The Broken Lurker

You know all too well the face of the thing that took Cass. How could you not? It's burned into you, into your wings and retinas and skin.

You don't know what it promised her, what otherworldly siren song it used to lure her in. But - maybe it's your patron god, maybe it's the corruption - you can guess.

She wanted stability. A guarantee of wholeness. A promise that the two of you would never fall apart. And so did it.

She used to tell you, when she found you in your games of hide-and-seek, or when you almost got lost in the town square, that there was a thread between your hearts, connecting you. So no matter how far apart you were, she could follow the thread, and find you. When your parents died, the idea of that thread lent some comfort, knowing no matter how bad things got, she would be there for you.

Maybe that was how you knew when it all went wrong, that unnerving sense of direction as your little legs carried you as fast as they could to the makeshift altar in a church you'd never seen before. She had tugged on the thread, pulled it taut. You knew to follow it.

Cass was there, and so were a half dozen others you'd never met, and so was it. And it was broken. Broken in every way, shattered, fractured. One eye that split into two into four into dozens into hundreds into millions stared in every direction like jagged shards of mirror. Tangled twisted creaking limbs reached out from tears and fragments and towards your only family.

You couldn't stop it, of course. You shrieked and cried and struck it with all your might and all you got were the scars to remember it by. It left a splintered skeleton in the air of the chapel as it swallowed Cass and snapped her thread and broke from the world and disappeared.

But that brief contact must have broken something in you, too. Made you see like it. Because it forced its mind into you.

It wants to be whole.

And it sews itself together with your sister as its thread.