“I’ll see if there are supplies we could use here, go check what is down there,” Levi told Asher.
Asher frowned. “We should stick together.”
“It’s a nurse’s office, not Dr. Faine’s lab, it will be fine.” Levi wasn’t sure it would be fine, but they still had nothing to go on. How was he going to beat the game with nothing?
I’m willing to die a few more times if it advances the game. It means we’ll be out of here faster.
Asher narrowed his eyes. “Sixty seconds, then we meet back in the hall. Deal?”
“Deal.” Levi gave him a little push towards the door further up.
As Levi creaked open the medical office, he peaked inside. It was just a standard room space, slightly converted with cots, a desk, and a small exam area. Nothing looked strange. He slipped inside the room, moving to the exam area first. He wasn’t sure what this scenario would do yet, but it was never a bad thing to have medical supplies.
He felt a draft of cold air against his left side and glanced up from the pile of bandages and medicines he was forming on the counter. There was a crack in the window with a hole in the center, like something small and heavy had once been thrown at it. The crack fractured further as fog poured through it.
Fuck.
Levi rushed to the door, but a freezing draft hit him like a wall and the door slammed shut. He grabbed the handle and pulled, but it remained closed.This is bad. This is really fucking bad. He planted a foot on the door frame and yanked.
Nothing.
“ASHER!” Levi shouted.
The cold hit him harder, forming ice on the door handle so fast it felt like it burned as the air the temperature dropped all at once. His breath came in thick white puffs as he turned to look at the window.
It exploded inward.
The fog poured into the room, racing across the ground and up the sides of the walls like liquid, rising from the floor, past his ankles, his knees, his waist. The cold was so intense his muscles contracted and his hands went numb at his sides.
“Levi!” Asher’s voice came through the door, his fists pounding on the outside of it.
The thoughts arrived before he could respond, freezing his vocal chords in his throat. His knees buckled and he was on his hands and knees in fog that was up to his chest and still rising.
Nobody would notice if you weren’t here.
It was louder than last night, clearer, not a whisper anymore.
Nobody has ever noticed you. Nobody ever will. You’ve never mattered.
He tried to push back.Fuck off, this is a game. I matter to Asher—
You know Asher isn’t real. You’ll be alone when this ends. Just like before.
That went through everything he had — every defense, every wall, gone.
First you kill your brother, and now you’ll kill Asher when you leave. He can’t exist without you. You will kill him. You’ll be alone. You never mattered.
“Fuck off!” Levi shouted. The fog kept rising, his hands felt stiff on the floor, linoleum freezing under his palms, his vision narrowing.
He staggered up to one knee as his ears began to ring, the sound of Asher’s voice and fists at the door fading. The fog above his head shifted. The grey air condensing against the ceiling, gathering, taking on a shape.
He looked up.
The thing pressed against the high ceiling was folded — bent at the shoulders, waist, and knees because the room couldn’t accommodate its height, and bent again in places that weren’t joints. The fog hardened into limbs that weren’t limbs, branches that weren’t branches, a body grown rather than built with legs ending in claws made of root that had pierced the linoleum and drawn up around themselves like something taking hold.
Long ragged folds of grey draped from shoulders that weren’t shoulders, hanging in tatters around it, fraying into vines at the hem, and from within the hood stared back a yellowed animal’s skull. Long hollow snout, its mandible loose, seemingly anchored to nothing, the dark sockets oriented toward him, and the entire skull was adorned with antlers that forked through thecloak and forked again until they brushed the ceiling on both sides, scraping the plaster as the head shifted. From beneath the skull, where there should have been a neck, hung a curtain of black hair — long, wet-looking, falling past where shoulders would have been on something built right.
The cold coming off it was different from the fog’s cold. Personal.
