“You zoning out again?”

“Huh?”

Alice snapped awake, the sounds of birds and the wind rustling around her bringing her a smidgeon of comfort amongst the ceaseless burning along her bones.

A slender hand snapped its fingers in front of her face, and she recoiled, almost falling off the backless park bench she was seated on.

“Are you alright?” Asked the same voice, and she finally turned around, meeting a sharply feminine face, bright green eyes full of intelligence observing her every twitch. “You usually don’t stare at the infinite for so long without something worrying you.” She hesitated for a second, reaching out and placing a comforting, warm hand atop Alice’s shoulder.

“Is… Is there anything going on? Back home?”

No. Of course, the answer was ‘yes’, but she already knew that. It always was.

The question still comforted her, lessening the feeling of liquid torment roiling within her bones.

Alice shook her head, and the other girl passed an arm from behind her shoulders, prompting Alice to lean on her. The bench was as uncomfortable as ever, but the company alleviated it.

At least she could enjoy these moments, as sparse as they had become in the passing months.

Alice sighed and closed her eyes. “I love you, Lily.”

Alice waited as she snuggled deeper into the embrace, but the answer never came. Confused, she looked up and numbly stared at the hollowed, blackened pits where before there were a pair of beautifully bright eyes.

A stream of blood fell from the top of her beloved's head, her neck marked with the visible bruises left by a pair of ugly, meaty hands.

Alice stared at the ruined visage, her heart shrivelling into a blackened stump, the blood freezing within her veins into jagged daggers.

So, so cold.

The corpse, for it could be nothing else, slowly turned its torso towards Alice, the creaking and snapping of rotten bones resonating across the clearing. The corpse’s head lolled from one side to another in a macabre mimicry of a broken pendulum, sickening grinding coming from the back of its neck.

Even then, those unending pits never lost track of Alice’s eyes.

“I’m sorry.” She whispered, unable to move, unwilling to move.

“Sorry won’t bring me back.”

It felt as if someone had taken a shiv to her torso and started to butterfly her still-breathing corpse.

“It should’ve been me.” Alice wasn’t capable of tearing up. She wanted to, god, how she wanted to cry and bawl and scream and shriek and tear the concept of death itself into a million glittering pieces, but she couldn’t.

She couldn’t. And she deserved it.

“But it wasn’t.”

“But it wasn’t,” she whispered back at the now pristine black coffin in front of her, its top half open wide for all to see, nothing and no one to accompany her but the bitter rain and the frigid cold that slithered inside her body and made her stifle a scream.

She watched, as the coffin was lowered, somehow still seeing the blackened pits that seemed to draw her in.

She watched, as the coffin went down, and down, and down. Always ever-downwards, never once settled.

And, as she watched, she felt the hot, humid breath she was so horribly familiar with, fingers wrapping around her throat as she was pushed into the unending pit in front of her.

“Got you.”

Crack.

—❈—

Alice gasped awake, screaming misery flaring up all around her limbs and torso, a shriek of agony smothered in its crib before it could leave her throat.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Alice stood stock still, dulled eyes staring at the rapidly changing bioluminescent bed of moss she was lying on top of. She still could see those empty, blackened sockets drilling a hole within her cracked soul, a sea of putrid red spilling forth.

A feeble attempt at moving her legs made a glob of bile crawl across the back of her throat, only to be violently expelled in a series of gutwrenching coughs that dragged her bruised ribs across her torso, drawing lines of liquid fire.

Her throat burned, her legs didn’t work and her left arm felt as if someone had grabbed it with an industrial pincer and started pulling.

She didn’t dare move, but the very last thing she wanted to do was dwell on her previous delirium. Dead was dead, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

Instead, she focused her feverish mind towards cataloguing her surroundings, ignoring the feeling of hands stifling her throat until something gave way with a pop.

The floor appeared to be some kind of luscious, incredibly thick and fluffy bioluminescent moss that changed hues, akin to a plant-like version of an aurora borealis, but within a deep pit in the middle of nowhere and with no clear mechanism.

Craning her neck as much as she could without the agony flaring up enough to rip a scream straight out of her chest, she stared at the cavern walls filled with penumbra. If she focused just so and displaced the noticeable fog that plagued her mind, she could almost make up deeper patches of darkness. Gateways, or passages towards other caves, she guessed.

In front of her and towards the back end of the small cave, there was a strange shimmer of a colour she could not describe. Being the only thing other than moss, rock walls, or her own thoughts that she could focus on, Alice stared at the strange spot, even as the back of her eyes felt like they started sizzling.

She could feel her brain stuttering and restarting, trying to wrap itself around whatever the anomaly was. Slowly, she tilted her head as slowly as she could, bit by minuscule, agonising bit.

Wet, hot trails of something sticky had started to crawl across her cheeks, even as ever-so-minutely, something started to reveal itself. A shape, a line, a weathered stone engraved with undulating markings here and there that made Alice want to claw her eyes out and keep digging.

Finally, the shape of a doorway made of stained glass made her want to cry in relief, were not her eyes inundated in her own blood. Each fat, sticky drop falling on top of the moss with an audible plop.

Alice crawled like an overripe maggot swam across putrid flesh, inching closer and closer to the door.

A door meant people. People meant a possibility of survival, of not dying in this godforsaken pit.

Even if she deserved it.

Finally, after the scraping of broken bones against mauled flesh made her throw up a second time, she reached the door. A simple brush of her fingers with her good hand was enough for it to open wide of its own volition.

In front of her she could see a passage of weathered, cut stone. There was light coming from someplace above, but a single look upwards sent her retching once again, the endlessly fractal nature of the space near the not-ceiling blending into sanguine chunks whatever sanity she had left. Impressions and sensations she couldn’t describe skittered below her skin, and she did her best to not start thrashing around, even as she felt something dig its way across her throat and towards her eyes.

Unable to resist herself, she started rapidly blinking and kept doing so even when her eyelids felt nothing upon closing.

Alice tried to ignore the feeling as best as she could, even as she saw a crystalline spider trailing red dust from its myriad of phasing legs the size of a fist from the corner of her eye, murmurs of maddened worship slipping from a dozen’s dozen grafted drooling maw, disappearing after a split second.

Its whispers remained.

Alice did her best to not look at anything but the floor from now on as she kept crawling and crawling. Ignoring the way her body screamed at her to just lay down and die already as it was confronted with the gibbering section of her brain that demanded she gets out of there and jump in the water already.

Alice stopped, dead air hanging around her with the feeling of a public execution, its audience cloaked in the mutilated carcasses of dead shadows, watching from just two inches to the left.

That… what?

No matter, she should just jump in the water already.

Alice slashed her own palm with her fingernails, the small stab of pain helping her focus through the fog of unreality.

She could hear the sea, and feel the delicate lapping of gentle waves softly crashing against the shore, and she wanted to dive in. Oh, how she longed for it.

The sea, as old as it was loved. She loved the sea, its rhythmic breathing and the wet trail of fresh red it left behind. The shores of ash and titanic bones filled with giggling, burning marrow.

She couldn’t help but laugh, and the sea laughed with her in its boundless joy, willing to swallow whole her woes, and her with them.

Suddenly, she was falling, falling and falling through the earth, the slowly swirling abyss below beckoning her forward as she fell just sideways, layers of dahlia dust swirling in infinite vortexes as a creature made of dreams and the frozen blood of deadened gods carrying a weeping, cracked star on its back swam ever forwards. One of the spiders she had seen before joined with trillions of others into an unthinkable amalgamation, profane sutras coming from their forms in perfected, crystalline insanity.

She fell and fell and fell until the tips of her fingers touched the surface of the blackened sea.

Something yanked her backwards, just as an impossibly pale arm shot forward, just a hair shy of grabbing her head. The hand closed, and she noticed in mute incomprehension how it was made up of an uncountable amount of closed eyes.

One of them snapped open, and Alice screamed.

Oblivion beckoned, and Alice’s mind crumbled.