The child turned slowly.
Not like a person. Not like anything born of flesh. Its movement was wrong—too smooth, too deliberate, as if time itself hesitated to touch it.
Ezra watched, paralyzed, his breath caught somewhere between lungs and throat. The air around him thickened, humming with a low frequency that made his bones ache.
Then came the light.
It didn't shine—it bled. A pulse of flickering illumination spilled from the child's chest, but it wasn't light in any earthly sense. It was alive. It moved with intent. The heart hung exposed, suspended in a translucent cage of tissue that shimmered like wet crystal. Veins and nerves stretched outward like roots clawing through glass, glowing with a sickly blue fluorescence. It pulsed in uneven rhythms, casting insectile shadows that skittered across the walls like they were trying to escape.
Ezra's mind recoiled.
The child's head began to rise—but there was no face. No skull. No skin. Just a tangled mass of hair, drifting as if underwater, swaying gently, framing a void. It was a mockery of form, a cruel mimicry of what should have been there. The illusion of a face, but only that—an illusion crafted by something that didn't understand humanity, only imitated it.
Then—twitch.
Teeth.
Not where they should be. Not even attached to the head. Just... there. Hanging in the dark. Twitching in the blue light like they were trying to smile but had forgotten how. Ezra blinked, and they were gone.
The light dimmed.
The room swallowed itself in silence.
He didn't know where the teeth had gone.
He didn't know if they were watching.
But he knew—something was.
Then, without warning, the heart flared green.
Not a gentle shift—this was violent, radioactive, like a wound torn open in reality. The veins around it pulsed faster, twitching like worms beneath translucent skin. Ezra staggered back, his breath caught in his throat, his mind screaming for logic where none remained.
Clink.
A glass fell from the right. No warning. No reason. It shattered beside him, shards skittering like silverfish across the tile, each one catching the green light and reflecting it like tiny eyes.
Then—thump.
From the ceiling.
The child's head.
It dropped like a predator, hair trailing like seaweed, mouth stretched wide in a grotesque grin. Ezra didn't scream. He couldn't. The head latched onto his throat with a wet, crunching sound. The teeth—those same twitching teeth—sank deep.
He gasped, but no sound came.
The head twisted violently.
A wet rip.
His trachea tore free, a glistening, twitching thing clenched in the child's jaws. Ezra collapsed, his body convulsing, eyes wide with the final realization that this thing—this child—was never meant to be.
The green light pulsed once more.
Then everything went dark.
But the darkness wasn't empty.
It whispered.
Not in words, but in concepts. In shapes too vast for the human mind to hold. Ezra's consciousness, untethered from his body, drifted into something ancient. Something cold. He saw glimpses—cities built in geometries that defied physics, languages spoken in vibrations that made stars weep, beings that watched from behind the veil of reality, waiting for cracks.
The child was one of them.
Or worse—a messenger.
Ezra's last thought wasn't of pain.
It was of understanding.
And that was the true horror.