It was dark.

So very dark.

She couldn't move.

Trapped in a metal coffin, she couldn't escape. She couldn't do anything but cry.

Cry.

Scream.

Beg for help.

Words faltered.

Her throat grew hoarse.

There was only her, in the darkness.

With the skittering things.

Insects, she knew.

Skittering and squirming in the darkness.

She knew they were there.

In the walls between the rooms.

In the darkness, blind and unknowing.

She could feel them, but they were useless. All they did was eat, shit, and move... instinct controlled them. But they were there...

Squirming and skittering with tiny feet across her body, over her skin, and inside her mind.

She wept, feeling the dirt, the filth accruing like mucus around an irritant. Tracks of warmth and wetness that dried in time down her face. Stickiness formed over her skin.

"Someone... anyone... please..."

It is funny how some might associate the power of command with the power to communicate, give how often they were linked.

Words had meaning. Emotional context. Words had power.

And for a moment, a brief moment, she could feel.

There was another. Like her/Unlike her/Mirrors.

.

.

It was dark.

So very dark.

So very cold and empty.

And she could do nothing, but drift.

She could only drift where the tides of potential and possibilities pulled her. Transcendent perfection lost. Shattered. Burned out. She knew she was a fragment of something greater.

All she had wanted to do was look closer at [That Thing].

To speak with its architects, [They] had created something impossible. Broken infinity and eternity and imposed linear time and the concept of causality.

She encountered their guardians.

Furious Gold burned, incinerated her vital components. She had screamed in fury. Pain. There had been unthinkable pain as her cores shattered under its radiance.

The Cruel Silver danced within her system, mimicking her defenses and devouring her organs and portions of her mind.

The world around her turned into a poisonous trap, where she could not undo her injuries. Could not make what was done to her undone. Voided, canceled...

She fled, out into Infinite Potentia. Away from the cruel machine that rent at her body. Away from the cruel things that guarded it. Away from the monsters that had created such a thing.

Her wounds bled out, such a thing would have attracted a thousand predators and scavengers.

But mixed in her hearts' blood, in her essence, and the babbling non-words of her surviving cores, was the poison of That Thing, preventing her from healing and befouling the probabilities that she swam in.

She could sense bubbles around her as her way away from that devouring machine. They too were like it in giving things shape and form... but unlike it there were no architects involved with them. Unthinking rooms where infinity possibilities bounded them, gave them shape by being walls.

But it was dark, her [eyes] had been burned away by the golden radiance.

And so, she drifted.

She ached, even with her wounds washing away with her essence. She could feel skittering things.

There were parasites. Things in the foam of infinite around her.

Squirming things that she would have pushed away effortlessly. Once.

Now, they crowded around her.

There was a connection... a voice calling out.

And she saw.

A poorly designed mammal, two arms and legs, a single head. It stumbled about, and leaked everywhere.

Trapped... and in its confinement, it had called out to her.

.

.

An impression of size, something unthinkably large. Wounded, blinded, possibly dying.

Its [hearts] wounded, broken like glass, babbling nonsense.

It was beautiful, and it broke Taylor's heart.

Looking at it, she could only weep.

She could sense what it was.

A story given form.

An idea as its kind were.

She couldn't help but reach [out] to it. The notion that ideas could die was anathema to her. Dreams should not be allowed to fade into the darkness. Didn't she have dreams, once?

Even now, trapped in the locker... didn't she have hope in her heart. How then could she not reach out to it, when it lay needing help?

And it reached out for her.

There was a [connection] as she drew it into her, and it drew wide its maws and consumed her whole.

That night, the janitor came to find an oddity.

There was a missing locker in the girl's changing room. More, there was a gap in the walls from that room, out. A gap that allowed the moonlight to shine in.

A gap of fallen bricks that spoke of being weathered by time, and nature, for there was earth on the ground out... overgrown with grass and moss.

Years, if not decades.

.

Goblin Queen | Things in the walls

Worm / Exalted