Spooktober 2025: Doom

Previous Part Spooktober 2025: Broods   The forest thinned, but not toward safety. The trees simply gave way to stone—great slabs of it, black and veined with silver, rising from the ground like teeth. The air felt heavier here, not colder, but denser, as if time itself thickened and clung to me.   Each step rang hollow. Beneath my boots, the silver veins pulsed faintly in rhythm with my heartbeat. When I paused, they did too.   That’s when I saw them—figures moving among the stones. At first I thought they were men, the regiment I’d heard before. But their armor was crusted in moss, their movements too slow, too deliberate. The light of the moon slipped through their ribs.   Dead, then. But still walking.   They didn’t see me at first. They circled a stone slab at the clearing’s center, chanting in a language that I almost recognized. Words that brushed the edge of my memory like the tide against a scar.   When I stepped closer, something stirred inside my chest. The bruise throbbed anew. My vision wavered—and I saw another version of myself, kneeling on that same slab, whispering the same words.   I couldn’t look away. The air split with a soundless crack, and the earth around the slab opened like a wound.   A shape crawled free—vast and pale, a skeleton crowned in shadow. The soldiers turned as one, dropping to their knees.   And through the black mist that poured from the pit, my other self looked up and smiled at me.   Not a cruel smile. A knowing one.   You brought me back, it said—or maybe I thought it. You were always meant to.   The pulse beneath my feet matched the one in my chest. Then they became the same.   Next Part Spooktober 2025: Drown