The dream begins in stone. Earth pressing close on every side. You are inside a mountain.

The chamber opens around you, a rough cylinder of volcanic rock stretching impossibly high, its walls slick with bioluminescent fungus that casts everything in hard, feverish orange. The air reeks of sulfur and deep mineral heat. Steam hisses from vents in the floor. At the chamber's edge squats a blue-black stone altar, darker than the shadows around it, as though it drinks the light that touches it.

Robed figures line the walls. Dozens, swaying, chanting in a low rhythmic drone that pulses with the fungal glow. Their robes are dark, & they have hideous headpieces with a dangling strip of red leather or an actual tongue protruding from the forehead.

At the center, upon a glistening dais, she waits.

What once was a woman has become a swollen grotesquerie of distorted flesh. Her skin, stretched taut and bruised, bears blotches of sickly yellows and purples. Vestiges of her former beauty linger like a haunting specter; delicate Western features, high cheekbones, a jaw that once held poise, cruelly affixed to a body warped beyond mortal recognition, as if some mad artist had forced a fair visage upon a rotting canvas.

Her cracked lips twitch, emitting fragmented murmurs in a faint, eerie singsong. Schoolgirl English, broken and looping: "...take my photograph by the river... the light is so lovely today... he promised... he promised me..."

A tall woman stands over her. Braided hair upon the shoulders of long, flowing robes. Beautiful in a way that feels wrong, a dangerous beauty worn like armor. Around her neck, a small crystal pendant catches the fungal light. She speaks a word, and the chanting deepens.

The abdomen draws the eye. Grotesquely enlarged, gleaming with sweat and unnameable ichor. Veins sprawl like dark roots beneath the translucent skin, pulsing with a rhythm that resonates with the very air. Something stirs within, rippling beneath the surface with slow, measured purpose. The faint outline of a claw presses outward, scraping. Then an eye, vast and glistening and disturbingly sentient, glides against the inner surface, gazing through the thin veil of flesh into the realm beyond.

A groan escapes her parched lips, half-whisper, half-dirge. Her distended form ripples, and for the briefest moment a faint smile crosses her cracked lips, strangely serene. It vanishes, supplanted by sheer terror.

Then the altar cracks.

A hairline fracture splits the blue-black surface with the sound of bone snapping, and the darkness pooled within disperses in a sudden exhalation. Three hundred stolen breaths released at once. The tall woman turns sharply, composure breaking. She speaks a command in a language older than the mountain. The chanting falters.

The woman on the dais screams. Raw, mortal, tearing from a throat that has forgotten how to make any sound but lullabies. Her back arches off the stone. The membrane ripples violently, , desperate, & wrong. The thing inside thrashes. It claws. The translucent skin splits along the dark root-veins and slick, hot ichor pours across the dais.

Her head snaps back. Her mouth opens wider than a mouth should open. A single piercing note of agony, and then the sound stops, and so does she. Her eyes go fixed. Her cracked lips freeze mid-syllable, the last fragment of a lullaby caught between her teeth. Whatever was left of the woman behind those features has departed.

The membrane tears and the form eviscerates her body as it emerges.

A roughly triangular mass of glistening, blotchy orange flesh heaves itself from the ruin of the body. Two yellow oval eyes sit at its apex, flat and unblinking, radiating terrible vacant intelligence. A long crimson tentacle unfurls below them, dragging across the stone. Fanged maws gape open across its ventral surface, drooling, snapping at nothing. Clawed appendages sprout from its sides, pulling its bulk forward with a wet, sucking sound. Where it moves, it leaves a trail of orange bile that hisses against the stone.

The tall woman raises her hands. The crystal pendant flares. She speaks a word of command, the same cold authority, but the thing does not hear her. A clawed appendage whips outward and catches her across the chest. She staggers. The pendant shatters. She falls.

You feel a pull from inside and the moment you destroyed the girdle flashes though your eyes, eerily similar.. connected.

The chanting collapses into screaming. The robed figures scatter. The thing moves through them with terrible, purposeless violence, the way a fire destroys, without intent or satisfaction. Bodies break. The blue-black altar topples and shatters against the floor.

You feel a pull again like something leaving you as all you can think of is stopping this horror.

A deep subsonic groan rolls through the stone, from the earth itself. The floor fractures. Steam erupts in scalding columns. The volcanic rock shudders and begins to give way. Chunks of ceiling drop in slow grinding falls, smashing through the fungal light. The creature screams, a vibration felt in the teeth and the sternum, and the floor opens beneath it, a widening maw of heat and collapsing stone, and the thing slides and thrashes and is swallowed.

The dream pulls back. Upward through rock and root and soil, out into open air. Night sky. Stars. The peak of a mountain, tall and dark against an African sky, trembles. The trembling becomes a shudder. The shudder becomes a groan that silences every living thing for miles. The peak sinks, folding inward like a chest exhaling its last breath, stone and soil and forest sliding into the void where the chamber was. Dust rises in a vast pale column that catches the starlight.

Silence. Absolute. Final.

The mountain is gone. In its place, a wound in the earth, raw and dark, still settling. Nothing moves.

You see the shattered remains of the gem in the girdle of Nitocris blow away by the dessert winds

You wake gasping. The cabin smells of sulfur and iron and something sweet and rotten beneath both. Your sheets are damp. Your teeth ache, as though something vibrated through them moments ago.

The ship rocks gently. The sea is calm. The silence feels emptied, as though something that was supposed to be there has been removed from the world, and the world has not yet noticed.

You do not sleep again that night.