Huff. . Huff . .
..why is this happening to me..!
His breath tore through his throat in ragged gasps, each exhale sharp and burning. Footsteps pounded against the ground—his own—a frantic, thunderous rhythm that matched the panicked hammering in his chest. Behind him, it came. Always behind. Unrelenting. Closer with every step. No matter how fast he ran, the distance shrank.
No!... please… move faster…!
He screamed the words inside his skull, urging his frail, trembling legs to obey—but they felt like rotted wood, splintering with every step. Each footfall was a battle, a betrayal of time and age. His lungs burned. His vision blurred. Behind him, the sound—wet, dragging, impossibly close—grew louder.
Then, just ahead. Salvation?
A slit in the wall. A gap barely wider than his shoulders. It wasn't a hiding place. It was a gamble. A whisper of a chance. But hope was the only thing more desperate than his breathing.
He stumbled toward it, threw himself into the crevice, and smeared himself with the wall's damp, decaying filth—muck and mold clinging to his skin like rot. He pressed himself flat, every heartbeat threatening to give him away.
It passed.
God. It passed.
A shape moved inches from him—a nightmare sewn together by madness. The creature lurched forward in twitching spasms, its form grotesque: arms where they shouldn't be, heads stitched into shoulders, a ribcage weeping pus from its seams. The patchwork skin was stretched too tight in places, sagging in others. Every breath it took made its torso balloon outward like something bloated and drowned, then collapse with a sound like meat hitting stone.
It paused.
It sniffed.
He didn't breathe. He didn't dare blink.
And then… it moved on. Slowly. As if... it wasn't done searching.
As the creature pressed onward, dragging its grotesque weight down the corridor, a breath tore from his lips—shaky, involuntary. He hadn't meant to exhale. But his lungs screamed for air, and now it was too late.
A wet choke burst from his throat as saliva caught mid-swallow. He clamped a hand over his mouth, but the sound had already escaped—a pitiful, gurgling gasp. His eyes widened in panic. Tears poured freely now, hot against the cold grime smeared across his face. They weren't from sorrow. They were from pure, suffocating terror.
His body was betraying him, shaking so hard he feared the vibrations would echo off the walls. He couldn't stop it. Couldn't stop the cold that had sunken into his bones, the dread that clawed at his insides. Every inch of him screamed to run, but his limbs had lost the rhythm of walking—much less sprinting.
So he did the only thing left.
He slid down, pressing his stomach to the floor, the damp filth seeping through his clothes. Inch by inch, he crawled—like a dying insect—away from the direction the thing had gone. Each movement was agony, slow and jerky, his fingers clutching at cracks in the stone to pull himself forward.
He couldn't help but imagine it turning back. Hearing him. Smelling his fear. Grabbing him from behind with a dozen mismatched hands and dragging him into the dark.
He didn't dare look. If he turned, he might scream.
If he screamed, he would die.
So he crawled. Blind. Broken.
Praying to no god he believed in that the monster wouldn't hear his tears.
He dragged himself through the mud, inch by agonizing inch, until his arms felt like sacks of stone and his breath came in sharp, pitiful gasps. The cold earth clung to his body like a second skin, sucking the last warmth from his bones. But still, he moved—driven only by the fading instinct to survive.
Then, finally, the sounds behind him vanished.
No squelching footsteps.
No breath like bloated bellows.
Just the steady drum of rain and the whisper of wind through mist.
Relief washed over him like a dying ember of light.
That thing... it was gone.
His trembling slowed. His vision, foggy from panic, began to clear enough for him to take in his surroundings. A mist-choked valley stretched before him, shallow but unforgiving. The walls rose just high enough to mock escape—slicked with rain, too treacherous to climb without gear. The earth beneath him was a slurry of mud and rot. He was trapped in nature's grave, open-skyed and indifferent.
His body eased. But with that stillness came the crash—the sudden, brutal emptiness left behind when the adrenaline bled away.
His limbs screamed in protest. His back ached. His mind teetered on the edge of collapse.
He couldn't run anymore. He couldn't even stand.
He knew the truth: if he blacked out here, in the open, it would find him. Or something else would.
Desperately, he scanned the blurred landscape, but the fog devoured everything. No shelter. No structure. Just mud and wet stone and silence. Then—a bush. Low. Wide. Barely enough to conceal his torso, but it was all he had. No time to weigh options. No strength to hesitate.
He crawled to it like a man dragging himself to his own grave.
As he pulled his broken body beneath the branches, his legs still exposed to the world, a bitter, hollow thought echoed in his mind:
"If it's my fate to die here… so be it. I'm so tired…"
The cold cradled him like a coffin. His eyelids fluttered, heavy as lead.
And then—darkness.
He passed out to the sound of rain, not knowing if he'd ever open his eyes again.