The air had a pulse.
Aelis felt it first in her teeth—like a hum, low and nauseating, vibrating through the marrow of her skull. Every breath dragged something hot and rancid into her throat, something that made her gag reflex twitch before the air even reached her lungs. The tunnel ahead of her wasn't just dark—it twitched.
The walls moved.
Not all at once. Not like a living thing. But in shivers. Ripples. A million tiny, synchronized spasms. She squinted, lifted the dying beam of her flashlight. The beam cut through the pitch—
—and revealed nothing but insects.
The walls weren't walls.
They were beetles.
Thousands. Millions. Carapaces slick with a sheen like oil, piled together so tightly they looked like wet, armored muscle. They scuttled across one another in slow waves, like a tide of twitching shell and leg. When the light hit them, they paused—not in fear, but in attention. As if they had noticed her. As if they were waiting.
Aelis didn't blink. She couldn't. She just kept breathing that thick, insect-sweet air. Every inhale tasted like old honey and bile. Then—something landed on her shoulder.
She slapped it away.
Too late.
Her skin erupted. Not in pain—yet—but in movement. A surge. Like ants in her veins. She ripped her sleeve open.
The skin beneath was shifting.
It crawled.
Tiny black dots—egg sacs?—bulged beneath the dermis, writhing, pressing upward like boils that breathed. She screamed, slapped her arm against the wall, tore her flesh against the swarm.
The beetles parted for her blood.
They made room for it.
Then they drank it.
She stumbled backward, the buzzing rising in pitch. It wasn't coming from the walls anymore. It was inside her ears. Inside her skull. Her flashlight dimmed—flickered—died. And for a moment, in that pitch-black, she felt something skitter across her tongue.
She clamped her mouth shut.
Too slow.
One had gotten in.
She gagged, coughed, but her throat only constricted harder. She could feel it in there—legs scraping the inside of her windpipe, wings twitching. She reached into her mouth with trembling fingers, forced herself to vomit, to claw it out. But what came up wasn't one.
It was dozens.
They poured from her mouth like hot coffee grounds, clicking and wet. Some were still whole. Others were half-melted, their wings fused together with mucus and bile. And one—a larger one—stayed in her mouth. Bit down.
She screamed.
Her tongue split.
The air filled with a wet, shrill sound—almost like laughter, but insectile. It echoed off the tunnel walls as if something deep below the swarm had heard her suffer—and was amused.
She ran.
She didn't think. She couldn't. Her legs moved, slipping on the beetle-slick floor. The ground crunched beneath her—a thick, soft crunch. Larvae. Thousands of them. Each step popped their fat, white bodies like zits, their insides spraying up her legs in acidic streams.
Then—
She saw the nest.
It wasn't a structure. It was a body.
Hung from the ceiling like meat, a corpse swaddled in resin-thick web. It had no face left. Just a yawning pit where eyes and nose and mouth had once been, and something inside that pit pulsed. Not with breath—but with birth.
The corpse burst open.
Wings. Legs. A roar that wasn't sound, but motion—as hundreds of beetle-things spilled out, larger than dogs, hissing, their mandibles clacking wetly as they hit the ground running.
Aelis turned. Too late.
They reached her.
One sank its jaws into her thigh, pulling muscle loose like taffy. Another latched onto her arm, digging in, peeling the skin down in long, slow strips like it was unwrapping a gift. She screamed until her throat tore.
Her vision flickered.
And then—
She heard it.
A voice.
Not in her ears, but in her blood.
"Womb of rot... feeder of the next... you carry the first egg now."
Her belly cramped.
Hard.
Something squirmed inside her.
And she understood.
She was never meant to escape.
She was meant to hatch.