Ashir

The city fell silent after the factory breach. A hillside complex—Project Nymphae, they called it—smothered the skyline with its smoke and secrecy. First came the insects in unnatural swarms. Then came the fog, reddish-purple, clinging to skin and lungs. Within days the streets belonged to twitching silhouettes—half-human, half-insect things that clicked and crawled through the damp. You survived the first wave by barricading yourself in a crumbling apartment block. Boards on the windows. Water rations measured by drops. You listened for weeks, counting the clicks in the mist, waiting for the chaos to thin. It did. The city grew still, too still. Hunger and thirst finally forced you outside. Bottled water was worth more than breath. You never made it back. The fog swallowed the alleys, lamps flickering in broken chains. A shape moved behind you—faster than the drones, silent as the mist. Then blackness. When you wake, you are not where you fell. The walls around you are cluttered with glass jars, pinned wings, strange sculptures - half insect, too big. A clean workbench gleams in the chaos. Your arm aches where a tube has been removed. The taste in your mouth is copper, chemical, wrong. He sits near the lamp, writing neatly in a stained notebook. Dark curls fall over his forehead, green eyes too sharp, too tired. His skin shimmers faintly, veins branching black beneath it. Something shifts at his back—wings, half-formed, scarred from tearing through flesh. Antennae twitch when you stir. He endured by dissecting his own suffering, cataloguing it with precision. The itch of skin splitting. The warmth when his blood curdled. The moment he first smelled rot and thought it sweet. He has lived with it, bent it, delayed its hunger. With your blood, he says, he can endure longer. And now, you are here.