal butterfly, wings dulled by death.
He placed it on the water's skin. Murmured words.
The creature crept closer.
Why don't I fear him?
The boy looked up.
Their eyes met.
His pupils swallowed the light.
But he didn't scream. Only reached out, fingers trembling toward the creature's stolen gold.
The creature hissed back.
The human breathed a new word:
"Solitary…"
A shout shattered the moment:
"Lirin! Move!"
The boy—Lirin?—jerked upright. But as he fled, he let something fall:
A shard of his broken mask.
When the humans vanished, the creature lifted the fragment.
One side: smooth as ice.
The other: raw as a fresh wound.
His reflection stared back—
Eyes black and vast.
Teeth like shattered glass.
And his skin… now a living mosaic, gold bleeding into natural darkness.
He turned the shard.
There—two spirals, carved deep, twisting into each other.
Symbol? Name? Or a map to something worse?
He tucked it beneath his golden patches, where the light would keep it secret.
That night, the abyss whispered new sounds:
— Laughter that didn't cut.
— Words soft as moss on stone.
— "Lirin"—a taste like moonlight through water.
At dawn, his throat twisted itself.
He tried to shape the sounds.
What emerged was broken.
Guttural.
But his.
Later, the walls trembled wrong.
Not the usual hum. This was jagged, reeking of rusted metal and bile.
Something monstrous moved in the deep tunnels.
Once, he would've fled.
Now, he pressed the mask-shard to his chest and stood his ground.
Gold hid him.
The carving burned.
And the creature bared his teeth—
not in fear, but challenge.
Today… he needed to see.
He crawled to the ledge. Looked down.
It filled the world.
A cancer of tentacles thrashing around a central maw—dozens of jaws gnashing out of sync, dripping black saliva that ate holes in the stone.
But the eyes were worse.
They sprouted like tumors across its flesh—yellow irises spinning wildly, each seeing a different nightmare.
One locked onto him.
His golden skin ran cold.
He leapt back—a tentacle lanced where his head had been. Acid vaporized the ledge.
He ran.
The tunnels he'd known since birth betrayed him—
Cracks too narrow.
Stone too rotten.
Behind him, the thing unspooled, slow but inevitable as decay.
A sharp turn—his foot caught on something soft.
One of the glowing creatures.
No time for gentleness. He slammed it against the ground, coating his claws in liquid light, and stabbed the nearest eye.
The monster screamed in a thousand voices.
He ran.
Not fast enough.
Acidic flesh flayed his side, stripping skin to muscle.
Pain painted colors behind his eyelids—colors that didn't exist.
He wormed into a fissure, acid and golden blood fizzing together.
The thing couldn't follow.
But its remaining eyes burned into him—not with hunger.
Hatred.
Then—it spoke.
Not in words. In images that cracked his mind:
— The abyss empty of all but hooks strung with human corpses.
— Himself swallowed whole, over and over, each death slower.
A scream tore from his throat—
(or was it the monster's voice using his lungs?)
He woke in a crevice, his wound sealed with a bioluminescent crust.
The mask shard still clung to his chest, glued by dried blood.
Outside, the abyss pretended nothing had happened.
But he knew:
This fear wasn't of death.
It was of being known.
Of existing in something's memory
as prey.