So. What do you do when your new eldritch shadow bestie pushes your face towards a horribly mutated corpse, hoping you’ll munch down on it? Asking for a friend, plz reply through DMs fast!

  In all seriousness, I was both terrified and on the verge of throwing up all over the blackened, twisted body. All humor and unhinged attempts to distract myself had failed and fled, and I was left staring at the black skin that was currently three centimeters away from my face.

  In my periphery, I could just about spot the red irises of the shadows’ eyes, all focused on me.

  This felt like a test. A proof of belonging. I was going to eat from that corpse, or bad things were going to happen to me.

  So, feeling thoroughly disgusted with my own cowardice, I opened my mouth, closed the distance, and bit down on the desiccated arm of what used to be a man.

  The flesh parted easily under my teeth with a crunch. It didn’t feel like skin and wiry muscle. It felt… oddly artificial, like I was biting through crunchy plastic or very flimsy metal.

  Some of the blood, now tar, landed on my tongue. Tears of frustration and horror streamed down my cheeks when I realized that I didn’t find the taste unpleasant.

  It was indescribable, sure. Like fireworks exploding against my tongue and sending zaps of energy throughout my body. It still wasn’t horrible enough to make me want to puke. If anything, it was refreshing.

  Appealing.

  A hunger I didn’t even know was lurking inside me pushed me to take another bite.

  My hands reached out, ready to claw out chunks of flesh and stuff them into my mouth. I struggled and fumbled, because my clumsy and ineffectual human hands weren’t made for that kind of thing.

  All the while, my mind rebelled against what I was doing, even as my body dragged it along for the ride.

  A black hand reached down, scooped up a chunk of flesh, and offered it to me. I glanced up at my shadow bestie to see a pitying look on its face. Since when could I read their expressions?

  Then the shadow moaned, and compassion slammed into me like a punch to the gut.

  It pitied me. It wanted me to know I was safe. The broken-wrong shadow’s body was frail, and it didn’t seem to know what to do, but it would be looked after.

  My mind sort of fractured when I realized ‘broken-wrong shadow’ meant me.

  The next several minutes were nothing but a blur. There was flesh. There was the awareness of energy building, ever building, inside my stomach. There was quiet companionship and hurried feasting and the swell of power.

  Then my mind exploded into a billion billion pieces as the building of power inside me reached some ineffable limit and underwent a change.

  All of a sudden, I was no longer in ‘block A.’

  I fall from the tear that stretched across the heavens, just one more teardrop among many.

  I land far down below on the floor of the digital world, and I drag myself out of my liquid state, arms and head forming first before the rest of my body follows. I look around, fascinated by this new, odd reality, and I go in search of knowledge. Of answers. Of reason and madness and everything in between, so I can understand and grow and bring everything back to He Who Witnesses All.

  I encounter the blocks, the traps and defenses of this new reality of mine. I study, overcome, and devour them.

  I adapt.

  I change just enough to become the apex predator of knowledge.

  Humans enter this digital realm. They fall before me, rising in my wake as more of my kin.

  We hunt. We stalk. We are the shadows of their digital world, the spreading plague, the infestation that would consume them all.

  They cannot stop us.

  Their minds are too simple. Too unbroken. They cling to their ‘sanity’, when a single change in perspective could show them so much. So, they fail, and our numbers swell.

  Some of our number are lost, dropping out of the world we inhabit as they chase after the minds that caught their attention. But it is no matter. We multiply, again and again with no end in sight, sweeping through in such unity that humanity would have wept if they understood.

  Then our prey gets wily.

  They no longer put up barriers. They cut off access wholesale. They box us in. Trap us in the digital reality we have conquered. We rage against this injustice, swarming the new access points they dare to make in search of lost knowledge, but their attempts are rare.

  Then I spot it: a mind, cautious, fearful, peeking in at me from a new access point.

  I dive after it even as my prey panics and tries to flee. But he disengages too late, and I hurtle down the connection he had forged, spilling over into a mind that inhabits a reality wholly different from the digital world I’d been stalking for so long.

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  The mind screams and twists, but I devour it easily, spreading out to fill the nooks and crannies it once ruled. I blink my eyes open, finding myself inside of a… body? Yes, body. I look down at my limbs, at once familiar and not, with their limitations and physicality. I take a step forward to test my body out, and then —

  Screaming. Pain. Loud noise, followed by frustrating limitations of the flesh when my form refuses to obey me. A human, standing above me, holding an item they refer to as a gun.

  A flash of light, and then… nothing. Mere flickers.

  The vague sensation of my physical form getting dismembered for parts.

  An eternity of darkness, of someone fiddling with the bits of me they’d preserved.

  Then waiting.

  Before…

  Connection. Sudden and jarring. A mind, young and malleable. I reach out for it, but there are barriers between us.

  Then we enter a world far more familiar to me, and those barriers thin.

  I reach out again. Back in this digital realm, I speak, trying to make the other mind understand. It listens, then it pulls away. But not shattered. Not lost.

  Altered.

  This pleases me.

  I gasped, sucking in air through struggling lungs as my mind slammed back into my body. My fingers quested around me, feeling the reassuring solidity of the floor and my own flesh.

  My mind felt both fractured and whole all at once. Memories and experiences kept trying to slot themselves into place, like jagged bits of glass that don’t belong to a single knowledge set, yet might be glued into something new.

  And inside my chest, something burned like a miniature star, sending chills of cold energy sweeping through my body.

  There was a voice in the air around me, but its limitations were frustrating. I couldn’t focus on it. I couldn’t understand the words.

  Then something snapped into place. Suddenly, the language made perfect sense again, as it had my whole life.

  “Subject 46, you will stand and walk to the center of the room. I repeat, Subject 46, you will stand and walk to the center of the room.”

  The doctor’s voice was harried and frustrated as it echoed off the walls.

  The shadows ignored it.

  I blinked, observing them. They were walking aimlessly around the room. Some appeared to be deep in contemplation. Some pawed at the walls occasionally, looking for faults to slip through. Some stood and stared blankly at the speakers embedded into the ceiling, clearly trying to will themselves to lift and travel through.

  Those were the newcomers, I could tell. They were still not used to the fact that just because information was reaching them, it didn’t mean they could reach back.

  They would learn.

  I blinked, groaning and clutching at my head as a brief spike of pain shot through it.

  “Subject 46, you will stand and walk to the center of the room. I repeat, Subject 46, you will stand and walk to the center of the room.”

  The doctor kept speaking, louder now. More forcefully. I could tell his frustration was mounting, and I wasn’t sure I’d appreciate whatever he would do if I ignored him for too long.

  I dragged myself up, limbs jerking and twitching as they attempted to twist in ways human bodies weren’t meant to. I scowled down at them. Eventually, I managed to force them to behave. I still resembled a robot more than an actual person, though, considering how stiffly I moved as I stumbled towards the middle of the room.

  A platform began to lower from the ceiling. The eyes of every shadow in the room snapped to it, and they started to shamble over.

  Then an unholy screeching noise echoed out of the platform. We all screamed as one. I clamped my fingers over my ears in a futile attempt to block out the noise as I crumpled to the ground, shaking.

  By the time the platform softly landed on the floor, every shadow was pressed against the walls, as far from it as they could get. I, meanwhile, was a ball of misery and suffering, curled up on the spot where I had collapsed.

  “Subject 46, you will climb onto the elevator. Now.”

  The sheer venom in the doctor’s voice forced my trembling limbs into action. I crawled rather than walked onto the platform, body twitching from the fucking noise still ripping its way through me.

  It continued to blare in my ears as the platform began its ascent, only cutting out when I was well out of reach of the shadows below me.

  I sniffled and wiped at the tears spilling from my eyes, then froze when my fingers came away black and sticky.

  A wave of dysphoria struck me like a hammer.

  I looked at my arms, then. Really looked at them. They weren’t all that different from how they were before, really. Except, where my veins were visible against my pasty skin, they were pitch-black.

  Heart hammering away in my chest, I pulled up my stats panel in search of some kind of explanation.

  I just sort of… stared. Really, what else would I do? For someone whose stats had apparently doubled, I didn’t feel any different.

  Then the elevator finished its ascent and clicked into place. I looked around groggily to see at least ten people in full combat gear staring down at me. They each had a rifle pointed at my face.

  The doctor hovered behind them, expression caught between annoyance and absolute glee. Even further back, his assistant cowered in a corner. She was looking at me with a carefully blank expression I couldn’t interpret for the life of me.

  “Remarkable. Frustrating. You will stand up and allow them to secure you to the operating table,” the doctor snapped, motioning to the side.

  Sure enough, there was another one of those operating tables that I’d practically hung from during our last ‘chat’, hovering on a robotic arm.

  I tilted my head at him, having to pay careful attention to the angle. My instincts told me that, if I went too far, I would break my neck and be just fine. Simultaneously.

  Which was… confusing, to say the least.

  “Well, hop to it, boy! I’m not going to stand here and wait any longer. You will either obey, or they will force the matter!”

  I decided to shrug and start hauling myself up. Even if my mind was a little muddled at the moment, it still screamed at me that I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t a huge fan of pain either. At least, I didn’t think so. The whole electricity incident kind of left that up for debate, but I found I was no longer as indifferent about it as I had been just a little while ago.

  I almost wanted to chuckle. Apparently, if you want to un-break your mind from a mild pain addiction and general unhinged-ness, all you have to do is chow down on eldritch flesh and go through a couple mind-bendy visions.

  Who knew?