The Blooming of Alex
Part I – The Forest of Rot
Alex's last memory was ordinary.
Controller in hand, the glow of his TV painting the room in flickering neon. His headset tilted back around his neck, a faint buzz of online chatter still echoing. He had been laughing at something dumb in the game, one of those nights where time meant nothing.
Then silence.
No power outage. No fading. One blink—home. The next—elsewhere.
When he opened his eyes, he wasn't in his bedroom anymore. Above him stretched a sky thick and green, heavy with drifting particles that shimmered like dust motes in a sunbeam. Except they didn't fall—they floated, clinging to the air like spores. The air tasted sour and sweet all at once, as though someone had left fruit to rot in a closed room.
He sat up slowly. The forest around him was alive in ways it shouldn't be. Trees twisted in impossible angles, their bark swelling and contracting in rhythm, as though something beneath the wood was breathing. Some of them oozed yellow ichor from splits in their trunks, the liquid running like sap but stinking like pus.
Alex gagged and covered his mouth.
Flowers littered the ground, but their colors were wrong. Bruised purples, angry reds, bloated grays. Their petals trembled when he walked past, twitching as if alive. Some opened wider—not like flowers, but like mouths—revealing rows of glistening teeth made of bone-white thorns.
He stumbled, sneakers sinking into the damp earth. It gave under him, soft and spongy, as though the ground itself was rotting from the inside out. Every step was a squelch.
"What the hell…" His voice cracked. It sounded too loud here, swallowed instantly by the trees.
Alex turned in a slow circle. No roads. No houses. No sign of civilization. Only that sky, those trees, and the choking sweetness of decay.
A sound broke through the silence.
Not an animal. Not the wind.
A laugh.
It rolled across the forest like thunder, impossibly deep and wet. It wasn't cruel. It wasn't mocking. It was… warm. A grandfather's chuckle, a father's belly laugh. Somehow kind. But in this place, it was worse than a scream.
Alex froze, breath locked in his chest.
"Beloved child…" The voice was close. All around. Inside his skull. "You have come home."
"No." He shook his head, panic bubbling up. "No—this isn't real. This is—this is a dream. A nightmare."
The air thickened. A low buzzing crawled at the edges of his hearing, growing louder with each breath. He swatted at his ears, but there was nothing there—just the echo of flies circling, invisible.
Something moved between the trees.
Something huge.
He didn't look directly at it, couldn't. Every time he tried, his eyes slipped off it, catching only pieces: folds of sagging flesh, skin the color of bruises, a single gleaming eye glistening in the dark.
The laughter came again, deeper now, closer. The ground shuddered under his feet.
Alex's heart hammered. He stumbled backward, breath ragged. His hand brushed against his forearm—and he froze.
For just a moment, he felt it. A shift. Something writhing under his skin, moving on its own. Like worms. Like roots.
He yanked his sleeve up, but his arm looked normal. Pale, sweaty, trembling. Yet in that instant, he could swear something had pushed against the inside, stretching his flesh from beneath.
The forest whispered around him. Words too soft to understand, hissed from a thousand unseen mouths.
The laughter rumbled, low and fond.
And Alex realized he was no longer alone. Not in the forest. Not in his body.