Moonlight spilled through the windows, painting pale lines across the boards.
The creature crawled up into view.
It emerged slowly, as if the darkness in the stairwell was a throat and it was being coughed out. The moonlight from outside brushed its limbs, sliding over branching bone, over the inward-collapsed chest.
When the light touched its body, it recoiled slightly.
Not much. Just a flinch.
Enough to show it didn't like being seen.
It stopped where the shadow met the pale strip of moonlight.
Watching him.
Time stretched. Seconds. Maybe minutes. Long enough for the pain behind his eyes to wake up again, a slow, twisting drill working its way into his skull. Each heartbeat throbbed against bone.
His hands trembled once.
His face didn't.
The thing's presence felt different now.
Still wrong. Still terrible. Still wired directly into the part of the brain that woke children up screaming.
But it no longer felt like the weight of a nightmare bearing down on him.
More like something large and dangerous that had stepped in front of him instead of over him.
A wild animal, not a god.
"What are you?" he asked.
The question stabbed through his skull. Pressure spiked. For a moment, it felt like the words were scraping against something in his head that didn't want to be touched.
He spoke anyway.
"Do I fear you?" His voice came out low, almost steady. "Should I? What would I have had to fear to dream up something like you?"
The creature didn't answer.
It barely moved, the branches of its head twisting in small, almost thoughtful motions. It didn't look like it was hunting anymore.
It looked like it was deciding how much effort he was worth.
Not food.
Not prey.
Just… a problem to solve.
Nightmares aren't random. They're what's already inside, wearing worse skin.
All the things he never let himself think during the day. All the hours spent pretending he was fine, that the deadlines weren't crushing him, that the future didn't look like an endless list of obligations.
All that pressure had to go somewhere.
So this is what my stress looks like, he thought. Good taste, I guess.
He took a step forward.
The floorboard under his foot creaked.
The sound cracked whatever fragile balance they'd built.
The creature lunged.
Four arms slammed against the floor and walls, launching it forward with horrifying speed. It moved like a spider that had been taught how to sprint. Its mouth opened wide, teeth spiraling as they spun, the whole drill of them aiming straight for his throat.
Up close, it became almost impossible to process.
Bits of its body disappeared and reappeared between blinks. Limbs bent in directions they shouldn't. Segments snapped out of view and then popped back in a different place, like reality was buffering around it.
His senses slipped over its edges, refusing to settle.
It looks strong… but is it?
Smart enough to stalk the hiders… but it threw Kevin at me instead of attacking directly.
Did it think I'd break more easily like that? It hunts the ones who hide and throws a puppet at the one who fights back…
He could almost feel the pattern of it.
Not brute force.
Psychology.
Its strength was getting into their heads, not raw power.
It had used the game. The rules. The people. It had let him believe he was just unlucky, just caught in something bigger than him. The kind of story where you just suffer until the credits roll.
And for a while, he'd let it.
Now, as it rushed him, close enough for the stench of blood to hit him like a physical blow, he kept thinking.
He didn't flinch.
Didn't step back.
He lifted his hands.
Not to block. Not to punch.
To meet it.
For a fraction of a second that stretched too long, everything narrowed to the point where its teeth would enter his neck.
They never did.
The creature stopped.
Its body hung over him, all weight and angles and teeth. Air dragged through its round mouth with a sound like knives slowly being pulled from a drawer. One of its upper limbs braced against the floor beside his foot. Another rested lightly on his shoulder.
Not pinning.
Just touching.
Claiming the distance between them.
Cold radiated off it. Not the kind of cold that frost gave. Something deeper. A wrongness that pressed against his skin like static.
His pulse hammered in his throat.
If it wanted to, it could end him between one heartbeat and the next.
Instead, it stared.
Or whatever the branch-sphere where its face should've been counted as staring.
The pressure in his skull spiked, then twisted. Thoughts slipped sideways. For a moment, it felt like something was peeling through him, turning his head over in its hands the way he'd turned over possibilities.
Fear didn't vanish.
It changed shape.
It stopped being an avalanche and became a knife he was already holding.
One long finger-bone lifted from his shoulder and tapped, once, against the center of his chest.
Heat flared there.
Not burning flesh.
Burning meaning.
He sucked in a breath.
"I get it," Hao whispered, because if he didn't talk he was going to start laughing or screaming. "You're not here to eat me."
Its head tilted a fraction, branches creaking.
"You wanted someone," he said. "Someone to hide. Someone to give up. And someone who… didn't."
The trial hadn't needed survivors.
It had chosen to make one.
Not because he'd beaten it.
Because he'd done something it wanted recorded.
A witness.
Nightmares weren't just about what scared you.
They were about what they believed was true.
Homework you never finished. Conversations you never had. Futures you didn't choose, only endured. All that helplessness, compressed into one house and one monster and one set of rules.
And then someone who broke one of those rules and stayed standing long enough to notice.
The creature's finger-bone tapped his chest again.
Not harder.
Just more deliberate.
Approval was the wrong word. Approval implied something kind. This felt more like a tag.
"Should I fear you?" he asked again, throat dry.
The creature leaned in until its teeth almost brushed his skin.
Every instinct he had screamed at him to run, to duck, to claw his way free.
He held his ground.
Very slowly, the thing's mouth closed.
The teeth folded in on themselves, layer by layer, until the ring of them was no longer. The pressure in his skull eased by a fraction.
It moved.
Not away from him at first.
Around him.
Not a prison.
A boundary.
A reminder that it could have crossed it.
That it chose not to.
The creature turned back toward the dark.
Its body slipped into the open basement like water running backwards. Limbs, chest, coiled trunk, branch-head, all folding neatly into the black. The last thing to vanish was the curve of its mouth, teeth glinting faintly in the moonlight.
They didn't snarl.
They didn't smile.
They just… remembered him.
Then they, too, were gone.
The darkness settled. The open door yawned, plain and quiet, as if nothing had crawled through it at all.
Hao stood alone in the cabin.
Broken furniture lay scattered like bodies. Blood streaked the floors and walls in drying arcs and smears. Doors hung crooked on their hinges. Shadows filled the corners where his mind insisted people had stood.
His legs gave out.
He sat down hard on the floorboards, breath shaking, hands burning where they'd brushed the creature.
"All that," he muttered, the words catching on something like hysterical laughter, "just to walk away."
The cabin didn't answer.
Somewhere below, deep in the dark, something creaked. Not the frantic pounding of something trapped.
The slow, patient settling of a house that had just finished hosting something important.
He stared at the shallow grooves in the floor.
A witness mark.
A quiet promise that this wasn't the end of anything.
A chill slid down his spine.
In some ways, that was worse than dying here.