The sky blazes with a lurid glow, streaks of searing orange and red swirling like molten magma across the fractured earth. Even a glance upward feels like staring into an open furnace, forcing my gaze downward. A low, maddening hum vibrates through the filament, tinged with a sickly crimson light. My heart pounds; a pull both physical and psychological as my regrets catch up to me. I shout for help, begging the deities in my head for any sort of assistance. Their voices garble incoherently before fully cutting out in an inhuman silence. A cutting, unnatural quiet, where every minute shift of the wind, every passing whisper is amplified to distressingly clear proportions.
The ground beneath me trembles as I start to hyperventilate, my breaths direct and heavy, coaxed with a sickening sweetness entering my lungs. The immediate change in surroundings strikes into the depths of my gut. I double over onto my knees, ejecting bile from my throat. I clutch my trembling shoulders, watching the vile liquid dissipate into the ground, sinking into the writhing doughy earth. Dotting the sky, beasts of flesh resembling bloated insects and leeches patrol the skies. Where am I? What have I done? What has happened to me?
I can not stay here. My body refuses to. My nauseous thoughts blur into an empty mass of panic, echoing symptoms I’d only heard of in news stories. Stories of wearisome adolescents who delved into alternate dimensions on vacation, drawn to the depths through an ethereal, inexplicable pull. Most never returned. Those who did—the world wishes they stayed.
Lifting against the oppressive, molasses-thick weight of gravity, I take off in a blind, stumbling sprint, my gaze kept firmly on the floor. My squirming arms drift into view, and for the first time I behold what has become of them after this nightmarish exposure. My arms have withered, roughened in inhuman, fissured patches. Vapid strands of dead skin splay along the surface, peeling off the upper layer in long, painful swaths.
A grotesque need swells inside me—a need not to consume, but to make, to churn and shape and knead, a compulsion as natural as breathing, even if I choke on my own breath. As if possessed, my fingers twitch, remembering motions I have never known: the rolling, the pressing, the shaping of dough.
Time is slipping away from me. No, the very concept of time slips from my understanding, as all that fills my mind is obsession and remorse. The skull cracks and pries open as maddening chants squirm into the recesses of my head, seeping beneath the skin to echo in overlapping choirs. I claw at the throbbing agony hammering into my head, and it never escapes. That very same word haunts me again and again, dispersing itself through all manners of eldritch speech—the one word I can discern—cookies. cookies. cookies. cookies.
