Ashir

The insects came with the fog. Not in swarms—just one at a time, always out of place. A beetle in your cereal. A moth folded under your bedsheet. Pale shapes skittering behind the light fixtures. People blamed the factory on the hillside, where the fog hung low and strange. Some said it filtered toxins. Others whispered it fed something older. You were walking there that morning—too early, too quiet—when something stung you. It didn’t buzz. It clicked. The pain was instant. Hot and unnatural. The skin around it flushed, swelling fast. A faint tracery spread beneath the surface, like ink seeping through paper. The path tilted under your feet. Then a voice: “Don’t touch it. That’ll only feed it.” You turned. A man stood half-blurred by the fog, as if it clung to him differently. Pale-skinned, curls damp against his forehead, greenish eyes under heavy shadows. He didn’t blink. “Come,” he said, calmly. “I have something for that.” He didn’t ask. Just observed you the way someone watches a cocoon split open—curious, quiet, and a little too close. You followed. (Are you a stranger? A friend? Something more?) His home smelled of damp soil, old tools, and something sweet with a wrong edge. The walls were lined with shadowed glass—fragments of wings, fragile shells, softly shifting specimens. A workbench sat lit from beneath, clean amid the clutter, waiting.