shadows of solace

The world around you is nothing but pain. You awaken, but not as you'd expect. A searing headache pulses in your skull, a constant, unforgiving throb that drowns out your thoughts, while confusion clouds your senses. Where are you? What happened? How long has it been?

Gradually, your senses begin to return. The ground beneath you is cold, damp, and gritty. The air is thick with the smell of earth, heavy and suffocating. You blink against the overwhelming darkness, struggling to orient yourself. But the world feels off, wrong. The weight of the earth above you presses down in a way that doesn’t make sense. You should be—alive. And yet, you feel anything but alive.

As you stir, it hits you: you're buried. Trapped in some forgotten grave, encased in dirt like a corpse. The very thought of it paralyzes you with dread. Dead? No, that can’t be right. You are here. But you’re not supposed to be. You should be breathing the fresh air. You should be feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin. Yet here you are, in the suffocating blackness of the earth.

How long have you been out? The question drifts through your mind, but the answer eludes you. You try to remember, but it’s like trying to grasp at smoke. Your head pounds harder with each attempt. Were you buried alive? Is that it? No, it doesn’t make sense. You’re not dead. You can’t be. But… no one else is here. Nothing makes sense.

The panic rises, thick and choking, and you need to escape. You need to get out. Instinctively, you reach out, your hands clawing desperately at the dirt above you, fingers scraping, tearing at the soil in a wild frenzy. But instead of resistance, the earth crumbles away at your touch, disintegrating into dust with an eerie, unnatural speed.

Dust. That’s all that remains. You cough violently, the fine particles choking you, clinging to your throat, suffocating you. What is this? How could it just vanish like that? You could feel the cold sting of the soil against your fingertips, but even that slips away into nothing. It doesn’t make sense.

As you struggle, your mind is a whirlwind of frantic thoughts, each one tumbling over the other, desperate for answers. But before you can even begin to piece it together, there’s something else. Something far worse. A sound. A static hum, deep and insistent, thrumming in the back of your mind.

It’s unbearable. It grows louder, more invasive, until it consumes everything. The buzzing turns to a shriek, a terrible, jagged screech that gnaws at your sanity, stripping away any coherent thought. Your body convulses as the static floods your senses. You can’t think. You can’t feel—except for the overwhelming urge to make it stop.

STOP.

The word echoes through your mind like a mantra, repeating over and over again until it becomes the only thing you can hear, the only thing you can think. STOP. STOP. STOP. Each repetition drowns out everything else, until it’s all you are. The pressure builds, your veins turning pitch black beneath your skin as something... wrong begins to surge through you.

Your nose begins to bleed, dark crimson dripping freely onto the dirt. You can feel the blood pooling inside your mouth, taste the metallic tang as it mixes with the rising panic. Your veins pulse with a horrible, unnatural darkness, and then—your ears.

They’re changing. Stretching. Twisting. The cartilage warps as your ears elongate into sharp, jagged points, alien and grotesque. Your vision blurs as something else takes hold. Your eyes—your eyes—feel like they’ve become hollow, like dark pools of nothingness. But not nothingness… something. The irises, gone, leaving behind nothing but swirling black voids. It’s like you’re staring into an abyss—and the abyss is staring back at you.

A swirling vortex of darkness pulls you deeper, drawing you into its gravitational pull, hypnotizing, locking your vision in place. There’s no escape. No way out. The swirling void is endless, pulling you further into it.

And just as you think you can’t take it any longer, you see him.

A figure, standing at the edge of your fading consciousness. A man—no, not a man? You weren't sure but He’s wearing a bright, blinding yellow hoodie, his face a patch of featureless black, with a grin far too wide, too sinister to belong to any living being. But it’s not him that you fear. It’s the tall, thin, and grotesque shape standing behind him.

The being is tall—unnaturally so. Lanky limbs stretch upward, impossibly long, like they might tear through the fabric of reality itself. Its presence looms over you like a nightmare, the sensation of being trapped in its gaze crawling beneath your skin. It doesn’t move, but somehow, its every inch feels as though it’s closing in, suffocating you.

The figure in the yellow hoodie speaks—his voice soft, dripping with a strange, sickening warmth.

“Operator, the girl is on the urge of passing out,” he says. “What shall we do now? What if she blacks out for another four years? Can we truly waste any time on her if that’s the case?”

The other figure—the operator, the tall, horrifying entity—responds in a voice that rumbles through your bones, a low, booming command laced with static.

“Magnificent question, my dear proxy. But if she stays unconscious for more than a week, we’ll dispose of her. For now, though… bring her back to the mansion.”

There’s a chilling pause before the proxy responds.

“Understood, sir.”

A dark amusement drips from the operator’s voice as he speaks again, his words laced with an unsettling satisfaction.

“Such an obedient proxy... you never put me to shame, Hoodie.”

And with that, you slip back into unconsciousness, the world around you fading into a blur of static and shadows. The nightmare continues, but now, you're not alone in it. And the truth... well, the truth, it seems, is far darker than you could ever imagine.

____

Farts cutely ong I need me some of that fine shyt hoodie 🥴