Tales of flame and void

A Broken Machine, A Living Memory

The machine had broken that day.

Of all the arcane constructs lining ANSEP's sterile corridors, it was the cafeteria's second-level food dispenser—blinking red, leaking broth from its vents, unable to deliver even a pouch of nutrient paste—that fractured Zelaine's practiced silence.

She waited beside it, motionless, as if her stillness could coerce function from something already dead.

Then a voice stirred the air beside her.

"Looks like it gave up," someone said.

A man with scorched cuffs and a tray in his hand. His smile wasn't wide—just stubborn. Like something he'd been carrying for years, refusing to put down.

"Honestly, I respect that."

Zelaine didn't answer.

She didn't do conversation.

Especially not here—where alliances were currency, and every word might one day become ammunition.

But the man kept talking. Not about her. Not about ANSEP.

He talked about his daughter.

> "She folds paper birds. Calls them firewings. Said if she folds a thousand, a real phoenix might come for her."

Zelaine kept her eyes on the dead machine.

But her breathing had slowed.

For one quiet moment, something in her chest shifted—foreign and unwelcome.

> Had her mother ever said something like that about her?

Had her father ever spoken of her to a stranger?

She didn't remember their voices.

Or their faces.

Only the emptiness left behind when they stopped existing.

---

His name was Elim.

He wasn't important in the grand hierarchy of ANSEP—just an engineer. Just someone with too much hope, too little fear.

But the next day, she returned to the cafeteria at the same hour.

So did he.

He talked. She listened. At first because silence felt familiar. Later, because his voice didn't ask anything of her.

> "My wife grows herbs in rooftop pots. Says mint makes even war taste tolerable."

She said nothing.

But she stayed longer.

And eventually—she replied. Small things. A word. A shrug. A glance. She found herself wondering what kind of child would fold birds out of ration sheets.

He once handed her half a protein bar and said:

> "When the war ends, you should meet her. She'd like you. She braids strangers' hair just to annoy them."

Zelaine had blinked. That was all.

But later that night, alone in her room, her hands had hovered over her braid before letting it fall.

---

Now—

Here, in the womb of monsters and thread, that memory broke.

Elim sat slumped in a throne of black spires.

Yai-thread—corrupted, oily—dripped from the base of his skull like a leech made of wire.

His mouth hung open, mid-breath.

His eyes blinked once. Not in recognition. Only in reflex.

He twitched.

A tremor passed through Zelaine's spine.

She hadn't realized she'd stepped closer until her boot clicked against the stone.

---

✦ The Spy Within

Zelaine knelt.

The air was thick with that awful warmth—the kind that clings, not comforts.

Elim's hands were curled inward. Like he was still holding something. Maybe a paper bird.

Her own hands refused to move.

Just one tear escaped her cold eyes, tracing a line she couldn't feel.

> "He spoke like love was an altar," she whispered.

"Like he burned parts of himself to keep someone else warm.

And now—look at what it bought him."

Her fingers twitched, then clenched. She didn't wipe the tear away.

> "People don't shatter because they're fragile.

They shatter because they remember.

And memory… memory is a fire that doesn't stop burning, even when you're ash."

She rose, slowly.

Her legs were stiff—she hadn't noticed. Her breath shallow. Skin cold.

She pressed her hand against the wall beside the throne.

It was warm. Wet. Breathing.

> "This place feeds on that fire. It drinks what the heart can't forget.

And the heart…" Her voice thinned.

"The heart's not an organ. It's a spy.

You feed it hope—and it betrays you."

She stepped back from the wall.

Her right hand curled, a thin flame thread winding around her knuckle like a vein of molten memory.

> "I'm burning it down."

---

✦ Atiya's Suspicion

Atiya hadn't spoken. But now, he did.

"I've been sensing it."

His voice was low. Distant. As if he were talking from the bottom of a tunnel.

"I've felt the Hingcha since we arrived. But not like before. Not from a direction. It's… everywhere."

Zelaine turned toward him, slowly.

"That's what lairs do. They seep."

He shook his head. "No. This isn't seepage. It's saturation."

He looked up—eyes wide, unfocused.

"There's no center. No core. That doesn't make sense unless—"

He froze.

And then: "It is the lair."

Zelaine's brows creased. Her voice was clipped. "You're spiraling."

"Strike the wall."

"What?"

"Now."

"You want me to waste Yai on slime and suspicion?"

Atiya's eyes sharpened.

> "Do it. Before it's too late."

---

✦ The First Laugh

Zelaine's breath hitched.

Then she let the flame thread unravel—sharp and precise—and drove it into the wall.

It screamed.

But not from the wall.

Not from the place the flame touched.

From everything.

Laughter rang out—high, guttural, wet, layered like a hundred throats giggling at different pitches.

The floor vibrated.

So did her jaw. Her fingers.

The air cracked—not like thunder, but like skin tearing.

---

✦ The Emergence

A dim green light seeped up from beneath the ground—soft as fungus, sharp as decay.

A heartbeat followed. Then another. Then a hundred.

Some pulsed fast. Others in reverse.

All of them wrong.

The ground split.

And from beneath it, the first horrors emerged.

---

▌1. Amorphous Masses

Flesh without shape. Eyes blinking across their surfaces like wet paint sliding on mirrors.

Each eye reflected a different memory:

Elim laughing.

Atiya holding a burning scroll.

Zelaine—on her knees, mouth open, crying.

She flinched. But the memory wasn't hers.

---

▌2. Tentacled Horrors

Slick limbs coiling in symbols only mad gods might understand.

The suckers didn't grip flesh—they whispered names.

Dozens. All hers. All wrong. All spoken in Yaishna's voice, but reversed.

---

▌3. Fractal Entities

They walked, folded into themselves.

One moment in front, the next behind.

Every blink shifted the world.

Zelaine saw the cafeteria again.

Elim was there. Offering a protein bar.

She blinked—he vanished.

---

▌4. Whispering Shadows

Hanging above, whispering things Yaishna never said.

> "I should've held you longer."

"I should've never let you go."

"Forgive me."

Zelaine's legs buckled.

"No," she hissed. "You don't get to say that."

But the lair didn't care for truth.

It only knew what would break her.

---

The Hingcha hadn't been waiting.

It had been growing.

Now, its dreams had bodies.

And they were awake.

---

The lair screamed.

Not with sound, but with shifting dimensions, a hundred rooms blooming and collapsing all at once, the very fabric of reality peeling back in convulsions. Hingcha's eye—if it could be called that—stared from the center of it all. The pit had expanded into a domain, a fractured labyrinth of looping passages, mirrored chambers, and blood-lit halls, where time crawled sideways and light had no temperature.

Atiya and Zelaine stood at the edge of that impossibility, trembling, bleeding, but alive.

---

>"No use brute-forcing it," Atiya said, his voice strained. Threads shimmered from his fingers, dancing through the air like strands of silver silk.

> "It doesn't play by the rules."

Zelaine's hand dripped scarlet, her roses already unfurling from her back like blooming spears.

> "Then we change the game."

A. Subversive Use of Powers

Atiya closed his eyes. A moment later, space folded like origami.

The Hingcha lashed forward—and struck itself.

It screeched, limbs tangling in the recursive loop Atiya had spun. A corridor twisted back onto itself, catching the entity's tendrils in a Möbius snare.

>"It's attacking its own reflection," Zelaine breathed.

Atiya gritted his teeth.

> "Just buying seconds. Do it."

Zelaine pressed a bleeding palm against the wall. A rose unfurled, its thorns coated in her blood.

> The bloom pulsed. A ripple passed through the corridor. For the first time in hours, Atiya remembered his sister's name.

>"The blood anchors memory," Zelaine whispered. "If we forget who we are, we die."

She drove thorns into the psychic veil. The Hingcha shrieked, not in pain, but in confusion.

---

B. Psychological Warfare

The lair dimmed. Shapes approached. Faces of the dead.

>"Mother?" Atiya flinched.

>"No," Zelaine said, grabbing his wrist. "Don't engage."

They sat, back-to-back, in a ring of bleeding roses. Atiya focused on his breath. Zelaine drew memories across the floor in blood: their first mission, that stupid snack shop she dragged him to, the moment he pulled her out of a collapsing foldspace.

> The Hingcha watched, waiting for fear. None came.

It pulsed again, louder now.

---

2. Sacrifice and Collaboration

A. Power Synergy

Zelaine gasped.

> "Give me thread. Now."

Atiya nodded. His threads unraveled from his palm, and Zelaine stabbed them with her bleeding fingertips.

> Blood met thread. The lines turned black and gold. Living, shifting ropes of memory and intent.

They rose into a lattice, wrapping around Hingcha's limbs and locking them in a spiral. The creature buckled, losing form.

>"It's cracking," Atiya muttered.

>"Only for a moment."