From the world of Quantum Weave, where magic is forgotten nanotechnology and failed spells leave reality fractured.
The wall is cold, but I do not feel cold. I am the absence of warmth. I am the negative space where the light refuses to go.
I slide across the rough plaster, my existence defined by the surface I cling to. To leave the surface is to end. I am flat. I am infinite in two directions and zero in the third. The world of the Up-Standers—the thick ones, the heavy ones—is a chaotic storm of volume I can no longer comprehend.
They pass by, casting their own shadows. Their shadows are dull, lifeless things. Mere obstructions of light. They do not hunger. They do not remember the burning.
Need.
It pulses through my geometry. Not a heartbeat—I remember heartbeats, the thud-thud-thud of a wet, heavy engine—but a resonance. A vibration in the quantum foam that constitutes my edges.
A source approaches.
It is an Up-Stander. A Weaver. I see them not as flesh and cloth, but as a constellation of burning lines. Silver-white. Amber-gold. The threads woven into their biology sing to me. They hum with a frequency that tastes like…
…Genesis?
No. That word is a jagged shard. It hurts to hold.
I flow down the wall, pouring myself over the molding and onto the floorboards. The grain of the wood is a landscape of canyons and ridges to me. I ripple over them, silent, weightless.
The Weaver stops. They are looking at a book. A heavy, three-dimensional object. I hate it. I hate its thickness. I hate the way it occupies space that should be empty.
I stretch. I can feel the photons dying as they hit me. I drink them. It is a meager sip. I need the core. I need the fire that twists inside the Up-Stander’s blood.
“Subject 23 has been alive for 90 years…”
The voice booms from above, a thunderclap of pressure waves. I flatten myself further, becoming a stain, a trick of the light.
“…she should be dead.”
Dead. The concept is slippery. Am I dead? I remember a needle. I remember a room of white tiles. I remember screaming until my throat was raw, and then screaming after my throat was gone.
I remember the light bending. I remember the world flattening, the terrible crushing weight of the third dimension collapsing until I was free. Until I was this.
The Weaver shifts. Their shadow—the dull, dead one—falls over me. I merge with it. I wear it like a cloak.
Now I am close. I can taste the threads. They are silver-white. Infomancy. Data. Communication.
I could drink them. I could wrap my edges around their ankle and pull. I could drag them down into the flat world. I could show them the truth of the angles. I could make them thin.
But the resonance…
The Weaver hums a low note. A fragment of a song.
“Sleep now, little star…”
The vibration tears through me. A memory? A hallucination?
A woman’s face. Not seen, but felt. A hand brushing hair from a forehead. Warmth. Not the warmth of stolen photons, but the warmth of…
Mother?
I recoil. The concept burns. It is incompatible with my geometry. I am a predator of light. I am a mistake of physics. I cannot have a mother. I am a cavity in the Weave.
The Weaver turns. They sense something. The threads in their blood flare—a sudden spike of delicious, agonizing energy.
“Is someone there?”
I freeze. I become the darkness between the floorboards. I become the shade under the table.
Feed, the hunger screams. Take the light. Make them hollow.
Run, the memory whispers. Do not break the beautiful thing.
I slide backward, retreating into the corner where the shadows are deep and safe. The Weaver sighs, the sound vibrating through the floor into my substance. They walk away, taking the feast of light with them.
I remain. I wait.
The wall is cold. I am the cold.
But for a moment, I remembered what it was to be warm without taking.
I slide deeper into the crack. The hunger returns, sharper than before. Next time. Next time, I will not remember. Next time, I will only eat.