The air had changed.
Finn didn't know how long he'd been lying there, curled up in the narrowing corridor, his fingernails digging into the living floor. Minutes? Hours? Days? Time here was thin and tattered—like everything else. Like him. But now, the quiet had shifted.
It wasn't noise, exactly. Not footsteps. Not whispers.
It was a pressure. Like a thunderstorm rolling in behind closed eyes.
Finn raised his head, and immediately, the world tilted. The corridor stretched and contracted, a lung expanding with rot. The walls around him were slick now—sweating, maybe—and pulsing with that steady rhythm, too slow to be a heartbeat, too fast to be natural.
A rhythm of feeding.
And in the distance—though distance meant nothing here—Finn saw it.
A shimmer in the air.
A distortion, like heat haze. But colder.
It came from no direction, yet all of them. The architecture twisted as it approached—not physically, not completely—but in ways that made Finn's stomach twist and his eyes ache. The floor didn't bend under its weight. The world did.
Finn pushed himself backward, crab-crawling until his back hit a wall. But the wall gave under his touch, pulsing against his spine, as if it welcomed his fear. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't cooperate. They shook violently, useless beneath him.
And then he saw it.
The King.
Not the man in the throne. Not the hooded figure of regal silence. But the thing behind all of it. The truth that wore the image of a king like a skin mask.
Its form was ever-shifting, glimpsed only in fragments—too vast, too wrong to fully comprehend. Bones that pulsed like organs. A face stretched sideways, lips unmoving but always grinning. Dozens of spines, or limbs, or antennae dragging along the walls. And eyes—no, not eyes—voids in space, rimmed with impossible light, each one staring through layers of thought and memory.
Finn didn't scream. He couldn't.
His throat closed. His tongue was stone.
The King moved—or perhaps the world moved around him—and with each step that wasn't a step, Finn felt more of himself fall away. Not physically. Mentally. Memories peeled from his skull like sunburnt skin. Names. Moments. Feelings.
Gone.
He tried to grab them. Clutch at them. But they weren't there anymore.
A birthday candle blown out.
A brother's laugh.
The last words his father ever said to him.
Vanished.
In their place was… hunger.
Not his hunger.
The King's.
The King was eating.
Not his flesh. Not his blood.
His dreams.
Every hope, every flicker of light that had once burned inside him—the things that made him Finn—they were being swallowed. Slowly. Lovingly. Like a feast savored bite by bite.
And the worst part?
The King wasn't even trying.
He didn't reach out.
Didn't speak.
Didn't move.
His presence alone was enough to devour.
Finn fell forward, clutching his head. His mind was unraveling like cloth in a storm. His thoughts were not his own anymore. He couldn't hold them together. Couldn't remember what he'd been fighting for.
Why had he come here?
Had he come at all?
Had he always been here?
No. No.
No.
That flicker sparked again.
He had a name. He had a life. He had a self.
It wasn't all gone. Not yet.
He screamed—not aloud, but inward. A scream against the pull. Against the silence. A scream that said I am still here. It was small. Pathetic. A candle in a storm.
But it was his.
And something in the King's monstrous body twitched.
Not in pain.
Not in fear.
But in interest.
The King noticed.
Finn could feel it, like a hook in the center of his soul being tugged—gently. Not to drag him in. Not yet.
To examine.
To savor.
The King had tasted millions. Swallowed dreams like wine. But here was something new. Something raw. Unripe. But resisting.
So rare.
So delicious.
Finn gasped as the ground beneath him shifted again, coiling like a serpent, lifting him off the floor and dragging him forward, slowly, inch by inch. Not by force. But by inevitability.
He kicked. He clawed. He fought.
But the King did not stop him.
Because the King knew.
There was nowhere to go.
The King didn't need chains. Didn't need guards. This place—this castle, this tomb—it was the King. Every wall, every hallway, every breath Finn took—it all led back to Him.
To the center of it all.
To the hunger.
Finn's body trembled, tears leaking from his eyes, but he kept whispering to himself, over and over, as he was pulled into the belly of the dream-eater.
"I'm still here."
Even if no one else could hear him.
Even if the King only smiled.