The trick to surviving Brookridge Mental Health Institute wasn't fighting the doctors. It was swallowing the pills.
Or, more accurately, making them think you swallowed the pills.
Allur sat on the edge of his perfectly made, perfectly white bed. Nurse Higgins stood in the doorway, her smile plastered on like a porcelain mask. She handed him the tiny paper cup. Two white pills. Lullabies.
"Down the hatch, Allur," she chimed. "Let's keep those bad dreams away."
Allur took the cup. He didn't look at her face. If he looked too closely, the illusion would slip. He would see the bloated, parasitic thing shifting beneath her skin, piloting her meat like a cheap suit. Instead, he stared at her sensible white shoes.
He tossed the pills to the back of his throat, took a sip of water, and swallowed hard, making sure his Adam's apple bobbed. But the pills didn't go down. With practiced precision, he pushed them deep into the pocket of his cheek.
Nurse Higgins checked his mouth with a penlight, nodded in satisfaction, and locked the heavy steel door behind her.
As soon as the deadbolt clicked, Allur spat the pills into his hand. They were dissolving, leaving a foul, metallic taste on his tongue—like battery acid and burnt hair. He crushed them under his heel and kicked the powder under his bed.
It had been three days since his last dose. The withdrawals were starting.
Lucidity was creeping back in.
He sat down, his fingers immediately finding the cracked plastic wristwatch on his wrist. He traced the glass. 3:15. The hands hadn't moved in a year. He closed his eyes and forced himself to remember his sister's face. Maya's tear-streaked cheeks. The smell of her vanilla shampoo. The sound of her voice begging their parents not to send him away.
I'm still here, he told himself, gripping the watch until his knuckles turned white. I am human. I am awake, but I am human.
By midnight, the hallucination began to violently glitch.
It started with the temperature. The sterile, climate-controlled air of Ward 4 vanished, replaced by a suffocating, blistering heat. Then came the smell—the unmistakable stench of sulfur, rotting copper, and century-old decay.
Allur opened his eyes.
The white padded walls of his room were gone. He was sitting inside a cage of massive, petrified ribs. Above him, the fluorescent light fixture was a cluster of bioluminescent, pulsating fungi clinging to a ceiling of jagged black stone. Outside his window, the quiet suburban night was actually a swirling tempest of toxic purple ash.
The Charnel. His head pounded. A thin stream of blood leaked from his left nostril. Being this awake hurt. The human brain was never meant to process the apocalypse.
Then, the floor vanished.
It didn't simply break; the illusion of the concrete floor was violently ripped away. A massive tremor shook the building. The sound was deafening—not the rumble of an earthquake, but the sickening tear of tearing flesh and snapping bone.
The emergency lights in the hallway flickered and died.
And then, the screaming started.
It wasn't the patients. It was the night staff.
Allur crawled to the iron bars of his Charnel cage and peered into the hallway. The illusion of the hospital was failing rapidly. The perfectly tiled floor was shifting into a landscape of jagged, ash-covered rubble. Someone—or something—was tearing the Slumber apart from the outside.
A heavy, wet thud echoed down the corridor.
Thump. Squelch. Thump.
Something was coming. It sounded heavy, dragging its mass over the uneven ground of the real world.
Allur shrank back into the shadows of his cell. The thing rounded the corner. It was a Scavenger—a Charnel beast drawn to the scent of a broken hallucination. It looked like a hairless, starved hound the size of a bear, but it had no eyes. Where its face should have been, there was only a gaping, circular maw lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth, constantly chewing on the toxic air.
It paused outside Allur's cell.
To the normal world, the heavy steel door of Room 412 was still locked. But in the Charnel, the beast simply stepped through the gap in the ribcage.
It was inside with him.
The Scavenger swung its massive, blind head, sniffing the air. It could smell the rot of the world, but it could also smell the terrified, pulsing blood of a human. It let out a low, rattling hiss.
Allur backed against the wall. He had no weapons. He was wearing hospital scrubs. If he screamed, no one would come. Even if a guard arrived, they wouldn't be able to see the monster tearing him apart; they'd just think he was having a violent seizure.
He looked down at his right hand. It was shaking uncontrollably.
To Wake is to Rot, he remembered the old whisper in his mind.
The Scavenger lunged, its jaws snapping shut inches from Allur's face.
Allur didn't have a choice. He closed his eyes, gripped his broken watch with his left hand to anchor his sanity, and focused every ounce of his willpower into his right arm. He stopped hallucinating his own flesh. He forced his hand to fully Wake.
A sickening cold washed over his arm. When he opened his eyes, his right hand was no longer a pale, trembling teenager's hand. It was coated in the dark, hardened ash of the Charnel. It radiated a terrifying, heavy energy.
The beast lunged again.
This time, Allur didn't dodge. He reached out with his Woken hand, plunging his fingers directly into the empty space beside him. To a normal observer, he was grabbing at thin air. But in the Charnel, his hand closed around a jagged, rusted iron spike protruding from the rotting wall.
With a guttural scream, Allur tore the spike free and drove it upward, right through the underbelly of the lunging beast.