The sky was wrong.
Gray, not from clouds, but from ash. It rained in flakes—soft as snow, but stinking of burnt teeth and old meat. The buildings, what remained of them, stood like ribs of a long-dead colossus. Concrete wept rust. Windows gaped, shattered and black, as if the structures themselves had seen too much and couldn't close their eyes anymore.
Aelis limped through the hollow city, her face raw beneath the bandages, barely clinging to the tatters of sanity. Her arm still itched where the veins had held her. Not an itch exactly. A pulse. Like something was breathing under her skin.
She followed the sound of singing.
Faint. Childlike. Wrong.
Not melodic—but wet.
The kind of sound you'd hear through a drainpipe in hell.
She crept down an alley that bled rust from every brick. Flies buzzed in lazy spirals overhead. Something shifted beneath the asphalt—like skin stretching over a skull.
And then she saw them.
Children.
Or what used to be.
They stood in a half-circle in the courtyard of an abandoned church, heads tilted back, mouths agape. No tongues. Each had been bitten off, clean. The stumps stitched shut with black thread, like sewn-up secrets. And from their open throats came that horrific song—not made of words, but of wetness. Gurgles. Moans. A rhythm older than language.
They sang to something.
And it answered.
A shape hovered above the altar where the pulpit once stood. Floating. Wrong. A tangle of limbs—too many—and all of them backward. Heads dangled from it like pendulums. Not just human heads—animal, insect, even one that looked like it had once belonged to a mannequin.
It spun slowly.
And whispered.
The children fell to their knees.
Some clawed at their ears. Others peeled the skin from their faces in long strips. One boy—maybe ten—rammed a rusted spoon into his eye socket and twisted. Aelis couldn't scream.
The shape noticed her.
It did not turn.
It bent.
Reality curved around it—air folding like wet fabric. And as it twisted to face her, its heads began to sing back—a perfect mimicry of the children's voices.
Only deeper.
Like the sound of rotted lungs echoing in a cathedral of bone.
Aelis turned to run.
But the children were behind her now.
And they had no eyes.
Only mouths. So many. Split across cheeks, foreheads, palms.
One girl whispered without speaking:
"They told us things you can't unhear."
Another child approached.
Their chest opened—not cut, but unzipped—revealing a nest.
Teeth.
Inside, not organs.
But a hive.
Living things swarmed within it. Laughter buzzed from it. Insectile. Infectious.
Aelis fell to her knees. Clutched her ears.
The hymn grew louder.
And then it stopped.
Silence.
Every child turned at once.
Their heads twitched in perfect sync, bones cracking, necks bending at unnatural angles.
One voice spoke from all of them:
"We remember your face, mother.Now remember ours."
And her mind—
Snapped.