Archive of Our Own ^beta

He stood, his boots wet with snowmelt and dew, feet and fingers soaked through to the bone, at the plateau of the mountain with no name. Chaos and jubilation continued to contort and dance around his shivering body, and he continued to sweat at the heat. Around him, a myriad of contorting figures waltzed and rumbled through the mountaintops, singing their praises to a greater evil than he had ever known, and worshipping its madness. The false idol before him, the golden calf, was a door. It was a yellow door, with nothing too special about it, except for the fact that, behind its unassuming and unthreatening disguise, a warren of living corridors, a stomach of some kind, lay in wait for him, alone. Clutched in one of his shaking hands, blue fingertips beginning to turn black, was a map — a map to the centre of the hallways, a map to this being's great destruction.

Continuing to stall for breath, to examine the cold spirals that blew from his lilac lips, he turned his head every so slightly to his right. The Archivist didn't meet his gaze, though he waited for her attention. When she didn't look his way, instead mumbling a single command — he hadn't been certain if it was "open it", or "go inside", or "be careful", — he nodded, a sickness filling his organs and a terror gripping his spine.

His hand found the doorknob and twisted it, and it opened with a whine, a shrill scream of horror, but none of the bodies around him, consumed by rhythm as they were, heard a single thing.

And she closed the door behind her, though she wouldn't remember doing so in an instant. With her heartrate roaring in her ears and her eyes already raw and streaming, she dashed into the corridors, clutching a map she had drawn herself.

The corridors were curled and shifting, feigning gently left over hours and hours of running and never meeting a middle. They sloped and rolled and twisted and turned and on their walls hung a million fake exits — mirrors that reflected into each other the chasms of infinity, sending loops and pathways deep into the impossible fractal pattern of the living structure. Photographs and paintings and pictures fastened in warped frames from black and yellow walls, each depicting the same image: the corridors, the canary carpet and black rug, the buzzing lights that then stung her eyes. They were styled in a multitude of methods; some were impressionist, slicks of oil paint melding into each other like wax, warm colours, as though Van Gogh had discovered the door and been briefly inspired; some were surrealist, on melting walls hung melting clocks, like Dali and Magritte had stumbled into the hallways and had thrown up their interpretations onto canvas; some were simple black and white pictures, many of which were faded, peeling, and flaking away, as though the corridors were hundreds of years old and had witnessed the creation of each and every camera.

She knew the pattern well, black, yellow, black, yellow, and she despised it. Furious at the lie she'd been spun and the trap she had crawled right into, she continued to run through the halls, the tapping of her heels muffled by the rug. The only thought blowing through her mind, as the heat she'd only experienced brief respite from clouded her vision and stifled her lungs, was the need to be free, to be gone, to be elsewhere.

Michael Shelley had opened the door to escape from a world of madness — the mountains that even his Miss Robinson could not name, though they had many faces to put names to — into a coffin of clarity. The dizziness left him and the uncertainty bled away as his hands balled into fists and his feet found purpose at each leap further inward. Listen, watch, do as you're told. Helen Richardson had left behind a world she could grasp, an institute built upon the foundations of knowledge and learning: an untouchable philosophy of nonengagement, a museum of safety, a collector's archive — a building she could get behind — and had entered a warren of terror. Her legs trembled like a fawn's at every new step she took. Listen, watch, never get involved.

He ran; he ran for their lives, for the lives of everyone he knew and everyone he loved. She? She ran for hers. She ran for a life she'd barely claimed, a life she was reshaping, moulding into something better, something with more promise, something with more spark. Even without knowing, he ran for her loves and her needs and her futures, and she ran to escape his.

And, so, they ran into each other.

When he finally met her, deep in the labyrinth, far past the point of no return, time had lost any effect it had on the two of them at all. They almost hit each other as they each turned a corner, oblivious to the hurried footsteps coming from behind the other side which had matched their own so perfectly it was as though one was the other's ghost. Initially, he had been horrified at the image of another wanderer, and had jumped to the conclusion of replacement, and then he had settled into camaraderie. Then, he had felt an overwhelming sense of pity and pain, as her existence implied his failure, and he dreaded the fate of humankind. Her suspicion toward him was grave and serious, and her inability to place his horrifying recognisability only spurred her terror onward. It didn't take her long to, at the sight of the trembling creature before her, wrung out and left to freeze, forgive him his likeness to her own monster and allocate the blame to a missed memory, or an ill-conceived one.

In an instant, the two of them had already made up their minds to form an alliance. Allyship would guide them farther than solitude would. Michael Shelley corrected the seat of his glasses on his nose, and threw a hand forward. Helen Richardson had shaken so many hands and sealed so many exchanges: some had been sticky and warm with sweat, but who had she been to judge? Others had been stiff and unbending, and some had been lended to her with no certainty at all, they'd hung limp. His hand had been received like living ice, and Helen had suffocated a cry as she had felt the blood vessels contracting as her circulatory system slowed the flow into a thick trickle that hardly showed the capacity for life.

The young man before her placed his second hand, equally as cold, on top as he continued shaking it, and nodded his head briskly before speaking. His soft and sullen voice had the texture of a squeaking hinge. "Hello?"
"Good..." for anything within her, Helen couldn't remember the time, "hello."
"Are you lost?"
Springing apart from him and brandishing the map, before squashing it back into her jacket pocket, Helen shook her head. "No!"
"Wonderful!" The man tucked some stray golden strands behind his ear and then exhaled into the wool that decorated both his collar and his sleeves. "She gave this to me," he said, as though Helen should have recognised a she.
As Helen watched him briefly scan the map before tucking it away, she forgot the fear as he pressed a hand to his chest and bowed slightly.
"What's your name?"
"I'm..." With a start Helen realised the sudden embarrassment of forgetting her own name, and she turned the question on its heel.

"I'm..." the stranger blinked a couple times before losing focus, shaking his head rapidly and almost losing the glasses.
"It doesn't matter," Helen didn't allow him to finish, and he nodded. "Do you remember why you're here?"
"I'm here for work, actually," he wheezed an awkward laugh, and Helen raised her brows.
"Oh?"
"I — uh — well," he trailed away, narrowed his eyes, and Helen understood it to be confidential. Fine. She'd signed enough silent warrants and burnt enough leases to understand. She allowed him to replace her question with his own.
"Do you know a way out of here?"
"I know that I've been here before." Helen began, "and... ah, nothing."
"Understandable," he muttered, and glanced at crumpled sheet of paper he held in his fist.
"I'll remember," Helen reinforced the lie that she'd been telling herself.
"I hope so..."
"Is that‐?"
"A map." The young man shifted uneasily on the balls of his shoes.
"Where does it lead?" Helen asked, and the other pursed his lips, angling his eyes in a sad and awkward manner.
"To the centre, I think. But..."
"But," Helen shifted around to peer over his shoulder and scan the page, "no centre."
"No- no- no- look." Dragging a finger to one corner in particular, the man tapped the paper several times. "Look, look, look."
"That's it?"
"Only a piece of it." He sighed. "I think I must be missing something."

The map was a mixture of swirls and loops, a mess of interwoven lines, haphazard passageways, and dead ends. It contained paths which overlapped and twisted around each other, and it didn't dismiss them though they seemed to change every time Helen blinked. It was terrifying and vast though contained to a single sheet of paper. It was more than a labyrinth, it was a tomb. And, it was almost identical to a map that Helen had drawn without thinking. A map with a curving, swallowing maelstrom nestled into it's opposing corner.

"But," the young man's eyes glistened, "I'm lost!"
He bleated, sadly, "I've failed her, and I'm failing everyone."
"Don't be silly," Helen muttered, still scanning deeply the map as she reached back into the pocket of her jacket, "you haven't failed anyone."
"I didn't say that." The young man's eyes widened behind glasses that were steaming up as he exhaled, and she paused.
"Huh?"
"I didn't say anything."
Pausing for a moment, narrowing her eyes and burying them deep into the man's, Helen hummed, looked away, and pulled her map out of her pocket.

Drawn on the back of a printed copy of a story that she'd only had a few seconds to scan — there had been a man buying flowers, drinking coffee, seeming off — Helen slid her crumpled diagram beneath the stranger's map, and discovered that either corner connected perfectly.

Homes, maps, and corridors were Helen Richardson's forte. She knew she hadn't misread the map when she'd first been introduced to the dark yellow door; she'd never misread a figure or misjudged an angle, a direction, a curve. A spark of familiarity woke her mind as she turned her head to look back at the terrified young man, as she took in his curls, those in his hair and those in his cheeks.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, everything's just fine. And, I can read this."

"Okay! Which way do we—"
"That way." A gleaming certainty entered her eyes as she turned a sudden corner and this man, clearly no stranger to letting another take charge, followed along behind.
His heels trotted along after hers like little cloven hooves, rhythmic but uncoordinated. Every couple of steps he would stumble, trip over laces he wasn't wearing, gasp, throw out his arms as though to steady himself, but the strategies, Helen knew, were for nothing. She'd been in here before, and he had never even stepped foot onto this liminal plane. She heard him trip, at one point, and collide with a huge, tilted mirror. It wasn't his fault, she inhaled tightly through her lips, when the floor shuddered violently in anguish beneath their feet, but she couldn't help but marvel at how truly uncoordinated, at how plainly lost, at how pathetically unbalanced he was; she found herself questioning whether the one that had ushered him through the door had bothered to train him just enough to survive, or had simply offered him as something of an appetiser.

The mirror lay on the ground in pieces, and he knelt in the centre of them, groaning as he gripped his head.
"Are you alright?"
He mumbled a brief "ow" in response to Helen's query, but nodded all the same. With a heavy sigh, one of exertion or terror, he staggered upward and brought his hand, curled, to his lips, and ran his ivory tongue over the pale skin of his knuckles, spotted with crimson. He had removed his gloves, green velvet, expensive-looking, and had gained a tremor where they had once protected, but Helen had little interest in correcting his mistake. She assumed he hadn't wanted them damaged, or that the heat was killing him too.
"Alright..." Helen replaced him on the ground and, remembering her previous visit with a start, reached for a huge, jagged shard.

It cut her fingertips ever so slightly as she lifted it; she winced, but though she didn't speak, the follower noticed, his hands pressed to either side of his head as though he'd crumble and lose it if he let them go.
"Your fingers," he eventually mumbled, and took the glass from her in his hands.
"Thank you..." she whispered, narrowing her eyes into the reflection.

From within it, she saw a great, rolling beast, a creature whose limbs were twisted and stumbling, whose spine was long and contorted, whose grin was wide but unfeeling, and whose eyes were everywhere you couldn't directly look. It lollopped and bounded through the reflected hallways, so forceful that the walls would shake behind it. Its thick and swollen hands would hit the floor one by one, and the creature would lean in order to press itself forward. It leered and lurched and thrashed, spilling sagging skin before it vanished into ash.

She was grateful for it taking the opportunity to reveal itself in the broken mirror. She couldn't imagine the fear and anger she would have to release in the poor man's direction if he had broken a mirror that could have been their exit.

Its state of matter never changed, and Helen could see where it had taken inspiration from solids — where it froze in place or hit walls with a thump — liquids — where it sprawled laterally into itself, creating pools of grey, semi-coloured flesh — and gas — where it became light and endless colour, and disappeared again.

"I'm sorry about your mascara," the young man frowned and startled her from her silence.
"Yeah, it's alright... just—" grabbing the poor lamb's hand before he glanced into one of the shards, Helen hissed— "don't look into the mirror," and he nodded briskly.
"Should we-?"
"Keep going?" Helen nodded, and the young man swallowed as he broke into a wobbly dash to keep up with her.

While Helen was unable to explain to the young man exactly how she could recognise an exit and exactly why she knew her way around as well as she did — she could see suspicion and pity in his eyes — she found it even harder explaining to herself. In some ways, she was as lost as he was, ushered through a dark, yellow door — an experience the two of them had shared — and welcomed into bright colour and harsh light. However, slowly, she found that her body knew the corridors. His stayed clueless and outcast. Like muscle memory, her limbs and the meat and bone within them seemed to twist as though by themselves, without authorisation from the brain. Every choice she made was correct, except, she felt, trusting someone like the lamb beside her.

He could tell, she knew.
She could taste his suspicion in the air, and she sensed that he could understand hers. Every nervous glance she would throw his way was reflected tenfold, and she could not find it in her heart to blame herself, and neither could he. Every moment of unblinking terror was reciprocated. He shook slightly and held onto his sleeves as he walked, picking at the wool as though it didn't truly belong on his skin, though, Helen could hear her inner sceptic being beaten to death by her inner lifeguard; she was searching for metaphors, similes that alluded to him being untrustworthy, and, when she couldn't see them, she would create them.

The effect that this treatment had on the young man was more serious than she'd anticipated. He began to hobble a few feet behind at first, which she realised later that he meant for her to take as a sign that he was attempting to give her space, but in the moment the action only made her hackles rise. Slowing down further, he began to follow the walls with his fingers, as though proving that his mind were elsewhere and not focused on killing Helen in cold blood. Still, like a fawn imprinted on her, he followed, without talking, without initiating contact, and, sometimes, she noticed, without breathing.

He would respond when she asked for it, agreeing swiftly or humming — "mm, no... my map says otherwise..." — and sometimes even slinking up beside her in order to compare the paper tangles that he considered gospel. It was during one such occasion that Helen made the grave mistake of trusting him.

"So... this way."
A sigh predated his words, and he shook so violently as he spoke them that Helen thought for only a moment that there was more than fear haunting him. "It c-certainly looks tha- that way."
"Then," ignoring the stammer he'd developed in favour of maintaining that last little bit of faith in the theory that her new follower was human, and not liar, Helen nodded firmly, "we go this way." Left and right no longer had any meaning to either of them, neither did any of the cardinal directions, and they'd abandoned the words entirely in favour of the movement of limbs.

"Actually," the man whispered, and Helen felt a shiver slide up her spine, "I think we stop here for a while."
She stopped studying the map. "What?"
"The cold crawls closer," he spoke too softly, and Helen hardly heard him, "and it knows where we are."

"What are you—" Helen spun round and glanced upward to where she'd remembered him being, but the man was no longer there— "talk... huh?"
Instead, she locked eyes with the reflection of a terrifying creature; it limped in rolling, staggering steps from out of the frame, curled into being, the sickly colour of a tornado-heralding sky, and shifted into a standing position, upright, legs apart, eyes narrowed, head cocked.
Her eyes flicked downward in a hurry and her face followed; the young man was sat, cross-legged, on the carpet, in a state of utter dejection. She almost allowed a swell of questions to burst from her sweltering throat but, glancing in rapid sweeps over the corridors that the two of them were locked and lost in, a pang of empathy replaced them.

The man had collapsed against a tilting mirror, his arms wrapped around himself and a shiver wracking his brittle body. A wretched thing, as miserable as a monster, the young man sighed deeply and shakily, and impressed upon Helen a fear so palpable and freezing that it cooled the hot blood in the hungry and cavernous system of caves and tunnels that she was beginning to feel herself becoming.

She joined him in his melancholy, eager to avoid the beast in the mirror, and leant into him by a fraction as she knelt, her back against the wall with him.

Helen whispered, "are you okay?"
He laughed, bitterly, a single, shallow note. "Are you?"
In silence, Helen leant against the wall, and his fingers, which she could now see were blue with cold, clawed deep into the woollen wound he wore around his neck. Gently, and without speaking, with shaking hands, he gingerly offered her an end.

She thought of refusing, blaming the heat that made her head swim and her skin cry, but the young man's eyes were wide and afraid, as though a stranger's safety meant anything to him at all, and she thought it more polite to take his offer, and put him at ease.

Grasping one thick end of the scarf, she crawled to his side and wrapped it a couple times around her own neck. Within the remainder of it, which, Helen could see, was still long and plentiful and winding, the other hid the lower portion of his face, two slender hands, and a thin and brittle neck. The only sound was his deep and shaking sigh into the wool, warming the piece before his lips, and Helen joined him in a hymn of breaths, where the scarf soon became damp with his condensation, her sweat, their tears.

Inhaling deeply the air, terrifyingly cold, that blew around the young man, Helen stifled another sob, and realised with a start that the black of her mascara had sunk into and stained the crimson scarf. The young man didn't notice or, if he did, didn't care, so she dabbed with the scarf her cheeks and the very corners of her eyes until they were at least dry.

Instead of chastising her for sullying his scarf, he sunk further into it and blinked out excess tears.

"I think..." he whispered, hoarsely, "I had a cat?"
Helen's heart sank. "A cat?"
"I-I-I think."
Drooping, slightly, Helen shifted over the floor until she was just a little bit closer to him. "I'm sorry."
"Do- don- don't be." Words began to falter in his mouth, distracted by fear, or cold. "Someone will lo- look after it, I think." As his eyed turned in Helen's direction he continued. "If th-there really is a c-c-cat, that is."
"Anyone else can look after it, I'm sure." In her delirium, she'd forgotten how to comfort someone.
The young man frowned, then sighed, then wiped his eyes and brow and hauled himself to his feet. He offered Helen a hand, but Helen had already pulled herself upright.

"Do you trust me?" He shrugged forth the question, and Helen hadn't the heart to give him an answer.
"You've been of some use," she said, instead, and his face warped into a stray smile, as though the words had a wisp of a bittersweet truth to them, as though they were what he'd been dreading hearing, as though he interpreted more than Helen had meant with them.
"Are we ready to go, then?" He asked another, still smiling like he'd forgotten about his cat.
"No reason not to, is there."
In a moment of unblinking rapture, as though midway through an epiphany that required an element of madness in order for it to work, the man stared directly down the barrel of the corridor, with a mouth twisted in horror, understanding, and excitement.
"There's every reason... if you know what reasons you're looking for."

Helen wanted to confess that he was frightening her, but instead tolerated his ecstacy in favour of satiating her curiosity. Turning back the way they'd come, startling herself with what she realised was a total lack of recognition for the hallway, Helen located the mirror that the young man had leant against. It was empty, but wouldn't be for long — she recalled the monster, growing into view on its warped surface — and, instead of giving to the young man any explanation or understanding, she bolted into the corridor and prayed that his sense enough to follow remained.

She trusted herself to avoid reasons not to escape, to dodge bullets that she had already noticed were wedging themselves deep into the shivering young man beside her and, eventually, to dig them out of his sprinting corpse. As far as Helen could tell, she was gazing deep into the eye of one of two options; either, he'd been in the corridors longer than her, his mind had already been long warped by the repitition of the tunnels and he had been haunted by the beast in the mirror for somewhere between weeks prior to Helen's entrance and years, or his sanity was of particularly weak and feeble stature: perhaps he was easily manipulated in his old life, a servant of some kind, a younger sibling or a gifted child. Either option had a few flaws, but both had merits.

In any case, Helen was now travelling with him directly on her heels, and was having to force herself not to rationalise movements and choices made by him.
She trusted him about as far as she could throw him but, as long as he remained within that distance, she kept finding reasons to avoid ditching him all together.

There could have been no telling of how long they'd run, and every glance at her phone gave her no indication — corridors, corridors, corridors — of the time, or the date, or the year. The way that the young man looked at her phone, at her digital watch — with huge eyes and a mouth that could have been wide enough to swallow the world, a dark, red trail of a hallway behind it — made her believe that his perception of the year would be different to hers.

Neither of them had ever attempted or would ever attempt something as frightening and degrading as smalltalk, certainly nothing as forward as "so, what year is it where you come from?" so the question remained unanswered.

"Wait!" Helen's train of thought was broken by his sharp, wavering voice.
She had been running in circles, she could recognise the way that the mirrors were ordered; it was conducive to her imagining of the corridors, intuitive directly to her style, and she expected the young man to direct her into an offshoot where the fractal patterns of the forever shrinking spirals would at the very least showcase some other form or imagery, but the young man had no such plan.

Instead, he directed her to a mirror, and a Helen was inside. A Helen made of black tear streaks and busted lips, frayed sleeves and broken bones, answered the invisible call.
"Hello," Helen said to the mirror. "Hello."
It spoke with her, as swollen and limp and emptied as the object of its mimicry; the young man had staggered away from the glass and was eying himself with a terror that Helen couldn't relate to, and ended up ignoring.

As Helen drew nearer to it, her focus sealed deep onto her reflection, she was reminded of her first trial. Her eyes met those of the other Helen, and she studied its features with a wonder and a sorrow; she had become a warped and painted person, and she saw so in her reflection. Her bones hurt, and the pain was visible, as though she'd been fighting shrinking walls with all her force, as though she were being slowly crushed and brute strength was all she had. Her skull was every so often seized with a series of terrible headaches, the nerves in her limbs were trapped and sore, and even her cheeks had begun to ache with the strain of the facial expressions that she hadn't been aware of herself pulling. Beside her, the young man seemed in equal agony. He glared with red eyes at the mirror while his chest heaved and fell, and every now and then would exhale suddenly and painfully, as he too took in the image of himself.

But Helen could see him panicking. She was strangely calm, and eerily pleased.

Instead of soothing him, she lifted her hands, where colour was changing and joints where pulsing, and put them against the ice cold of the glass. Her face followed and, for a minute, she met the other Helen in a horrified harmony, hands together, cheek to cheek, eyes closed to the world.

A million images wafted into her mind, filling every crack that the corridors had caused in it and plugging every widening pore that had been poked into it. She remembered an identical situation, a friend, an oasis, in the form of a mirror without the hunting creature.

A wail of fear and disbelief awoke her from the comfort she had found in a relatable face, and she lifted her head, leaving gentle stains on the glass, to sob curses and hate in the direction of the young man, but he was gone. The ignorance of the first corridors had surrounded her, and she was alone again.

Of course, she began to walk. It was intuitive; it had been her first reaction when she'd entered the corridors, and it would be her last in them. Walking meant moving; it meant conserving energy — while running meant wasting it — but spending time, and Helen had so, so much time.

As she walked, she scanned every mirror; she measured every face, she checked every glass. She did so, and she waited for an exit, just for her. The heat began to occupy her thoughts once more, penetrate with gruesome fingers into her brain and make it pocky, full of holes. She found that she was struggling to recall her means of entering the corridors, much less remember each petty detail about her methods of travelling. As far as she was concerned, her party had consisted of herself, her bruises, her broken phone, and her broken mind; she hoped it was broken: nothing with any claim to sanity, nothing holding onto it by fingernails, would have convinced itself without question of the things that Helen was seeing in the mirrors that surrounded her. A monster had replaced her own reflection.

Until, it didn't.

For so long, or what had seemed so long, or thirty seconds, or days, Helen had stumbled alone in her second set of intestines, avoiding giving the ache in her bones any notice while she groaned occasionally at the way her stomach was heaving, full of air. Her footsteps had guided her on a road to nowhere, echoing before her feet had hit the floor, or so terribly delayed in their passage to reach Helen's ears; she'd never remember the first step, and certainly she'd never stop, not until she fell apart.

She knew a story, a fairytale, from her youth about a girl who had walked until she fell apart, and became the roots and flowers and fed the grasses and worms her dirt and bone. The girl had walked for many reasons; because she was lost, and had never been taught to stay put and be found again, because she were being pursued by a man, and because her blind mother and injured father were never going to look for her. So, on she walked, and walked, and walked, until her feet bled and her body doubled over. Until her mind didn't know anything but walking. Until she raised her hands in prayer and hunger, and her skin became bark and her eyes became stiff, and her fingernails and hair grew into laurel leaves.

Until — a blond man interrupted Helen's reminiscing.

He was tall, his skin had turned pale. He walked with a limp into Helen's view as though she were his reflection, and when he continued walking without noticing her, nose bent into a map he held, she continued walking, too, apathy replacing fear. Until, he started upright, straightening with a chest rising and falling so fast, as though he were a prey animal. With a finger pointed at the mirror, struck dead with something mimicking panic, he shouted unintelligible words, meaningless noise, at Helen from beyond the glass. Screaming, his hands pressed against the face of the mirror, the young man seemed familiar in his horror and his agony, as though Helen had stirred some sort of fighting dread.

It was this pitifully human terror that invited Helen to creep up to the opposing mirror. Her hands had joined his and she began to study the odd recognition within her.

Within him, a paralysis born of horror froze him in place, while Helen was sealed by her feet to the floor from fatigue and loss of effort. His eyes were wide and his mouth twisted, and he mumbled a question that was so dreadfully muffled by the glass that Helen couldn't strain to understand him. Even bringing herself to ask him to repeat it was a chore, as though she were standing idly by and allowing the bones in her jaw to grow past their roots and intertwine, fall in love, clamp her mouth shut and keep it so. Helen, instead, waited, and her waiting paid off.

Before she had any chance to react, the stranger had taken his fists to the glass, to her face, and a deep crack had shot from the centre to the corner. A round, web-like pattern grew as his second set of knuckles came into contact with the scar, and flakes of the mirror began to burst in fragments and land, singing, tinged with red, on the carpet.

After the first crack, a rift was caused in Helen's mind between the real, and the insane. With a start, she jumped away from her reflection, the young man, her mouth agape.

His fist had come into sudden contact with the face of the mirror, and smears of red blood had followed his knuckles, staining the mirror's surface and spirting to freckle her nose and cheeks. From the impact, several offshoots and sparks had run from the crater to the edge of the mirror, each oozing the same red substance, and one had darted directly over the bridge of his nose, splitting his face in half and wobbling his grimace of pain and fear and confusion into a queasy smile.

With a grunt, and, afterwards, a yelp of pain, the young stranger glared into the mirror and slammed his fist again into the crack he was making.

He shouted some inaudible words before his knuckles hit the mirror again, and he whined softly at the pain as a crack split the mirror in two. He followed it with a gasp so loud that Helen almost misjudged the sound of breaking glass as that of his breaking arm. The cut ran from the top of the mirror, all the way down its glistening, wiggling surface, and met the frame by the young man's boot, which was, now that Helen was paying attention, damp and dusted lightly with a white frost.

It split, burst in a fray of glittering sparks, and he stepped in through the doorway to gaze at her, licking his bloody fingers, after the shards of glass had finished echoing over the floor.

He entered her world, again. Again? Helen wracked her mind until it was sore, but could find nothing.

"Come on," the blond beckoned her into the corridors, and Helen couldn't remember to distrust him, "we have a job to do."
"We do!?"
"Yeah!" The young man called as he continued to guide her through rich and twisting corridors; colours that could make Helen taste headaches followed her every move.

The man led the way, determined, certain, a scarf warming his throat — must he not have been sweating? — and a map hanging from his hand as though he'd memorised it and no longer required it. Wincing, Helen brought out her own: crumpled, singed as though the intense heat had burned it in her pocket, and, shamefully, hers; she had no means of navigating without it, but until his bizarre entrance into her life she had walked with no memory of it.

Or, very little. Studying the map, Helen recalled the pen. She had shaken it, before using it, before scribbling her mad writings on the wall of the Archivist's house of cards of a mind. The Archivist was a figure unforgettable — Helen couldn't imagine a future where she didn't see him each night in her dreams. What had she to waste his time with? Certainly, hadn't she the nerve... she had devoured the Archivist's precious space, and for what? A statement.

Her eyes met the bouncing curls of the man who led her, who, even then, muttered under his breath a history of sound and word that Helen didn't have access to. A statement, she nodded, about a blond man, in a house she was renovating, and a yellow door. She understood it in its inclarity; she grasped onto its threads, its rolling, curling lies, like they were a language she was raised in, and she were rediscovering the way her mother tongue choked the false one and burst forth from her mouth. She began to mimic him, copy him, sway with her words, bubbling and broiling out of her mouth in a delicious broth of knowledge.

The tale — she continued to nod — was native to her, like she was a lens for the story to be shone through, and she was excellent at her job. She took pride in being this Distortion's cradle, for a while, as she listened to the words that the man was weaving into sentences. The story was long and winding, coiling itself like the corridors themselves around her veins and throat and lungs, until she breathed it.

"Here we are, finally," the young man spat, and Helen settled beside him, hovering in his shadow.
"A mirror?"
Not just any mirror, she almost imagined him saying. Her own, pristine reflection stood in it, carved and battered but by any other means unchanged.
"This—" she remembered her first escape, her first entrance and her first flight; she recalled a mirror that did not contain the monster she had been seeing, but the man finished her sentence for her— "has to be destroyed."

Confidence performed a vanishing act, draining from the young man's face. It left it blue, as blue as the veins they were trapped in — their veins. Adamantly apathetic, lost in the misunderstanding of her own mind, Helen muttered, "you wouldn't," and he replied, "I have to," and she shook her head with no movement of her eyes and he took his fists to the surface.

With the crack of the mirror, Helen woke up and lunged for his arm, staining her palms with old blood and collecting splinters in her fingers as she shrieked for him to cease, but new splits formed before his bone even struck the glass, as though predetermined, and Helen lost sight of her reflection.

Her jaw dropped in an instant and her eyes locked onto the broken mirror as she froze in place.
"Why—" it took every ounce of force to break her body from its position and glare daggers into the fragile face that had reappeared beside her— "would you do that!?"
A look of confusion appeared on his face, replacing the dumb confidence, a hesitant and queasy smile, as he stumbled into the opposing wall and leant against it, his palms on his knees and his body bent at the waist. The expression briefly became concern, and then doubt, but it was replaced once more by sickening pride.
"Because I- I was told to." Mist blew from his mouth in curls and evaporated into the air as Helen felt her blood boil.
"By who!?" The outburst was uncontained, and Michael stuttered for a second, a distant expression morphing his face into something much, much more untrustworthy.
"By..." he furrowed his brow and threw down his head once more, long, blond hair spilling over his shoulders and curling in ringlets around his neck. His long and bloody scarf hung low, and painted the lambskin of his coat with a stark red, until he pulled himself upright once more and held his bruising hands out in front of his face.

Perhaps it was the angle of his smile, that cautious, or maybe callous, smile. It could have been the pointed nails on the end of each long and broken finger. Maybe it had been the light and airy laughter that he allowed delirium to coax from his mouth — inhuman laughter.

Something sent a chill up Helen's spine.

"Who are you?" She repeated her first question with more force, and the blond man stiffened, his arms by his side and his chin raised slightly.
After an irrational moment or so, he slackened slightly, and shook his head with a trembling lip, as if to say I don't know. Not anymore, I don't know.
"Then," she growled, her mouth going dry, "who sent you?"
"I- I- I..." standing up straight and running hands along his scalp, the man gasped, spluttered, and winced as his memory failed him.
She was reminded his failure to recollect his own name at the start of their journey, of his terror and embarrassment at the thought of failing a task he clung to so desperately it may have been divinely appointed. He scrunched his nose and he pounded his fist on the side of his head, hoping to shake loose a memory or two.
"Helen Richardson!" He shouted, grimaced, slumping his shoulders and heaving a sigh, before instantly reverting to verticality, his eyes wide and his mouth agape.

Helen stiffened, his sudden chill permeating her flesh and freezing the blood in her veins. She became a vessel for his fear, "what did you call me?" She became a host for his rage. Clenching her painful fists, her knuckles swollen and her fingers hot with agony, she bit back the rising bile of terror he had spiked in her, and crushed it with her teeth into acid.
"Did I tell you my name?"

Instead of answering, he smiled. Not a kind, welcoming smile, but the smile of a victor. The smile of someone who had waited aeons for the key to their prize and the amendment to their prayers.

Shifting his heavy, wool-lined coat from his shoulders, the young man staggered slightly on crooked legs. He caught the coat on his elbows, but the sharp symbols and hazardous colour beneath had already revealed itself, released from its padded prison. With two legs unfit to stand on, limp and trembling, and his hands folded above his hips, the man shuddered, throwing his head forward until it was covered by curly hair. From between the blond ribbons, that same smile peered, a wide mouth, and large, focused, forward-facing eyes. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

Immediately, the thought came to her; this man, whether friend or foe, was not going to let her leave. Whether he was aware of his doings or not, he was trapping her, spinning a seam of lies and twisting them around her body, smashing her only exit right before her eyes and pulling a face of true or faux bewilderment when she confronted him.

Here he was: too weak to survive alone, yet he was here for a purpose. Too trusting to rely on himself alone, throwing this wilting figure at the closest person of any authority, yet he had been given this task by someone with a purpose, with a higher power, with a brain. Whether it was him and his free will dismantling her exit plans and wrecking her chances, or the person behind him with a higher strategy in mind playing with his strings as though he were a puppet, something was frightening Helen Richardson, and she was going to ditch its mouthpiece as soon as possible.

It — for Helen had seen its hands burst in sudden growth and its fingers wind in tendrils and fronds and knew for certain no longer that it was really human — began to laugh, again, harsh and suffocating, as she ran away. It gave no chase, instead, allowing Helen to sprint into the tunnels.

Deep in the tunnels, long past the last hallway where Helen could hear its dizzying laughter, Helen charged through. Unable to hear the laughter of the foe, Helen convinced herself that it had elected not to follow, and she envied its resting state while she caught her breath on lungs made of paper mache and expressed each exhale as though whistling it through treetops.

Helen briefly thanked herself that she had never fallen prey to either the addiction of smoking or taking ecstacy, before she second-guessed herself and began to hobble, leant against the right hand wall and glaring with half closed eyes at a mirror a few dozen feet in front of her. Had she ever smoked? Had she ever given it the chance? Or had she always chosen to dismiss the filthy habit in favour of another? In this case, when?

Who cared? Helen cared. She had been giving thanks to her own mental fortitude, her stainless steel will and her propensity to avoid people that she could find little trust in. Why had she been thanking her past self? Right, right, right, her mind swirled with questions, and more questions answered those questions. A mental hydra arose in Helen's mind, but she continued to put one foot in front of the other.

Peering over one golden rim, Helen saw not her own reflection, but another's.

The other looked like her, moved with her, and gasped with her as she fled it. It wore her clothes and had the very basic essence of her features. But it was only a mimicry; one eye was lifted visibly above the other, the eyelashes curling and drifting into a beautiful and regular spiral; the mouth opened in horror with Helen's, wider than it should have, and the very ends of its lips slid from its face while it grinned, beautiful horror. Why would Helen be grinning? Its cheeks where stained the faintest lilac colouring. Its neck was long and thinning like dough. The skin was too smooth, too tight, too warped, too pulled, too saggy, too dull, too dead. The flesh of this distortion of Helen, this caricature, had a texture that Helen Richardson could feel and eyes that travelled too deeply into her soul only to find glass fragments in her brain. It blinked a fraction of a moment before she did, and Helen twisted on her heel in order to continue to run in a different direction while it giggled at her absence but didn't move a muscle.

Footsteps of Helen's did not fall upon the rug, pressing down into the shag carpet, meeting fluffy, dread-like villi. Instead, it was as though another set hit hers from below, mimicking her footprints and mirroring her stagger like an equal and opposing energy. Heat had brought Helen to almost a tumble, her throat filling up with damp air every second and clogging her lungs. Something echoed her thirsty steps with perfect clarity from below, as though they were rehearsed, predisposed to this moment and this environment and this prey. Helen did not like the feeling of guilt that it caused, as though her stumbling was an act. A nervous feeling made itself at home in the very pit of her gut, and Helen coerced herself to walk along the very edge of the carpet so as to avoid the upward force.

And, suddenly, the floor began to break away.

It started with tiles; a small selection of them came loose at the corners, and she felt them wobble under her heels, shivering beneath her steps. After a while, cracks would widen along their edges, and the first crash brought her to her senses. One ceramic square peeled from under her, and fell away with a clatter. It left a black, four-cornered hole behind, and Helen cautiously peered through it, her heart in her mouth and her swollen hands curled into fists, her knuckles white hot. Far beneath, there was another floor, another carpet, another rug, an identical corridor with walls that must have stretched upward for many, many feet, and a second Helen.

Certain that she was deceiving herself, Helen rubbed her eyes and knelt further down. She'd never seen a second set of stairs. The second Helen looked at her with a huge smile but blank eyes, and equally bruised and warped hands in fists. Tentatively, Helen forced her chin upward, mustering all the courage and all the disbelief, and all her energy was pooled in keeping herself standing, so that when a third Helen screamed in horror, sobbing black tears through a hole in the ceiling, the original (she hoped) barely flinched. The black tears fell from her and landed beneath Helen's eyelids, and she blinked them several times to allow the streaks to roll down their cheeks and join their predecessors.

At the sound of a sharp crack beneath her feet, Helen elected to bolt from the scene, the clicking of her broken heels followed closely by the breaking of glass and the clattering of tiles.

Laughter began to rattle through the corridor, reverberating through walls and echoing between them. Harsh and cruel, it continued until Helen could just about recognise it as her own, before a tight tug beneath her feet caught her attention.

The walls kept laughing at her as she knelt, her palms to the wall and her eyes wide open, as the rug beneath her began to be slowly pulled into and eaten by the every-growing gap in the floor some fifty feet behind her. The carpet, too, began to sink deep into the cavernous well that she had opened. Every inch of atmosphere became thick with the noise of laughter as the hole widened, as though the Helen from below were stalking her gracefully, hanging just behind every fallen slate.

In her horror, mascara seeping down her face in rivers of ink, Helen, pushing herself more and more into the wall, begged to be allowed to pass. She cried out a plea of mercy as she pressed her fragile body further into the brick, and — as though responding to her despondency — the wall behind her fell away. No, it simply disappeared. It left no trace that it was ever there. Instead, a corridors manifested itself behind Helen's back, and the terrified woman didn't consider thinking twice before she sprinted deeper into the belly of the beast.

And, while she stumbled onward without bothering to dissect the reason that the treacherous passges were letting her pass unscathed, all that Helen could bring herself to feel was blame for the creature that had followed her. The scrawny, blond, helpless animal had been nothing but dead weight, and she hated him for fleeing at the only moment she'd ever truly needed him.

He had been the one to flee, right?

At another dead end, in her anger, Helen stamped her foot and eyed with egregious confidence the wall before her. It obliged, swinging aside with a scream, and she stormed through, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. Her singular point of focus was whatever mirror fell into view, and so many of them hung in her way, creatures painted on their faces.

By this point a certainty had overtaken her. Bashing her palms against unmoving bricks, she cried out for the hallways to let her pass, to guide her to an exit, and more and more they obeyed her until she was carving her way through their flesh while the walls around her retreated at a glance.

Eventually, a scream pulled her attention to the mirror beside her, and she fell backward into a wall that broke her fall like a pillow. Where the rolling mass of comfortless creature had often lumbered, it had cornered a frail fawn in the mirror's frame. Already bleeding around the throat, the small creature doubled down in fear and anguish and horror, its face contorted into a primal scream. Helen had forgotten the image of a man, and had recalled the image of a young beast.

The bulbous cloud of colour and gas, irritated by the woolly thorn in its labyrinth, fell upon its front paws to devour the animal, and Helen broke from her place of rest to join the mingling thunderstorm in its place of worship.

Instead of meeting them, with a shatter of broken glass and a pained gasp, Helen broke through the mirror, wrenched a muscle from her calf to her neck, which remained tight as she tumbled to the floor, and came to a stop with a groan, and a shiver. Forcing her eyes shut, she cursed the heels and spat out the few shards of glass that had embedded themselves in her cheeks, choking and hiccuping on her fingers as she searched her mouth. Swallowing blood, she lay still, on her back, and watched as curling spools of mist blew from her haggard breaths and floated away. Her fingers began to turn numb with cold, first their ends, then their knuckles. Her eyelashes began to lengthen with crystallised ice, and it took all her shock and all her strength to bring herself onto her sore knees, and then onto her legs, a broken woman.

Trembling and grasping her face as though to make sure that all her features were still in their correct placements, Helen exhaled a single, shaking groan as she opened up her eyes, before it melded with a gasp and burst into a cry, and her throat welled up in horror and disgust. Bile rose thick in her throat.

A corpse knelt before her.

It was as white as snow, and thick with frost. It knelt on the ground, its hands thrown to either side in submission and its knees frozen to the tiles on the floor. Its neck was long and slightly twisted, as though turned to either side at once, though mostly hidden behind locks of curling hair, and its mouth was cracked open in a hungry scream to reveal a tunnel channelling into its body. Stone-white teeth gleamed, arranged in an order too perfect to be true, too flat, too clean, lined the inside of the mouth, behind dry, blue lips. Blue veins had crawled from the two wrists, from the sleeves, to block and join and recreate the corridors. They were building them, using materials from the body to renew their sacred halls, and the blood vessels were thick, bulbous, and completely still.
Not as though they were holes, but as though it had never needed them: the eyes were gone.

Unsure of whether she was feeling pity for the corpse or rage at its intent to block her path, Helen clenched her fists as she knelt onto the ground, grasped a shard of glass from the broken mirror so tightly that she could feel its edge slide deep into her palm and cut her a new lifeline, and began to use it to hack away at everything dry and cold and dead that was blocking her path to freedom. The old flesh of the hollow corpse — the shell of whoever it had been before — came away like dust as she hastily slashed with vicious cries at the leftovers of the man that she had forgotten she'd ever understood.

Behind the old blood vessels, grown like tree roots deep into the system she was navigating in order to fill them and disorientate her, was a single, dark corridor, with a single speck of light at its end, hovering like a beacon, or the lure of an anglerfish. They crackled and fell away in pieces, crumbling bone or drifting ash; empty, flayed, matter. Nothing poured from the veins that had burst forth and fed the living corridors the lamb's blood. Maybe the sacrifice had long since been drunk dry, or maybe it had never even lived. It was still, and the sinew that had built the visceral web was thin, waiting for someone to destroy it, or take up the mantle of a living fuel tank.

Unhappy with staying too long, reading far too deeply into the empty eyes of the cadaver and finding no literature, Helen turned to her side, raised her chin, and sucked in air as she crept, like a crab, sideways through the decay.

A door met her, several yards in distance away, gleaming with light that to Helen gave her the impression that it was anything but heavenly. It was sacrilegious to glow that brightly. How many radioactive isotopes wished that they could inspire fear this quickly with their glow.

Ahead of her, a tall, blond figure stalked through the tilting corridor. It seemed to drift across the floor, the outline of its frame melding with and disappearing into the walls. It was dressed warmly, but still hunched its shoulders in cold, before shaking its head dismissively and grasping with a single hand the doorknob before it. Though it looked very much like a person, Helen could see through the charade. With a start she recognised him as the young man that she had stumbled into faith with, that she had shared a scarf with — a scarf that the thing still wore. Then, with a rising bitterness, she recognised the young man as Michael. For a fleeting moment, all sense of her past life returned to her, and she remembered the yellow door and its matt black handle, as well as its sentinel, the golden angel with the crooked smile. She remembered how Michael had looked at that door, how his eagerness had been masked as wonder, how he had shown curiosity not toward the door itself but toward the idea of Helen Richardson taking the bait, and how he had goaded her into falling into his trap. She remembered the fear, and the anger, and, in a moment so brief that there was no time for rational thought spare within it, she reimagined the revenge.

Michael had come with her into the corridors; she seethed, he had shared the terror with her. He had performed a nervous disposition so well, and bluffed a dark ignorance so masterfully, that Helen hadn't had a chance to hesitate the question of loyalties.

An explosive ripple of dizzying laughter harmonised with the sound of the squeaking door; it rose and fell and shuddered and groaned. The monster glided forward, clutching its sides and strobing wildly in its artificial bioluminescence as it burst with every hoarse and trembling gasp, and its body contorted and writhed to fit the shape of it, of the giggles and the chokes. A husk of a frame embodied the real spirit — the laughter was the flesh of the being, Helen could see it possess and torment the puppet boy beneath, who was just a coat and scarf now. Helen remembered that scarf and winced.

As the laughter rose and fell, hauling forward long and twisting limbs that were otherwise draped over its body or tangled with it, it sparked a flash of life into the mess of golden string and bloody yarn. Generating new senses for the being, for the moving melody, by opening up new eyes across its tendrils of hair or allowing a second tongue to lap at the collar of its coat, the laughter inhabited the body rather than influenced it like a mind did. It wore Michael. It would soon wear Helen.

When this version of the beast, traitorous and trembling, had let itself into the corridors that it owned, that it knew, that it had watched Helen suffer in, Helen had been prey. Now, it had left the sanctity of its own, wooden stomach, and Helen was keen to reassemble herself, to assign to herself its role of predator. She growled at its lack of sympathy and shut the door behind it as she darted forward. Beneath her palm she found a keyhole. In a fury unmatched, a fury that carried the weight of her previous despair, she fell to her knees. Peering into the gap between the key and the lock, she hissed, "not this time, you fucker," and twisted the key until it clicked.

It came to life in her hands, turning itself in its rusted box, seething with gentle creaks. Helen convinced herself that the keen behaviour of the key was a sign that the wrench she was squeezing in between the gears of Michael's plan was fated, required, wanted by more than just her selfish desire to be right for one last time. Manipulating customers was briefly forgotten, and Helen began to manipulate herself.

She shook, under the perfect impression that, for sixteen minutes and twelve seconds, she was finally holding the master-key. She trembled, and waited, and feared for every lie that may be discovered and devoured, for, Michael was the biggest threat to her life, and Helen grasped onto the door handle as Michael's lolloping body hung and writhed toward the victim in the chair, before giving up; a weakling.

Grinning, wild and manic, at the figure of Michael as he neared the locked door and led the poor, bedraggled Archivist along with him as though he were on a leash, Helen hadn't the space in her mind to take in that another creature had settled beside her. When she did notice it, she almost shrieked in horror at its visage; it was a dull, grey mass, huge and bulbous and pointed in odd areas and at weird angles, in its hands, its back, its head. It had a technicolour outline that seemed to glow and pulse, and it moved awkwardly, like a machine, on another plane of existence, walking on film rather than in person. It skulked over to the door, and pressed the side of its huge, translucent head to the keyhole. It growled, menacingly, at what it despised on the other side, and Helen took a moment to wonder what it's ideal outcome would be. It was distracted by Michael: it harboured no care, no curiosity, no hate, and no ill-will toward Helen, and she was grateful.

Then, its disappearing face seemed to contort into a scowl, and a snarl burbled from the throat that was its entirety. In anger and betrayal, it slid a hand into the gap in the door, crushing and collapsing thousands of bones as it did so, until it's body was bent toward the floor and it's multicoloured arm was shunted up to its elbow into shards. It continued not to pay Helen much, or any, attention, and Helen crouched over its arm, peering through the keyhole.

It's arm, she saw, grew and stretched and warped as it crawled across the floor and over to the hated pair.

It waited. It waited before it began to shriek in hatred, but the hatred was performed and meant mainly to incite terror and displeasure; the true loathing came from Helen Richardson.

Michael had stalked and lured Helen Richardson deeper into the tunnels than she'd ever meant to go. Michael, tall and calculated, with all his true intentions hiding in his curly, blond hair, had dragged Helen so deep into that neon mystery, she was sure. He had led her through the corridors, and he had pulled her into terror. He had guided her for hours upon hours upon days into the closed circuits and echo chambers of his veins, deep and deeper still into the winding hallways of his atria and the soft and soothing coffin of his esophagus, further and further until she'd made it to his stomach and escaped the Helen who had been already digested and turned, and the Helen who knew before she was imprisoned what her fate would be.
At least, Helen thought so.

Helen thought he had attempted to guide her, like a false prophet, into his disease. She thought that her stumbling steps had always been into footprints already sunken: his. She couldn't conceive of a universe where she would willingly enter the hallways a second time — second, third, fourth? — where she would risk the possibilities of being consumed, mangled, reborn. The other Helens she had seen were shallow mimicries of herself, they were unfortunate outcomes, replicas, mockeries.

In fact, the more she thought about Michael, the more spiteful she became, until she began to scream in hatred with the monster beside her. In a forced choice between a traitor, who was then laughing his way into absolute power, and a monster, Helen picked the monster. She did this, because the power was rightfully hers.

In a flash of a moment, in a flutter of a single heartbeat fuelled by fury, disbelief, and betrayal, still waving, like antennae, its long and sharpened fingers, the hand of Helen's new ally took further initiative and grasped Michael's waist, breaking perfect, uncanny skin and revealing splashes of deep, red blood.

Helen continued to watch with eyes wide as though they were sewn open, one of her aching hands over her mouth, covering, slyly, the softest and most vitriolic grin, as Michael's flailing, strobing body, was pulled to the base of his perfect door, and a scream became a gargle of horror and understanding. His victim had become his destroyer; a vivisection of Michael occurred before the eyes of his terrified successor; the one to inherit his 'what'.

Bones, human bones, crunched and cracked. A human scream poured from his lips along with more blood than should have ever lived inside. Splitting limbs were destroyed and rebuilt into a ghastly, dessicated corpse, and, soon enough, Michael was opened with a whine, a shrill scream of horror.

It didn't take her long to notice and it didn't come to her with surprise to find out that she now held his crooked spine. Polygon vertebrae poked at odd angles into her hand, and, within, the bone marrow was bright, fluorescent, gleaming. Glancing briefly at her cuts and bruises, she noticed that her own blood glimmered that same, intense and insane colour. She studied the backbone in her hand; it twisted, a helix shape, as well as bent awkwardly at impossible angles.

The original Helen could have winced, might have gasped, would have screamed, should have cast the bones aside and run far back into the corridors to look for any mirror than wouldn't swallow her, or would at least hesitate. This new Helen knew that every mirror would reflect the face of a monster, a killer, a beast.

Alone and confident, she opened her palms to the sky and held up her recovery, her holy grail, the twisted spine that backed the rolling grey monster that she would soon become.

There was no going back for Helen Richardson; there was every opportunity, however, to cater to the present, and make sure to prepare for the future. Time became difficult to form, and the fragile line between the finished and the ongoing became blurred and blue. But, the yet unbegun, the unborn, the unstarted, was new and beautiful, and Helen accepted it. She had hesitated to travel with Michael, her personal Judas. She did not hesitate then to open her mouth, unbothered at the stretching of her skin along her unhinged jaw, and slide the bones inside, until they found her empty skeleton and fused into her skin. The rest of her bones migrated to her hands and filled them. Cubic knuckle joints were squeezed into place at her fingertips. The ball joints of her wrists were molded and forced into five pieces each, which made fine bends in each finger. The bones in her forearm were pressed so far into the fingers that they lengthened and jutted at angles impossible. Every bone was squeezed into place within her mechanical hands. Her skin fused quickly with her clothes, and a hundred new eyes made themselves known around her head. Her hair blossomed with volume and colour and light, and curls began to freeze within it, and her mouth folded and crushed itself into a wide smile, brimming with the white, pointed teeth.

Turning the key and shunting open the new door as easily as though turning over a new leaf, Helen stepped into the unlit, fabric chambers of Nikola Orsinov, and felt her presence almost immediately, a new knowledge of her rivals inhabiting her systems. At the sight of the Archivist, Helen gripped with white knuckles the shreds of her past life, but shreds were all they were, and they slipped through her long fingers as easily as water.

Both Helen and Michael had died that day, and Helen stood, unimpressed, both heels growing like vines out of the bloody compost beneath her; it was a red scarf, streaked with black, tangled itself around her shoes. She stamped on it.

Ripe for the taking and studied by Michael for days, Helen Richardson would make a better Distortion than he. She would live a fruitful li(f)e, before it would be cut about a thousand years too short by the man who now begged her for respite.