Spooktober 2025: Broods

Previous PArt Spooktober 2025: Sting   I woke to stillness. Not silence—there was sound—but it came muffled, as though I lay with my head beneath a pillow, or under water. My first breath tasted of dust and... honey?   As I opened my eyes I saw that my staff was still beside me, split in two. I reached for in, and the moment my fingers brushed the wood, both halves pulsed weakly, before falling silent and lifeless.   I pushed myself upright, noticing that my chest no longer pulsed in pain, and that the forest had cchanged. The trees here seemed to lean inward. Their bark slick and wet, their roots knotted like sleeping serpents. The air shimmered faintly with motes of dust... except it wasnt dust, they were small insects, swirling around me trailing the finest of threads behind them before sinking into the soil.   Something was alive down there, and these insects were trying to wrap me up for it, life a fly in a spiders web. A stood quickly, too quickly perhaps as I grew lightheaded. I stumbled backwards and me heel struck a stone, uprooting it from the ground as I fell.   It was a carved marker. Its face etched with symbols both familiar and unknown. One line in particular seemed to glow faintly. My name   At least I thought it might be my name. If felt familiar, as an old scar that aches in the rain.   The soil shifted near the broken staff, the serpentine roots flowing around and through the broken pieces, as if to knit them together again.   A voice rose from everywhere: We are not done with you yet   I lept up and ran.   The trees seemed to close in on my, as if to keep me from leaving, but I broke through, each knot an eye marking my passage, every rustle of branches whispering this way, he went this way.   And through it all an echoing laugh   The brood is hatched, there is no escape   Next section Spooktober 2025: Doom