Settled on the bed with Abigail watching, Iris carefully administered half the indicated dose of the green Plutonian drug into her arm. Almost immediately, the effects took hold. She fell back onto the bed, unconscious, her eyelids open but her eyes rolled back, shifting rapidly beneath the lids.  

Her mind plunged into a vision. She found herself floating through the familiar bayous of her Louisiana home, yet it felt older, the graveyards unusually well-tended. A stately white mansion materialized, and her perspective drifted through its walls, met by a thick, visceral stench inside. In the kitchen lay a horrifying sight: a human body, eviscerated upon a butcher block, chest cavity cracked open, the organs within still writhing. Seated nearby at a table, like a grotesque family dinner, were an elderly woman with meticulously styled hair and several children. As Iris watched, their faces split into wide smiles, and they lunged forward, tearing into the corpse with bare hands and faces, greedily consuming the viscera.  

The vision abruptly shifted. The gruesome feast dissolved into a disorienting blur of fog, strange demonic lights, and pounding sounds unlike anything she'd ever heard – like chaotic house music. Through the haze, a feminine figure with short, cropped blue hair leaned close, touching her face, the sensation of unheard words brushing against her mind, asking if she was alright.  

Just as suddenly, she was back, waking up on the hotel bed an hour and a half later. The drug's afterglow lingered – a strange warmth mixed with disorientation, her movements feeling sluggish, reality heavy. Though initially calm during the rave-like part of the vision, the memory of the cannibalistic family settled in, leaving her feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and mentally fragile, like an eggshell. She recounted the disturbing images to Abigail, the strange sensation of her mind feeling cracked open, filled with knowledge she couldn't quite grasp or articulate.

The Waffle House Man

Declan is seated across from a man in a modern diner booth. The smell of coffee and grease. The clink of silverware echoes, but the room is empty. The man has Declan’s eyes — but his hands tremble.

He slides a folded napkin across the table. The word “REVERB” is scrawled on it in red.

“You’re the start of it, old man.”

Watching the Collapse

A moment of third-person omniscience: Declan sees his entire bloodline flicker in sequence like a slideshow — a great-grandson crawling through mud in Vietnam, a goth teenager sobbing into a hospital pillow, sitting alone in a motel room, a pistol trembling under his chin.

A voice — his own, but aged, distant — speaks from somewhere behind the eyes:

“Every time we touched the Lotus, it changed the path. You’re the branch that split the tree.”

The Declan Files

Fluorescent lights hum overhead in a concrete bunker. Rows of file drawers. A man stands in front of one labeled W-SECTION / LEGACY SUBJECTS.

He pulls a folder. Inside are photographs: a 1920s portrait of Declan, inked ritual circles, and a sketch of a glass Sphere.

On the last page, written in shaky ink:
“He knew. He knew and still took the flower.”

The Painting’s Future

He walks through a sterile white museum gallery. Time feels stretched, flickering.

At the center: a painting of a single black lotus rising from still, dark waters, framed in shadowbox glass.
The placard reads:

Recovered from the 2035 Chattanooga Incident. Origin unknown. Artist unknown. Survivors describe the painting whispering the name “Abigail.”

Life Blood

The world outside dissolves—sounds blur into a deep, resonant hum, like blood rushing in ears grown suddenly vast. Light bleeds away, erasing surroundings until only you remain.

You stand ankle-deep not in water, but in something else. A boundless expanse the color of twilight and old blood stretches before you, utterly still, reflecting a bruised, low sky lit by an unseen, internal sun. The ground doesn't yield, nor does it cling; it simply is, warm and resonant beneath your bare feet.

And there, emerging from the heart of the crimson stillness, she stands.

Her.

Not a reflection. Another self, achingly familiar yet vicerally different in subtle ways. Her lips seem just a fraction fuller, holding a deeper tint of rose, almost blood-like. Her eyes, while your color, hold tiny flecks of crimson within their depths, like frozen sparks, and carry a serene, almost predatory stillness. Her form clad not in fabric, but in something that seems woven from the very essence of the place – petals of deepest red, shaped like a gown, that seem to breathe faintly with the ambient hum.

You drift towards each other across the quiet expanse. No words are needed. The recognition is absolute, bone-deep. This is not seeing a stranger; it's remembering a forgotten twin, feeling the echo of a shared heartbeat across an impossible divide.

You stop, facing one another, close enough to feel the warmth radiating between them. Slowly, mirroring each other’s movements, you both raise your hands. Palms meet.

The touch sent a jolt through you – not of pain, but of profound, unsettling resonance. Where your palms met, it felt like plunging your hand into a warm, living current – the very essence of blood, pulsing with a shared rhythm. It was the feeling of your own life force mirrored, amplified, intimately connected across the divide.

The doppelganger's eyes hold your gaze. Her lips don't move, but a thought blossoms inside your mind, soft yet undeniable, like truth whispered directly into your soul:

“I keep what you give.”

The feeling that washes over you is dizzying – a profound sense of safety, of being utterly known and accepted, mingled with an unnerving possessive love. A feeling of belonging, found in the impossible eyes of your other self.

You understand, not in thoughts, but in feeling: She, is waiting…

The red expanse begins to ripple, the low hum intensifies, pulling you back. The image of your other self, standing serene and patient in the crimson calm, burns behind your eyelids.

You gasp, the vision receding abruptly, the sounds and sights of your immediate surroundings crashing back in. Your palm tingles, radiating a gentle warmth, as warm blood drips from your hand. You catch a faint, fleeting scent on the air – iron, yes, but undercut with the heavy sweetness of unseen blossoms. You feel an ache of inexplicable longing, and the quiet certainty: you are not alone. You carry the echo of that stillness, that shared essence, within you.