Chapter Text
Cold air flooded your lungs like shards of broken glass.
Your first breath was a mistake - too sharp, too much, your chest seizing as the cold carved its way in. You coughed, hard, the sound ugly and wet and swallowed entirely by the dark. When it passed, you lay still and breathed through your nose instead, trying to make sense of things.
There was nothing to make sense of. There was only dark, and cold, and the flat press of metal against your back.
Your hands moved before your mind caught up with them, dragging across the surface above you - close, too close, inches from your face. Smooth. Seamed. The interior curve of something like a lid.
A coffin.
No. You shoved the thought down and pushed both palms flat against the ceiling of the thing, feeling for any give. There was none. You tried again, harder, knuckles throbbing with the cold as they connected with a dull, protesting whine of metal. A seam of light bled in - pale and faint, threading down across your face like it didn't quite know what to do with itself.
You pressed your eye to the gap.
Green. Soft, impossible green - grass, real grass, growing out of what looked like the floor of some vast cavern. Stalactites above, dripping with something luminescent. Pale moths drifted between them, their wings throwing quiet light across the stone. And in the middle of all of it, standing with their back half-turned to you, was a figure.
Red cloak. White mask. Still as a portrait.
You opened your mouth to call out and got another cough instead, ragged and humiliating, scraped out of the bottom of your lungs by the cold.
It was enough.
The figure turned.
You had about half a second to register the mask angling toward you before a silver blade punched through the gap you'd been looking through, missing your face by a margin you would think about later, alone, at length. You jolted back on pure reflex, spine hitting the base of the capsule, and then the blade pressed down - a lever, not a weapon - and the lid popped off with an almost insulting softness.
Light hit you all at once. You squinted, arm thrown across your face, and by the time your eyes had adjusted, the blade was already resting against your throat.
You went completely still.
The figure stood over you, head tilted. Up close, the cloak moved like it was alive, shifting with a breath you couldn't hear. The mask was smooth, featureless, two dark eyes carved into it that caught the light and gave nothing back. They looked at you. You looked at them.
They said something.
A language - liquid and precise, every syllable deliberate - that meant absolutely nothing to you.
"I don't understand you," you said, which felt spectacularly useless.
The figure's gaze tracked down, then back up. Slow. Assessing. The blade drew back, just slightly, just enough that you remembered how to breathe.
You took the opportunity to look properly. Exoskeletal legs. Horns rising from the top of the mask. The cloak rippling to reveal, briefly, a second pair of arms folded underneath. Your brain tried to categorise person and landed somewhere just to the side of it.
The front of the mask shifted — mandibles, you realised, with a lurch of something cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. Not a mouth. Mandibles. They parted slightly, and the sound that came out was something between a sigh and an exhale.
Then your body made the decision for you.
You grabbed a rock - small, barely the size of your fist - and threw it. "Stay away from me-!"
The blade came up. The rock bounced off it with a loud clang and skittered away across the grass. You didn't watch where it went because the creature's hand was already around your wrist, grip like a vice, and you reacted on instinct: knee up, going for the crotch, because you were panicking and it was the only move you had.
A second arm shot out from under the cloak and hit you cleanly in the stomach.
The air left you. Your legs gave. You went down on your back with considerably less dignity than you would have preferred, and then she was on top of you - straddling your hips with the kind of casual ease that made it clear she wasn't even trying - wrists pinned on either side of your head.
You stared up at her. She looked back down at you.
She said something else. Measured. Not angry, somehow. You got the impression she was explaining something, the way a person explains something to someone they expect to be unreasonable.
You had absolutely no idea what.
The silence stretched. Neither of you moved. The moths drifted overhead. Somewhere distant, water was running over stone.
Then, in a creeping horror that arrived slightly late, you became aware that you were not wearing anything.
Your face went hot all at once. You made a sound - not a word, just a sound - and immediately tried to pull your arms free to cover yourself, which achieved nothing except making her grip tighter for a moment before she seemed to actually look at you and understand.
She stood up. Quick, fluid, no hesitation. Her eyes moved across your form one more time - not with anything you could clearly read - and then she raised one hand, fingers curling. A gesture.
Follow.
You lay on the ground for another few seconds. Cold grass against your back. Open air above. A cavern the size of a cathedral, lit by living moths, populated by at least one creature that had just knocked the wind out of you with a spare arm.
You didn't have a better option. You got up and followed.
Whatever this place was, it wasn't anywhere you recognised.
Earth - if this was even Earth - had moved on without you. Vines swallowed what might once have been walls. Rooms endored with broken glass ran along youir sides. Instead of streetlights, clusters of pale glowing butterflies clung to iron brackets along the path, their wings beating slow and steady. Great round boulders rose from the ground, covered in spiral carvings that wound all the way to their tips.
You walked behind her in silence, barefoot on cobblestones worn smooth by what must have been centuries. The cold bit at your skin with every step. You kept your arms wrapped around yourself and tried not to look at anything too directly, because every time you did, your brain handed you a brand new thing to panic about.
She stopped.
Ahead on the path, something moved through the undergrowth - low, heavy, shell dark as river stone and nearly invisible against the ground if it hadn't been for the pale foliage framing it. It moved slowly, the way things do when they think nothing is watching them.
She moved faster.
The blade launched like a thrown spear, trailing a white thread behind it, and caught the creature on its soft underside. It stilled immediately. The thread pulled the blade back to her hand with a soft, practiced sound, and she crouched over the body without ceremony.
You watched her peel the shell segments off with a faint wet sound that turned your stomach. You were about to say something, or possibly nothing, just make a noise to fill the space, when silk erupted from her - from her hands, from somewhere under the cloak - weaving around the shell in quick, efficient loops. It took maybe thirty seconds. At the end of it, she held up a garment.
She tossed it to you.
You caught it. Turned it over. Shell panels along the front and shoulders, silk everywhere else, pulled together in a way that looked - against all odds - like something a person could actually wear. You pulled it on. It fit. The silk was warmer than it had any right to be.
You gave a thumbs up. She stared at the gesture with the particular blankness of someone encountering something they've never seen before and don't intend to ask about.
You dropped your hand.
The path continued. You fell into step behind her again, the new garments rustling softly with each step. The moths passed overhead. The distant creatures sang.
Maybe, you thought, with the particular desperation of someone with nothing else to hold onto-
maybe this isn't so bad.