Aster sits in the kitchen, heart still thudding in uneven percussion against his ribs. Of course, the world chose the exact moment he stepped off the property to unleash metal hellhounds and cosmic police sirens on his ass.
He should be relieved it’s over.
He isn’t.
His breathing still comes in shallow, ugly fragments. The golden field—whatever the bastard thing actually is—flickered back into existence exactly two hours after he slammed the front door behind him, and with it the world snapped back to kitchen tiles, silent appliances, and the deeply offensive illusion that everything is fine.
Without the sirens, the claws, and reality peeling open like wet paper, the house is suddenly too quiet. Too safe. Less home, more padded cell with better lighting and a fully stocked pantry.
Aster paces. Back and forth across the kitchen. One hand shoved into his hair, the other dragging along the back of a chair until he leans his forehead against it with a dull thud.
“Fuck this,” he mutters. “I’m not apologizing for thinking my brain is a glitchy nightmare machine, but,” and he lifts a finger toward the universe, “I now recognize staying alive means listening to my hallucination. There. I said it.”
He exhales. Sharply. Spins around and stomps to the kitchen table where the envelope still sits, flapping against reality like a paper bird having an identity crisis.
“No more excuses,” he says, grabbing it. He peels the list from the table like it’s grown roots.
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
A part of him shrieks, We literally just saw the worst, but he ignores it. That was earlier Aster’s problem. Now, he’s playing “Let’s Pretend The Insane Recipe Is Rational.”
The paper is cool against his fingers. Too cool. Like a passive-aggressive fridge note from a roommate you barely tolerate. Aster squints at the looping letters. The sheer capital-G Gothic of the handwriting already annoys him.
No hidden code. No ancient sigils. Just a fucking list.
And a note highlighting the fact that under no circumstances should he leave the house, with a kids drawing of the bloodhounds looking nothing noting more like a misshapen dog with lightbulbs for eyes.
He promptly crumbles the note, forgiving himself for that lack of judgement, reframing his incredible lapse of judgment, as a small oopsie daisy.
He scans through the list.
And snorts. “Blessed by the full moon? Yeah. Good. Great. I’ll be sure to plan my next psychotic break around lunar phases.”
Further down—worse.
“Dassie fur. Seashells. Really. Why not toss in a mood ring and a selfie stick to summon the spirit of Gwyneth Paltrow while we’re at it.”
He lets the list fall flat against the counter.
“It’s a recipe,” he tells himself. “I don’t need to understand it. I just need to follow it. And judging by the week I’ve had, this thing is either going to fix me or take out a thirty-year loan on my kidneys.”
He drags both hands down his face, smearing skin oil across the page. It hardly feels like the worst thing happening here.
Then he notices something he somehow missed before: a rectangular bulge taped low on the fridge, half hidden behind the list.
He peels it free.
A padded envelope.
Weighty. Real.
His pulse picks up as he tears it open.
Inside is not another recipe. Not a second eldritch scavenger hunt. Just a property deed in his name, a bank card with no activation nonsense, a fully charged phone, and a ring of keys—one of which matches the front door he’s been panic-breathing behind for the last two hours.
Aster blinks as his brain cartwheels between shock and nausea.
The property deed stares up at him like a slap. Something so normal, it feels hostile. The world is offering him safety. Shelter. Stability. And after the shit he’s come from? That’s a monster in its own right.
He drops heavily into a chair.
This is worse than monsters. Worse than the hallucinations. Worse than the screaming sirens of metal nightmares.
Someone has just taken care of him.
He doesn’t know what to do with that.
The next day is spent in motion.
Aster stays inside and throws himself into logistics with the kind of grim focus normally reserved for bomb disposal. He makes calls. Tracks down ingredients. Crosses items off the list. Refuses, with the stubbornness of a man held together by spite and caffeine withdrawal, to think too hard about any of it.
Some of the ingredients are easy enough to source. He’s had a knack for procurement ever since teenage Aster played sous-chef to D-list alchemists and B-tier drug dealers. The trick, he learned early, is to keep your head low, your product decent, and your dignity somewhere in a dumpster out back where no one can trip over it.
By afternoon, most of it is at least in motion.
Which leaves him with some free time.
And his own nerves.
He opens a cupboard in search of distraction and freezes.
Three full bags of whole coffee beans stare back at him.
Real beans. Proper coffee. Not instant granules, not cheap supermarket dirt masquerading as caffeine, but the actual good stuff.
Of all the cosmic horrors currently dismantling his understanding of reality, this is what nearly undoes him.
Something as stupidly kind as coffee.
His chest tightens and loosens by degrees, like someone somewhere has pressed a balm against a wound he’d gotten used to calling permanent.
Before he can ruin the moment by thinking too much, muscle memory takes over.
Grinder. Portafilter. Tamper. Frother.
The first sip makes him close his eyes.
Honest-to-God coffee.
Warmth spreads through his chest in slow, disbelieving threads, and for one glorious minute the paranoia, the sirens, the psychic wildlife and whatever the hell is trying to eat him all recede beneath the simple fact that this tastes like being briefly forgiven by the universe.
Then his stomach growls.
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He glances at the kitchen. Eggs. Bacon. Flour. Cream. More food than he’s had easy access to in months.
Something in him lights back up.
He cooks.
And once he starts, he doesn’t stop.
Pancakes. Scones. Bacon sizzling in a pan like a love song to arterial blockage. He cooks the way some people pray: frantically, gratefully, and with a deep suspicion that stopping will bring God back into the room.
For an hour he just exists. Eating. Cooking. Breathing. The house fills with warmth and grease and flour and coffee, and his bones begin, reluctantly, to unclench.
Then he catches himself smiling.
The warmth curdles.
It feels too nice.
Too easy. Too exactly tailored to all the things he’s spent years not letting himself miss. A home he never had. Safety with no humiliation attached. Good coffee. A stocked kitchen. Silence that doesn’t feel empty.
It’s too precise. Too intimate. Like someone has studied the shape of every crack in him and furnished a house to fit around them.
Aster stares at the walls like they’ve personally betrayed him.
It takes nearly a full week for the deliveries to trickle in.
Seven days of staying indoors. Seven days of checking the street through curtains like a paranoid pensioner with a vendetta against daylight. Seven days of living with the slow, gnawing certainty that something is still out there, and for once it isn’t a debt collector.
It’s worse.
Sometimes, when the veil slips, he sees them.
The Bloodhounds prowling just beyond where the protective field ends, invisible unless the mask of reality happens to slip. He feels their hunger in the air like a draft, just waiting for the next flicker, the next glitch in the simulation that’s keeping him safe.
But the deliveries come. Piece by piece.
Then the building begins.
Three days of torment.
Three days of deciphering instructions that read like a terrorist manifesto dictated through a Pink Floyd album. Three days of assembling a machine that sits much too close to the word ritual for comfort.
By the end of it, Aster stands back in the spare room and stares at the thing he’s made.
The electrolysis tank sits in the centre like Frankenstein took a correspondence course in occult chemistry and got bored halfway through. Wires snake around cracked crystals and tarnished brass fittings. Coils run through murky liquid. Chalk glyphs scrawl across the floor beneath it like someone lost a bet with necromancy.
A soft, flickering blue glow pulses from the tank, lighting up the dim room in uneven breaths.
He drags a hand through his hair, strands sticking to his damp forehead, and tries not to overthink it.
Because when he does?
His brain lurches sideways.
Hours spent following cryptic, half-mad instructions—part chemistry, part spiritualist word salad—all stitched together with just enough consistency to keep him hooked. He double-checks everything. Triple-checks. The emulsification steps, the exact pulse frequencies for the crystals, even the stupid chanting part that makes him feel like a divorced cultist trying to magic his wife back.
And now here it is. Humming. Glowing. Alive.
He casts a wary eye at the tank.
Dassie fur, reduced to ash and mixed in. Seashells, ground down. Psychedelics, carefully extracted. All blended in the tank’s bath. He half expects the water to stay its gross yellow-brown, but no—once he adds the dassie fur ash, it shifts. To a vivid, electric blue.
And he knows enough chemistry to be bothered by that.
Because that reaction? Not something he recognizes.
And that colour? Not normal. And why does it glow??
His gaze tracks the brass wire suspended through the centre of the tank, wrapped in coils and held inside the electromagnetic field generated by the four crystals placed around it. The instructions at least make one thing clear: over the next twelve hours, the elixir is supposed to crystallize along the wire.
What happens after that remains an open question with deeply concerning implications.
Aster rubs at his jaw.
The key was where the robed lunatic said it would be.
The house is in his name.
The ingredients reacted exactly the way the list implied they would.
And now this ridiculous machine is working.
Everything keeps lining up in ways it absolutely should not.
It’s too much. Too neat. Too pointed. Like some cosmic joke—or worse, some elaborate con. A hallucination. A trick from a brain that’s been fraying at the edges for years and has finally gone fully off-script, Fight Club-style.
Either some cosmic joke is unfolding around him with unnerving commitment to detail, or his brain has finally gone completely off-script and is now manufacturing physical evidence just to spite him.
He grunts and shakes his head, trying to dislodge the spiral before it picks up speed.
Not now. Not tonight.
Neither option is especially comforting.
But he’s in too deep now to pretend otherwise.
He double-checks the wires, the vents, the crystals, the ridiculous chalk glyphs at his feet.
Makes sure nothing is actively on fire. Satisfied—or as satisfied as a man can be while standing over a suspiciously bioluminescent occult electrolysis tank—he kills the lights and closes the door.
Out in the living room, he collapses onto the couch like a puppet with its strings cut.
Only then does the exhaustion hit.
Not the jittery kind. The deep, cellular version. The sort that makes him feel as though his bones have been replaced with wet plaster and all his thoughts are being held together by whatever cheap glue keeps budget furniture from collapsing in-store.
The last few nights have been a blur of stress, insomnia, and checking the perimeter like a man expecting reality to kick the door in.
But now there’s nothing left to do for twelve hours except wait.
So he turns on the TV and finds the dumbest thing available and lets the flicker of it wash over him until the static in his head finally begins to soften.
His eyes slip shut.
His breathing slows.
And before he can fight it, sleep drags him under.
In the next room, the tank keeps working.
Unseen, the air around the crystals starts to crackle—faint at first, like static gathering between invisible wires. The hum deepens by degrees, slipping lower and stranger, until it no longer sounds mechanical at all.
The liquid shimmers.
The blue darkens.
The tank pulse in time with some slow, impossible rhythm not meant for human ears.
And through the night, the thing in the tank grows.
Alive, in its own way.
Becoming.
The second he opens the door after the twelve hours, he knows something’s changed.
The tank is different. The once-vivid blue solution has cleared, turned to water so transparent it looks empty. But that’s not what grabs him.
No.
It’s the crystal.
Tiny. Square. Sitting dead centre on the brass wire, no bigger than his pinkie nail. It glows faintly—barely there, more pulse than light—like it’s breathing in shallow, measured gasps.
Aster’s hands move before his brain can stage an intervention. He lifts the wire free and stares at the thing hanging from it.
Crystals can form in angular shapes. He knows that. Intellectually.
This one still feels wrong.
The surface spirals inward in precise stepped layers, like a fractal got drunk and tried to become bismuth. It doesn’t look grown so much as designed—too neat in some places, too alien in others, the geometry of it both exact and somehow feral.
Aster stares at it, pulse stuttering.
Because for all his brain keeps trying to file this under scam, delusion, psychotic break, elaborate chemical accident—whatever category feels least spiritually humiliating—this thing is real.
He’s holding it.
This tiny humming square of bad decisions and impossible chemistry is apparently his ticket to whatever comes next.
Magic. Madness. Death.
Potentially all three in a trench coat.
The next step in the instructions.
The attic.
He finds the latch behind an old bookshelf he somehow never noticed, and a narrow set of stairs unfolds upward in a cough of dust. By the time he hauls himself into the attic, his heart is thudding hard enough to qualify as a second personality.
The room is dim and cold.
And in the centre of the floor is a brass circle that absolutely did not come with the house.
It’s etched deep into the boards, wide enough for a person to sit inside, ringed with symbols that seem to twitch at the edge of vision. When he tries to focus on them, they wriggle just enough to make his skin crawl.
He hates that immediately.
Still, he follows the instructions.
Crystals. Feathers. Totems. Small piles of ritual nonsense arranged with humiliating care. Candles, naturally, because apparently no one in the history of bad magical decisions has ever thought to branch out aesthetically.
He lights them one by one.
He feels the shift the second he lights the last one—the way the air goes heavy, the way his chest feels tight, like the room just got smaller without moving.
He ignores it.
Focus. Stay grounded. Keep pretending this is chemistry and not the opening act of his own cautionary tale.
He lowers himself into the centre of the brass circle, head buzzing faintly with uncertainty and dread.
“You’re not crazy,” he mutters. “You’re desperate. There’s a difference.”
His hand finds the glass pipe.
He hates the pipe on sight. Hates what it implies. Hates that no matter how many ritual candles and brass circles you throw at the situation, a crack pipe remains a crack pipe with stronger branding.
He slots the crystal into place.
Flicks the lighter.
Watches the flame catch.
The crystal darkens.
Then it begins to sweat.
Then it melts.
The first curl of smoke rises—blue, thick, electric-looking, sharp with a smell that lands somewhere between grapefruit, burnt sugar, and battery acid.
Aster stares at it in silence.
“Right,” he says flatly. “Because nothing says sound decision-making like smoking a suspicious crystal in a haunted attic.”
Then he brings the pipe to his lips anyway.
The first inhale hits like a live wire shoved through his lungs.
His whole body jerks as if something inside him has grabbed the wrong voltage. Muscles spasm. His eyes water instantly.
He keeps going.
The second pull is worse.
Static crawls in from the edges of his vision. His fingers start tingling. His scalp prickles.
He forces himself to hold it.
That’s what the instructions said.
Hold.
Hold.
Hold.
His chest feels like it’s about to split. His ribs lock. Every nerve in his body lights up at once. The symbols carved into the brass circle begin to shiver at the edges, as if laughing quietly among themselves.
Then he exhales.
Violently.
The coughing folds him in half.
And then—
Reality peels back from the corners in long strips of static and black.
The world melts away at the edges, and Aster falls forward into nothingness like a thread cut clean through.
Blackness.