It’s the week before Christmas, and the campus empties like a held breath finally released. Dorms go dark, fraternity houses lock their doors, and the usual buzz of twenty thousand students fades to nothing. I wake to a stillness that should feel peaceful, but doesn’t. Instead, it presses against my chest, heavy and wrong.
I walk through the neighborhood surrounding campus, past houses with drawn curtains and empty driveways. Everyone’s gone home. Everyone except me.
The demon stirs, restless in the silence. She doesn’t like this emptiness: prefers the pulse of bodies, the heat of crowds, the friction of desire and fear mixing in confined spaces. Without that energy to feed on, she coils tighter in my chest, impatient.
I feel out of sync with the world, like I’m the only one holding my breath while everyone else has moved on to exhale. The stillness follows me down empty sidewalks, through vacant lecture halls, into the spaces where life should be but isn’t.
My phone buzzes against the kitchen counter of my off-campus apartment. Mom’s voice fills the empty apartment, bright and familiar, asking if I’m coming home for Christmas. She mentions Dad’s planning to smoke a ham this year, how Aunt Linda’s driving down from Bakersfield, and how they miss me.
The demon perks up at the mention of Los Angeles, the Valley. Millions of people pressed together on freeways, crowded malls, endless sprawl of want and need. She practically purrs at the thought.
I delete the voicemail without finishing it.
A news notification pops up as I’m scrolling. Update on the missing family… the Hendersons. Still no trace since they vanished after the Kraken game last week. Their rental car sits untouched in the stadium parking garage, tickets still tucked in the visor. Back at their Airbnb, suitcases remain half-unpacked on the bed. SPD fears the worst.
The demon purrs with satisfaction, a low vibration in my ribs.
I shake my head and text Mom back.
Working on a huge paper. Can’t make it. Love you.
She responds immediately with disappointed emojis and promises to send leftovers.
I set the phone face down and stare out the window at the empty street, feeling the demon settle back into patience.
~oO🐺Oo~
I grab my jacket and head out. Even the air outside feels heavy, like it’s holding something back. The usual Seattle drizzle has stopped, leaving everything damp and still. No wind, no movement. Just the weight of gray sky pressing down on empty streets.
The walk to Starbucks takes longer than it should. Without the usual foot traffic, I notice things I’ve missed before: how the pavement cracks run in perfect spiderwebs near the bus stop, how the silence makes every footstep echo.
Inside, the coffee shop feels like a refuge from the emptiness. The espresso machine hisses and gurgles, filling the quiet with familiar noise. A handful of people scattered across tables, each one isolated in their own bubble of laptop screens and earbuds.
“Grande oat milk flat white. Extra hot, please.”
The barista nods without really seeing me. Standard Thursday afternoon transaction.
I settle into my usual spot by the window, watching steam rise from the cup. The milk art dissolves into beige swirls as I take the first sip, feeling the heat spread down my throat and into my chest.
For the first time in months, I sit here without anywhere urgent to be. No work shifts, no restless energy driving me out into the night. The demon stays quiet, satisfied by the warmth and the low hum of other people’s conversations.
I realize, slowly, that this might be the first time I’ve been alone with my own thoughts since the cabin.
All those weeks have blurred together in a pattern of noise, adrenaline, and aftermath. Moving from one moment to the next without stopping to think about any of it.
Now the quiet forces me to notice things: the way my fingers wrap around the cup, how the heat seeps through the mug into my palms. The businessman at the corner table tapped his pen against his notepad in tight groups of three. The woman near the counter was checking her phone every thirty seconds, waiting for something.
Normal people doing normal things. Living in a world where the biggest worry is whether to add an extra shot or if their train will be on time.
The demon stays curled in my chest, patient for once. Maybe she’s as tired as I am. Maybe this emptiness suits her too, in its own way.
I pull out my phone, thumbs already moving before I’ve decided what I’m looking for. The screen reflects the coffee shop’s overhead lights as I swipe past notifications I don’t want to read.
The search bar blinks at me. My finger hesitated for a second before typing.
Seaside cabin Vancouver Island _
Results flood the screen: places with names like Driftwood Bay and Cedar Point. I scroll through photos of weathered decks overlooking rocky shores, fire pits surrounded by twisted pine trees. The demon shifts, interested but not urgent. She’s curious.
My fingers move faster.
Christmas availability. Private lake cabin _
More results. A place called Thetis Lake catches my attention: remote enough that the photos show more trees than people. Another search.
Ferry schedule Vancouver Island December_
I don’t think about my passport somewhere in my desk drawer, or how much gas money I have, or whether my beat-up Honda will make it past the border. The logistics feel distant, like someone else’s problem.
A cabin listing shows a stone fireplace and windows facing nothing but forest. Available through the weekend. The booking form loads before I’ve consciously decided anything.
It’s not dramatic. Not running away or making some grand gesture. Just the simple recognition that I need space to breathe, and Seattle doesn’t have any left.
~oO🐺Oo~
Back at the apartment, my hands move without consulting my brain. Jeans, sweater, and underwear for three days. The worn Macpac rain jacket that’s seen its share of adventures. Hiking boots I haven’t touched since the desert. Phone charger, portable battery, the basics.
The hiking bag sits open on my bed like a mouth waiting to be fed.
I grab the notebook with the coffee-stained cover, the one I’ve carried through two years of classes but never actually write in. Then the blue ceramic mug from the kitchen counter: chipped handle, perfect size for my hands. These feel necessary in a way I can’t explain.
The jewellery box on my dresser catches my eye. Inside, nested in faded velvet, was the silver cross necklace my parents gave me for my tenth birthday. Thin chain, delicate enough that I was terrified I’d break it. “For protection,” Mom had said, fastening the clasp behind my neck.
My fingers hover over the silver. The cross feels cold against my palm, heavier than something so small should be. I hold it for maybe thirty seconds, feeling the weight of ten years and everything that’s happened since.
I set it back in the box and close the lid.
At the door, I pause. Hand on the knob, backpack over my shoulder. Not fear… just that moment when you’re about to step outside your routine and your body reminds you to think twice.
The lock clicks. I check it, then check it again.
~oO🐺Oo~
The ferry’s engine drums beneath my feet, a steady pulse that drowns out the noise in my head. I claim a spot on the upper deck, despite the December chill, because I need the space around me.
The Sound stretches endlessly, gray, matching the sky so perfectly I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Salt spray mists my face as Seattle shrinks behind us, the city becoming a smudge of lights and shadows. The Space Needle disappears first, then the skyscrapers, until there’s nothing but water and the dark line of the horizon.
Wind whips through my hair, sharp and clean. It tastes like nothing I’ve breathed in months: no exhaust, no steam from coffee shops, no weight of too many people pressed into too-small spaces. Just cold air and the endless churn of waves.
My shoulders drop an inch. Maybe two.
A gull wheels overhead, crying something that sounds almost like freedom. The coastline ahead emerges slowly, rocky and wild, promising trees that have never heard a car horn or felt the heat of pavement.
For the first time since the cabin… since everything changed, I let myself imagine that maybe I can outrun this thing. Maybe distance will quiet what’s been clawing at my insides.
The demon stays silent, lulled by the water’s rhythm.
~oO🐺Oo~
The ferry docks with a shudder that runs through the deck planks. Victoria Harbor spreads before me, all weathered wood and salt-stained stone, nothing like the glass and steel I left behind.
I shoulder my pack and follow the stream of passengers down the gangway. The moment my boots hit the dock, something shifts. The air here bites cleaner, sharper. Each breath fills my lungs with pine and cedar instead of exhaust and rain-soaked concrete.
The streets beyond the harbor are quieter than anything Seattle offers. No horns blaring through traffic jams, no construction crews tearing up sidewalks. Just the distant cry of gulls and the soft slap of waves against hulls.
I walk without direction, letting my feet choose the path. Every step carries me further from the weight I’ve been dragging. The demon inside me stays curled tight, almost drowsy. Maybe it feels the distance too?
A taxi idles near the ferry terminal, its driver reading a newspaper. I slide into the backseat.
“Thetis Lake,” I tell him.
He glances at me in the rearview mirror.
“You sure? Not much out there this time of year, eh?”
“I’m sure.”
The taxi pulls away from Victoria Harbor, and the city falls behind us like a shed skin. Houses cluster tightly at first, then spread apart as we climb into the hills. The driver takes a turn onto a narrower road, and the trees close in on both sides.
These aren’t the manicured evergreens of Seattle parks. These are wild things: Douglas firs that tower overhead, their branches threading together to block out most of the gray sky. Cedars with bark like weathered leather. The understory grows thick and dark between their trunks.
“GPS keeps dropping, eh?” the driver mutters, tapping his phone. “Signal’s patchy out here. Must be the trees.”
I watch the device flicker between map and “searching for signal.” The world narrows to this ribbon of asphalt winding between the trees and the sound of my own breathing fogging the window.
The demon uncurls slightly, tasting the air through my senses. Not hungry. Curious.
Another turn, and another. The road gets smaller, more personal. Like it was carved just for us. My pulse steadies for the first time in weeks.
The road turns to gravel with a crunch that vibrates through the taxi’s seats. Moss creeps across what’s left of the pavement like green fingers reclaiming territory. The driver slows, peering through the windshield at trees that lean closer with each yard.
“This it?” He checks the address on his phone again, squinting at the screen. “Yeah, this is your spot.”
The gravel gives way to something that barely qualifies as a road: two tire tracks with grass growing down the middle. Branches scrape against the windows as we crawl forward.
“Cab can’t get much closer, eh?” The driver pulls to a stop where the track curves out of sight. “You’ll walk the rest.”
No judgment in his voice. Just the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’s dropped plenty of people in the middle of nowhere.
I hand him cash and step out. The silence hits me first: no engine noise, no distant traffic hum. Just the whisper of wind through branches and the soft drip of moisture from leaves.
The taxi’s taillights disappear around the bend, leaving me alone with my pack and the path ahead. The trees close ranks behind me like they’re sealing an entrance.
The demon stretches, testing this new space.
~oO🐺Oo~
The path curves between two massive cedars, and suddenly the trees part like curtains drawn back from a stage. Thetis Lake spreads before me, a sheet of dark water so still it looks solid enough to walk on.
I stop walking. Can’t help it.
The surface barely moves, more mirror than lake. Every tree, every cloud, every hint of sky doubles itself in perfect reflection. A fallen log floats near the edge, its bark silver with age, creating the only ripple where it touches the shore.
Light breaks across the water in thin silver lines, threading through gaps in the canopy overhead. The whole scene pulses with quiet beauty, the kind that makes you hold your breath without thinking about it.
The demon inside me stills completely. Not sleeping, but… listening. Like she’s trying to taste this silence through my senses.
I take another step forward, then another. The path leads me around the lake’s edge. My boots crunch on wet gravel and fallen needles.
Then I see the cabin.
It’s nothing like I expected. No weathered logs or tilting roof. This place looks like it stepped out of a design magazine: all clean lines and modern timber, glass panels that reflect the lake back at itself. The structure sits low and wide, hugging the shoreline instead of fighting it.
A wraparound deck extends from one side, its railings made from the same honey-colored wood as the walls. Glass doors face the water directly, promising unobstructed views from inside. A narrow dock stretches out from the shore.
I walk closer, my pack heavy on my shoulders. The place feels expensive but not pretentious. Like someone with money decided to build something that belonged here instead of imposing their will on the landscape.
The front door is painted deep green, almost black in the filtered light. A brass key hangs from a simple hook beside the frame. Trust in a way that makes me pause.
The demon shifts, testing this new space like a cat sniffing unfamiliar territory.
I reach for the key. My fingers close around warm metal, and something deep in my chest unknots for the first time in months.
Maybe distance is exactly what I need.
~oO🐺Oo~
The hot water hits my skin like a gentle shock, steam rising around me as I sink deeper into the hot tub. The tub sits flush with the deck, its edges designed to blur the line between human comfort and wild water. From here, I could reach out and trail my fingers in the lake itself.
I let my hair fall loose, the ends floating in the heated water. No swimsuit, no towel within reach. Why bother? The nearest neighbor is miles away, hidden behind walls of Douglas fir and cedar.
Above me, clouds drift across the night sky in slow motion. Stars peek through the gaps, sharp pinpricks of light that flicker and disappear as the clouds shift. The air tastes clean and cold on my face while my body soaks in liquid heat.
The demon inside me stretches, lazy and content. It likes this: the contrast of temperatures, the exposure to open sky, the way the hot water makes my skin hypersensitive to every breath of wind.
I lean back against the smooth edge of the tub, letting my legs float. The stars wink at me through a gap in the clouds, and for the first time in months, I feel like I can breathe without counting the cost.
The contrast sends shivers through me that have nothing to do with cold. Hot water laps against my breasts, my stomach, while night air kisses my shoulders and face. Every nerve awakens, caught between fire and ice.
My nipples tighten, partly from the chill, partly from something deeper stirring. The demon purrs, feeding on the sensation, amplifying it until my skin feels electric. Water swirls around my thighs as I shift, and that simple movement sends heat pooling low in my belly.
I close my eyes, letting my head fall back against the tub’s edge. Stars burn behind my eyelids as my hand drifts down, fingers trailing through the heated water. The contrast makes everything sharper, the silk of water against my palm, the bite of air across my throat.
My other hand finds my breast, thumb circling slowly. The demon hums approval, hunger uncurling like smoke in my chest. Out here, miles from anyone, I can let it breathe. Let it feed on this slow-building need.
The water rocks gently as I move, tiny waves lapping at my skin. My fingers slide lower, finding the heat that has nothing to do with the spa.
~oO🐺Oo~
The water cradles me as I sink deeper into sensation, my body floating weightless between fire and ice. Steam curls around my shoulders while stars watch through shifting clouds. Nothing exists beyond this moment, this perfect isolation where I can finally let go.
My fingers move with purpose now, circling and teasing until my breath comes shallow. The demon inside me purrs, feeding on every spike of pleasure, amplifying each touch until my skin burns with sensitivity. Water laps against my throat as I arch back, chasing the building heat.
I want this to consume me. Want pleasure to flood every corner of my mind until there’s nothing left but sensation. No thoughts, no memories, no guilt. Just this.
My other hand grips the tub’s edge as my fingers work faster, finding the rhythm that makes my hips rise toward the surface. The contrast of hot water and cold air sends lightning through my nerves. My breath catches, turns to soft gasps that echo across the still lake.
The first wave hits suddenly and sharp, making my back arch as pleasure races up my spine. My fingers never stop moving, chasing more, needing more. The demon feeds on it, turns it molten, spreads it through my limbs until I’m shaking.
“Oh fuck,” I breathe into the night air, my voice raw with need.
Water sloshes as my hips jerk, seeking friction, seeking release. My free hand finds my breast, pinching until the edge of pain becomes another kind of fire. The stars blur above me as the second wave builds, deeper this time, rolling through my belly like thunder.
It breaks over me harder than the first, dragging a moan from my throat that carries across the water. Primal. Shameless. My fingers work furiously now, no finesse, just need driving me toward something that feels like salvation.
The third wave starts before the second fully fades, building on top of it until I can barely breathe. My whole body tenses, every muscle coiled tight as I chase the peak. Water spills over the tub’s edge as I thrash, lost to everything but the fire between my legs.
When it hits, I cry out into the darkness, my voice echoing off the trees. Raw sound, animalistic needs given voice. The pleasure tears through me, violent and perfect, making my vision white out at the edges.
But still I don’t stop. Can’t stop. The demon wants more, always more, and I’m drowning in the hunger.
The fourth wave builds slower, deeper, like something fundamental shifting inside me. My fingers find new angles, new pressures, and suddenly I’m climbing again toward something that feels bigger than the others. My free hand claws at the tub’s edge, knuckles white as I hold on.
“Please,” I gasp to no one, to the stars, to the thing inside me that feeds on this. “Please.”
It breaks like a dam bursting. The fourth wave crashes over me with such force that I scream, the sound tearing from my throat without permission. My body convulses, spine bowing as pleasure floods every nerve. Water cascades over the deck as I thrash, completely lost to the sensation.
And still it builds. The fifth wave gathers behind the others like the ocean pulling back before a tsunami. My fingers never stop, driving me up and up until I’m sobbing with the intensity of it.
When it finally takes me, I shatter completely. The sound that comes from my throat is barely human, echoing across the lake like a wild thing’s cry. My body seizes, every muscle locking as wave after wave of release tears through me. The demon roars its satisfaction, feeding on my ecstasy until I’m nothing but sensation, nothing but pleasure given form.
I collapse back into the water, chest heaving, limbs floating uselessly around me. Stars spin overhead as aftershocks roll through me in smaller waves. My skin tingles where the night air touches it, every nerve still singing.
For the first time in months, my mind is blissfully, perfectly empty.
~oO🐺Oo~
When I finally open my eyes, the world has crystallized. The clouds have cleared, leaving stars scattered like broken glass across black velvet. An owl hoots from somewhere deep in the trees, its voice hollow and ancient.
I float in the hot water, my body loose and weightless. Every muscle has melted into liquid warmth. The demon inside me sleeps, satisfied and quiet for the first time in weeks. Steam rises around me like incense, and I let my eyes drift closed again.
Something brushes my foot.
Just the water moving, I tell myself. The hot tub’s jets creating currents. I shift slightly, settling deeper into the heat.
The touch comes again. Firmer this time.
My eyes snap open as something slick and cold wraps around my right wrist. Not water. Not imagination. The texture is wrong— slimy, revolting, like touching the underside of a rotting log. My breath catches.
Another tendril coils around my left ankle before I can react. The touch burns cold against my overheated skin. I thrash against it, water sloshing over the tub’s edges, but the grip only tightens.
“What the—”
The tendril around my wrist yanks downward with impossible strength. My shoulder screams as I’m pulled toward the water’s surface. My right leg kicks out desperately, heel connecting with something that gives like rubber but doesn’t release me.
The demon inside me jolts awake, clawing up from its satisfied stupor with sudden, vicious alarm.
Then darkness falls over my eyes like a living blindfold. Complete. Absolute. The stars vanish, the steam vanishes, and everything is plunged into suffocating black. My left hand flies to my face, fingers clawing at whatever covers my vision, but there’s nothing there to grab. Just the sensation of something pressed against my skin, breathing, and warm and wrong.
Another tendril wraps around my free hand before I can make sense of what is happening. The demon inside me shrieks, raking its claws against my ribs, but the tendrils are stronger. My hands are dragged behind my back, wrists bound by that same revolting, slippery grip.
No way to break free.
I feel myself rising. The water falls away from my body, cold air shocking against my wet skin. Steam that was warm and comforting moments ago now feels like ice crystals forming on my exposed flesh. I’m floating, suspended in darkness, held by things I can’t see or understand.
Time stretches. Forever passes in heartbeats, and some heartbeats never end. The tendrils shift their grip, adjusting, repositioning. The demon thrashes inside me like a caged animal, but even its strength means nothing here.
Then suddenly…
The grip around my limbs dissolves all at once. Vision returns in a rush of starlight and shadow. The clouds, the trees, the distant owl’s call. All of it flooding back as I hang suspended in empty air above—
Not the hot tub.
The lake. Dark water stretches out beneath me like black glass.
I’m falling.
The world slows. Stars wheel overhead as I tumble through air that tastes of cedar and damp soil. My hair streams upward, droplets of hot tub water spinning away like tiny meteors. The demon inside me screams, but it feels impossibly far away.
Below, the lake’s surface rushes toward me, perfect and still and waiting.
I hit the water like tearing through a membrane. The impact knocks the breath out of me. Cold bites instantly — needles, knives, a thousand sharp points sinking in at once. The shock blanks everything out, until there’s nothing left but the raw, merciless fact of it: cold.
I sink.
Deeper than should be possible. The hot tub couldn’t have been more than six feet above the water’s surface, but I’m falling through liquid darkness as if dropped from a cliff. Pressure builds in my ears, my lungs burning for the air I lost on impact.
The demon writhes inside me, no longer satisfied, no longer quiet. Awake and hungry and furious.
~oO🐺Oo~
My legs kick wildly, muscles screaming against the cold. The water feels thick as oil, dragging against every movement. I can’t tell which way is up: everything is black, endless black pressing in from all sides.
My chest burns. Panic floods my system as I thrash, desperate for air, for light, for anything that isn’t this crushing darkness.
Then my face breaks through.
I gasp, water streaming from my mouth and nose as I suck in ragged breaths. My lungs feel raw, like I’ve been drowning for hours instead of seconds. The ringing in my ears drowns out everything else: no wind, no lapping waves, just that high-pitched whine that makes my skull ache.
I blink hard, trying to clear my vision. The world spins sickeningly as I tread water, my limbs heavy and clumsy with cold.
There. A warm yellow glow cuts through the darkness, the cabin’s windows, impossibly far away. Two hundred yards, maybe more. The distance yawns between us like an ocean.
Everything else is shadow upon shadow upon shadow. The treeline bleeds into the sky, the far shore invisible. The lake stretches endlessly and is black in every direction except for that single point of light.
My teeth chatter as I force my arms to move, starting the long swim home.
The water bites through my skin, numbing my fingers until I can’t feel them cutting through the surface. Each stroke feels like moving through concrete, my muscles already seizing against the cold.
Noel’s face surfaces first. Those wire-rimmed glasses catching the coffee shop’s light, the way he pushed them up his nose when he was thinking. His terrible joke about tea being “the thinking woman’s caffeine.” I remember the blue curtains in his apartment, how they filtered the morning light into something soft and safe. How he laughed when I closed his laptop without asking.
My stroke falters. The cold seeps deeper.
Daniel appears next, emerging from the trading post doorway like something carved from the desert itself. His stoic mask couldn’t quite hide the warmth underneath, the boyish way he lit up when he talked about hidden trails and secret pools. How he warned me about spirits in the canyon, never knowing he was looking right at one.
Water fills my mouth. I cough, sputtering, my rhythm broken.
The truckers. Jim, yes… definitely Jim. His brother… Mike? Mark?
The name slips away like water through my fingers.
Seattle to Spokane. Spokane down to Salt Lake. Then Vegas, LA, Portland… and back to Seattle. A three-week loop, the kind of run that repeats until the days blur together. Colorado waits at the edges of it, home but not quite part of the official route.
Jim had shown me pictures of his kids on his phone while we waited at the truck stop. A little girl with a gap-toothed smile.
My arms feel like lead. I’m barely moving forward now, just keeping my head above water. One-forty. Maybe? God, was I even moving?
The senior. Brad? He’d been so proud of his stats, his scholarship, his future. The freshman girl who was with him in the shower. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, all bright eyes and nervous laughter.
I’m treading water now, the cabin light wavering through my tears. The salt mixes with the lake water on my lips.
The family. Just last week. The Hendersons. They’d come to Seattle for a Kraken’s game, the dad wearing his lucky Crosby jersey, the mom taking pictures of everything, the teenage son pretending to be too cool while secretly loving every minute. They’d asked me for directions to Pike Place Market. I’d given them a whole list of places to visit.
The tears come harder now, hot against my frozen cheeks. Each memory is a weight around my ankles, dragging me down. Noel’s gentle hands. Daniel’s quiet laugh by the firelight. The trucker’s calloused fingers showed me photos of home. The family’s excitement about their first Seattle adventure.
All of them gone. All of them taken by hands that look like mine, taste like mine, but move with something else’s hunger.
My legs kick weakly beneath me, barely enough to keep me afloat. The cabin light blurs and doubles, swimming in my vision like it’s underwater too. Eighty yards, maybe. That’s all I’ve managed. The distance between me and the shore yawns like a grave.
The water holds me suspended between choices I can’t name. My body moves on autopilot, keeping me afloat while my mind fractures into pieces I can’t fit back together.
Was the hot tub real? The tendrils wrapping around my wrists felt solid enough, but then again, so did the forest that first night. So did the hunter’s hands binding me to those trees. My fingers still remember the texture of rope that left no marks.
I think about Seattle, about the showers, about sounds that might have been real or might have been echoes of something darker bleeding through.
My legs scissor beneath me, numb and distant. Everything blurs: what I chose, what chose me, what I wanted versus what it wanted. The demon purrs in my chest, feeding on confusion as eagerly as it ever fed on flesh.
But this moment, right here in the black water with the stars wheeling overhead… this is real. My lungs burning, my muscles failing, the cabin light wavering like a dying hope. This clarity cuts through everything else.
The bodies are real. The blood is real. The families torn apart are real.
This has to stop.
I have to make it stop.
~oO🐺Oo~
My lungs burn like hot coals pressed against my ribs. Each breath costs more than I have to give, and the cabin light wavers impossibly distant: farther than the stars, farther than home, farther than the girl I used to be.
Clarity strikes, clean and merciless, as if someone split the darkness open.
I can’t let it continue. The hunger, the hunting, the hollow-eyed families on missing person posters. Every breath I take feeds something that devours innocence with my hands, my mouth, my body as its weapon.
My legs slow their frantic kicking. The rhythm that’s kept me afloat for… minutes? hours?… stutters and fails.
Then stops.
The demon shrieks inside my chest, a sound like shattering glass and tearing metal. It claws at my ribs from the inside, firing desperate electric pulses down my spine, trying to puppet my limbs back into motion.
No.
For the first time since the cabin, since the forest, since the hunter’s hands bound me to those trees, the word is entirely my own.
My body begins to sink. Not violently, not pulled. Just gravity claiming what was always temporary. The lake opens beneath me like an enormous mouth, dark and cold and utterly indifferent to the war being fought inside my skull.
The demon screams. Thrashes. Floods my bloodstream with adrenaline that has nowhere to go.
No more.
Ten feet. Fifteen.
The pressure builds in my ears, a white noise that drowns out even the demon’s rage. Lake water seeps past my lips. The surface above me becomes a distant memory of light.
Something shifts.
Not thicker water. Not colder.
Just… attentive.
Like the moment before thunder when the air holds its breath. Ancient eyes opening in the depths… older than the forests, older than the mountains that cradle this place.
The lake notices.
Tendrils emerge from the darkness below, not the fevered hallucinations of the hot tub, but something real and patient. They slip around my wrists, my waist, gentle as silk scarves. No force. No violence.
Just acceptance.
The lake understands what I’m offering. What I’m choosing. My body, my burden, my demon, all of it sinking into depths that have swallowed secrets for millennia.
The tendrils guide me down, and I let them. The cabin light fades to a pinprick, then nothing. The demon’s screams grow distant, muffled by water and will and the crushing weight of my decision.
The lake cradles me in its cold embrace, and for the first time in months, I feel something like peace.
I open my eyes one last time.
The last sound I hear is silence, and it does not break.
