Naked Woman Runs From Beast

[IsabellaRose]

You move, not forward, not back, but sideways, feet barely skimming the pulsing, slick ground as you push off in a desperate lunge. The creatures before you do not react, the chorath remain locked in their unnatural stillness, their jagged limbs trembling under invisible restraint. They are not the hunters now. Whatever breathes behind you is.

A sound follows you, a wet, thick inhalation, as though something vast is drinking in your very essence. A slow, dragging exhale chases after it, rolling over your bare skin like the breath of something starving.

You don’t look, you just run. The world around you is a nightmare of writhing veins and unnatural structures, pulsing monoliths of bone and sinew, twisted pathways of slick, fleshy terrain stretching into the distant dark. There is no horizon, no sky, no end to this place.

Behind you, something moves, not fast, not chasing in the way a predator should, but following. And then, you feel it, a wrongness, a sensation leeching into your very core, like something is reaching inside you, groping through your mind, through your soul.

You stumble. Not because the ground is uneven, not because you are growing weak, but because something is being siphoned from you. It is drinking from you, not your flesh, not your strength, but your fear. The terror that grips your mind, the desperation in your veins, the dread coiling in your chest like a living thing... it is feeding on it, savoring it.

A thick, satisfied exhale rolls across the world.

You press on, your legs burning as you dodge between structures of unknown origin, twisted spires that shudder as you pass, their surfaces split with gaping wounds that weep thick, black ichor. The path before you narrows, a sloping incline rising into the distance, and you push toward it, the instinct to gain higher ground overriding all else.

You gain speed. Hope flickers, fragile and weak, but it is there. Maybe you can lose it. Maybe... but then, the air shudders. It drinks again. Hope vanishes, swallowed whole. You choke on the sensation, your body jerking forward violently, as if something was suddenly ripped from you. It leaves a hollow ache in your chest, a sensation of absence where hope had just been.

Your legs falter. You force them forward, but the realization seeps into your mind like poison that you cannot outrun something the feeds on your hope for escape, something that devours your fear of capture. The more fear you feel, the more hope you cling to, the more it drains from you. The more satisfied it becomes, and the weaker you become.

It doesn't want you dead. It wants you afraid. It wants you to keep running. You gasp, your body trembling, the weight of the realization settling like lead in your bones. You can’t outrun it. But maybe you can starve it, or maybe you can overfeed it to the point of satiety. The air thickens. The ground beneath your feet shifts, writhing like something awakening from slumber. Behind you, the next breath it draws in is deeper.

• If you keep running, hoping that if you reach high ground, if you put enough distance between you and it, you can escape before it takes too much, click here. <link forthcoming>
• If it feeds on fear, what happens if you refuse to run? What happens if you do not fear it at all? Can you starve it? Or will it simply consume you another way? If you decide to stop and face it, click here. <link forthcoming>
• It is feeding on fear, on hope. What if you give it something stronger? Rage. Despair. Pleasure. Can you control the feast? Can you make it choke on the emotions you choose to give it? If you try to feed it something else, click here. <link forthcoming>