Echoes of the Damned

Raelyn's world had become a waking nightmare, but it was the visceral, realness of it that made it truly unbearable. The kind of horror where every breath she took tasted like iron and decay, where every heartbeat felt like it would be her last. There was no escaping it—no waking up, no pulling yourself out. This was real. Too real. 

She staggered through the dense fog of rot, the air so thick with the stench of blood that it clung to her skin, soaked into her hair. Each breath was a struggle, her lungs fighting to filter out the stench of decay. The walls of the tunnel around her, once distant and abstract, were now oppressively close, dripping with fresh blood as if the very earth itself was bleeding. But it wasn't just dripping—it was pouring, gushing, like arteries had been slashed open, their lifeblood cascading down the walls in heavy, pulsing streams.

Raelyn pressed her hand to one of the walls to steady herself, but it sank in, deep, the flesh-like surface parting beneath her touch. Warm, wet, and impossibly soft, her hand slid further into the wall, her fingers brushing against something pulpy and solid—a beating heart.

She yanked her hand back, trembling as the wall pulsed, veins and arteries writhing beneath the surface like some grotesque parody of life. The wet squelching sound of it reverberated in her ears, sending cold shivers racing down her spine. She gagged as the coppery tang of blood overwhelmed her senses, the metallic taste now thick in her throat.

It wasn't just the smell that made her want to vomit—it was the weight of the scene pressing down on her, the sheer visceral wrongness of it. The walls weren't made of stone or dirt. They were made of flesh. Flesh, sewn together like patchwork skin, pulsating with life, with veins that throbbed like they were still trying to carry blood through a long-dead body.

The ground beneath her feet squelched as she moved, sticky and warm, like she was walking through the aftermath of a slaughterhouse. Every step was accompanied by soft, wet squish of something giving way underfoot—organs, she realized with growing horror. The entire floor was littered with them. Intestines coiled around her boots like slick, fleshy ropes, while livers, kidneys, and unidentifiable pieces of torn flesh oozed bile and blood beneath her weight.

She looked down, her stomach twisted violently. There, half-buried in the carnage at her feet, was a human face—its eyes still open, staring blankly upward. The skin had peeled away in patches, revealing raw muscle and bone beneath, but its mouth was still wide open, frozen in an eternal scream. She couldn't tell how long it had been there, rotting in the mix of viscera, bit it didn't matter. The sight of it—the sheer reality of the face—burned itself into her mind, like a stain she could never scrub away.

As she tired to move past it, her foot caught on something solid. A hand. She stumbled, the fingers wrapping around her ankle like a last, desperate plea for life. But the body it was attached to was long gone—its skin sagging like wet parchment, the flesh sloughing off the bone in dark, glistening strips ]. Her breath hitched in her throat as she fought to pull herself free, her pulse pounding in here ears.

The blood around her was warm—too warm. It wasn't. It wasn't like the stagnant, cold pools of a battlefield. No, this was fresh. Raelyn could feel the heat of it rising in the air, like she was standing in the middle of something that only just died, its life force still clinging to the air like a miasma.

But then the sounds started.

Soft at first, almost indistinguishable from the wet dripping of blood. But then louder. Squelching, tearing, the unmistakable sounds of flesh being ripped apart, of bones snapping under pressure. She turned, slowly knowing deep that whatever she was about to see would be worse than anything before.

At the far end of the tunnel, a figure crouched over a pile of bodies. Its back was hunched, its arms moving in sharp, jerking motions as it worked through the bodies like a butcher in a slaughterhouse. Blood dripped from its fingers, thick and dark, pooling at its tore chunks of meat from the corpses beneath it. The sound of it chewing—wet and raw— filled the tunnel, each bite punctuated by a sickening crunch as it gnawed through bone.

Raelyn couldn't look away. The thing's body was grotesque, swollen and misshapen, its flesh hanging loose in some places and stretched tight in others Its face, if you could call it that, was a nightmare of half-decayed skin and exposed muscle, its mouth a gaping hole lined with jagged, broken teeth. But it was the eyes that held her—the way the rolled back into its skull with every bite, like it was lost in some perverse ecstasy as it fed.

She wanted to scream, to run, but her legs felt rooted to the spot, frozen in place by the horror of what she was witnessing. Her stomach churned, bile rising in her throat as the smell of the thing— of rotting meat and sour blood—washed over her.

The creature tore into another corpse, pulling its chest apart with a brutal twist of its hands. The ribs snapped like dry twigs, and it plunged its face into the cavity, rooting around in the organs with sickening enthusiasm. When it pulled back, its mouth was filled with a tangle of intestines, the slick coils hanging from its lips as it chewed greedily.

Raelyn's vision blurred, and for a moment, she thought would pass out. But then, the creature's head snapped up, its hollow eyes locked onto hers. Blood dripping from its chin, and it smiled—a twisted, hungry grin that stretched the ruined skin of its face.

It let out a low growl, deep and guttural, and started to move toward her.

Her body finally responded, and she stumbled back, her boots slipping in the gore beneath her. She could feel the panic rising in her chest, choking her as the thing advanced, its movements jerky and unnatural, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings.

It reached out a hand, fingers long and skeletal, the nails caked with blood and dirt. Raelyn turned and ran, her heart slamming against her ribs as she sprinted through the tunnel, the sound of the creature's pursuit echoing behind her. The wet, slapping footsteps, the sickening squelch of flesh against flesh—it was all too much.

She didn't stop. She couldn't. Not until she was far, far away from the nightmare that seemed to have come alive around her. The tunnel stretched on, winding through a labyrinth of blood and death, the walls pulsing with grotesque life.

But no matter how far she ran, the sound of tearing flesh and snapped bones followed her, growing louder, closer, as if it was inside her own mind.