Caelrisu woke up.
Back at the start. The [Endless Gallery] stretched before her again, infinite and suffocating.
Her temples pounded as knowledge, alien, corrosive, ravaged her mind. She sat, clutching her skull, trying to decipher the fragments. Words she did not know. Images she had never seen. Shapes that were not shapes.
After a minute, she staggered up, determined to move forward.
The moment she took a step,
CRACK!
Her head ruptured again.
"Understand it."
***
She woke again. Her corpse was still there. Not rotting, not vanishing. Twitching. Fingers scratching the ground. Legs convulsing. Its mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, gasping, begging without words.
She screamed, stumbling away from it. She wanted to run but the pain already started again.
Tick.
Tock.
Every second closer.
She tried holding her head together with her hands. Nails dug into her scalp, drawing blood.
Sixty seconds.
Her skull erupted again.
"Understand it."
***
This time two bodies lay there. Both twitching, both convulsing, both looking at her.
One dragged itself forward with broken arms, fingers leaving streaks of her own blood. Its jaw hung loose, whispering in her own voice:
"Run… run… run…"
She vomited, staggered, cried.
But still the minute passed.
Her head burst apart again.
"Understand it."
***
By the tenth life, there were ten bodies.
Ten Caelrisus, sprawled and twitching across the Gallery floor.
One clawed at her own eyes until only wet holes remained.
Another crawled endlessly toward the current Caelrisu, dragging broken legs, whispering
"Don't do it again… please… don't do it again…"
A third slammed her forehead against the floor, again and again, until the skin split and bone peeked through, as though bashing hard enough might stop the minute from coming.
Their begging overlapped in a chorus of self-inflicted torment.
"Don't stand!"
"Don't breathe!"
"Kill me before it happens!"
"Please, Caelrisu, please,"
Every voice was hers, but distorted, pitched too low, too high, fragmented into sobs, stretched into animal screams.
She clutched her ears, but her ears were lying traitors; the voices crawled inside her head anyway. Rocking on the floor, she wailed, "Shut up shut up shut up shut up!"
But the minute always came.
Tick.
Her skull swelled, pressure building like boiling iron under her skin. Veins bulged purple, her eyes burst wetly down her cheeks, her teeth cracked like splintering glass. And then,
CRACK!
Her head exploded again, a spray of bone and steaming membrane. Her own twitching corpse toppled forward onto the others.
***
By the fiftieth life, the corridor was carpeted in her.
Dozens upon dozens of Caelrisus sprawled across the floor like broken dolls thrown away by a cruel child.
Some twitched endlessly, fingers spasming against invisible chains.
Some sobbed dryly, throats long torn from screaming.
Others had begun tearing strips of flesh from their own arms, chewing it as if desperate to keep their mouths busy, to keep from speaking the cursed words.
The air stank of copper and rot. Steam rose from corpses whose skulls had freshly burst. The Gallery, once white and endless, now reeked like a charnel house.
She had to step over herself to move forward, bare feet slipping on blood. Each step made her gag as warm meat squelched under her soles.
And yet she walked.
Because if she sat still, the minute would still come.
The minute always came.
Each second stretched longer than the last. The pressure built behind her eyes, swelling like a balloon of molten glass. Her vision blurred, blood trickled from her nose, then ears, then the corners of her eyes.
The corpses stirred.
Not just a few, all of them.
Fifty Caelrisus sat up in jerks, heads lolling, jaws unhinged. Skin sagging off cracked bones. And in unison, hundreds of broken voices spoke, weaving into a sickening chorus:
"U n d e r s t a n d i t."
The sound vibrated through her bones, writhing in her marrow. She screamed and clutched her head, but the voices didn't stop.
And then hers joined them.
Her own voice, split from her throat without her permission, murmured the words in harmony with the dead.
"Understand it."
Her lips trembled, her eyes bulged. She knew what came next.
Her head burst again.
***
By the hundredth life, the Gallery had become a mausoleum of her.
A hundred Caelrisus sprawled across the impossible corridor, every one still alive in some way, none granted the mercy of death. Their bodies jittered, convulsed, pulled themselves across the gore-slick floor to reach her.
And this time, they didn't only beg.
They argued.
They strategized.
They fought with one another, all with her own voice.
One, her skull already cracked open but not yet burst, shrieked:
"Close your eyes, don't see it, maybe it won't come!"
Another clawed at its throat until fingernails split and tore, screaming in a froth of blood:
"Cut it out! Tear it out! Rip the brain out before it bursts!"
Third crawled to her knees, arms clinging to her leg with pathetic strength, weeping, rocking, begging:
"Please, make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop…"
The hundred voices overlapped, rose, crescendoed into a frantic chaos. They shoved instructions into her ears, each contradicting the last, each more desperate than before.
But none of it worked.
It never worked.
Her stomach lurched. The pressure began again, counting down in the silence beneath the screams.
One minute.
And in that final, stretched eternity, one voice didn't plead.
It whispered.
Not begging. Not commanding. But teaching.
"Eat, Caelrisu. Eat"
Her heart froze. She wanted to vomit at the thought but couldn't. Her skull pulsed like a drum of molten iron.
She fell to her knees, clutching her temples. Her vision tunneled.
And just before the inevitable explosion, she saw them all smiling, her True Self's smile, kind and evil, across a hundred broken faces.
Always, after sixty seconds,
Her head burst apart.
And the last sound before the blackness, before her own body dropped lifeless into the pile, was herself whispering, soft and sweet, with that impossible smile:
"Understand it."
***
150th life
The Gallery no longer resembled a corridor. It was a graveyard garden, grown from her own corpses.
The bodies had started to change.
Skin knitting over wounds that should have remained raw.
Bones snapping and twisting into new angles, spines curling like the roots of a tree seeking deeper soil.
Fingers from different corpses fused together, hands becoming grotesque webs of flesh, twitching toward her whenever she passed.
The air, as always, reeked of copper and rot.
But her corpses were no longer just twitching.
They were merging.
One mound of herself shuddered violently, and from the mass rose a neck, no, three necks, woven from her own vertebrae. All three mouths opened at once, whispering with perfect synchronicity:
"Understand… understand… understand…"
She stumbled backward, bile burning her throat, but there was nowhere to go. Her hundred-and-fifty selves stared at her through sockets that should have been empty, each filled with a faint glow, the kind of glow she had seen in her "True Self's" blind eyes.
The minute came.
And this time, when her skull shattered, it wasn't only obliteration.
She felt it.
The bursting wasn't just destruction anymore. It was refinement.
The agony honed her, stripped her, tempered her like steel against the anvil of her own flesh.
In the instant before the blackness claimed her, she almost swore she heard a grinder's noise inside her brain.
***
200th life
She woke again to the same floor, the same endless corridor, the same stench of herself rotting. But this time, something different waited inside her.
A pressure, subtle at first, then undeniable.
Her veins pulsed, not like blood, but like liquid metal.
Hot, heavy, alien.
It crawled under her skin, threading through her like molten mercury searching for a path. Every heartbeat rattled her chest with the weight of something not hers. She clawed at her arm, nails digging trenches into her flesh, her own veins bulged, writhing away from her touch.
Her blood was hiding from her.
She screamed and dug deeper, tearing at the skin until she saw it: a silvery shimmer sliding beneath, vanishing before her nails could pierce it. It flowed away, conscious, like a rat scuttling from the light.
Around her, the corpses began to laugh.
Not in unison this time, no chant, no command.
Just a fractured chorus of cracked throats, wet wheezes, and rattling lungs.
A hundred versions of herself wheezed through broken teeth, some pounding the floor with skeletal fists, others coughing blood as they choked on their own laughter:
"It begins."
Their voices layered, overlapping, cascading into a grotesque harmony.
"It begins… it begins… it begins…"
And she felt it too.
The shift. The intrusion. The slow replacement.
When the minute came and her head burst apart again, she didn't just die, she spilled.
Her body opened like a broken vessel, and that molten not-blood gushed from her split veins, searing the floor, seeping into her twitching corpses, binding them closer together.
A sound of sewing was heard.
And then the darkness took her.