Chapter Text

The cold was endless.

Not the sharp bite of wind, not the sting of snow on exposed skin — but the deep, creeping cold that settled in your bones when you’d already given up. The kind that told you you were already gone.

And yet... Ethan Winters opened his eyes. He wasn’t supposed to.

Not after that. Not after handing Rose to Chris with the last trembling strength of his hands, brittle like cracked porcelain. He’d felt himself coming apart — like a doll whose seams had finally given out. He was supposed to fade. To be done.

But he woke up.

The ceiling above him was unfamiliar — white, sterile, humming with the soft buzz of hospital lights. A distant beep kept time with his heart. He tried to move. Pain flared through his limbs, dull and deep, but he was alive. That word felt foreign. Unreal.

His voice cracked, rasping like dry leaves:

"… Mia?"

No one answered.

The door opened minutes — maybe hours — later. A nurse. Then Chris. And all Ethan could say, even through the fog in his head, was:

"Where’s my wife? Where’s my baby?"

Chris didn’t hesitate. For once, his face wasn’t hard. There was something in his eyes Ethan couldn’t place, guilt, maybe. Or awe. "They’re… safe," Chris said, stepping forward with a smile starting. "… And they’re waiting for you, Winters."

"… You’re kidding."

"Nope."

Ethan was tempted to cry, maybe out of joy he was still alive and so were they, or relief that they were still waiting.

Mia had stopped believing, somewhere between the rescue and the silence. The moment Chris had appeared on that helicopter with their baby in his arms and sorrow in his voice, she’d known, even before he said it. 

"He’s gone."

And she’d screamed. Cried until her voice gave out. Held Rose so tightly it was like she could protect her from the grief. For weeks, she sat in a quiet house, surrounded by government agents and clean-up crews and white walls that weren’t home. She sang to Rose in broken whispers. She watched the door every night, knowing it wouldn’t open.

Until the day it did. It was a quiet knock. Hesitant. She didn’t get up at first. Another agent, probably.

"Mrs. Winters?"

Chris’s voice. Tired. Gentle. Mia opened the door with a sigh. He was standing in the hallway. And behind him, leaning against the wall, pale and shaking, was Ethan. Alive.

Her breath caught.

For a second, the world froze.

Then she moved — faster than she’d ever moved in her life. A blur of tears and gasps and his name falling from her lips like a prayer.

"Ethan, Ethan, Ethan, oh my god, Ethan—"

He caught her, arms wrapping tight even as his body trembled. He buried his face in her shoulder, letting the tears come. "I didn’t think, I thought…"

"I know," she whispered. "I know."

Their daughter stirred in the crib across the room. Tiny. Perfect. Alive. Ethan pulled back, just enough to see her. "She’s okay?"

"She’s perfect," Mia said, smiling through tears. "She still has your eyes you said she’d grow out of."

He laughed, cracked and wet and real. And that night, for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Ethan Winters held his daughter in his arms, warm, alive, and home.

The first week back felt like a dream.

Not the kind Ethan used to have, the ones twisted with mold and blood and fire, but a dream where the air didn’t taste like ash, where hands didn’t always have to reach for a weapon, and where the only sound that filled the house was the occasional, happy babble of a baby trying out new syllables.

They had been given a new home. Somewhere quiet, hidden, away from all of it. The BSAA had their secrets, but Chris had pulled every string he could to get them something that felt close to peace. It was small. Safe. White curtains, soft yellow walls. Wooden floors that creaked slightly, like the house was sighing in relief right alongside them.

Ethan couldn’t sleep through the night yet. Sometimes the creaks made his body tense, old instincts sparking. Sometimes he’d wake up gasping, hand curled into a fist, convinced he was back under that goddamn village— or worse, that he’d opened his eyes and found it was Rose who hadn’t made it.

But then he’d feel the weight of a body beside him, warm, breathing. Mia. And the soft, fluttery hiccups of a baby monitor, Rose breathing tiny clouds into the dark.

They were alive.

On the eighth morning, Mia made pancakes.

Ethan sat at the kitchen table with Rose on his lap, her tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb like she never wanted to let go. He still didn’t understand how he was here. Every time she looked up at him with those wide, curious eyes, his eyes, it hit him like a wave. She didn’t know what he’d done to keep her safe. She didn’t know what he’d lost.

But she knew his face. She knew his voice.

She giggled when he kissed her forehead, and that was enough.

Mia turned at the stove, spatula in one hand, her hair messily tied up with a pencil of all things. She was humming, something wordless and old, and Ethan realized this was the first time in years he’d seen her like this: soft, unguarded, smiling for no reason at all.

“You’re staring," She said in a sing-songy voice without turning around.

"You’re beautiful," He replied, and meant it more than he ever had before. She glanced over her shoulder with a small, playful smile. "You're just saying that because I made breakfast."

"I’m saying it because it’s true," Ethan said. He bounced Rose lightly on his knee, and she cooed. "… But also, yeah, the pancakes help." Mia brought the plate to the table and set it down between them. She kissed Rose on the top of her head, then Ethan on the cheek.

"You’re warm," She whispered, surprised. "Your skin. It feels…"

"Normal?" He offered.

She nodded, quietly. "I was afraid I’d lost you forever. That what came back wouldn’t really be you." He looked down at his hand, the one that had been severed more than once, the one that had held bombs and guns and miracles. There were scars, still, but the fingers flexed when he told them to. They weren’t blackened or crumbling anymore.

"Maybe I’m different," he admitted. "But I’m still me. I remember everything. You. Her. That last moment…" Mia’s eyes welled up. She reached across the table, took his hand. "Don’t talk about it. Not right now. Just… eat. Be here. We can deal with all the rest later."

So they did. They sat and ate, and talked about nothing. About how Rose had started to recognize music. About how the neighbor’s cat was always watching from the fence. About how Mia wanted to paint again, maybe. Ethan didn’t know what he wanted yet, not beyond this, but he promised her that whatever she needed, he was here.

That night, after Rose was asleep, they lay together in bed, still fully dressed, half-under the covers, just being. Mia curled against his chest, listening to his heart like she couldn’t quite believe it was still beating.

"Do you remember our old apartment?" She murmured.

"Yeah. The couch was too small."

"And the water heater never worked."

"But we were happy there," Ethan said. "For a little while."

They were quiet for a little while.

And then Mia whispered the thing she’d been holding in her chest for far too long: "I thought I’d never get to tell you I love you again."

Ethan kissed the top of her head. Held her like a man who’d clawed his way out of hell just to have this.

"I never stopped hearing it," he said softly. "Even when I was… breaking. It’s what kept me going."

She didn’t answer. Just held him tighter.

Outside, the wind moved gently through the trees. The Winters family finally let themselves rest, for once in their lives. There were no swarms of murderous flies, no Mother Miranda holding Rose captive, no vampiric she-giant hunting him down.

The house smelled like rain.

Ethan stepped in through the front door, shook off his coat, and sighed into the familiar, clean hush of home. His lunchbox thudded against the hallway bench, and he rolled his shoulders with the heavy exhale of a man coming off a long day behind three monitors and six unsolvable bugs.

Systems engineering again — like the old days. The job was boring sometimes. Peacefully so. No mold, no monsters. Just code. Thank God. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed normal until it came back.

"I'm home!" he called softly, stepping out of his boots. From the kitchen, Mia’s voice floated gently: "We’re in here!" 

"… We?"

Ethan followed the sound, passing framed photos of Rose’s first birthday, frosting on her nose, tiny fist in cake, and one newer picture that caught him off-guard every time: the three of them in the backyard, sun-drenched, smiling like they’d never seen a shadow in their lives. He stepped into the kitchen and saw her: Mia, glowing in that soft, quiet way she always did when she was up to something.

Mia tilted her head. "Do I?"

"Yeah. That’s your I’m-hiding-a-secret smile." She pressed a hand to her chest, mock-wounded. “You know me too well.”

“You’re my wife. Of course I do." She turned to face him fully, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her eyes shimmered, just a little. "I have something to tell you."

Ethan’s breath caught. Not because he was afraid, but because this Mia, the one who looked like she was holding the whole sun behind her smile, never said things lightly.

"What is it?"

She reached into her apron pocket and handed him something small. It was a photograph— grainy, black-and-white, and unmistakable. A ultrasound. The silence stretched between them, suspended like held breath.

Ethan stared. Then he looked up, wide-eyed, his voice cracking: "Are you serious?"

Mia nodded, already blinking back tears. "I found out two days ago. I wanted to be sure. I wanted it to be real before I told you." He ran a hand through his hair, stunned, then let out a shaky laugh that turned into something like a sob.

"Another baby!"

"A girl," Mia whispered. "They think it’s a girl."

He moved to her before he even realized he had, arms wrapping around her like he could shield her and the entire universe from anything ever again. "I get to do it again," He murmured into her hair. "This time… not surrounded by blood. Or monsters." Mia pulled back just enough to meet his eyes.

"… I want to name her Petal," she said quietly. "If that’s okay with you." His heart cracked open.

"Petal?"

"Yeah. Because she’ll be soft, and strong, and new. And she’ll never have to know what we went through. She’ll grow up with her big, brave sister, and she’ll have you. That’s all I want."

Ethan kissed her, deep and slow and full of every word he didn’t know how to say yet.

When he pulled back, his voice was thick with tears. "Then Petal it is."

The hospital room was too white.

Ethan stood still, hands clenched in the pockets of his coat, trying to breathe through the thick static of anxiety. He’d been here before — hospitals, heart monitors, clipped voices behind curtains. But this was different.

This was Mia.

This was Petal.

"I’m fine," Mia was saying to the doctor, her voice calm but tired. "Just tired. I felt a little dizzy, that’s all."

“You’re not fine," Ethan cut in, sharper than he meant to. "You fainted in the kitchen!"

Mia turned her head to meet his eyes. "I’m pregnant, Ethan. Not made of glass."

The doctor cleared her throat gently. "… Actually… I think this is a good time to go over everything."

The words that followed dropped like stones in Ethan’s stomach.

High-risk. Placenta previa. Scar tissue. Complications. Previous trauma. Monitoring. Surgical prep. Immediate delivery if needed.

And finally, the one that twisted the knife:

"If she survives this pregnancy, we strongly advise against any future attempts. Maybe get tubes tied or even removed, and or a vasectomy."

It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room.

Mia went quiet.

Ethan… couldn’t move.

The phrase "If she survives," lodged in his throat like a splinter.

That night, they sat in silence on the edge of their bed, Rose asleep down the hall, her stuffed bear cradled in her arms like a security detail. Ethan couldn’t look at Mia. He couldn’t look at her stomach. He was too afraid that the shape under her nightshirt would disappear if he stared too long.

"Say something," Mia said softly.

He took a deep breath. His voice cracked. "I can’t lose you."

"You won’t."

"You don’t know that."

Mia turned toward him, took his hand, and laced her fingers through his with a strength that belied how tired she looked. "You were supposed to be gone," She whispered. "Remember? And you fought your way back. We’re not ordinary, Ethan. We never were. But we are still here." He shook his head. "Mia, this isn’t mold or monsters. This is… this is your body. It’s a fight I can’t win for you."

"I don’t need you to fight for me," she said. "I need you to believe in me. And stay. Right here. Please. Through every appointment. Every sleepless night. Every ache."

He finally met her eyes, red-rimmed and shining. "… I’m terrified."

"So am I."

The next day, Rose climbed into bed between them with a picture she’d drawn.

It was a stick figure version of them: Ethan tall, Mia round and glowing, Rose with pigtails, and a tiny, smiling baby with a big pink flower above her head.

"This is baby sister Petal," Rose explained proudly, tapping the smallest figure with her crayon-stained finger. "She’s sleepy but she’s strong."

Mia started crying before she could stop herself. Ethan kissed the top of her head and pulled both of them close. "We’ll get there," He whispered. "One day at a time."

It started with Mia throwing up in the sink.

She waved Ethan off the first time. Said it was a stomach bug, maybe stress. They both worked too hard — Petal had just started school, Rose was a seven year old with questions no one in the BSAA handbook could answer, and Ethan was back working long hours consulting from home. Life had been steady, busy, quiet. For once, normal. But then it didn’t stop.

And one morning, Mia stood in the bathroom, silent and pale, a plastic stick trembling in her hand. Two lines. Not a joke. Not a false positive.

Six years after Castle Dimitrescu. 

Six years after she’d almost bled out on an operating table bringing Petal into the world. 

Six years after birth control and vasectomies and every possible protection they'd agreed on just to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.

But it had.

Ethan came home to silence. Not the peaceful kind, the kind that felt off. Like a storm was holding its breath. Mia sat at the kitchen table with both hands folded in front of her like she didn’t know what they were for anymore.

"… You okay?" She didn’t answer right away.

Then, softly: "I’m pregnant."

It didn’t register. Not at first. He blinked, waiting for a punchline. "… What?"

"I didn’t know. It’s late. Too late," She whispered. "They won’t do an abortion now. It’s already into the second trimester. I thought it was menopause."

Ethan’s stomach flipped.

"But— but… We can’t. You can’t."

"… I know."

The silence after that was worse than any gunshot Ethan had ever heard.

The doctors didn’t have answers. Just raised eyebrows and a printout of low odds and rare exceptions.

"Yes, the vasectomy was successful."

Yes, the birth control was consistent."

"Yes, this is real."

"… I shouldn’t be alive," Mia said bitterly to one of them. "I was told I wouldn’t survive another one."

"Science doesn’t always account for the impossible," The doctor said gently.

Ethan wanted to scream.

The pregnancy was worse than the others. Bedrest. Emergency scans. Machines whirring like insects in the dark. Petal cried once when she saw Mia hooked up to a monitor. Rose sat beside her mother every night and read aloud from old fairytales.

It started with pain. Mia said it wasn’t real. "It’s Braxton Hicks," She whispered, wincing, hand pressed to her stomach. "They come and go. It’s too early, Ethan. She’s not ready."

But Ethan had seen that look before.It wasn’t false labor. It  was a storm building behind her ribs, pulling her under. "Mia," He said, low and urgent, "How long has this been happening?" She didn’t answer. Her breath hitched, her knees gave out. He caught her before she hit the floor. The next contraction came less than a minute later. And then the bleeding started.

They weren’t going to make it to the hospital. There was a storm outside, a real one, blocking the roads with sheets of ice and wind howling like wolves through the trees. He called 911. No one was coming. Not fast enough.

And Mia? Mia looked at him with the clearest eyes he’d ever seen, even through the pain. "You have to do it," She whispered.

"No— no, no, no, I can’t— I’m not…"

"Your mother trained midwives. Your grandfather was a doctor. You’ve seen this. You know. Ethan, please."

He stared at her. At her blood on the floor. At the woman who’d trusted him with her life again and again who had walked through fire with him and come out scarred but alive. And he nodded.

It was chaos after that. Quiet, focused chaos. Ethan moved like he was outside his own body, towels, gloves, antiseptic, scalpel. Petal sobbed in Rose’s arms in the hallway, and Ethan had never been more grateful for how calm and capable their eldest had become. He didn’t let either of the girls see their parents in such a state.

Inside the bedroom, Mia gritted her teeth through the agony. Her hands trembled as she squeezed his. Her words were hoarse; "If something happens—"

"Don’t," Ethan said, almost choking. "Don’t say it. Please, Mia, for the love of God, do not say it."

"If something happens, take care of her. Herb. Take care of all of them."

He shook his head. "You’re going to hold her. You’re going to see her face. You’re going to help her spell and write and love her like you did with Petal and Rose." But Mia only smiled, soft and sad, like she already knew something he didn’t.

He cut. It was clean, deliberate. His hands shook once, just once, and then went steady with a force he didn’t know he still had in him. And then… A cry.

Tiny. Piercing. Alive.

Ethan pulled Herb from the blood-soaked ruin of it all, trembling as he wrapped her in a towel and pressed her to his chest. She was so small. But she was breathing.

"Mia," He said, voice breaking. "She’s here. She’s okay. She’s—" But Mia didn’t answer.

The world went still. Ethan turned, holding their daughter, and saw her face.

Peaceful. Pale. Still. Her skin going grey, her lips turning blue. He dropped to his knees.

"… Mia," He whispered. "Please."

Nothing. He screamed once. Just once. It tore through the house like thunder. And then he held Herb closer, like maybe she was the only reason gravity still worked.

The next day, the paramedics came. Too late. They took Mia’s body gently, respectfully, like she was something holy. Rose didn’t speak for hours. Petal clung to Ethan like a vine, refusing to leave his side.

And Herb, little, blinking, barely old enough to understand sound, curled against his chest and slept.

They buried Mia under the tree in the backyard, the one she loved in spring, when it flowered pink and white like breath on glass. Ethan planted rosemary and sage around the grave. Petal added daisies. Rose placed a single photo on the headstone: one of Mia smiling, wind in her hair, sunlight on her face.

Ethan sat on the porch that night with Herb in his arms, watching the stars blink through the leaves. "You weren’t supposed to be here," He whispered to her. "And now you’re all I’ve got left of her."

Herb blinked up at him with Mia’s eyes. Ethan Winters wept quietly, and held his daughter like the only living thing left in the world.

It was Jill who called.

Her voice was low and tight, like someone who hadn’t slept in three days. "We found something. Southern Europe. An old village. No current population. Locals call it Ghost’s Town."

"How clever…" Ethan muttered. Herb gurgled against his chest.

"It’s not clever, it’s accurate," Jill said. "The place is dead. But there’s something growing under it. Not mold, exactly. Not Cadou. But something... close." Chris was already en route. Ada had apparently shown up uninvited — as usual.

And Ethan?

He looked around the house. Empty walls. Mia’s sweater still hanging from the back of a chair. Petal curled against Rose on the couch. Herb, just two months old, staring up at him like she knew something. He could’ve said no. Should’ve. But he didn’t.

"… Give me twenty-four hours."

They brought three BSAA squads.

The village was bone-white, crumbling, and silent. Stone cottages stared out with hollow window sockets. Dead vines clung to the walls like skeletal hands. It looked like it had been evacuated decades ago— but nothing had touched it. Not time. Not nature. Not even dust. Ghost’s Town, they called it. No name, no history. Just the memory of life.

Ethan stood at the edge of a wide, moss-coated well and stared into blackness. Jill came up beside him. "Cave’s down there."

"How deep?"

"Too deep." She passed him a tablet with scans from below. "Thermal mapping picked up a fungal mass. Big one. Hanging from the ceiling of a cavern the size of a cathedral. And it’s... twitching."

Ethan studied the image. Pale tendrils like hanging roots. Bulbous shapes in the center. Something pulsing.

"You brought my children to this?" He growled.

"You brought them," Jill said softly.

And that was true.

He left the girls topside with the BSAA. Rose had protested. Petal had asked if the mold was coming back. Herb had cried the second he walked away. He kissed all three of them. "I'll be back. This is just recon." That was a lie.

They lowered into the cave on repelling lines, flashlights flickering across damp stone and spore-stained walls. The air grew colder, heavier. Wet. And then they saw it. Suspended from the cavern ceiling like a cocoon spun by giants: the mass. It was huge, twenty, maybe thirty feet across. Mottled. Grey-veined. Twitching, like something inside was dreaming. Cadou-like nodes pulsed in slow, nauseating rhythms. Vascular cords hung like roots, some fused into the walls and ceiling.

Chris muttered, "What the hell is that?!" And then the mass moved. Not a twitch. Not a shudder. It reached. Faster than thought, tendrils shot out, silent and fluid like water underwater— and before anyone could scream, they were wrapped, lifted, dragged— Ethan barely got a word out.

"My girls—!"

Darkness swallowed them.

The silence was absolute.
No breath. No heartbeat.
Just cold.

And then—

Light.

Not from flashlights. Not from the sun.

It came from inside the walls.

Glowing veins. Pale blue. Webbing through fungal tissue. And whispers. A chorus of breathless voices — old and young and overlapping, repeating the same thing over and over like a pulse:

"We remember. We remember. We remember—"

Jill blinked awake on the ground, coughing up spores. Chris groaned beside her. Ethan opened his eyes to a nightmare:

They were inside the mass. Not digested. Not dead. Absorbed.

The cave was no longer stone— it was living, breathing. The floor squelched. The walls trembled. Fungal light pulsed like nerves firing. And in the distance, echoes of a child crying.

Rose. No. Rose?

Ethan stood, heart roaring.

"Where are my daughters?!"

The walls didn’t answer.

They just breathed.

July 19th
10:34 AM
Ljubljana, Slovenia

The rain tapped against the hospital window in soft, uncertain rhythms. Evelyn Evans gritted her teeth and pushed, breath ragged, fingers clenched in the sweaty hand of her wife, Karina. Machines beeped gently in the background. The doctor murmured encouragement in Slovene, but Evelyn barely heard it. Her mind was elsewhere.

Not on the pain. Not on the screaming. But on the absence.

Mia. Her sister should’ve been here. She blamed Ethan.

They hadn’t spoken much over the years, not since Dulvey. Evelyn had never known what really happened in that house, and Mia had never explained. But when she died, Evelyn felt it like a psychic wound— one she hadn’t known she still had.

And yet, even in death… Mia had sent something back. Evelyn had found out she was pregnant just seven months before Mia passed. She hadn’t told anyone except Karina. Not even Ethan. It felt too strange, too private.

Too haunted.

But now—

The cry that shattered the air was sharp and wet and alive.

"It’s a girl!" the midwife announced.

And just like that, Evelyn stopped breathing. Because when she looked down… The baby had Mia’s eyes.

Dark. Deep. Curious. Watching the world like it was something that could hurt her— but she wasn’t afraid.

Karina was sobbing. Evelyn held her daughter in shaking arms and whispered the name they had agreed on weeks ago, long before labor had begun:

"Helena. Helena Evans-Winters."

July 19th
10:34 AM
Ghost’s Town Cave, Southern Europe

Ethan’s knees hit the ground with a thud as the fungal walls pulsed around him. His daughters were screaming. Chris was yelling. Jill was firing into the walls. The cave itself felt like it was thinking. And the voices inside it whispered louder:

"Winters. Winters. Mia. Ethan. Rose. Herb. Petal."

The walls knew them. They remembered them. And somewhere, deep inside, Ethan felt it— like a thread tugging at his chest, something distant and bright piercing the dark: New life. A baby. Somewhere far from here. Crying.

Mia’s blood was breathing again.

The road ended four miles back. Not with a sign or barrier, but with the silent collapse of civilization. Bonnie Evans stood on a broken asphalt path now half-consumed by moss and Mold-cracked stone, staring at what the world had forgotten.

Ghost’s Town.

It didn’t appear on maps anymore— not on digital grids or the old paper ones she kept rolled in her satchel. The few surviving records dated back to the final Umbrella collapse and the Cadou-Variant Mold Conflict, a name nobody really said aloud anymore.

Just: that place. The Mold place. The cursed place.

But for Bonnie, it wasn’t a legend. It was the end of a line.

The line of Ethan Winters. Her great-great-grandmother Helena had once spoken of him in fragments— her mother’s brother-in-law, a man who vanished into the mold-choked lands. A man who died and died and kept walking. Bonnie’s breath hung in the air. The sun was warm, but the rot in the wind made the bones feel cold.

Ghost’s Town wasn’t named by tourists or maps. It named itself. Through what it had become.

Houses leaned like drunk men into alleyways of creeping blackness. Their wood was grey with age, but bloated, almost alive—soft with fungal threads beneath every board. Streets twisted in unnatural spirals, as if warped by a dreaming mind. The church's spire pointed not upward but crooked, bent like a finger beckoning someone back.

And beneath it all, the Mold pulsed. Not visibly. Not yet. But Bonnie could feel it.

Sprout stirred at her hip.

The weapon’s blade— "Thorn," her father’s final gift—was forged from a mold variant called Sprout and chloroplast, sealed in engineered obsidian. It buzzed faintly whenever it sensed memory. Or danger. Or sometimes… just presence. Bonnie took a deep breath and pressed forward.

It wasn’t long before she saw the smoke.

A small trail, winding from behind a crumbled apothecary with a half-missing roof. The kind of campfire no normal person would make out here.

She stepped closer, hand at Thorn’s grip.

Then…

"Ahhh… a traveler… How curious." The voice rolled like wet gravel over old paper. It didn’t come from behind her, or in front of her, but from the space beside her, as if it had always been there, waiting for her ears to notice.

She turned. Fast. And saw him.

He sat beneath a shattered stone archway, surrounded by stacks of crates that breathed. Not literally, but they exhaled a kind of fungal mist, like pollen, like breath. He wore layered patchwork robes, stitched together from pieces of old BSAA flak jackets, priestly vestments, even torn Mold-treated medical garb. His eyes were yellow. Not glowing, just wrong.

His flesh? Soft. Sunken. But not rotting. Stabilized. Transformed.

Bonnie knew Mold when she saw it. And this poor man was full of it.

"You’re not… human," She said flatly.

The Merchant chuckled, a slow, full-body tremor that rattled his supplies. "Ah, my dear. I was BSAA, once. Bravo Squad. Recon detail. It’s been… ohh, about a hundred years. Mold doesn’t forget. It doesn’t let go. It just… reshapes."

Bonnie stepped forward warily. Thorn pulsed once at her side. The Merchant flinched but smiled.

"Ohoho, lovely blade you’ve got. A living one, I’d wager. Heirloom, yes? Your father had good hands."

"You knew my father?"

"Mh. No. I knew his work. He traded formulas through the Mold-net. My stock carries several of his failed children."

Bonnie grimaced.

"You’re a dealer, then. Relics?" 

"Call me a curator. I sell what’s left of the old world. What survives. What grows in the dark." He leaned forward, flesh creaking like old floorboards.

"And you, Bonnie Evans… you’re the first sprout of new light I’ve seen in decades."

That froze her. She hadn’t given her name. "How do you know me?"

"She told me."

He gestured toward the depths of Ghost’s Town.

"Mia."

Bonnie’s breath caught in her throat. The name hadn’t been said aloud in years. Not even in her family. But it was burned into the mitochondrial memory of her bloodline, whispered through tales of Ethan and the daughters and the cathedral.

"… You, you— You lie!"

"I trade. Never lie. I have no need." He gestured to a crate. "Want proof? Open it." Bonnie knelt cautiously and pried open the lid. Inside was a wedding photo. Cracked, fogged, but real.

Mia Winters. Ethan Winters. A baby in Mia’s arms.
Their eyes smiled, but the picture felt sad. Too still. Like a goodbye already whispered. Bonnie looked up, hands trembling.

"Where is she? Where is Mia?"

The Merchant’s voice lowered.

"What’s… left of her waits. Trapped. In the Vault Beneath the Heart.” 

"The Vault—?"

"A memory cathedral, sealed deep in the Mold’s core. Queen guards it. Her lackeys watch it. It is not a place for the living."

Bonnie stood.

"Then I’ll carve my way through the dead."

The Merchant laughed again. "Good. You’ll need to. But remember: Ethan does not want to kill you, Bonnie. He wants to bring you home."

Before she left, the Merchant called to her once more.

"Oh, Bonnie, dear! If you see the black sun… run. You can’t kill it yet. Not without the other sprouts."

"What other sprouts?"

“You’ll know it when you see it. Good luck!"

The road narrowed the deeper Bonnie pressed into Ghost’s Town. The sunlight behind her had vanished behind fungal overgrowth, bloated stalks that bloomed like tumors, reaching from rooftops down toward the cracked cobblestone streets. Every window was blind with dust and black mold. The town’s air had texture now: dense, sour, and vibrating faintly like sound just out of range.

Bonnie's boots scraped across the old stones as she passed what was once a florist’s shop. Now, dried petals and flesh-mold hybrids curled from the doorframe. The plants wept moisture. One twitched when she passed. Thorn pulsed at her hip, twice.

"Two lifeforms," she whispered. "Close."

She ducked into an alley between two ruined buildings, lowering her breath, her back pressed to the wall. She could hear it now: boots— not military— theatrical. Clicks of polished soles over stone.

And then a voice.
Sickly sweet, like a smile coated in formaldehyde. "I smell fresh roots, sister. A new thorn. Do you think she bleeds?"

Another replied, silkier, darker… delighted. "They all bleed. But she might bloom!"

Bonnie spun around the corner, Thorn flashing outward in a silent defensive arc—

And stopped cold. Two figures stood on the old road. Not BSAA. Not Mold-born. Not monsters in the traditional sense.

They were… dressed for a masquerade? The first wore a torn red ballgown with black roses growing from the seams. Her face was hidden behind a mask in the shape of a smiling Queen of Hearts playing card, except where her mouth had been cut open to reveal her real teeth, filed to points.

The second, tall and androgynous, wore a white jester’s uniform soaked in crimson, with black veins running up their exposed arms like thorns under the skin. A silver mask covered their eyes, but the mold had grown through the slits, forming actual pupils made of twitching fungal growth.

They bowed in unison.

“A guest for the Crimson Queen. How delightful.”

Bonnie didn’t waste time.

She lunged at the jester.

Thorn sliced upward—a flash of black and green, the blade whistling with bio-electric discharge. But the jester movedlike the Mold itself—fluid, fast, unpredictable. They twisted backward like a marionette with too many strings, laughing as they went.

The woman in the gown hissed, and with one fluid motion, pulled a folding parasol from her side, mold-infused, the spokes sharpened into bone-tipped spikes. She spun it once and slashed toward Bonnie’s neck.

Bonnie ducked, rolled, sliced out with Thorn and caught fabric and flesh.

A spurt of spore mist escaped the gash. Bonnie stumbled, coughing. Toxin. Parasol was laced with the Queen’s formula.

The jester seized the moment, pouncing. Their fingers were laced with fine, hair-thin Mold threads, whipping outward like a net. Bonnie slashed the threads, barely. She fell into a crouch, heart pounding, eyes stinging.

"Who are you people?!" The woman in red twirled, blood trailing her gown. "We are the Red Court. Chosen of Her Majesty. Disciples of Order!"

The jester whisper-yelled, "And you, little seed, are an insult to that order. A mistake! A sprout in the wrong garden!" Bonnie grit her teeth and tapped the hilt of Thorn. The bio-circuit glowed green. "Then try and weed me out!"

Bonnie fought in tight arcs, using alleyway walls to block the parasol's full spin. Thorn grew when infused, its blade stretching into a whip-like tendril. She used it now, wrapped the jester’s arm mid-cast, yanked forward, then drove her boot into their chest, sending them tumbling through a fungal-cracked window.

The parasol swung.

Bonnie ducked under the Queen’s wide swing, slid low, and drove Thorn through her calf. The woman screamed, not just pain, but rage. Mold burst from the wound like tar, and black roses bloomed up her leg, twisting into her torso.

"You… ungrateful… ROOT!"

Bonnie yanked the blade free and sprinted back into the alley.

She couldn’t win this fight— not yet.

The Red Court screamed after her.

"Run, little weed! The Queen will prune you herself!"

Bonnie collapsed behind a broken bookstore two blocks down. The Mold was already trying to invade her lungs. She bit into a mycelial stimulant capsule, holding the bitter compound under her tongue. Her vision cleared. Just in time to see a shadow.

A woman. Pale. Brown hair tied back. Blue dress. Barefoot. Looked just like her. She stepped out from the alley shadows. Bonnie scrambled to her feet. "Who are you?!"

The woman didn't speak. She looked at Bonnie. Then whispered, "Ethan is close." Then vanished.

The Cathedral wasn't built. It grew.

Once the heart of Ghost’s Town’s forgotten chapel, it had been overtaken—no, possessed—by the fungal’s memory. Stained glass dripped with black rot. Pews were replaced with long-dead spore vines twisted into throne-like seating. The altar no longer bore a cross, but a crowned skull sprouting fungal antlers.

The air buzzed with psalms of the spore, chanted in no human tongue. Bonnie hit the floor hard. She cried out, shoulder crashing against the base of the altar.

"On your knees before the Crimson Queen, you misgrown little gutter weed!"

The Queen of Hearts stood above her.

She wore a cracked porcelain half-mask, streaked in red, and a corseted battle-dress that shimmered crimson and bone. Her bioengineered parasol clicked shut in one hand, her other grasping Bonnie’s hair like a trophy. Fungus flowed across the cathedral floor, reacting to her presence, fawning.

Bonnie spit blood. "You want my kneel? Break my legs!"

The Queen smiled, just a little. "If I break them, you’ll never stand again. But if you kneel willingly, you might be taught grace!"

She flung Bonnie toward the base of the altar like a rag doll. Then she raised her hand. And three colossal presences entered the chamber.

He came first.

Ethan, the tallest of them all, stood at 11 feet 6 inches, ducking beneath the archway, his black silhouette scraping mold from the stone. He wore a long, asymmetrical coat, one sleeve short, the other long and immaculate opera-length white gloves. His boots thundered with every step, heels ringing like a bell of war. A massive black, wide-brimmed hat hid his face in shadow, but when he lifted his head, Bonnie saw no eyes. Only a shadow.

"You’ve touched her," He said, his voice silk and rot. "You laid hands on her."

The Queen raised a brow, unbothered. "The brat broke into my garden. I plucked her. You're welcome!" Ethan’s boots slammed the stone. The fungus recoiled beneath him.

"You don’t pluck! You butcher! You parade like a cracked doll and still wonder why they ran from you!"

Chris came next, the ground trembling softly under his cybernetic Mold-laced exo-armor. At 6’4, he looked almost normal… until you saw the grafted arm, twitching with bio-electric pulses, and the blood-colored insignia of his forgotten BSAA past scarring his chestplate. He didn’t speak right away. He looked at Ethan. Then at Bonnie.

"She's just a kid," He muttered. "How long before you call her daughter too?"

She didn’t walk. She ghosted. Ada arrived with not a sound, her heels never touching the ground as tendrils carried her just above the surface. Dressed in crimson silk laced with shadowy black widow motifs, her veil drifted around her face like smoke. She stood 9’2, her posture effortless, eyes behind red-tinted glasses that didn’t reflect light, they absorbed it.

"If we’re voting, I say keep her alive," Ada murmured. "She’s more fun this way. And she hasn't begged yet."

Bonnie struggled to stand, wiping blood from her mouth.

"I’m not begging any of you!" Ethan tilted his head. The Mold inside him stirred.

"You carry her scent. Mia. You don’t know why. But you do."

"Mia this, Mia that…" Chris muttered.

Ethan snapped.

"DON’T TALK ABOUT MIA!"

"Why not?!" Chris shouted. "You left her! You and your queen. You buried her with protocols and left me to burn with her corpse!" Ethan roared, a sudden burst of sonic pressure flooding the cathedral. Bonnie fell again.

The Queen stepped between them.

"ENOUGH!"

Her parasol clicked open. It hissed, spraying a red mist that settled over them all. Not to subdue, but to remind. This was her domain. "You squabble like broken dogs at a feast! I brought the girl. I have claimed her fate." Ethan’s laugh was slow. Cruel. "You don’t claim fate, Jill. You just break it when it doesn’t bow to you!"

Ada smiled faintly behind her veil.

"Why not let her speak for herself?"

They all turned to Bonnie. Four titans. Four gods in the skin of monsters. Bonnie, bloodied, breathless, stood… Before The Queen kicked her down.

"You want to resurrect your dead wife inside me?"
“You want to test me, experiment on me, command me like some chess piece?”
“Then try. Try me. But if you fail, I swear I’ll bring this whole rotten cathedral down on your heads.”

A silence.

Then Ethan smiled.

A true, terrible thing. 

"She’s got Mia’s fire!"

Chris clenched his fists. "Or just her death wish." The Queen nodded, pleased. "Then let’s prepare the sacrament!"

Bonnie sat on the cold obsidian floor, arms crossed, back pressed to the root-veined wall beneath a crooked depiction of Mother Miranda, painted in fungal black and blood-gold. Her temple still throbbed where Jill had slammed her down hours ago. She was tired. Hungry. Slightly pissed.

The room smelled like iron and crushed lillies. She was supposed to be the sacrifice, and yet…

"It makes the most sense she stays with me," Ethan growled. "I understand the fungus better than any of you."

"Understanding it doesn’t mean you control it," Chris snapped. "You’re emotionally compromised and barely tethered to reality!"

"Says the man with a murder arm and a vendetta against goddamn mirrors!"

"Oh for the love of—" Ada groaned, massaging her temple. "You're all embarrassing yourselves. She stays with me. I’m the only one here who doesn’t want to either dissect her or spoon-feed her memories of a long dead wife!"

The Queen sipped from a black goblet, perched lazily on her cathedral throne like this was theater. "This is what happens," She said dryly, "When you let undead men babysit…"

Bonnie wasn’t alone. She felt it at first as a tingle, a cold breath along her shoulder, like fingers made of mist. Then came the voice:

"These fools are going to kill you and scuff your boots, dear."

Bonnie whipped her head around. No one. But—

A figure stepped through the wall.

Graceful. Towering. Dressed in a long, ghost white dress. A sly smirk beneath crimson lips. A wide hat casting elegant shadow.

She was translucent. Glowing slightly from within, like threaded moonlight.

"Don’t scream," She purred. "It’s terribly common." Bonnie stood slowly, unnoticed by the bickering monsters.

"Who the hell—?"

"Lady Alcina Dimitrescu. Pleased to haunt you."

She offered a polite, utterly unnecessary curtsy.
Bonnie blinked. "… You’re a ghost."

"I was a weapon. Now I’m dead, fashionable, and annoyed."

Alcina brushed nonexistent dust from her dress.

"Especially at that tacky throne goblin you call a ‘queen.’ Mother Miranda was much better."

Bonnie stared at her. Alcina stared back. They both blinked.

"… Are you seriously wearing gloves with one long sleeve, Winters?" Alcina added, glancing toward Ethan. "He looks like a butcher’s mannequin." Bonnie actually snorted.

"Listen closely, darling," Alcina said, her voice now low and urgent. "They don’t know I’m here. They can’t see me, hear me, or touch me."

"But I remember this Cathedral. I died not far from here. My daughters are watching too. They remember us— not too fondly, I might add."

"And while your tall, emotionally constipated ancestor squabbles over custody like it’s some episode of Maury…"

She offered her hand. "You and I are going for a… walk." 

Bonnie blinked. "… You want me to trust a ghost?"

Alcina leaned in, towering. "Darling. You already trusted three psychopaths and a mushroom queen. At least I have style."

They reached an old chapel door, its hinges rotted, but not locked. Alcina hovered beside it, a solemn hush in her voice.

"Out there is Red Hollow proper. You'll want to find the bell tower. My daughters wait there. They’ll guide you."

"You're not coming?"

"I’m bound to the Cathedral… For now. But we’ll meet again."

Bonnie hesitated.

"Why help me?"

Alcina’s eyes softened, just a flicker.

"Because I remember being young. I remember watching men argue over my body like I was a thing."

"And because my daughters… would have liked you. They will now, I hope."

Bonnie looked down. Then back.

"You’re weird, ghost lady."

Alcina smirked.

"Tell your little fungal friends the Countess of House Dimitrescu is watching."

And just like that… she vanished.

"—I was her husband. She’d want her legacy with me!"

"She wanted you to let her go, you lunatic—!"

"Please. Both of you are just mad you didn’t think of this first—!"

Jill sighed loudly. "Why the hell is the brat so silent? Speak!"

Silence.

The Queen stood. Bonnie was gone.

"Oh. Oh you clever, slippery weed." She narrowed her eyes toward the altar, her eye twitching and her fists clenched.

Chapter Text

Pack, noun - a group of wild animals, mostly wolves, working together, usually familial.

Bonnie ran. Her boots slapped broken stone, her breath stung in her throat, and every twist of her neck brought flashes of black-lacquered armor and gold-lined masks behind her.

Jill’s lackeys, two Pawns and one Knight, based on the creaking of their fungal-plated limbs and the scent of formaldehyde perfume that filled the air behind them. Bonnie ducked under a shattered archway and skidded into a shadow-warped alley. "The girl’s warm," Said one, voice modulated and wrong.

"She shouldn’t be warm. Make her cold."

They were close. Far too close for Bonnie’s liking.

She pressed herself against a crumbled wall, fingers brushing Sprout, her weapon, now humming faintly at her hip. The Mold and Fungus in this town responded to her like vines twitching toward sunlight, but tonight it was panicke, darting away from her body like even it was scared.

"Off with her head," Hissed a second voice.

"Off. OFF.

OFF!"

The third, larger, heavier, dragged something across the ground. Bonnie didn’t look, but she heard the slither of a great blade.

"Knight-class," She muttered to herself. "Fantastic…"

Bonnie waited until the smallest one passed, then lunged. A strike to the back of the knee. The Pawn shrieked and crumpled, veins popping from the crack in its armour.

"FOUND HER—!"

Too late. Bonnie was already running again, through corridors of abandoned vendors and churches grown through with fungal roots, the bell tower’s silhouette finally visible above the rooftops. But it was still too far.

She reached an open courtyard— moonlight catching on black-and-white tiles forming a jagged chessboard design—and nearly slipped in the frost-thin fungus coating everything.

The Knight was already there. Just her luck.

"Hello, little girl," it said, voice masculine but warped through the mask.

"You run well. Do you bleed well?"

Bonnie braced herself, Sprout drawn. Thorn-shaped and pulsing, it vibrated in her grip.

“You really want to find out?” She spat.

The Knight lunged. She rolled—

— and then…

A scream. Not hers.

CRACK.

A pale blur descended from the rooftop, dragging the Knight across the tiles like a doll. Screams followed— one Pawn tried to flee. A second blur caught them mid-step. Laughter.

Mad, delighted, sisterly laughter.

"Aw, did we break your toy?"

"Mother will be so proud!"

"She’s watching~!"

Bonnie, panting, rose slowly, watching the last of the lackeys dissolve into steaming fungus and perfume. Then they turned to her.

Three women, pale, gorgeous, and off. Their eyes glowed with light, their bloodied mouths curled in curious smiles.

One stepped forward.

"You must be Bonnie!"

"Who…?"

"Cassandra," said the first with a twirl. "This is Bela." She gestured to the calm, poised one with the sickle. "And that’s Daniela." She waved.

Bonnie stepped back.

"You're ghosts."

“Wrong," Bela corrected softly. “We’re memories that learned how to walk again!"

"And Mother sent us to protect you."

Bonnie narrowed her eyes.

"Alcina?"

Cassandra beamed.

"You met her. She likes you. That's rare. She didn’t even like us when we were alive."

"Still doesn’t…" muttered Daniela.

The sisters led her up a spiraling staircase inside the broken tower. The walls pulsed with fungal veins, glowing ever so faintly, a strange warmth that reminded Bonnie of heartbeats and candlelight. At the top, the massive bell lay half-smashed into the floor, suspended on tendrils that hummed lowly, like it might still ring with the right push.

The girls stood beside her. Watchful. Elegant. Dangerous. "You’ve got more people chasing you than a cursed princess," Bela said gently. "But you’re safe here. For now." Bonnie looked around. Then at them.

"Why? Why protect me?"

Daniela shrugged. "Because the world is full of monsters."

Cassandra added, "And you? You’re the one they’re all circling."

"Mother thinks you’ll change everything."

Bela then added, "For better… or worse."

Bonnie sat beneath the shattered bell, Sprout beside her, the Daughters perched like strange angels in the arches above.

"Why was that tall guy so interested in me?"

"Winters? You look just like his dead wife who died in childbirth, apparently."

Bonnie’s eyes widened at that, one new monster she had to worry about? She stepped into the courtyard beneath the crumbling bell tower, trying to shake the chill crawling across her back. Something felt wrong, not immediate danger, but something older. Like this ground remembered too much.

Petals floated through the air.

Pink-white at first, then tinged with the faintest hue of red. Bonnie blinked, she hadn’t seen flowers in this place, and these petals… they moved like they had a mind of their own. Like a swarm.

They drifted across the ground toward her, silent, graceful, pulsing with Mold-light.

Bonnie drew Sprout slowly, voice low.

"Okay. Definitely not regular weather…"

Then came the buzzing.

Soft at first.

Then louder. Insistent. Eager.

A cloud of black flies swirled overhead, spiraling through the air like a tornado of gnashing wings and wet giggles.

Somewhere within that cloud was a sound like laughter; childish, bubbly, wrong.

"New friend?!"

"Is she squishy?"

"Can I take her ears?"

Bonnie stumbled back as the swarm of petals and flies collided midair, spinning around each other like they were dancing.

Then, they began to take shape.

From the swarm of flies, a girl emerged, barefoot, giggling, floating just slightly above the stone. Her limbs were long, too long, her ears splattered with dried blood like she had painted them herself. Her lips were stained and bitten, her smile wide and red as a split pomegranate. Tucked in her arm was a bloodied bunny plush with floppy ears, the original colour was white. She thinks. The bunny’s too yellowed and bloodied to tell.

"Hi!" She chirped, swaying as she hovered closer.

"I’m Herb, you’re Bonnie. Daddy wants you!"

Her head tilted.

"Are you gonna scream now or later?"

Beside her, the petals drew together like cloth into a second girl, taller, older and elegant but off. She wore a blindfold across her face, but Mold pulsed faintly around her eyes. Cracked red veins snaked from under the silk, growing in time with her slow, deep breaths.

She didn’t speak.

"That’s Petal," Herb said, twirling midair.

"She sees everything, even with her eyes shut! I think it’s ‘cause she listens with her skin now."

Petal’s head turned slowly toward Bonnie. Even blindfolded, she looked through her.

Bonnie stepped back again.

"You’re not real," She said, voice steady despite the fear in her chest. "You’re hallucinations. Mold tricks!"

Herb leaned in, grinning too wide.

"If we’re fake, can fake things bleed?"

Petal raised a hand, vines trailing from her fingertips like nerve endings. Something was squirming under her skin, which made Bonnie’s own itch. She gulped, feeling queasy at the sight. "Anyways, come on! You’re coming with us! No exceptions!" 

A chain suddenly wrapped around the girl’s leg, and before she knows it, a piercing pain shoots up through her body originating from her ankle. The two starts of the chain was wrapped tightly around Herb and Petal’s wrists, the two sisters originating to the first forms Bonnie saw them in; a swarm of flies and a swarm of petals.

The brunette was dragged through the air, towards a looming castle. The castle rests in the blackened roots of the mountain like a wound in the earth, brutal and silent. It is not beautiful in the way the old noble houses were. There are no elegant spires or golden domes, only towering slabs of pale stone stitched together with dark iron struts and mold-veined masonry. It is functional, not decorative, like a fortress built by memory rather than men.

The outer walls are high, jagged, and overgrown with fungal cables that pulse faintly in the twilight. Spores drift from the battlements like ash. Some of the towers lean inward, as if the weight of time, or grief, bent them toward the keep’s cold heart. Gargoyles perch on ledges, not carved from stone but formed from molded bone and hardened resin, twisted faces frozen mid-scream.

A wide gatehouse yawns at the front, flanked by sentry towers wrapped in fungal lattice. The drawbridge is down, but the chasm beneath it is not empty, it writhes with a tangle of Mold tendrils like black seaweed in deep water. The walls weep, and roots cover the ground.

The castle swallowed the sky.

Bonnie barely had time to scream before the world tilted—her ankle snapped sideways under the force, the chain dragging her like a hooked fish. Her limbs flailed, Sprout spinning from her fingers, vanishing into the dark. Wind knifed past her ears. The courtyard shrank below, the Daughters yelling something—but it was already too late.

CRASH.

Glass exploded around her in a halo of razors.

The window shattered inward, showering the marble floor in splinters of moonlight and blood. Bonnie hit the ground hard, shoulder-first, skidding across a moss-veined rug that smelled of mildew and memory. Her breath left her in a cracked wheeze.

She tried to move—her body screamed.

The petals and flies followed, swirling through the broken window like a kaleidoscope of hunger.

Petal landed like silk dropped from heaven. Herb landed like a child tossing herself into a pile of leaves. Giggling.

"Welcome to Daddy’s house!" Herb sang, arms stretched wide.

Bonnie groaned, pushing herself upright. "What is this place?!" she spat, lip split, ankle already swelling.

Petal moved silently to the wall, running her hand over a massive oil painting there, dark reds, golds, and shadow. A family? A funeral? Hard to tell. The paint had melted in places, like it wept under heat.

"Castle Winters," Herb said, rocking on her heels. "It’s where the good monsters live. The ones who remember how to love." She grinned.

"And also eat people sometimes! But mostly love!"

Bonnie crawled back toward the window, dragging herself inch by inch. Her fingers brushed the broken sill. Then the temperature changed. The whole room breathed.

She felt it, not wind, not a draft. A slow, deep inhale from somewhere below the floorboards. The fungus on the walls twitched. Petal turned toward a door veiled in crimson curtains, head tilted as if listening to something Bonnie couldn’t hear.

Then,

Footsteps.

Heavy. Measured. Familiar.

Herb beamed. Petal smiled.

Bonnie froze.

A shape emerged from the hallway beyond. Pale. Towering. Wrapped in mourning-black armor that shimmered like oil. His eyes burned softly beneath the hat.

He stopped in the doorway, tilting his head.

"You're warm," Ethan said.

His voice was low, like it came from inside her own bones.

"And you're hurt."

Bonnie tried to speak, but her voice failed her. He stepped forward. Slowly. Carefully.

And knelt.

"Don’t be afraid," he said, softly now.

Herb giggled behind him.

"She’s gonna be so mad you talked to her before dinner!"

Ethan ignored her.

He reached out with one gloved hand and Bonnie flinched.

But he just touched her ankle. Lightly.

The Mold responded immediately, threads curling from the floor like tiny hands, wrapping gently around the sprain.

It didn’t hurt.

It pulsed.

Warmth bloomed through her leg, strange and ticklish and wrong.

Ethan looked at her again, eyes tired but intent.

"You’re important," He said.

Not like a question. Like a sentence.

A judgement, a prophecy.

"And you’ve come home."

Bonnie’s breath stuttered in her chest as Ethan’s hand drifted from her ankle. The warmth of the Mold was fading now, leaving only the cold sweat of being too close to something ancient and deeply wrong. Behind him, Petal stepped forward. Her blindfolded gaze locked onto Bonnie like a target she could still see clearly.

"I want to play," Petal whispered. Her voice was calm, clear. Too calm. Herb bounced beside her. "Ooooh, a game?"

Bonnie’s eyes narrowed. "… What kind of game?"

Petal smiled. Not with her mouth, but with her teeth, the kind of smile that belonged to predators beneath tall grass.

"Cat and mouse," She said. "You run. We chase. If we catch you,"

Her head tilted gently.

"You bleed." Bonnie scrambled back again, the words rattling through her like bullets. “No! Absolutely not! I’m not playing your sick—!"

"Shhh," Ethan said gently, placing a gloved finger to her lips before she could finish. His white — yes, white, Bonnie could see that now — eyes glowed faintly now, filled with something between affection and threat.

"She’ll play," He said. Not a request. A order.

Bonnie stared up at him, horrified. "You can’t be serious!"

"I am, my dear." Herb squealed and began clapping like a child at a birthday party. "Oooooh! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!" Petal turned slowly toward Ethan, still smiling. "Ten seconds, Father?" The giant nodded, standing. "Ten seconds."

Bonnie’s pulse thundered in her ears. "You’re all insane!" Ethan looked down at her, expression unreadable. "Maybe. But the rules are simple, and we’re being so generous."

"Ten seconds," Petal repeated, almost reverently. "And then we hunt." Herb’s body was already vibrating with excitement, her swarm struggling to stay contained. "Can I keep a finger if I catch her first?"

"No maiming," He said mildly. "… Not unless she breaks the rules."

"Ugh. Fine!" Bonnie stood shakily, Sprout somehow back in her hand, as if the Mold had returned it without her noticing. She didn’t ask questions. She just stared at the three monsters before her.

A lord, a ghost, and a swarm dressed like a girl. Then Ethan raised his hand.

"Run."

Bonnie didn’t wait. She bolted.

Bonnie’s boots skidded across blood-slick stone as she ducked into a warped hallway, heart thundering. The laughter had faded behind her, swallowed by the twisting corridors of the castle. Her legs burned. Her lungs screamed. She turned sharply, through a rotted door hanging off its hinges, into a room that felt wrong. The air shifted. Quieter. Thicker.

Bonnie slowed to a halt. This room had no laughter, no buzzing flies, no coiling petals. Just welcome silence. A soft, suffocating kind of stillness.

It was a nursery. Or had been. The crib in the corner was cracked and mold-ridden, its mattress blackened and hollow. Toys lay scattered on the floor, waterlogged and broken, wooden animals with teeth too sharp, dolls with missing eyes. A mobile hung overhead, its arms sagging with decay, stuffed birds barely clinging to thread. Bonnie swallowed thickly and stepped forward.

A sickly sweet stench hit her, old blood, rot, something sour beneath it all. The wallpaper had peeled away in clawed strips, revealing fungal veins crawling underneath like nerves. On the walls, childish crayon scrawls had long since faded into blurred streaks. One still held shape: a family, smiling, their arms joined in a stick-figure chain. Her foot squelched in something wet. She didn’t look down. Instead, something caught her eye.

A painting. Framed in blackened gold. Hanging at the far end of the room. It was somehow untouched by rot. No fungus dared touch it. Bonnie stepped closer, heart slowing, not from calm, but from dread. The woman in the painting smiled with radiant warmth. Long dark brown hair. Light blue eyes. Her smile held something so familiar it made Bonnie’s stomach twist. Same eyes. Same nose. Same cheekbones. No mole on the lip. None under the eye. But otherwise… it was her. Or someone who looked exactly like her.

Next to the woman stood a man with short, dusty blonde hair and sharp, pale blue eyes. He held a swaddled baby in a pale green blanket, nestled close to his chest like a treasure. Below them were two little girls. One was about seven, with the man’s eyes and hair, smiling shyly. The other…

Bonnie froze. The younger girl looked almost six. Black hair. Pale skin.

A hint of Mold-light in the painting’s pigment—barely visible, but there. Her face. It was Petal. Unmarked. Unblinded. Still whole. Bonnie staggered back a step, mouth dry. A faint signature glimmered in the lower right corner of the frame.

'R.W.'

She stared at it, heart thudding in her ears. A whisper behind her: soft, echoing, wrong.

"Home is where the family is."

Bonnie whirled around, panting, but nothing was there. Just the decaying nursery. The painting. And the shape of a memory that didn’t belong to her… but somehow did. Bonnie didn’t move.

Couldn’t. She stood before the painting like it might breathe if she got too close, might whisper if she turned away. The eyes of the woman followed her. Not in the clichéd, ghost-story way, but with a quiet, aching weight. Not menace. Recognition. And underneath the frame, scrawled in neat, faded cursive, just barely visible through layers of grime and mold:

MIA WINTERS, ETHAN WINTERS, ROSEMARY, PETAL AND HERB WINTERS

Bonnie’s breath caught in her throat. Mia. A name from the dusty corners of family stories, something her grandmother once said while half-asleep in her rocking chair, voice dry with age and memory:

"Your great-great-aunt Mia was strange. Good woman. Lost to something awful. Died having her third. Poor soul." 

Bonnie had barely listened. Until now. Until the truth wrapped its hands around her shoulders and neck like a vice.

She looked again at the painting. At the woman with her face. No, Mia’s face. Long dark hair. Light blue eyes. Warm smile. Everything but the moles. Bonnie swallowed. Hard. Her heart thundered.

"That’s why…" She whispered, voice cracked, didn’t dare continue.  That’s why the Mold responded to her. Why the Daughters called her 'special.' Why Ethan looked at her like a puzzle piece he’d lost generations ago. Why they said she’d change everything. She wasn’t just some survivor. She was a Winters.

Bloodline deep. A flickering remnant of a family swallowed by Mold, reborn through nightmare, and never truly gone. Her gaze drifted down again to the girls in the painting. Rosemary. The oldest, her expression gentle, reserved. She looked almost human. Petal… Petal looked hopeful.

Like she hadn't been broken yet. And Herb, the baby, just a swaddle of green cloth in Ethan’s arms. A family sealed in time, preserved in oil and pigment… now scattered into blood and madness. Bonnie took a step back from the frame, her whole body tense with revelation.

She didn’t hear the door creak open behind her. Didn’t feel the shift in the Mold around her ankles. Not until she heard Herb’s voice, sweet and sing-song, but closer than it should have been.

"Found you."

The fight was a blur.

Flies. Screams. Shadows. Firelight.

Bonnie hadn’t meant to, only to survive.

She’d lit the damp fireplace to draw her into a trap. Herb had swarmed too fast, too eager.

And then…

CRACK.

A shove. A scream.

Flames.

The fire didn’t burn like normal. Mold clung to the wood like grease, smoldering with a sickly green hue, and when Herb hit it, the swarm scattered in a shriek, her body forming again amidst the cinders. She stumbled out, blackened and broken, coughing with a wet, animal rasp. Her long arms dragged behind her. Smoke hissed off her skin. She fell to her knees.

And began to sob.

"I don’t— I don’t wanna die," Herb choked out, voice high and cracked. "I was just— I was just playing!"

Bonnie froze. Her weapon, Sprout, hummed in her hand, still glowing from the heat. But she didn’t strike. Herb was rocking now, her bloodied bunny plush clutched in shaking fingers. Her face, usually painted in giggles and madness, had crumpled into something tragically real.

"Don’t go," Herb whimpered, her head bowed low. "Please don’t leave me. Please. Please…" Bonnie’s chest ached.

Despite everything, the fight, the chase, the terror, this wasn’t a monster anymore. This was a child. A child whose body had become something wrong. And a child who just wanted her mother. Bonnie dropped Sprout.

Kneeling down beside the girl, she wrapped her arms around Herb’s scorched shoulders, holding her like she might fall apart. Herb flinched, then melted into the embrace, trembling. Bonnie stroked her hair, fingers threading through ash and silk and Mold and fungus.

Then she whispered, gently:

"Herb… if I pretended to be Mia, your mum… would that help?"

A shudder. Then a faint nod against her chest. Bonnie closed her eyes.

"Shh," She murmured, voice as soft and warm as she could make it. "It’s okay now, baby. Mommy’s here."

Herb whimpered.

"Mommy… I— I was good, wasn’t I?" Bonnie nodded, tears prickling her eyes.

"You were so good. So strong."

"I didn’t mean to break the people. I just wanted friends. And when Petal got quiet… I didn’t know what to do anymore. And I was so hungry…" Bonnie cradled her. "It’s not your fault, baby."

Herb coughed again. Blood this time.

Her voice was barely a breath now.

“Will you… stay with me… till I go?"

"Yes," Bonnie whispered. "I promise, baby."

The room smelled of burnt Mold and childhood nightmares.

But in that moment, it was quiet. And in her arms, the creature called Herb died with a smile.

One down. Three more to go.

Chapter Text

Bitch, noun - a female fox, dog, wolf or otter, however is commonly used as an insult.

Bonnie barely made it out of the nursery.

Her hands still smelled like ash and melted skin. Herb’s final breath clung to her shirt like perfume. The hall ahead groaned with rot, the Mold pulsing faster now, like it was nervous.

Then,

Click.

The doors ahead unlatched themselves, swinging open without a hand in sight. A long hallway stretched forward, gilded in baroque golds and wilted roses. Candles burned low in wall sconces shaped like jaws, and at the end stood a woman.

Not just a woman.

An apex.

She was tall, lean, dressed in black velvet laced with crimson veins. Her skin was flawless, alabaster pale, and her long white-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders like silk soaked in milk. Eyes like shattered rubies blinked slowly, both rimmed with smeared kohl and tired madness. Her dress seemed to be a wedding dress, marred with blood and coal and other.

And her mouth? Red. Not lipstick. Wet, fresh red.

Blood smeared across her lips and chin in elegant, careless streaks, like a painting that had started pretty and gone wrong. A pearl necklace clung to her throat, speckled with dried flaking red. Bonnie didn’t want to guess if the pearls were real. Or if they were teeth.

"Hi, Bonnie," The woman cooed, voice like sugared poison. "I’ve been just dying to meet you."

Bonnie took a step back. The woman smiled wider, tongue flicking out over her lips.

"Aw! Don’t run! That’s Petal’s thing. I’m more of a… hostess!"

Her hand lifted. A trapdoor beneath Bonnie's feet clanked open, and she fell. Darkness swallowed her. She landed in a chair. An elegant one. Mold-wrapped. Bolted to the floor. The room she now sat in was circular and cavernous, lined with cracked mirrors and veils of faded lace. A chandelier made of bones hung overhead, gently swinging.

Across from her, seated like a queen on a moss-draped throne of broken furniture and bones, was the same woman. "I’m Rosemary Winters," she said sweetly, crossing her legs. "My sisters were made from the Mold. But me? I was born from it!"

Bonnie swallowed hard.

"I… met Herb," She said softly.

Rosemary’s smile twitched. A muscle jumped in her jaw.

"I know. I felt her snuff out…" Her nails, painted black with the tips filed to points, tapped her cheek. "She always got too attached. Soft. Like Mother." Despite Rosemary’s words, Bonnie could tell she was pissed off.

Bonnie’s fists clenched. "Why am I here?!"

Rosemary clapped once. Too loud.

"Games!"

She stood, skirt swirling, bare, bloodstained feet slapping against the damp stone.

"You see, I could rip out your spine right now! Really! So tempting… But that would be boring."

She stepped close. Bent over Bonnie, nose nearly brushing hers.

"I want to watch you struggle." She giggled, then shoved a lever.

A wall of the room flipped open, revealing a puzzle of Mold-covered tiles and dripping organ pipes. Symbols flickered on them: a red eye, a baby, a crow, and a green flame. Everything buzzed faintly with infection. "You have ten minutes," Rosemary whispered, lips brushing Bonnie’s ear. "Get the right combination, and you walk free. Get it wrong… and the fungus under your chair eats you!"

She stepped back, grinning too widely. "Here’s the catch," she said. "There is no correct answer!"

"What?!" Bonnie breathed. Rosemary laughed. A full, throaty, deranged sound. "There never was!" she sang. "Because I don’t want you to win, Bonnie. I want to see you fail. I want to break you. And maybe, if I like the sound you make when you scream, I’ll keep your voice in a bottle!"

She began dancing slowly, humming a lullaby in a minor key as Bonnie stared at the impossible puzzle.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Time was already running out. 

Bonnie stared at the writhing wall of symbols.

The red eye.

The baby.

The crow.

The green flame.

Behind her, Rosemary danced barefoot across broken glass and blood-slick tiles, humming an unhinged waltz that echoed off the moldy mirrors. Her reflection in each mirror shifted, smiling too wide, bleeding from the eyes, wearing a wedding dress that never was.

"You'll fail, Bonnie~" Rosemary sang. "Everyone fails. Mommy did. Petal almost made it, but she cried. You’re going to cry too."

But Bonnie wasn’t listening to her voice, tempting as it was. She was listening to the Mold. It hummed. Low, like a voice trapped under water. Sprout, still at her side, began to vibrate. The symbols on the wall quivered. And then… flickered.

The symbols repeated. Like a rhythm. Not random. A sequence. She narrowed her eyes.

The baby…

The flame…

The crow…

The eye.

She stared. Something tugged at her mind, a fresh memory. That painting. Mia, Ethan, and the girls. The baby wrapped in green. The light in Mia’s eyes, warm like fire. The crow perched in the background, almost hidden. And Ethan’s blue eyes, watching. Seeing everything.

Bonnie’s fingers twitched. She stepped toward the puzzle. Slowly.

"You’re wasting your time!" Rosemary howled, skipping in wild circles. "It’s rigged! I made it perfect! I smeared blood on the gears myself!"

Bonnie ignored her. She pressed:

Baby.

Flame.

Crow.

Eye.

A pause. Then a click. The Mold under her feet retracted. Chains snapped loose. The mirrors shattered outward.

And for a single, horrified moment, Rosemary stared at the unlocked door behind the puzzle. "… What?"

Bonnie turned toward her, panting, eyes wide.

"There was a way out," She whispered. “You just couldn’t see it."

Rosemary’s face contorted. Not in rage. Not yet. In confusion. And something underneath it.

"…That’s the order my father used to tell bedtime stories," She muttered. “When we still had a mother. When we… when we were all…"

She blinked.

"Happy." Bonnie took a cautious step back.

"You forgot who you used to be," She said, voice soft. "You built this puzzle to trap someone else. But you laced yourself into it."

Rosemary trembled. Then her smile returned, wilder, sharper than ever.

"Oh, darling," she whispered. "Now I’m going to have to chase you."

Bonnie didn’t wait. She ran.

Bonnie’s boots thundered across the frozen stone path, breath tearing from her lungs in ragged bursts. Behind her, the Winters estate loomed like a nightmare, cracked windows, fungal vines pulsing across its towers, and the sound of Rosemary’s shrill laughter echoing like a dying music box.

But ahead? Fog. Cold. Freedom.

She didn’t think; just ran. Her knuckles were still scraped raw from solving the rigged puzzle. She had somehow cracked it. Escaped. Survived. Just as the crumbling town’s edge crept into view through the fog, he hit her.

Like a freight train.

Something massive slammed into her from the side, and she went tumbling through the snow. She reached for Sprout—

But a metal foot crushed her hand to the dirt.

"Easy now. Reach for it and I’ll break ya spine, lass." 

The fog parted, revealing him.

Chris Redfield. The Iron Dog. A monster in blackened exo-armor, his shoulders draped in cracked wolf insignias, his right arm a grotesque blend of metal plating and Mold-twisted muscle. Eyes cold. Blue. So blue they hurt. She kicked up, managed to strike his jaw…

Nothing. He barely blinked.

"Feisty," He muttered, kneeling. "Shame. I like the quiet ones." Bonnie gasped, "Who the hell are you?" He leaned down, breath warm against her frostbitten cheek.

"Chris. Redfield. But you can call me the last man you’ll ever meet if you don’t shut up and come quietly." Bonnie hissed, "I’d rather freeze to death."

Chris grunted and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, his cybernetic arm humming with energy. Mold crackled from the joints like restrained lightning. She thrashed again,but it was like being shackled to a tank.

"You got lucky in that castle. But luck runs out, sweetheart."

"Jill’s been looking forward to meeting you. Woman just loves her collectibles."

Bonnie froze. "Who?!"

He turned slightly, smirked. "Oh yeah. The Queen of Red Hollow, sorry, Ghost’s Town, herself. You’re her latest obsession."

Then, more softly, as if to himself:

"Damn shame. You really do look like her."

"Like Mia."

Bonnie’s heart stopped.

"That’s why he wants you," Chris added, walking through the fog.
Behind them, the castle groaned. Somewhere high above, a bell tolled one last time, deep, hollow, fungal.

And just like that, Bonnie was gone again. Snatched by the enemy. Again.

Snow turned to rust. Fog turned to steam. She must’ve blacked out on the way.

Bonnie hit the ground hard. No grace. No warning. Just a rough drop onto gravel and metal that scraped through her coat and bit into her knees.

"Up ye get, princess. We're on my turf now." She groaned, trying to push herself up, only for the butt of a gun to nudge her shoulder, not a hit, just a reminder. That he could. For kicks.

Standing above her, outlined in the choking steam of the ruined district, was Chris Redfield, or whatever the hell he’d become.

His exo-armor let off a soft hum, the corrupted veins glowing under bruised skin. He cracked his neck, then glanced at her like she was a misbehaving dog.

"You’ve been passed around like a cursed heirloom, haven’t ye? First then the choir of creepies, then the castle, now me." He kicked open a corroded metal door, revealing a long hallway of pipes, flickering red lights, and the low sound of machines breathing. "Welcome tae my factory, sweetheart. You’ll find the service here’s shite, the rooms are cold, and the staff’s mostly dead— because I killed them."

Bonnie limped after him, dragging one leg. "Is this where you manufacture more psychos like the Queen?"

Chris snorted.

"Aye. And it’s where I unmake them too."

The inside of the factory was a maze of abandoned conveyor belts, old BSAA signage twisted by mold and fungus, and half-built exo-soldiers slumped over workstations. Every few steps, Bonnie passed a tank, something squirming inside. Something breathing. She gagged at the smell, burnt oil, old blood, wet rust. Chris didn’t slow.

"You know what yer problem is?" He said over his shoulder. "You think yer special. You think you’re not just another broken thing someone left behind." He stopped in front of a thick, steel door lined with barbed vines, turned to face her. "You’re not special. You’re a fucking relic. A cracked mirror we all keep staring into hopin’ it’ll show us who we were before this world turned to rot."

Bonnie’s voice cracked, "If you hate me so much, why not just kill me?!" Chris leaned down, that cracked-wolf emblem across his chest rising and falling with his Mold-charged breath. "Because I want to know what makes you tick."
"Ethan thinks you’ll bring his precious wife back. Jill thinks you’re prophecy. Me? I think you’re a question mark that bleeds." He opened the door.

"So! We’re gonna find out what happens when we strip away all the noise. All the ghosts. The memories. The Mold. The fungus."

"What’s left, Bonnie?"

He stepped inside. The door groaned wider. Bonnie looked past him. A cold lab. An old chair bolted to the floor. A drained IV bag. A heart monitor long dead. Welcome to Chris Redfield’s sanctum.

This wasn’t just a factory.

This was where he broke people.

The metal chair was ice-cold.

Chains rattled as Chris clamped her in, tighter than necessary — wrists, ankles, even a band across her chest. Restraints that screamed less containment and more personal vendetta. Bonnie winced as the cuffs bit into her wrists. "You always treat your guests like prisoners?"

Chris didn’t answer at first. He stood a few feet away, staring at an old terminal that flickered with green light and static. His armor hissed faintly, Mold steam curling off his cybernetic arm. "Guests don't make half the damn world chase them like a bitch in heat, do they?"

She blinked at the venom in his voice.

"Guess that’s the difference between you and Ethan. He wanted this. He invited it." He turned. His eyes, bloodshot and lined with sleepless fury, locked on her.

"That daft bastard embraced the Mold like it was a fucking second skin. Let it twist his blood, his mind, and his family! And what did he get out of it? A dead wife, a mutant daughter, and a big fat legacy made of spores and hallucinations!" Bonnie tried to speak, but he slammed his fist into the wall. The clang echoed.

"I fought this shit for decades, girl. Lost friends to it. Watched people melt into puddles of screaming meat ‘cause of that damn fungus."

"And then Jill— Jill! She brought us here. Said it was the only way to save us." He spat to the side.

"… Now look at us. I’ve got fungus in my veins, a fake heart that hums like a hive, and a war I’m not even sure I’m fighting anymore!" He leaned in close, his breath hot and metallic.

"But I can still sniff out a lie."

Bonnie held his stare, barely. "Why me? Why are you really doing this?" Chris didn’t answer right away. He stepped over to a table beside her, old, scorched. On it: a photo, face-down. He flipped it. Mia.

Not the painted one from the nursery. A real one. Tattered. Water-warped. Smiling faintly, before the world fell apart.

"You look just like her, y’know. Same eyes. Same goddamn hope in ‘em. But you ain’t her. You’re just another Mold baby, cut from the same rotten cloth, stitched together by fate and bloodlines and whatever cruel joke’s steering this world."

Bonnie’s throat tightened. "Is that what this is? You hate Ethan so much, so you’re taking it out on me?!" Chris’s face twisted. His eye twitched.

“I hate Ethan… because he let it win. He gave up."

"I hate Jill… because she dragged us into the fire, and now calls it a kingdom."

"But you?"

He leaned down, his voice a low, exhausted growl:

"You’re the crack in the wall. You’re what’s slipping through. So I need to know, Bonnie—"
He slammed something onto the arm of the chair. A syringe. Glowing faintly with Cadou-Mold hybrid fluid.

"Are you infected? Or are you just… special?" Bonnie’s eyes widened. The restraints hissed tighter as Chris laughed. Outside, the factory groaned. Something mechanical shifted. 

The restraints loosened with a subtle hiss.

Bonnie barely breathed. Chris had stepped away, muttering to himself, back turned, hands trembling as he looked over files, vials, and a photo that hadn’t left his hand the whole time. That was her chance.

The cuffs had reacted to something in her skin, maybe her blood, maybe the fragments of Mia’s legacy buried deep in her bones. Either way, she didn’t question it. She just moved. Fast. Silent.

She slipped off the chair, padded barefoot across the cold steel floor, darting between half-shelled exosuits, rusting drone limbs, and tubes of forgotten bio-soldiers floating in stagnant brine. The entire place smelled like engine oil and rot, and the air hummed with something too alive for machinery.

And then—

CLANG!

A wrench slipped from a nearby table as she bumped it. It hit the ground with a sound like a gunshot.

Bonnie froze.

Chris didn’t turn around.

Not at first. But when he finally did…

"... What the fu—?"

"WHERE IS SHE!?"

She heard it before she saw it. The roar. The pure rage.

Tools flew. A table overturned. Something, someone, screamed.

"SHE WAS RIGHT FUCKING HERE!"

"FUCK!!"

Bonnie sprinted down the dim corridor, heart hammering in her ribs. The hallway shifted, parts of the floor literally breathing with Mold. The factory was alive, infested with the same engineered rot Chris had once sworn to burn away. Behind her, footsteps boomed.

And then his voice, distorted through comms and fury:

"YOU THINK YOU CAN OUT-RUN ME, GIRL?! YOU THINK YOU CAN PLAY GAMES IN MY HOUSE?!"

The hallway opened into a maintenance bay, but this was no bay. This was a death maze. There were hanging slabs of meat, some still twitching. Pipes that hissed boiling steam. Saw-blades rigged to tripwires. And deeper still— cages. Some were empty. Most weren’t. One creature reached out, skin bloated and stitched and metal, whispering something in a child’s voice as she passed: "Don’t let the Dog catch you…"

Bonnie ducked into a service tunnel, crawling on hands and knees as the temperature rose. Red warning lights flashed sporadically, revealing warning signs:

 "CAUTION: BIOFUEL CONTAINMENT UNSTABLE"
"DO NOT DISTURB TEST SUBJECT 009 – IRON HOUND"
"AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY – LIVING SYSTEMS ACTIVE"
Suddenly, a voice, not Chris’s, crackled through an intercom system, warbled and feminine:

"Bonnie~ Bonnie~ where are you going?"

"We just started playing with you!"

"He’ll find you. He always finds his toys."

Petal? Rosemary? Or was it the factory itself?

Bonnie didn’t stop to think.

She slid beneath a Mold-sealed door just as something crashed behind her, metal shattered. Something roared, not human, and not far.

Chris bellowed from somewhere above:

"I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD, BONNIE— YOU'RE GONNA WISH I FUCKING KILLED YOU WHEN I HAD THE FUCKING CHANCE!"

Then came the alarm.

LEVEL 3 LOCKDOWN INITIATED.

She’d triggered something.

Behind her, mechanical arms began unfolding from the walls. One ended in a syringe. Another in a bone saw.

Bonnie slammed the reinforced door shut behind her and locked the manual seal.

For a second, just a second, she let herself believe she’d made it. The chamber was massive, rounded like an old bunker, with mold-scarred concrete walls and scattered weapons left behind by whoever had fought here before… and lost. She stumbled forward, grabbing a shotgun from a weapon rack, then a box of shells. A rusting pipe. A cracked stun baton. Her hands trembled, but her jaw was clenched.

No time to cry. No time to rest. There were two exits and a maintenance hatch. She ran to the hatch, jammed. The other doors required clearance codes. "Of course they do…" She muttered. Behind her, the lights flickered. A long pause.

And then…

"YOU THINK THIS IS A FUCKING GAME?!"

His voice came through the wall like a storm.

"YOU THINK YOU GET TO RUN, RABBIT?! CRAWL THROUGH VENTS AND PULL FIRE ALARMS LIKE THIS IS SOME SHITTY SCHOOLYARD REBELLION?!"

"I TRIED TO PLAY THE PATIENT BASTARD!"

BOOM.

The door buckled. She backed away. Loaded the shotgun.

"BUT YOU’RE JUST LIKE HIM!"

SLAM.

"LIKE THAT STUPID SON OF A BITCH ETHAN! ALWAYS RUNNING TOWARDS THE NEXT MESS, DRAGGING OTHERS WITH HIM! YOU THINK YOU’RE SPECIAL?!"

BOOM. CRACK!

A section of the wall exploded inward, not the door. He baited her. Chris stepped through the smoke. But it wasn’t Chris. It was The Iron Dog. Muscle tore through the remaining fabric of his armor, and with a sickening crunch, his jaw unhinged and split. Half-man, half-beast, the corrupted result of centuries of battle, failure, and survival. His cybernetic eye glowed blood red. Mold-pulsing veins stretched across his body like barbed wire, some wrapping into the railgun fused down his spine. He cracked his blade-limb like a whip. The air rippled with heat and rot.

"YOU DON’T WANT TO BE A MONSTER, GIRL?! THEN WHY THE FUCK DO YOU KEEP SURVIVING LIKE ONE?!"

He charged. Bonnie barely rolled in time, he smashed through two steel beams like they were damn matchsticks. She grabbed the pipe, useless. The shotgun? Slowed him down, but not enough.

"YOU’RE NOT MIA! YOU’RE NOT ETHAN! YOU’RE NOT EVEN ONE OF US! YOU’RE THE FUCKING GHOST OF A FAMILY THAT SHOULD’VE DIED OUT CENTURIES AGO!"

He summoned them— wolves, twisted echoes of dead soldiers. Three of them, jaws gaping, rifles fused to their limbs. Bonnie backed toward the central platform and spotted a control terminal blinking.

[ EMERGENCY POWER GRID: GUNSPINE OVERLOAD CONTAINMENT FAILED ]

"Shit! Shit! Fuck!"

Behind her, the railgun spine on Chris’s back began charging.

"Let’s see how much your blood can handle."

Bonnie didn’t think, she ran for the old BSAA terminal and slammed her hand on the keypad.

[EMERGENCY OVERRIDE: RAILGUN SYSTEM]
The code was half-corrupted, but her fingers flew.

[DISABLE? Y/N]
YES. YES. YES.

The gunspine on Chris's back started to charge, but the screen flashed:

[OVERRIDE ACCEPTED]
[ERROR: POWER FEEDBACK LOOP]

"What the fu—"

Chris screamed. The railgun short-circuited, energy snapping like thunder down his spine. Explosive sparks lit up his back, forcing him to stagger, half-flesh, half-machine, snarling as he slammed into the wall, dragging claw marks into steel.

 "YOU LITTLE SHIT!"

The wolves lunged, but the feedback snapped something in their hive-mind, and one turned, snapping at the others. She grabbed a pipe off the floor and slammed it into one of their heads, making a sickening crack before it fell. Bonnie dove over a table, grabbed a still-loaded handgun, and fired into the floor, creating a momentary burst of shockwaves that stunned the enemies in place. Chris was recovering fast. Too fast.

She didn’t waste the window. Bonnie ducked under a leaky pipe, through a side door marked "RESTRICTED – OBSERVATION DECK", leaving behind the snarls, sparks, and rising screams of the Iron Dog losing control.

But before the door shut, she heard his voice one last time, distorted, furious, feral.

"YOU THINK THIS IS ESCAPE?!"

"I’M THE END OF THE LINE, GIRL— YOU HEAR ME?! I AM THE GODDAMN END!"

The door slammed. And Bonnie, scraped and bloodied, vanished into the deeper dark.

Bonnie landed hard.

Crack! The sound of her shoulder slamming into cold stone echoed in the pitch-dark. Thud! Then her hip. Her elbow. Her ribs.

Air burst from her lungs as she rolled once, twice, before coming to a bruised stop in a shallow pit of withered leaves and bone dust, lit only by a faint greenish glow from the veins in the rock. Silence.

"AAAAAAAAAARGHH—!"

Chris’s scream tore through the earth above like a chainsaw trying to cleave through bedrock. His voice echoed down into the darkness, cracked with pure rage. It made Bonnie flinch, her heart speed up.

"GET BACK HERE, YOU LITTLE BLOOD-TICK—!"

A metal door above slammed open, then shut. Footsteps. Muffled. Pacing. Cursing. But he was up there. And she wasn’t. Bonnie stayed completely still for several seconds, every breath careful, shallow, like the act of breathing too loudly might somehow bring him crashing down after her. Then, slowly… she sat up.

Pain bit down her right side like a row of broken teeth. Her ankle throbbed where it had twisted during the fall. Her lip was split and when she pressed her hand to her side, she felt stickiness. Warm. Too warm. Blood.

But it wasn’t gushing. Not deep. She could work with this. "Okay… okay, girl," She muttered, sitting with her back against the wall. "Still alive. Still intact. Mostly." She ran her fingers along her ribs, wincing as she found at least one cracked. Maybe two. Her left shoulder? Sprained at best.

"Fantastic… You’ll look great on a missing poster."

Around her, the space pulsed with quiet light. The walls were strange, a mixture of natural cave stone and roots, like the very earth had tried to seal this place shut long ago and failed. But there were no monsters. No voices. Just breathing. Hers.

And the slow rumble of Chris Redfield’s fury above, distant and barely contained. Bonnie pulled her legs up, tucked her arms around herself, and stared at the ceiling of the little cavern. She was safe, for now. But not saved. Her body was beat to hell. And her enemies? Growing more inhuman by the hour. And yet…

"Why do you want me?" She asked aloud.

"Why do I look like her? Why is every monster calling me a goddamn mirror?"

The only answer was the low, rumbling groan of the Mold shifting beneath her feet. Whatever this hole was, it wasn’t just a ditch. It was waiting. And she’d have to come out eventually.

Chapter Text

Regret, noun - feeling remorseful, sad or repentant about what you have done.

Bonnie’s breath slowed. She pulled her knees in tighter, feeling the bruises swell, the blood crust under her coat. Just one minute. She didn’t know how long she sat there, minutes? Hours? Just…

"He found me here too."

Bonnie froze. The voice wasn’t hers. It came from the dark behind her. Soft. Hollow. Like it was being spoken from inside a ribcage. It was male. Young. Brittle, like wet paper and old bone. She turned, but there was no one. Just the same small cavern. The same pile of dried leaves and fractured ribs.

"Didn’t kill me right away. Said I was ‘useful’… until I wasn’t."

The voice seemed to echo from behind the stone, or maybe inside it. The Mold on the wall rippled faintly in time with the words, like it remembered them.

"I tried to climb back up." A pause. "Didn’t make it. The factory took the light out of me."

Bonnie’s throat tightened.

"Who are you?" She asked.

No answer.

But after a moment, the voice returned. Fainter now. Like it was already fading.

"He checks this place sometimes. Just to make sure I stayed dead."

Then a whisper, closer than before:

"You shouldn’t be here when he comes back. If you’re smart, you’ll run."

Bonnie pushed herself upright, every nerve sparking. Everything in her body was screaming at her not to stand. She was bruised, beaten, and half-collapsing from the fight, but she wasn’t stupid. Never stupid. The pit wasn’t safe. Not now. Not ever.

"Go."

The voice was behind the wall now. Or in it. Bones shifted in the pile as she grabbed her bag, her gun, her breath.

"I’m not going back up," She muttered, scanning the cave. "There’s got to be another way."

She turned slowly, checking the seams in the stone. The light helped, dim fungal-veins bleeding through rock gave faint outlines. Most of the walls were solid. Dead ends.

But near the far edge, behind a curtain of hanging roots, the green was moving. She shoved the roots aside and found it: a narrow tunnel, no wider than her shoulders, sloping downward. Water dripped. Fungus pulsed like veins around an artery. A tight squeeze.

Too tight for a monster like Chris. Maybe just tight enough for her. Bonnie glanced once behind her, to the empty hole, to the bones, to the whisper that was already falling silent.

"Run, rabbit."

She didn’t need to be told twice.

She dropped into the tunnel.

The tunnel narrowed after a while.

Bonnie scraped her shoulder twice on the way through. Her fingers bled from gripping slick Mold-slick stone. The light from the veins dimmed, faded, then flickered back in twisted pulses, almost like it was watching her crawl.

Her knees landed in something wet.

At first she thought it was water. But it smelled too warm. Too sweet.

Rot.

She kept crawling.

The tunnel widened. Just enough for her to duck through. She took one breath—

And froze.

Bones.

Hundreds of them.

Piled in heaps, fused into the walls, some gnawed clean, others half-melted, their marrow gone. The floor was soft beneath her boots— not dirt. Fur. Clumps of it. Matted, gray and black and russet, thick with shed skin and mold patches. Then she saw the markings.

Deep claw scores in the walls. Not random. Territorial.

And the smell changed, from rot to musk. Wet fur. Saliva. Animal breath.

A low growl rolled from the shadows. Bonnie’s hand darted for the shotgun. Another growl. Behind her. She turned.

Eyes.

Six of them. Low to the ground. Burning faint red in the dark. Then more. To her left. Her right. Above.

Not wolves.

Not dogs.

Something between.

Mold-stitched wolf-things— long-limbed, wrong-spined, all muscle and fang and parasite-born rage. Their mouths hung half open, tongues swollen and twitching with fungus. Ribcages too wide. Tails like barbed cables. And stitched into the flesh of one…

Was a BSAA dog tag.

Chris’s handwriting. Still burned into the metal.

Bonnie’s stomach turned.

This wasn’t just some accident of evolution. These things were made. Bred. Tested. One took a step forward, shoulders rolling unnaturally, mold strands snapping like wet sinew across its back. Its head tilted. Sniffed the air. Bonnie didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

She knew animals. You don’t run. You don’t turn your back.

Another one — larger — crawled from the side tunnel. It moved like a spider. One of its paws had been replaced with a metal joint, a blade welded into the wrist. Its jaws were sealed shut with barbed wire, so it breathed through its neck, a gurgling rasp like wet gravel.

That one watched her.

And then, from somewhere deeper in the den…

A whistle.

One low, rising note.

Every head turned toward it. Even the spider-crawler.

Then, slowly, they turned back to her.

The meaning was clear.

Run.

Bonnie bolted. No plan. No map. Just instinct.

She ran blindly through the den, wolves shrieking behind her, claws skittering on stone. One leapt overhead, bounced off the wall, nearly tackled her into a pit of bones. She fired the shotgun once, missed, fired again, grazed a jaw. A howl of pain.

She spotted another tunnel. Narrow. Vertical. Almost a chimney of broken stone and fungus. Didn’t hesitate. She dove into it. The pack howled in fury behind her. As Bonnie scrambled upward, fingernails torn and boots slipping on bone-polished rock, she felt heat rising from below. Not fire.

Breath.

The spider-crawler had followed.

She climbed.

Faster.

Faster—

A paw caught her boot.

She screamed and kicked, caught it in the face, and something crunched. It dropped.

She hauled herself up— just as the tunnel opened into another space. A hallway?

She didn’t care.

She crawled out.

Collapsed.

Panting. Bleeding.

Still alive.

But barely.

And behind her?

A sound she hadn’t expected.

A low howl.

But not feral.

She was in a deeper part of the den now, she realised. Just her luck.

They were wrong. Twisted and built from sinew and steel, yes— hunched backs, gleaming spinal tubes, and eyes that glowed faint yellow in the dark, yes. But not feral.

They watched her. Not like prey. Not like food.

Like strangers sizing up an intruder.

There were four of them, no, five, sprawled across the den like oversized hounds, their breathing slow, synchronized, too human. One had a mechanical leg fused at the hip, twitching every few seconds. Another wore a collar etched with what looked like numbers. But none moved to strike. Not yet.

Bonnie froze, ankle throbbing, shotgun raised but shaking. The largest of them, black-furred and broad-shouldered, stood. Slowly. Bones cracked as it rose onto two legs, towering over her.

It sniffed the air.

"… Mia?"

Its voice was low, rough, warped by whatever had been done to it, but still unmistakably intelligent. Or, intelligent enough. Bonnie’s mouth went dry.

"No," she said softly. "I’m not her. Sorry."

The others stirred at that. A ripple of agitation. The big one stepped forward, claws retracting slightly, just enough not to threaten.

"You smell like her."

"Yeah," Bonnie muttered, lowering the shotgun just a hair. "I get that a lot."

They were circling her now. Not in a hunting way, more like animals curious about fire. Like they hadn’t seen anyone outside the factory in… a long time.

"I don’t want trouble," Bonnie added. "I just… need a way out."

The black-furred one tilted his head.

"Up is pain. Down is worse. You sure?"

Bonnie hesitated. Her side still ached. Her shoulder burned. And above her, Chris was probably chewing metal out of frustration. If he found her in here—

"… I’m sure."

Silence.

Then the smallest one, barely the size of a large dog, padded forward and dropped something at her feet. A torn scrap of paper. Stained. Smudged. But readable:

"Lower tunnels — drainage access B. Beware the moaning girl. She bites."

"Down the back wall," The black-furred one said, gesturing with a twitch of his chin. "There’s a crack. Squeeze through it, you’ll smell the rust. That’s the old pipeway."

Bonnie blinked.

"… Why are you helping me?"

He didn’t answer right away.

Then:

"Because he made us. Then forgot us."

Bonnie clenched her jaw, nodding once.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don’t thank us," The big one growled. "Just don’t come back."

Bonnie didn’t wait for a second warning. She limped past them, toward the crack in the wall, and slid sideways into the dark. The walls tightened, just enough to make her ribs scream, and then opened again, revealing a slick tunnel of old drainage pipes and rusted wire. The scent of iron was thick now. Water dripped. Fungus glowed in veins down the walls.

Somewhere behind her, a wolf-voice murmured:

"… She’s going to wake her."

A pause.

Then the reply, almost reverent:

"Good."

The tunnel yawned open like a gullet.

Bonnie slid through the jagged break in the rock, ribs aching every time she twisted. The walls here were old, ancient, even. This wasn’t just factory runoff. This was older than Redfield’s machines. Older than the Mold.

The walls were lined with claw marks. Handprints. Burn scars. Symbols etched in ash and rust. Bonnie’s breath clouded in front of her as the air grew colder, more metallic.

And then… the moaning started.

Soft, at first. Almost like wind. But not quite.

It came from somewhere ahead, echoing through the pipes— a slow, drawn-out whimper that shouldn’t have been human. But wasn’t not human either. It ebbed and pulsed, rising into something that almost sounded like sobbing. Then choking. Then laughter. Then silence.

Bonnie’s steps slowed.

On the wall beside her, a scrawl in something brown:

SHE’S IN THE WALLS NOW. DO NOT FOLLOW HER CRYING.

She swallowed hard. "Too late for that," she muttered.

The tunnel split. One side led down, slick with moisture and black fungus veins. The other was dry. Cracked. And warm. From somewhere that way, faint red lights pulsed like a heartbeat. Bonnie moved toward the red, until the sobbing came again.

But this time, closer.

To her left.

Not down either path.

She turned— and there was a girl standing in the wall.

Not on it. In it.

Half-submerged in Mold, her face pale and beautiful and wrong, her hair floating like she was underwater. Her eyes were wide. Staring. Unblinking. Lips parted in a scream she never finished.

Then, suddenly—

Blink.

She was gone.

Bonnie stumbled back. "Nope. No thank you. Goodbye."

The crying started again, distant now. But not far.

Then, echoing through the tunnel: the faint click of bone.

Something crawling.

She turned and ran— toward the red light.

The warmth turned to heat. The air changed. Rust gave way to steel. The walls were reinforced now, marked with old Umbrella logos and melted hazard warnings. This wasn’t drainage anymore.

This was a lab.

A hidden one.

Bonnie ducked under a broken pipe and emerged into a cavernous chamber built into the earth itself, lit only by flickering panels and half-dead emergency lights. Hundreds of containment tubes lined the walls, most shattered. Some empty. Some… not.

She moved carefully between them. Faces pressed against glass. Sleeping. Dead. One twitched.

At the far end of the room, a massive terminal stood, blank screen crackling with static.

On the wall behind it: a mural.

Not painted.

Grown.

The Mold itself had formed shapes — faces, limbs, eyes, scenes. A woman cradling a child. A man with a ruined face. A tree that bled.

And in the center…

Bonnie froze.

It was her.

Not an exact match, not perfect, but unmistakable. Her face. Her eyes. Her expression. Etched in Mold like she’d always been part of it.

Below the mural, in clean black stenciling:

TEST SUBJECT ZERO.
RECURSION EVENT: ACTIVE.

"What the hell does that mean?" Bonnie whispered.

And then—

Footsteps.

Not crawling. Not skittering. Boots.

Coming from one of the side corridors. Heavy. Slow. Confident.

A voice followed, low and unfamiliar:

"Didn’t think you’d make it this far."

Bonnie aimed her shotgun toward the sound, but her hands were shaking. The silhouette emerged:

Tall. Black coat. A BSAA patch half-burned away. Mask hanging from his belt. His eyes gleamed silver in the dark. Not Mold-infected. Not exactly. But altered. Stabilized.

He grinned.

"Name’s Ezra."

"And you’re the key, aren’t you?"

Ezra’s eyes searched hers, hoping for something— trust, maybe.

"Bonnie," He said, voice low but steady, "I know what you’ve been through. But fighting them alone won’t end this. We can finish what they started— together. The fungus has been with my family for generations, we’ve been stuck in this town for a hundred and something years."

She let out a dry laugh, stepping closer, lowering her weapon just enough to seem willing. "Yeah? Together how? Drag me back to that hellhole? I don’t think so."

He tensed, fingers twitching near his holster.

"Look, I get it," Bonnie said softly, voice almost gentle. "I’m tired too. Tired of running, tired of ghosts."

Her eyes flicked down to his waist. Before he could react, the shotgun roared. Ezra’s body crumpled, eyes wide in shock. Bonnie stood over him, heart pounding but voice cold. "You wanted to bring me back. I’m done being anyone’s puppet."

She turned and vanished deeper into the tunnels, leaving the past, and Ezra’s blood, behind.

The tunnel had widened gradually, like a throat loosening after a long scream. She could almost stand now, stooped just slightly, her spine burning from hours of crawlspace survival. Every breath was thicker. Wetter. The air had shifted— less of that fungal humidity, more cold wind.

And then she saw it. Light. Real light.

Not the sickly bioluminescence of fungus veins, not the green glow of infection — sunlight. Dusty, faint, slanting through the cracks in stone and metal ahead. A rusted ladder leaned against the tunnel wall, half-eaten by time, but still standing.

Bonnie stared at it like it might vanish. Then she climbed. Every rung was a test of strength she barely had left. Her ankle screamed. Her ribs grated. But the wind kissed her face and the air bit with cold and she knew, she was close.

When she reached the top, the hatch resisted at first. Then groaned. Then, with a blast of air and noise and sky— it opened.

She collapsed onto frozen soil. Trees. Grey clouds. Crows in the distance.

And for the first time in what felt like years, Bonnie was above ground again.

Bonnie lay there for a long minute, cheek pressed to crusted snow and gravel, the world spinning like a carousel out of control. Wind whipped at her face, dragging strands of damp hair across her lips. The fog here was thinner, but the cold, it bit. Sharp. Honest.

She rolled onto her back with a grunt.

"Still breathing," she muttered, eyes half-lidded, "… somehow."

Then came the damage report.

Her shoulder was swollen, purple and hot to the touch. Probably sprained. Ribs bruised or cracked, she couldn’t tell anymore. Her palms were raw, fingertips blistered from climbing, crawling, burning, fighting. There was dried blood on her side and fresh blood on her mouth. She swore something had been done to her ankle.

She glanced down at herself.

The dark green top, once a snug, reliable layer, was ripped at the hem, one sleeve torn entirely off. Her "coat," if she could still call it that, was sleeveless and barely holding together, more patches and grime than fabric. A bloodstain crusted near the shoulder seam. Her jeans were intact enough, but soaked through at the knees. The boots were miracle survivors, scuffed, but solid, still holding her together.

And thank God for the backpack. Straps fraying, contents shuffled and smashed from every tumble, but it was still with her. She fumbled through it with stiff fingers. One protein bar. A cracked water bottle. Some duct tape. A useless flare. A large handful of bullets, wrong caliber for the gun she’d lost back in the den. A small cloth pouch that used to be full of herbs. Now it just smelled faintly of rosemary and smoke.

She laughed once. Just a sharp exhale through her nose.

"This is ridiculous..."

Southern Europe, her ass. Mountains weren’t supposed to be this cold. Not in July. Not even up here. But something was wrong with this region. Had been wrong for a long time. The Fungus warped more than bodies. It warped reality.

Bonnie sat up slowly, pain singing down her spine, and pulled her backpack straps tight. She had to find shelter. Preferably before the fog thickened again or Chris’s hounds picked up her trail. She pushed herself to her feet, wobbly, slow, but upright. Still breathing.

Bonnie adjusted the straps on her backpack, cinched her coat, what was left of it, tighter around her middle, and turned her face to the wind. It smelled of frost, iron, and distant rot. Somewhere down in the depths, something was still howling. But up here?

Silence. A dead, cold kind of silence.

The kind that settles over graveyards.

She picked a direction. Not because it looked promising, but because it looked like something. A slope that curved downward through broken pine trees, half-choked by brambles and snow. There was no visible trail, no footprints, no sun. Just vague light bleeding through fog and that gut instinct that any direction was better than staying still.

Her boots crunched softly over ice-laced ground. Slow, cautious steps. Every crack of a twig underfoot made her flinch. Every gust of wind set her nerves on fire. She wasn’t stupid. Something could be watching. Something probably was. But what was the alternative?

Sit. Wait. Freeze. Die.

No. Keep going.

One foot in front of the other.

She muttered softly, just to remind herself she was still there, still real:

"Left. Right. Left. Don’t stop. Don’t look back."

The fog shifted ahead, parting for a moment, enough to show a glimpse of jagged ridgelines and distant, crumbling towers swallowed by the mountain mist. Not the castle. Not the factory. Something older. Or maybe newer, but abandoned all the same.

Whatever it was, it was high. Which meant maybe it could see the rest of the world. Maybe it even had a radio. Or a map. Or just shelter.

Bonnie didn’t hesitate. She changed course, angling toward the ridgeline. Her legs burned. Her ribs ached. But the thought of getting above the fog, of seeing something that didn’t want to eat her alive?

It kept her walking. Through the snow. Through the silence. Just walking. It took her over an hour to reach it. Maybe more. Time had stopped meaning much around the time the Mold started talking to her.

The tower was half-sunken into the rock, its antenna cracked, its outer supports crusted with frost and neglect. An old EUCOM or BSAA insignia was still barely visible under the mold-bloomed rust. A plank had been nailed lazily across the entrance, like whoever last used it wanted to pretend it was sealed, but didn’t care enough to make it real.

Bonnie tested the plank. It creaked, then snapped under one hard boot.

Inside? Dust. Mold. Cold.

But also… stillness.

She closed the plank-door behind her and sagged against the wall with a long, shuddering breath. The room wasn’t big, one desk, one bench, some scattered tools, a toppled filing cabinet, and the old radio. Its green light blinked faintly, like it remembered how to work.

She crossed to it, dropped her bag, and flicked a switch.

CRACKLE.

“…-me in? Repeat, this is— kzzzt —hostiles at point six—"

Static.

She adjusted the dial. The light blinked faster, stronger—

"…multiple casualties, requesting evac— schhhhk —I said back the hell off—!"

BZZZZZZT.

Dead.

It whined for a few more seconds, then flickered out for good. Bonnie stared at it. "Yeah," she muttered. "Sounds about right."

She turned to the supply shelves. Dust-covered, but not empty. A battered pistol. A half-full box of shells. A rusted crowbar. A handful of MREs. Some kind of insulated blanket. It wasn’t much.

But it was something.

She sat down on the bench. Popped her shoulder back into place with a wet crunch that made her eyes blur. Then she tore a strip of fabric from her coat and used it to bind her ribs. Ate half an MRE cold. Reloaded her gun. Checked the door again.

Nothing. No movement outside. Warmth from an old generator hummed weakly under the floorboards. Not much. Just enough to stop her bones from icing over. And for the first time since the nursery, Bonnie breathed. Really breathed. Alone. Cold. Armed. Still hunted.

But breathing.

Chapter Text

Record, verb - In writing or some other permanent form to be used as later reference.

Bonnie found the diary half-buried beneath a pile of scrap and old uniforms in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It was leather-bound, stiff with age and water damage, but surprisingly intact. The pages stuck a little when she flipped through them— yellowed, fraying at the edges, the handwriting uneven but deeply personal. She sat cross-legged on the floor near the heater and read by the faint flicker of emergency lighting.

March 4th, 2099
First week in the tower. Cold as hell. Radio's shit. But the dogs came back. All of them. Even Cain.

March 19th, 2099
He brought them again. The hybrids. I call them 'the hounds,' but he has a name for them now. Lupo.
"You train loyalty into the bone," he told me. "Make it the first thing they remember."
They’re not dogs. Not men. Somewhere in-between. But they remember him. And they obey.

April 5th, 2099
Cain bit me. He didn’t mean to. He saw me stumble and panicked. Chris made him kneel for an hour.
I swear I saw it cry.

May 1st, 2099
They’re aging wrong. Too fast in the muscle, too slow in the brain. Like their time’s tangled. Chris doesn’t care. He calls them his Iron Pack. Says they’ll hold the line long after we’re gone.
God help whoever they’re holding it against.

May 16th, 2099
They talk now. Not right. Not fluently. But Cain looked me in the eye today and said,
"Happy."
Just that.
I didn’t know how to answer.

June 8th, 2099
I asked if he remembers where he came from. He said:
"No. I remember tooth. And heat. And the man."

The man? Who was the man? Bonnie wondered, but shook her head and kept reading, even though it was a violation of a dead man’s privacy. Bonnie blinked. Her fingers hovered over the next entry. There were only two left.

June 15th, 2099
Tomorrow's my 26th. I don’t think I’ll make it.

Something’s wrong with the mountain. With the Mold. It pulses under the tower at night. And the dogs are… twitchier. Restless. Especially Cain.

Chris hasn’t been here in three weeks.
If this is the end, I hope someone finds this. If someone finds this…
Tell Cain I wasn’t afraid of him. Not once. I’m sorry, boy.

- R

Bonnie lowered the diary. The year written at the top made her stomach turn. 2099.

It was 40 years old. Meaning the hybrids, the ones in the den she stumbled into, had been alive for decades. Maybe longer. Trapped in tunnels. Treated like animals. Left behind.

And Cain… was still down there.

She closed the diary, slowly, and leaned back against the wall. Whatever Chris had created, whatever loyalty he’d carved out of Mold and memory and God Knows What Else, it hadn’t died. It had just been buried.

Buried too deep. But not deep enough to stay forgotten.

The walk back down the mountain was cold, quiet, and steeped in dread. Bonnie wrapped her coat tighter, the wind slicing through the fabric like knives. Every step echoed in her boots, crunching against old frost and fungal-flecked stone. The sky had begun to bruise purple with oncoming dusk, but she didn’t stop. Not even when her cracked ribs protested. Not even when her ankle throbbed.

She had to try.

Just don’t look too long at the tunnel mouth, she told herself. Just call, toss, and run.

The mouth of the tunnel came into view after nearly an hour, the same one she’d clawed out of. The same one that had nearly killed her. She didn’t go in. Wouldn’t. It’d be a death sentence, and they told her not to come back into the den.

Instead, she stopped just before the lip of it and raised her voice into the dark:

"Cain!"

Her voice bounced down the tunnel walls, echoing into blackness. No response. Just the hum of Mold, deep and slow like a sleeping lung. She glanced at the diary in her hands. Thumbed the final page once more. Not afraid of you. Her grip tightened.

"Cain! I have something for you!"

Still nothing. The silence pushed back against her voice like water.

She took a breath and yelled louder:

"From someone named R! He wanted you to have this! I don’t know who the hell he was to you, but I think he gave a damn! That’s all I got!"

And before she could second-guess herself, she hurled the diary down the tunnel. It landed with a soft thwap, pages fluttering. She didn’t wait for a reply.

Bonnie turned and booked it. Her boots pounded frozen stone as she ran, breath sharp, lungs burning. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see what might be behind her. Whether it was silence, movement, or something crawling up the walls.

She ran all the way back to the tower, not stopping until the lazy plank door slammed behind her. Then she collapsed just inside, panting, staring at the frozen floor. The tower was still warm. Still safe.

And the den?

Silent. But she knew, deep in her bones, that Cain had heard her. Whether he understood? That was another question entirely. But something down there had shifted.

She could feel it. Like a breath held too long finally being let go.

Bonnie didn’t sleep.

She sat against the wall of the tower, shotgun across her lap, hands trembling just enough to be dangerous. The warmth of the place didn’t soothe her nerves — it only reminded her how far she’d come from the den, the factory, the nursery. From her.

The radio had already fizzled out after fifteen seconds of static and gibberish. The rifle she found leaned against the table like it had already been abandoned once. And the diary was gone— somewhere down in the dark, in the claws of something barely human. She didn’t expect anything to come of it.

So when the crunch of snow came just outside the tower door, her breath stopped. Not stomping. Not the violent clank of Chris’s exo-boots. Just a slow, deliberate pad. Like a wolf. Or a man pretending to be one. Bonnie stood slowly, every muscle screaming to run again. She crept toward the door, heart knocking in her ears, and then froze.

Through the crack between the boards, she saw it.

A shape. Low to the ground. Pale fur streaked with black. Huge limbs, the joints too long. It stood not ten feet from the tower. Not pacing. Not growling. Just… waiting. Its breath steamed the cold air. Then it raised its head, just slightly, and the light from the tower lantern caught something beneath its fur.

A scar. Jagged. Like it had been carved by hand or claw. Four letters, nearly hidden under a thick ruff of white-gray fur:

C A I N.

Bonnie’s breath hitched.

In its jaws, clutched delicately between blood-stained teeth… was the diary. Pages fluttered in the wind. The creature didn’t tear it. Didn’t chew. Just… held it. And for a split second, Bonnie met its eyes.

Not empty. Not blind with rage. Thinking.

Then, without a sound, the creature turned and bolted, on all fours, faster than anything that size had any right to be. It vanished into the trees, melting into the frost and fog like it had never been there. Bonnie didn’t move for a long time. When she finally sat down again, the shotgun was still in her lap. But her hands had stopped shaking. Not because she wasn’t afraid. But because someone, something, had heard her. And answered.

Bonnie sat in the tower, back against a broken cabinet, the rifle at her side and a cracked thermos of lukewarm water in her lap. The wind howled outside like it was trying to claw its way in, but for once, nothing did. She stared at the boarded-up doorway. The scarred name still danced behind her eyes.

Cain.

She whispered it once under her breath, and it felt like trying on someone else’s memory. Then she pulled the old man’s diary out of her pack again— the one she’d only skimmed before throwing it into the dark— and flipped to a marked page she remembered. The one with the chicken-scratch notes about "experiments loose in the lower tunnels."

Lupo, he’d called them once, almost as an afterthought. Pack stays close. Heard Chris talking to them like pets. Pack only moves when ordered. Mostly males— canine aggression engineered? The rest was unreadable, blurred by time or panic. But the implications stuck.

Bonnie leaned her head back against the cold stone wall.

All male.

Or at least… she’d only seen males. Huge, beastly forms — hunched shoulders, wolfish posture, but there was something about their builds. Their movements. Their rage. The kind that felt made, not born.

Territorial.

The moment she’d stepped near the den, everything changed. No warnings. No negotiations. Just snarls and flanking and a silent, suffocating sense that she wasn’t supposed to be there. But they didn’t chase her endlessly. Once she’d left that place, they hadn’t followed.

Not like Chris.

Chris would’ve torn the walls apart just to drag her back. But the Lupo?

They had rules. Not human ones. Older ones.

And that made her uneasy.

Bonnie rubbed her temple, remembering the cold look in Chris’s eyes. The way he’d referred to the creatures like dogs. Like tools. Like failures.

And Cain… Cain had a name.

Chris gave it to him.

Which meant—he didn’t just build them. He raised them. Conditioned them.

"Where I unmake them too," he’d said, back in that rust-stained corridor.

What if the Lupo weren’t just freaks in a pit?

What if they were soldiers? Discarded ones.

Bonnie ran her hands down her legs, checking for fresh tears in her jeans, absently pulling the coat tighter around her arms. She’d walked through blood and madness and lies to get here, and suddenly, this frozen tower felt like the eye of a storm. So many things didn’t add up.

Why make something like Cain and lock him underground? Why treat them like pets if you knew they could think? And why… did Cain not attack her?

She shook her head, breath fogging the air. She still didn’t know what the Lupo were— only that they were more than what Chris had turned them into.

Maybe they were victims, too. Just like her.

Bonnie eyed the horizon. The mountains stretched in every direction like jagged teeth, and down below, somewhere in that maze of tunnels and industrial rot, Chris’s factory squatted like a tumor refusing to die. She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and laughed under her breath.

"Yeah. Let’s just stroll back to the man-beast murder maze and shake hands with Frankenstein. Real good plan…"

Her ribs ached when she chuckled, but the sarcasm helped dull the rest of it. For about five seconds, she’d actually considered it, going back, just to try and get answers. See Cain or any other Lupo. Or maybe see what else the BSAA had buried.

And then her brain caught up. The sprinting. The screaming. The wolves. The railgun spine. The way Chris had shattered steel like drywall. How close she came to not rolling away in time. Her whole body still throbbed with the memory of it.

She should be dead.

By every calculation, every weapon jam, every blind shot, every unplanned sprint, she should’ve been ripped apart. She survived by instinct, adrenaline, and whatever spite-fueled miracle had dragged her through the dark.

No.

She wasn’t going back in there. Not yet. Not unless she had backup. Armor. A damn plan.

She stared out the tower window, boots propped on a rusted heater that groaned but gave off just enough warmth to keep her from freezing. The radio lay silent beside her, dead again after that fifteen-second burst of static. At least she had ammo now. And time.

"You can’t keep crawling into the lion’s mouth and acting surprised when you get bit, girl…"

She looked at her reflection in a shard of glass on the floor. Blood still streaked her face. Her right eye was bruised. Her lip was scabbed, and her shoulder barely stayed in its socket if she leaned the wrong way. She looked ten years older than she had that morning.

Not a hero. Not a soldier. Not a Redfield. Not a Winters. Not a chess piece. 

Just a survivor. Barely.

She sighed.

"So what's the new plan, Bonnie?"

The wind howled back like it was daring her to find out.

She stopped walking.

Boots half-buried in slush and frostbitten gravel, breath fogging up the frozen air in wheezing, uneven gasps. One hand on her ribs. The other still clutched the half-busted handgun she hadn’t dared holster since the last tunnel.

The wind howled through the jagged mountain pass behind her. Somewhere far below, she could hear the rumble of Mold. Of him. Of them. Bonnie looked around. Blank wilderness. No signposts. No compass. Just… cold. And ghosts. She dropped her pack in the snow, sat down beside it, and finally let herself think. Not about the pain. Not about the blood crusted along her side. About choices.

Chris’s Factory? No. Immediate death.

There wasn’t a world where she walked back in there and walked out again. He wanted her dead. Or dissected. Or worse— kept.

The Castle. Ethan. The Queen. Jesus Christ.

That was asking to get skinned emotionally and physically. Even if she made it past the guards, past the ghosts, past the Winters bloodline madness... Rosemary would cut her heart out just for killing her precious little sister. That was off the table.

So.

That left…

Ada.

Bonnie leaned her head back against the icy rock and stared up at the grey sky.

What’s the worst she could do?
No, seriously— what is the absolute worst Ada could pull?

Spider venom?

Sure. But Bonnie hadn’t seen a single venomous spider native to Southern Europe in her entire life.

Not that she was an expert, but still.

… But Ada hadn’t exactly looked local. She looked like a bad dream in red glasses. A viper with cheekbones and a thousand-yard stare.

And during the meeting?

She hadn’t even raised her voice. Hell, she barely moved. While Chris tore up the floorboards and Ethan stood there like a judge ready to sentence her to hell, Ada just watched.

Bonnie chewed the inside of her cheek.

That should’ve scared her more than it did.

But right now? After being hunted. After almost being torn apart. After crawling through a maze of bones, filth, and whatever the hell the Lupo were…?

That unreadable quiet was starting to sound like mercy.

Or at the very least?

A fucking break.

Bonnie stood, stiff and slow.

"If she kills me, I hope she does it quick," She muttered to the snow.

"Because I’m so tired of the games."

She hoisted her bag over her shoulder, shoved her frozen hands into the coat that had long since lost its sleeves, and picked a direction. East, maybe. Wherever the wind felt least like teeth.

She didn’t know where Ada’s territory was. But she’d find it. And whatever waited in that silk-threaded domain? It had to be better than going back.

The water shouldn’t have smelled like blood.

But it did.

A thick, coppery sweetness drifted off it, mixed with algae, fungus, something decaying and something alive. The pool itself stretched out like a wound in the world, deep, motionless, and green as rotted bone. A faint mist hung over its surface. No ripples. No fish. No noise.

Bonnie stood at the edge, boots sinking a little into the slick stone.

She didn’t know why she’d come closer. Didn’t know what drew her to the water. Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was the fact that every other path she’d taken ended in blood or fire or teeth.

This one?

It was just still.

And Bonnie, bloodied, bruised, wrapped in a ruined coat and frostbite— couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen stillness without consequence.

"No way this is just a pool," She muttered.

She circled it. No signs. No markers. No obvious entrances. But when she crouched near the edge and leaned closer, something about the depth of it tugged at her gut. Not fear. Not revulsion.

Curiosity. The kind of curiosity that kills people like her.

But I’m a good swimmer, she told herself.

And I’m tired of running through the snow. Maybe I’ll find something. Maybe this leads to… something else.

She kicked off her boots.

Shucked the backpack, then the coat, leaving only her dark green shirt and torn jeans.

The water was freezing.

She hissed, teeth clenched, as she stepped in. But then— movement. Familiar. Controlled. She slipped beneath the surface with barely a splash and kicked off from the bottom.

And then the world changed.

The tunnel wasn't obvious. It didn’t look like a tunnel at all until she reached what she thought was the bottom— and saw a flicker of red light far beneath her. She hesitated.

And then the water pulled her down.

It wasn’t suction. Not exactly.

It was like the gravity shifted. Like down wasn’t up anymore. Like the water knew her. Had been waiting.

Bonnie swam fast.

Fast enough to break the haze and reach the red light. It flickered behind some sort of barrier, a fungal membrane that parted for her like curtains soaked in oil. She passed through without choking, somehow breathing in the thick fluid just long enough to emerge in…

… A cavern?

Lit by amber-glow fungus and twitching threads of silk. The water spilled her into a wide, sunken chamber like a birth canal of carved stone and metal. And rising from the center platform?

Her.

Nine feet tall. Graceful. Red silk clinging to her figure like paint, spider legs curled behind her in a perfect, lazy arc. A red veil draped over her hair like bloodied lace. Her eyes, obscured behind red-lensed glasses, turned toward Bonnie with slow, predatory precision.

Bonnie dragged herself out of the water, coughing, soaked, and freezing, teeth chattering.

The chamber was warm.

"... You swim well," said The Widow, her voice low and honey-smooth. "I wondered when you’d stop running."

Bonnie forced herself upright, standing there soaked and shivering in front of this impossible spider-woman merchant thing.

"... I wasn't exactly headed here on purpose," Bonnie muttered.

Ada tilted her head.

"No one ever is."

She stepped closer— barefoot, silent, every movement a perfect glide.

"Still," she said. "You’re here. And alive. That makes you very… interesting."

The chamber hummed with silence. Ada’s red veil caught the flickering light, the crimson threads swaying ever so slightly with each breath she took. She’d been watching Bonnie this whole time, like a cat watches a mouse. But this time?

She looked... almost amused.

"How was my son?"

Bonnie blinked. The words didn’t land at first.

"Your… what?

Ada’s lips curled, just a little. Not in joy. In recognition. Like she’d just confirmed something Bonnie didn’t even know she was hiding.

"My son," Ada repeated, quieter now. "The first one you met. The… trader."

Bonnie took half a step back, heart thudding. That voice— the one that had rolled in like fog beside her, the robes stitched from memories, the yellow eyes that weren’t quite glowing—

"He said he was BSAA. Bravo Squad recon."

Ada gave a soft, sharp laugh. Dry as silk snapping.

"That’s the lie he tells travelers. It’s safer that way. He thinks it makes him more palatable. Human."

"He’s not."

Bonnie’s mouth opened, but she had no words. Just fragments. Flashes.

The fungal crates that breathed. The voice that knew Mia’s name. That called her a sprout of light. That knew—

"You’re lying."

But even as she said it, it didn’t sound like an accusation. It sounded like she was begging Ada to be wrong.

Ada didn’t argue.

She just stepped forward.

Her heels clicked softly across the stone, her spider legs staying perfectly poised behind her. Her veil slid back slightly, revealing the gleam of red glasses, and the sharp edge of something Bonnie couldn’t quite name.

"I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long," Ada said, circling slowly. "Especially in that coat. Those jeans. And those boots. You’ve contracted frostbite as well. Bravo to you."

Bonnie squared her stance. "I manage."

Ada smiled.

"The human spirit truly is wonderful. Fragile, yes… but persistent."

"You’re still alive, Bonnie Evans. Which means something in you is meant to be."

Bonnie hated the way she said her name. Like it belonged to her. Like Ada had known it before Bonnie had even spoken. She clenched her jaw, holding her ground.

"So what does that make your son?" Bonnie asked quietly. "Another experiment? Another relic?"

Ada’s smile faltered, just for a moment. Then it sharpened.

"He was… unexpected. A bloom in the dark. Not Fungus. Not parasite. Something between. A byproduct of centuries of games played by fools who called themselves saviors."

Bonnie’s skin crawled.

"And he remembers Mia."

"He remembers everything. His fungus never forgets. That’s its curse. That’s his curse."

Bonnie tried to slow her breathing. She remembered the crates. The vault. The picture. The look in that man’s eyes. Not malice. Not madness. Just… waiting.

Like he was caught between too many doors.

"So what happens if I go back to him?" She asked.

Ada turned to her fully now. No smirk. No flirtation. Just cold calculation.

"You won’t. Not yet. You’re not ready to hear the truth. You’re not even ready to survive it."

Bonnie’s fists clenched.

"You know, I’ve had six people try to kill me this week. Chris. Ethan. Rosemary. Petal. Herb. That blood queen."

"And now you."

Ada arched a brow.

"Oh, darling," She purred. "If I wanted you dead… you’d be hanging from the ceiling already."

The spider legs twitched. But only for a moment.

Ada turned her back on Bonnie and walked toward a curved wall covered in fungus-infused data screens. Silken cables pulsed like veins through them, glowing faint red.

"Come," she said. "You swam to me, after all. Let’s see what makes you so... persistent."

Bonnie hesitated.

But only for a breath.

Then she followed.

Down the corridor carved from blackened stone and iron-veined root, every step closer felt like walking into a silk-lined web. The walls shimmered faintly with fungal luminescence, and somewhere, low, soft, but undeniably there, Bonnie could hear the sound of breathing. Not hers. Not Ada’s.

The tunnels breathed.

Eventually, the space opened up into a high chamber of mirrors and broken glass. The floor had been carpeted with faded red cloth, and the air smelled like incense and old metal. There were crates stacked to the ceiling— just like the Merchant’s, but here, the contents were elegant. Sharp. Lethal. Bonnie saw vials, old Umbrella casework, half-completed weapons, preserved insects pinned to fungus-infused velvet.

And in the center of it all: a long, silk-draped chaise lounge, like a throne made for someone who never stopped moving.

Ada sat with practiced elegance. Legs crossed. One spider limb extended lazily along the backrest, another coiled beneath the floor. The red glasses stayed on. Always.

"Care for tea?" Ada asked, gesturing to a porcelain set Bonnie hadn’t even seen her touch. Steam curled lazily from the cup. Bonnie didn’t move. "… Does it have fungus or mold in it?"

"Everything does, eventually."

Bonnie raised a brow, but sat on the nearby stool. Not too close. Just within reach, if she had to lunge.

Ada sipped calmly, letting silence spool out before finally breaking it.

"You’re wondering why I haven’t killed you yet."

"… I was getting there."

Ada smirked, licking the corner of her lip. "You're entertaining. I like watching things grow under pressure. Mold… humans… you." Bonnie leaned back slightly, scanning the room again. "That man— your son. The trader. Is he the only one?"

Ada paused. Just for a moment.

Then: "No. I have a daughter."

Bonnie blinked.

"Really?"

"Her name is Wawa," Ada said simply.

Bonnie tilted her head. "Like… a nickname?"

Ada nodded. "It means ‘baby’ or ‘doll’ in my mother’s tongue. She liked to play with names. Wawa kept hers."

"… And where is she?"

Ada’s expression changed, just slightly. The smile didn’t fade, but it grew… wistful.

"The fungus… hit her hard. She doesn’t speak much anymore. Not in the usual sense. Her body adapted, but her sense of self… fractured. She hides now. In a pillar near the roots. Carves her dolls into the walls."

Bonnie’s brow furrowed.

"That’s… kind of tragic."

"It’s art." Ada’s voice snapped just enough to silence Bonnie. "She’s beautiful. In her way. She still makes things for me."

There was pride in her voice, even if it was buried in layers of veils and restraint. "The eldest Winters daughter is fond of her," Ada added, almost offhand. "They… write to each other. In little symbols. Gift exchanges. Poetry, even."

Bonnie’s lip twitched upward. "Crush?"

Ada actually laughed. A low, controlled thing. "Oh, Ethan and I never let them forget it. Two overpowered daughters of dying bloodlines, gossiping over porcelain dolls and fungus-root messages like schoolgirls. It’s adorable."

Bonnie blinked. Ethan and I.

"You and Ethan…" She began.

Ada waved a hand dismissively. "We were allies. Now we’re… something else. Survival partners. Blood-bound. We keep score."

"Do you want me dead?" Bonnie asked.

Ada tilted her head thoughtfully. "I want you useful. The others want you… broken. Or used. I want to see if you bend. That’s all."

Bonnie swallowed her next words.

The room felt colder, even with the steam still curling up between them.

"Can I meet Wawa?" Bonnie asked.

Ada paused again. For longer, this time.

"Perhaps," She said slowly. "But be warned. She doesn’t look like a daughter anymore. She looks like a wish someone forgot to stop making."

Bonnie’s stomach turned at the phrasing, but something deeper stirred in her, curiosity, maybe. Or the awful certainty that she would meet Wawa eventually, whether she wanted to or not. And whatever Wawa was, it would know her before Bonnie even opened her mouth.

Bonnie stood over the steaming corpse.

Its breath had finally stopped— if it had ever really been breathing. The Lupo was barely recognisable as anything close to human anymore. Ragged fur. Twisted limbs. One of its arms had been replaced entirely by some kind of bone-grafted bayonet. Its eyes were clouded. Not dead, just dulled. Like something had turned down the brightness in its soul.

She wiped the blade clean.

Behind her, Ada approached with that same soundless glide. One of the spider-limbs plucked something out of the air, an old ID tag from the creature’s chest. Still faintly readable.

"Bravo Squad," Ada muttered. "God. He used them too."

Bonnie didn’t look up. "… You said you’d tell me more if I did this."

Ada sighed. One of the few real sighs Bonnie had ever heard from her. No theater. Just… weight.

"The Lupo… were people. Not just once. But for a long time. Three full BSAA squads came with us into the deep. Alpha, Bravo, and Ghost. Ethan’s team. Chris’ team. And the backup."

She walked slowly around the corpse, letting her eyes trail over it like an autopsy that didn’t need a scalpel.

"Chris kept them. As test subjects. At first, they were brilliant. Enhanced senses, fungus and mold resistance, regenerative abilities, increased aggression—useful in combat. But… not obedient enough."

Bonnie frowned. "So he tweaked them."

"He bred them," Ada corrected. "Spliced, rewrote, accelerated. Mold and the fungus interacts with DNA in strange ways. Chris learned how to force evolution in under a generation. Some of the first Lupo still looked human. Talked. Thought. Had names."

Bonnie flinched. "… And now?"

"Now most of them don’t even remember language."

Ada crouched by the fallen Lupo, brushing the hair back from its face. There were numbers burned into the flesh under the fur. A serial code. Nothing more.

"He made them dumber," Bonnie said, trying not to let her voice crack.

"Every cycle," Ada nodded. "They reach sexual maturity in just under two years. That’s… fifty-five, I believe, generations since the first trials. Fifty-five rounds of ‘improvements.’ Chris bred loyalty and bred out individuality. He wanted dogs. Not soldiers. Not men."

Bonnie swallowed. Her stomach turned at the math.

"How many are there?"

Ada stood. For a moment, she didn’t answer. Then…

"Thousands."

The word hit like a fall.

"Not all are like this one," Ada added. "Some retained more. A few bloodlines still show higher cognition. Cain was one of them."

Bonnie’s face darkened at the name. She said nothing.

"He hates Cain," Ada continued. "Too clever. Too curious. That whole den you stumbled into? It's not just territory. It was a library once. A place where early Lupo kept records. Built a life. Raised offspring. Cain tried to teach them…"

She shook her head. "… Chris punished them all for it. Started sending the new ones directly into combat simulations. No names. Just numbers. Over and over. So yes— your kill was clean. But it was also mercy."

Bonnie stared at the corpse for a long time.

"How many Cains are left?"

Ada paused. "Four, perhaps five, in this generation. Maybe."

"Could they be reasoned with?"

"Maybe," Ada said, brushing off her gloves. "But reason is slow. And the world doesn’t have much time left."

Bonnie turned to her. "… You feel sorry for them."

"I do," Ada admitted. "But I don’t help them. I watch. That’s the difference between sympathy and interference."

Bonnie tilted her head. "And what are you doing with me? Watching, or interfering?"

Ada’s smile returned, sharp, velvet-edged.

"Let’s call you… an investment."

Chapter Text

The warmth hit Bonnie like a slap.

Steam coiled from mossy grates, and the air tasted of iron and orchids, thick with fungal humidity. It wasn’t cozy, but it was heat, real, all-consuming heat, after what felt like years in snow, stone, and death. Bonnie staggered in, dripping wet, coat torn, blood crusted over frostbitten fingers. She didn’t so much walk as collapse onto the nearest surface: a carved velvet bench that hissed faintly beneath her.

Ada turned from a terminal, her silhouette spider-limbed and lit by bioluminescent sconces.

She took one long look at Bonnie and blinked.

"How the hell are you still alive?!"

Bonnie gave a breathless, cracking laugh, wiping blood from her lip with a trembling hand.

"I have no idea."

Ada stalked forward, eyes scanning Bonnie like a scientist trying to figure out if a lab rat had just done calculus. "You swam through glacial runoff with an untreated shoulder injury, a limp, broken ribs, and no insulation? Are those blisters on your side? And, Jesus, your fingers!"

She seized Bonnie’s wrist before the girl could pull away. Frostbite. Deep. Ugly. Red around the edges, black near the tips. And still Bonnie had the audacity to roll her dark eyes.

"I’ve had worse."

"No. You haven’t.” Ada stood. "That’s the kind of frostbite you lose parts to."

Bonnie tried to wave it off, but the motion made her wince hard enough to crumple.

"Tch, fine. Maybe a little bad."

"You’re practically mummified, and still trying to act like you’re in a street fight."

Ada was already moving, her spider-limbs retrieving a sleek red medical kit. She snapped it open with surgical precision and pulled out a vial of glowing serum.

"Sit still."

Bonnie tensed. "I don’t… usually let people do this."

"You’re not people. You’re a half-dead raccoon that crawled through hell and expected a trophy. Relax."

The serum hissed against her ribs. Cooling. Burning. Both. Bonnie gritted her teeth hard enough to crack enamel.

"Fuck that stings—!"

"Good! That means it’s working." Ada wrapped the shoulder with fungal gel pads, tightened a brace around her ribs, and peeled away the boots. Bonnie flinched violently. Her toes were purple. Blistered. Two nails black. Ada didn’t say anything, just sprayed them with a fine mist that shimmered like pollen.

Bonnie stared at the ceiling, jaw clenched. "... How do people live like this?" she muttered.

"They don’t," Ada said. “They die… You didn’t. Somehow."

Bonnie managed a weak grin.

"Spite’s a hell of a drug."

Ada chuckled darkly and stood over her, arms crossed.

"You know, I’ve seen tyrants break with fewer injuries. And you, what are you? Twenty? Bleeding from six places, joints wrecked, freezing to death, and still mouthing off."

Bonnie pulled her coat tighter around herself, now just a bloodstained rag more than clothing. "I’m not trying to be impressive. I’m just… used to not stopping."

"Then stop. Just for tonight. Before your legs fall off."

Ada turned and headed deeper into the lair, leaving Bonnie swaddled in bio-stitched bandages and heat-laced breath, her fingers throbbing and wrapped like ancient roots.

"You rest," Ada called from the shadows. "And in the morning, you kill some dogs for me."

Bonnie exhaled slowly, sinking into the strange, fungal chair. Her body screamed. Her mind didn’t.

For once, that felt like enough.

The fungal steam had faded, replaced by cold light bleeding from the bio-lanterns above. Bonnie had slept, barely, and now sat hunched over a table carved from ribcage-shaped growths, fingers twitching around a cup of nutrient broth.

Ada leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, spider limbs arched behind her like shadowed sentinels. She watched Bonnie closely, amused at the girl’s barely-restrained tension.

"So," Bonnie finally muttered, voice still hoarse.

"These Lupo. You want me to kill them, yeah?"

"Mm."

"Then tell me how."

Ada smiled faintly and stepped forward, picking up a scalpel-shaped pointer and dragging it across a mold-filmed anatomy chart pinned to the wall. A rough sketch, clearly drawn by someone who knew the inside of a Lupo like they knew their own hands.

"The Lupo weren’t meant to survive this long," Ada began.
"Chris made them to be fast, loyal, and most of all; expendable. But the fungus, mold and canine DNA had other plans."

She tapped a section of the chest.

"Two hearts. Sometimes three if the mutation went well. The primary’s where you’d expect, left side. The secondary’s beneath the spine."

Bonnie raised a brow.

"So if I hit them center-mass, they’ll just get pissed?"

Ada nodded.

"Unless you destroy both hearts, they’ll recover within seconds. Decapitation works. So does obliterating the spine between T6 and L2. That’s where the secondary cardio cluster grows."

Bonnie blinked.

"They have spinal hearts?"

"Welcome to 2139."

Ada moved down the chart to the Lupo’s head.

"They don’t see like we do. Fungus spores in the eyes act like photoreceptors. That’s why you see that red glow— it’s not light, it’s how their brains translate infrared and pheromone trails."

Bonnie grimaced.

"And here I thought they were just creepy."

"They are," Ada said, sipping from a glass of dark liquid.
"But they’re also designed to track blood signatures. Yours included."

"… Great…"

Ada moved on.

"Lupo generations breed fast. About two years to maturity. The ones you’ve seen? Fifth-gen. Maybe sixth. They’re more feral, less language, more instinct. But more durable. Less pain. They’ve been bred down and dumbed down for obedience. It’s tragic."

Bonnie leaned in slightly.

"So Chris made the first ones. From BSAA squads?"

"Bravo, Alpha, and Echo. Fifteen soldiers total. Bravo was the first ones to go. Turned into twelve Lupo. First gen had names, memories, speech. Cain was the only one smart enough to fake regression to stay alive."

Bonnie’s face darkened.

"… He’s the one I threw a diary to."

"He’s the only one left who remembers being a man. If he’s still out there… he may be trying to rebuild what Chris destroyed."

Bonnie stared at the chart. The spines. The second hearts. The pheromone eyes.

"So I can’t just shoot them? I have to think."

"You always did."

Bonnie glanced up.

"What?"

Ada smiled, just slightly.

"Nothing."

Bonnie exhaled through her nose, already reaching for a pencil to start sketching weak points in her own notebook.

"Any other fun facts I should know? Like, I dunno, venom sacs or regenerative testicles or—"

"They imprint on voices," Ada interrupted. "That’s why they listen to Chris. His voice is coded into their fungus."

Bonnie’s hand froze.

"… So they’ll ignore me. Or attack on sight."

Ada nodded.

Bonnie closed the notebook.

"Then I guess I’ll just have to learn to speak louder, hm?"

The snow fell sideways, needles of white slicing across broken rooftops and half-buried signage. Bonnie winced as wind stung her face, her boots crunching through layers of frost and ash. The cold was vicious. Unnatural.

"How the hell is this Southern Europe?" She muttered, tugging her coat tighter. "Feels like I’m halfway to Siberia…"

Beside her, Ada strode silently, her breath not even fogging the air. She wore red like it was armour, immune to frost, immune to time. The spider-limbs curling from her back moved as naturally as a breeze. Bonnie’s fingers were stiff, her body still aching despite the bandages. Still, she glanced at Ada, curious, cautious.

"So… why the water? Of all the places to make your base?"

Ada smiled faintly, not looking at her. "Why do you think?"

Bonnie shrugged, teeth chattering.

"I dunno. Nobody likes water. It’s freezing. Hard to breathe. You’d drown."

Ada chuckled softly.

"Exactly."

She stopped walking and turned to face Bonnie, snow melting on her red glasses. Her voice dropped into that silk-smooth register again, low and deliberate.

"There’s a spider. Argyroneta aquatica. The diving bell spider. It spins a web underwater, fills it with air from the surface, and lives in it like a tiny lung. It waits. Quiet. Still. Until something swims close… then it strikes."

Bonnie blinked.

"You made a fungus-infested spider den… because of an aquatic spider?"

"I made it because no one expects the dead to breathe below." Ada’s smile widened. "And because I like to watch them panic when they realize they’re not alone under the surface."

She resumed walking, her steps light, unhurried.

"People think they’re safest on land. In sunlight. Where they can run."

"But you’re always watching," Bonnie said dryly.

"Naturally."

There was a pause, just the wind and the sound of the Lupo’s distant howls.

“You ever sleep?” Bonnie asked, half-joking.

Ada smirked.

"Only when I want to dream of something I can steal."

They walked in silence for a while longer. Bonnie flexed her fingers to fight the cold. She still wasn’t sure if Ada was helping her out of kindness, strategy, or boredom.

Probably all three.

But whatever Ada was, one thing was certain:

She wasn’t just inspired by the spider.

She was the spider.

And Bonnie? She was either the fly…

Or the girl learning to weave her own web.

… Yeah she was absolutely the fly.

It wasn’t a very large pack, which was apparently unusual for the Lupos. It was a makeshift den, hosting about four of those poor creatures. Bonnie almost felt bad for killing them, but then realised their mere existence was probably excruciating… and felt a lot less bad.

Ada was holding a notebook with one of the eight frankly massive spider legs on her back, standing off to the sidelines. Two hearts. Possibly three. Decapitate. Can’t shoot them. Be loud. Tracks blood signatures. Obliterate the spine between T6 and L2 if they get the upper hand. "I’m facing them on my own?"

"Affirmative." Ada said with a coy smirk on her face, holding a pen.

"Great…"

The den was suffocating in its stillness, thick shadows swallowing the fungus-covered walls. Bonnie’s breath came in shallow, sharp gasps, her muscles coiled like springs. The Lupos were out there, four in the pit of cold decay, eyes glowing red, watching, waiting.

Her fingers tightened around the cold metal of her blade, the faintest scrape of fur against stone making her freeze. Then the charge, wild, brutal, the first Lupo crashing forward with savage intent.

Bonnie twisted away just in time, slashing deep across the neck where fur thinned. The blade caught, flesh and tendon severed cleanly beneath the fur, and the creature’s howl echoed, fading as it crumpled.

One down.

The others moved in a blur, snarling and snapping like wild beasts cornered. Bullets flew, once, twice, but their double hearts kept them alive, adrenaline and mutation overriding pain.

She had to be precise. Or she would gravely pay for it.

A flash of movement; Bonnie aimed low, driving her blade into the spine between T6 and L2, the secret Ada had revealed. The Lupo jerked violently, a pulse of violent twitching, then went limp.

Two down.

Sweat and blood mingled on Bonnie’s skin as she fought tooth and nail, every strike calculated, every move life or death. The last two came at her simultaneously. She dodged, rolled, stabbed, her blade found the base of a skull, slicing deep. Silence. Bonnie dropped to her knees, chest heaving.

From the shadows, Ada’s voice emerged, cold and clinical:

"Say their serials. On their necks."

Bonnie’s hands trembled slightly as she brushed thick fur aside on the nearest Lupo’s neck. Beneath the grime, a faint tattooed line glimmered:

"BR-2197XK-0451."

One by one, she worked the others, voice steady despite the ache in her limbs:

"BR-2197XK-0489, BR-2197XK-0534, BR-2197XK-0678."

Ada’s spider-like limbs moved subtly, a hint of approval in her tone.

"Good. Remember those. Every one a ghost with a number. You just erased four of them."

Bonnie looked up, voice raw but steady.

"What’s next?"

Ada’s smile was slow, sharp, like a spider savoring her prey.

“Now we prepare."

The air stank of blood and hot iron, thick as wet wool. Four Lupos lay dead in a loose semicircle around Bonnie—limbs twisted, fur matted, steam still rising from their corpses. Her breathing had steadied, but her body buzzed with that post-fight high. Every nerve still braced for something else to leap out.

Nothing did.

Just silence, and Ada.

From where she stood against the crumbling stone wall, Ada’s eyes gleamed behind red-lensed glasses. She had her notebook open, one spider limb lazily turning a page.

Bonnie exhaled and knelt beside the last corpse. It twitched once, then stilled. She pushed aside the thick fur along its neck, revealing the serial number etched into the meat beneath:

BR-2197XK-0534.

She muttered the digits aloud.

Ada jotted them down without looking up. "Next."

Bonnie moved on. The second had it higher up, along the jawline. BR-2197XK-0451.

Another note. No expression change from Ada.

By the fourth, Bonnie’s stomach growled, loud and rude in the quiet. She flinched, then glanced sideways at Ada.

"I haven’t eaten since two days ago. I think."

Ada barely blinked. "It’s still warm."

Bonnie stared at the body. Then back to Ada.

"You serious?"

"Would it surprise you if I said I’ve done the same?"

That gave her pause. Ada, calm and pristine in her silk-draped predator poise, eating Lupo?

"There are entire families who do," Ada added, stepping closer now. "The ones who manage to kill one cleanly and not get disemboweled in the process. It’s not common, but it’s not forbidden. Kill one, feed ten. Quite common if food is scarce though."

Bonnie looked down at the corpse again. The fur was coarse, dark. But under it, the muscle looked… meat-like. Not quite beef. Not quite pork. Something in-between.

"You said these are what, fifth or sixth gen?"

"B-generation. Fast-grown. Genetically diluted. The further from human they get, the more edible they become. Technically."

Bonnie pulled her knife.

"If I turn into something, put me down."

Ada smirked faintly. "Don’t flatter yourself. One bite won’t do that. If it did, you’d have started changing from the blood splatter two fights ago."

She found a patch of clean flesh, upper thigh, away from glands or fungus bloom. Made a quick, clean cut.

It steamed in the snow.

Bonnie crouched, pulled a metal plate from her belt pouch, and lit a portable burner underneath. Within moments, the meat began to sizzle, curling at the edges. It smelled… weird. Smoky. A little too coppery.

"Smells like a wet animal stuffed in a radiator," She muttered. Ada leaned casually against a support beam, one limb curled overhead like a lazy mantis. "Better cooked than raw. Less spore risk."

Bonnie flipped it. Let it brown. Then, slowly, brought the strip to her lips. Chewed. Paused.

"… It’s not awful."

"Mm?"

"Stringy. Metallic. Kind of like venison had a one-night stand with a wolf and forgot to season the baby."

Ada chuckled. "a poetic review. Gordon Ramsay would weep."

"Who?"

Bonnie took another bite, less hesitating now.

"It’s not something I’d kill for, but… maybe something I’d kill and then not waste."

"Exactly," Ada said, tapping her pen. "The line between survival and indulgence is thinner than most people realize. Especially down here."

Bonnie sat down beside the corpse, chewing thoughtfully.

"We’re still human, right?"

Ada didn’t answer immediately.

"Me? Hell no. I have mold and fungus and all sorts, you? Absolutely, believe it or not."

"… Is this cannibalism?"

Ada shrugged, a wry smile playing on her face.

"You eat whatever you can find when the situation warrants it."

"But… aren’t you supposed to be above that?"

Ada hummed, leaning an elbow on her knee.

"Depends. Would you rather die than eat what’s available around here?"

"… I mean, no."

"… Why do you still stick around, Bonnie Evans? You’ve been thrown around like a rag doll, tormented by the Winters, had the misfortune of nearly dying by Chris’ hands… Why are you still here?"

"I’m not leaving here till I find out what happened to Ethan. To all of you."

Ada snorted. She knew Bonnie would never find out fully, let alone leave. But she’d decide she’d humour the younger girl.

"And after, hm?"

"After, I’m getting the hell out of here. No offence."

"None taken, trust me."

Out of the corner of Bonnie’s eye, she caught something. Something covered in blood-matted fur. A Lupo… but it seemed a lot bigger than any other she had encountered so far. "Ada?"

"Yes? Is something wrong?"

With a sudden movement, Bonnie jumped to her feet, blade ready and pointed, as the massive Lupo charged straight toward her, snarling. The blade slashed through the beast’s torso, severing a lung and part of its first heart with ease, blood sprayed. Bonnie spun, slashing across its side with a vicious downward swing. It howled, but didn’t back down.

Bonnie grabbed a nearby lengthy twig, plunging it through the back before pulling it back. It was drenched in blood, but at the end was its second heart. The Lupo crumpled to the floor, to which the girl responded by shoving the knife in the Lupo’s head.

"The heart’s edible," Ada commented. "Tastes better raw than cooked." Because of course it does… the brunette thought. Bonnie wiped sweat off her forehead, looking at the heart curiously. She tilted her head, taking a small bite out of it. 

Typically, it tasted like blood, but it also tasted like well… meat. A slightly bitter and salty taste, but not overwhelming. Not overly sweet or sour; a good balance, Bonnie decided.

"… This is totally cannibalism."

"It might take some time to get adjusted to," Ada replied. "But I wouldn’t totally call it cannibalism. More like… Think of it like how humans are technically primates, but eating a chimpanzee wouldn’t be labeled as cannibalism— it’s disturbing, sure, but not the same as eating another human."

Bonnie shook her head, swallowing. "It doesn’t feel right. Eating something alive is different."

Ada arched a brow. "How?"

"It feels… wrong somehow. It feels like I’m violating someone’s body. Like I’ve taken something precious from them."

A faint sigh came from Ada.

"Would you rather your kills go to waste?"

Bonnie paused. Slowly, she shook her head.

"Good." Ada folded her arms, gazing down at the body before her. Her face was impassive, but Bonnie could see the smirk hidden underneath. 

"Then there’s nothing you can do to help it.”

Bonnie swallowed dryly.

"No. I don’t suppose there is."

"I still don’t get how you view them as 'alive' when they’re dead. But I’m going to have to leave you, for now. Good luck in this village, Bonnie Evans."

"… Thank you. For all your help. Goodbye!"

Bonnie watched as Ada’s eight spider legs went into motion, placing themselves on the ground before lifting her body up and starting to move, the woman disappearing into the thick snow and heavy fog of Ghost’s Town.

The girl could only help but wonder: "Why did she help me?"

"Why didn’t she kill me, like all the rest of the people here?"

Chapter Text

The wind in Ghost’s Town didn’t howl. It sighed.

Bonnie tightened her grip on Thorn, every muscle wound tight. She had taken Ada’s recommended "shortcut" only to end up in a side street she didn’t recognize. The fungal air here was different, wet with the smell of copper, undercut with something sweet and rancid, like rotting fruit.

Sprout hummed faintly against her hip. Movement ahead. She rounded a corner and stopped dead. At first, she thought it was just another mold patch, but this thing had a shape. A wrong shape. It stood on two legs, yes, but the torso was elongated, ribs showing through translucent skin. The head was human-sized but faceless, except for a vertical split where the mouth should be. It breathed through it— a wet, fluttering hiss.

Its arms were long and ended not in hands, but in hooked, black talons, flexing with a slow, patient rhythm. Every movement was deliberate, like it was listening to her heartbeat.

"… You’re new," Bonnie muttered, not even surprised anymore.

The creature tilted its head. Then it screamed, a shrill, airless sound that made her teeth ache. It moved.

She barely got Thorn up before it hit her. Talons scraped across the blade, sparks and spore-mist erupting between them. The force drove her back into a collapsed wall, knocking the wind out of her. The monster’s breath was hot and damp against her face, carrying the stench of mold and blood. Bonnie twisted, drove Thorn upward into its side, but it didn’t scream. It laughed, a sound like splitting wood, and swiped.

Pain exploded across her ribs. She hit the cobblestones hard. Something wet splattered beside her, her own blood, pooling fast.

She gasped, vision already narrowing. Too much blood. The monster advanced, slow now, savoring it. The vertical mouth peeled open wider, revealing rings of pale, grinding teeth. Bonnie forced her knees under her, one hand clutching the wound, the other gripping Thorn. "Not… today."

She let Sprout grow. Thorn’s blade extended into a hooked, green-black halberd. When the monster lunged, she sidestepped, pivoting with every ounce of strength left in her. The hook bit deep into its neck.

This time, it screamed.

She didn’t stop. She pulled, the blade tore through flesh and mold, severing the head with a wet crack. The body collapsed, twitching. Bonnie staggered back against the wall, Thorn’s glow dimming as her pulse thundered in her ears. Blood soaked her shirt, her boots. Her legs wouldn’t hold her much longer. The head lay in the dust, mouth still opening and closing like it was trying to form words.

Bonnie spat blood at it.

"Yeah? Tell the Queen I said hi."

But then the world tilted. The cobblestones rushed up to meet her. Her last thought before blacking out was the sound of distant footsteps, slow, heavy, approaching. The footsteps were deliberate. Slow enough that Bonnie’s fading brain could count them, one by one, like a death knell. When the shadow finally loomed over her, it was tall. Taller than the Red Court Jester. Taller than anything human. A gloved hand gripped her collar and lifted her effortlessly from the stones. Her boots dangled above the ground.

"You’ve been busy," Ethan Winters murmured. His voice was low silk over rusted nails.

Bonnie blinked through the blur. "… Ethan—"

His tone sharpened like glass underfoot.

"You tricked Rose. You killed Herb!"

The words hit harder than the talons had. Her mouth opened, but his hand closed around her throat before she could speak. "You think you’re so clever. You think this town belongs to you. But you don’t understand family."

The world dissolved into stone and shadows. She came back to herself in darkness— dangling by her wrists from a rusting hook. The air was damp, stinking of mildew and iron. Chains rattled when she moved, and her toes brushed the cold floor only barely. Castle Winters was quiet above… but down here? The walls breathed. Ethan stepped into the light of a flickering oil lamp. His hat shadowed his face, but she could see his mouth curve into something like a smile.

"You’ve got good hands," He said softly. "Let’s see how well you use them without… these."

He gripped her left hand, pulling it taut. She thrashed, but the hook overhead bit into her wrists, keeping her in place. She felt the cold kiss of a blade. One slice. Skin peeled away from four fingers in slow strips. Her voice cracked into a scream that echoed through the stone halls. Ethan’s gloved hand caught the blood, let it drip into a waiting tin bowl.

"Still warm," He observed.

Then, a sudden snap of steel. The four skinned fingers hit the bottom of the bowl with a wet clink. She gasped, chest heaving, unimaginable pain blinding her. Ethan didn’t look away as he dropped the fingers into a grinder— an old, hand-cranked thing, once meant for herbs. The noise was wet, gritty, intimate. Bone and sinew reduced to a pale, dusty grit. He set the grinder aside, dipped two fingers into the bloody skin strips, and dragged them through the powder until they were coated.

"This is what family tastes like," He murmured, pressing the grisly bundle against her lips. When she turned her head, he pinched her jaw hard enough to pop. The taste was metallic. Dry grit stuck to her tongue. Her stomach heaved— but there was nowhere for the bile to go.

When it was done, Ethan stepped back into the shadow, leaving the hook swaying gently with her breathless trembling.

"I’ll be back when you’ve had time to appreciate it."

The dungeon door closed. The dark pressed in. And Bonnie was left hanging, blood dripping into the silence, every drop counting down to whatever came next. She was left for dead.

The dungeon air was thick enough to chew. Every breath scraped her lungs raw, the damp and mold coating her tongue like a film. The hook above her creaked with every shiver she couldn’t control. Bonnie tested the chains again, slow, quiet. The hook wasn’t bolted into the wall; it hung from an iron ring set into the ceiling stone. Old. Rust-flaked. Maybe… maybe she could slip it. But her left hand was useless now, mangled and throbbing with a heartbeat all its own.

Sprout buzzed faintly at her hip. "You’re… a little late for backup," She rasped.

The blade’s hum shifted, almost impatient. She understood, not words, but intent. Cut free. She flexed her fingers on her right hand, gritted her teeth, and reached up toward the hook. Her muscles screamed. The iron tore into the skin of her wrists until she felt fresh blood slick her palm. The angle was wrong. There was no way to slip the shackle cleanly.

Sprout’s hum grew sharper.

"… Oh, hell no," Bonnie whispered… but she knew there wasn’t another way.

She braced her good foot against the wall, gripped the chain with her right hand, and yanked down, hard enough to wrench her body sideways. Bone popped. Flesh tore.

The pain went white and absolute. Her left wrist gave way with a wet sound that drowned out her own scream. She fell in a heap, clutching the torn stump against her chest, vision black at the edges. The iron shackle still swung gently above, the discarded hand dangling from it like a grotesque ornament. Her breath came in ragged, shallow bursts. She forced herself upright, crawling toward the shadows where the wall met the floor. The dungeon door was shut tight, but there was a drainage channel, a narrow trough cut into the stone, just wide enough for her to slide Sprout through.

She set the blade against the lock’s mechanism. Sprout hissed, a spark, a pulse, and the lock gave with a groan. The door swung outward into a stairwell slick with mold and fungus.

Bonnie staggered into the open space, leaning hard against the wall. Her stump dripped a steady trail of blood down the stones. Sprout pulsed again. This time, it reached, green-black tendrils curling from the hilt, sliding up her forearm. She flinched, expecting pain, but it was cold. The tendrils wrapped the torn flesh, weaving a lattice of living mold over exposed bone. In seconds, the structure grew denser, harder, taking on the shape of a hand.

It flexed. Once. Twice. She stared, breathing hard.

"… Guess we’re even now," She muttered.

The dungeon behind her groaned, a sound like stone grinding against itself. Something was coming. She didn’t wait to see what. Bonnie sprinted up the stairs, new fingers curled around Thorn’s hilt, the cold mold-grip steadying her more than she’d admit. Somewhere above, Castle Winters still breathed, and Ethan Winters still hunted. But for now, she was loose.

And bleeding or not, she had no intention of dying here. Or anywhere in this goddamn freakish hellhole of a village.

The stone steps seemed to go on forever, spiraling upward through the bowels of Castle Winters. Bonnie kept one hand on the wall, her other, the mold-grown replacement, clamped hard around Thorn’s hilt. The air got colder with every step, until her breath was fogging in the dim torchlight.
Then she saw it. A thin bar of moonlight cut across the top of the stairs, falling through a half-rotted wooden door. The outside.

Bonnie shoved it open, and froze.

The back of Castle Winters was no escape. The stairs emptied into a long, sunken courtyard where the snow was churned red, bodies half-buried beneath it. The air stank of iron and wet stone. Shadows moved between the broken statues and collapsed trellises, dozens of them.

They weren’t Molded in the shambling sense. These things were lean, fast, their limbs too long, their faces stretched tight over grinning teeth. Blood slicked their claws to the elbow. Some were still feeding, hunched over twitching shapes in the snow. Others already had their heads up, nostrils flaring.

They smelled her.

The nearest creature snapped its head toward her and let out a low, rattling growl. Then they all moved. Bonnie slammed the door behind her, but the wood was old, the hinges screaming. She bolted for the far wall, boots slipping on the frozen crimson slush. Thorn flicked out in a long, black-green whip, catching the first creature that lunged. She yanked hard, snapping its neck mid-air, but there were too many.

A claw raked across her back. She stumbled, spun, slashed low to gut the thing, steam hissed from the wound as it went down, thrashing. Another came from her left, and she felt teeth close on her coat sleeve before her new hand twisted, crushing its jaw until bone cracked.

They were circling now, driving her toward the center of the courtyard. Their breath came in steaming puffs, their claws flexing. Bonnie’s mind raced. She couldn’t outrun them, not injured, not on ice. The only cover was a crumbling gardener’s shed against the far wall, its roof sagging under snow. She sprinted for it. Something slammed into her side. She rolled, vision flashing with stars, Thorn clattering away into the snow. The creature that had tackled her opened its jaws, stringers of saliva dangling.

Her mold-hand shot up, fingers stabbing straight into its eye socket. It shrieked, convulsing. She shoved it off, grabbed Thorn, and staggered into the shed just as the rest hit the walls, claws raking deep grooves in the wood.

The shed shuddered under the assault. Snow sifted down from the rafters. She braced the door with a rusted workbench, heart hammering. Outside, the courtyard was alive with snarls and screeches. They wanted her blood— and Ethan’s castle had just made sure there was no way to reach the front without giving it to them.

She was trapped.

Again.

But trapped didn’t mean beaten. Not yet.

The creatures hammered at the shed walls in waves, the wood groaning under every impact. Dust sifted from the rafters like a slow snowfall. Bonnie’s back was to the workbench, Thorn’s tip trembling in her grip from exhaustion. Her chest rose and fell in sharp, shallow bursts. She could feel her heartbeat pounding in the mold-grown hand, each pulse syncing with Sprout’s low, hungry hum.

She scanned the shed, shelves of rusted shears, spools of wire, a stack of cracked clay pots. Tools long forgotten. Tools she could make hurt. Her mind snapped into place. No running. No hiding. No more crawling out of Ethan’s pits to be hunted like a rabbit.

Fine, she thought. You want me? Come choke on me.

Bonnie dragged the workbench to the middle of the shed, ripping free the splintered drawers and dumping their contents, nails, rusted hinges, and a vicious-looking saw blade. She tore lengths of old wire from the shelves, looping them around the benches’ legs, twisting them until they bit into her palms. Sprout’s tendrils slipped along her arm without her even asking, shaping the wire into tense, perfect snares. The mold seemed to like this plan.

She baited the bench with her shredded coat, the bloodstains still wet enough to reek. Then she stood behind it, Thorn angled low, every muscle tight. The first breach came in a shower of splinters. The nearest creature shoved its head through the gap in the wall, teeth snapping. Bonnie stepped sideways just as it lunged fully inside, hitting the wire snare. It screamed when the loop cinched shut around its neck. She pulled hard, the wire biting deep until the sound gurgled out.

Two more forced their way through, claws raking. Bonnie let them come, her mind gone silent except for one bright, furious note: enough was enough. She sidestepped a swipe, Thorn’s whip snapping out to take a leg at the knee. Mold and meat sprayed the wall.

The second creature leapt the bench— straight onto the saw blade she’d rigged upright. Its scream cut short in a wet crunch. Bonnie ripped the blade free and hurled it at the third, the sharpened edge catching it across the jaw. The walls shook with more of them trying to get in. She didn’t give them the chance. Bonnie shoved the bench toward the breached wall, forcing the tangled, dead bodies into the gap. Their own dead became her barricade.

She stood there, panting, the courtyard now howling with rage on the other side. Every nerve in her body screamed to collapse, but she couldn’t stop grinning, raw, teeth-bared, blood-slick.

"Tell your master…" She shouted into the gaps, voice shaking with adrenaline, "I’m not running anymore!"

The pounding outside slowed. Snarls faded into low growls. They didn’t leave, but they waited. Watching.

Fine. Let them.

Bonnie leaned Thorn against her shoulder and started digging through the shelves again. If Ethan Winters wanted a hunt, she’d make damn sure the next round cost him something.

The pounding at the shed walls had faded to an uneasy stillness. The creatures outside weren’t gone, they were listening. Bonnie’s pulse still thudded hot in her ears, adrenaline riding the edge between clarity and collapse. Stealth was a dead idea now. She wasn’t going to creep through this courtyard like prey; she was going to punch her way out of it.

She shoved the workbench aside, ducked low, and slipped through the shed’s narrow back window. The fall into the snow was jarring, cold searing her wound through the makeshift mold-hand. She didn’t slow, just kept running, Thorn cutting through the skeletal remains of a trellis as she made for the rear wall of the courtyard.

The wall wasn’t stone. It was grown. A tangle of fungal trunks, thick and pale like giant roots, their surfaces webbed with black-veined flowers that pulsed faintly. Sprout thrummed against her hip, it didn’t like this wall.

"Too bad," Bonnie muttered, jamming Thorn deep into the nearest root. It split with a wet crack, spore mist spilling into the snow. She carved a hole big enough to climb through, the wall’s inner fibers screaming under the blade. She shoved her shoulder into the gap—

— and froze.

A voice cut through the night, sharp as a whip:

"Oh for fuck’s sake!"

Bonnie turned.

She’d seen monsters. She’d seen the Red Court, Ethan, Ada’s silk-and-shadow silhouette. But Petal Winters was different— the kind of different that set her instincts screaming danger.

She was tall, but not towering, her frame wiry and taut with the kind of muscle you only get from surviving every fight you don’t start. Her dark hair hung loose, streaked with something that wasn’t quite white, more like frost. A long, torn coat fluttered in the wind, its edges damp with blood that wasn’t all hers.

Her eyes… Bonnie’s breath caught. They were bloodied. Not bloodshot — bleeding. The whites and irises drowned in crimson that swirled faintly, like something alive behind them. A wide black blindfold hung loose around her neck, clearly meant to hide them when she didn’t want to be seen.

Right now, she wanted to be seen.

"You," Petal said, her voice low but crackling with venom, "are a pain in my ass. You know that?!"

Bonnie straightened, Thorn still in hand. "Don’t know you, don’t care. I’m leaving."

Petal’s mouth curved into something between a smirk and a snarl. "Oh, pest… you’re not leaving. You tricked my big sister. You killed my baby sister. And now you’re ripping up Dad’s garden like it’s your goddamn personal hedge maze?!" Her tone shifted suddenly, rising into a vicious, sing-song bite. "Not. Happening."

Bonnie’s grip on Thorn tightened. "If you think—"

"Shut your hole before I put my hand in it," Petal snapped, stepping closer. Her bare feet left bloody prints in the snow. "You’ve been lucky so far. Thing is… luck doesn’t mean shit when I’ve got a grudge."

She stopped a few feet away, tilting her head just enough that the light caught the bloody wetness in her eyes. "You wanna know what I do to people who screw with my family?"

Bonnie didn’t answer.

Petal smiled, and it wasn’t nice. "I make sure they’re still breathing when they beg me to stop." The wall behind Bonnie pulsed, the roots tightening around the gap she’d made. Petal stepped forward, hands curling into fists that flexed with unnatural ease, as if the bones inside were reinforced with something more than human.

"Now…" Petal’s voice dropped to a hiss. "… let’s see if you’re worth Dad’s time."

Petal was close enough now that Bonnie could see the slow drip of crimson from the corners of her eyes, spattering in the snow like tiny garnets. Her hands flexed once, twice like she was picking which bone to break first. Bonnie’s own pulse was hammering, every instinct telling her to brace for the hit. Instead… she looked past Petal, up at the fungal wall.

The roots were thick. Interwoven. Strong enough to hold weight.

"... Oh, hell," Bonnie muttered, and then she moved. She sheathed Thorn, grabbed the nearest root, and started climbing. Not careful climbing. Not stealthy climbing. This was all-out, hand-over-hand, boots digging into the slick white fungus like a woman with nothing left to lose.

"What the fuck are you—?" Petal started, but Bonnie didn’t answer. She was already halfway up by the time Petal realized what was happening. For ten full seconds, Petal just… stared. "Is she— is she climbing the wall?!"

Bonnie hauled herself higher, ignoring the burning in her arms and the tear of her back wound reopening. Fungus steamed in her breath. Her mold-hand gripped better than her real one ever could, finding holds in the smoothest spots. Petal finally shook her head, muttering, "Oh, you are so dead," and took a step forward— then stopped again. The sheer audacity of it kept her rooted, mouth curling in disbelief.

It bought Bonnie nearly ten minutes. Ten glorious, exhausting minutes. By the time Petal finally decided she’d had enough of this little circus act, Bonnie was a dark silhouette near the wall’s crest. "Fine," Petal said, rolling her shoulders. "If you wanna make me work for it,"

Her body blurred. The sound hit first, a sudden, rushing whuff like a thousand wings unfolding at once. Petal exploded into a cyclone of black petals, each one edged in something sharper than glass, the air hissing as they cut through it.

They swirled up the wall in a torrent, trailing a faint crimson mist. The petals moved with purpose, following Bonnie’s exact path, filling in the spaces her hands had gripped only moments before. Bonnie heard it coming. She didn’t look back. Just pushed harder, hands raw, nails torn, the fungal surface slick with her own blood. The top of the wall loomed closer. So did Petal.

The wall seemed to go on forever, each root bigger around than her thigh. The muscles in Bonnie’s arms burned, but the mold-hand kept pulling, gripping where her real fingers would have slipped. She wasn’t going to the top, the spires of Castle Winters stabbed up into the clouds like jagged fangs, far beyond reach. But halfway up, she spotted it: a balcony jutting from a massive round tower, its stone cracked but intact.

Petal’s storm of black petals was closing in fast, the hiss of their movement like knives whispering through the air. Bonnie lunged sideways, boots finding purchase on a thick root. She swung herself toward the balcony, fingers catching the ice-slick ledge. The old stone flaked under her grip, but she managed to haul herself up and over the rail.

Her boots hit the balcony with a jolt that rattled her teeth. The double doors ahead were warped and unlatched, she slammed them open and burst inside. The castle swallowed her whole. It was warm in here, too warm, the air scented faintly of copper and rotting lilies. A long hallway stretched ahead, lit by flickering sconces. The floor was black marble, polished enough to reflect her frantic movement.

Behind her, the petals slammed into the balcony with a sound like a storm hitting glass. They swirled and thickened, knitting themselves back into the shape of a very, very angry Petal Winters. "OH, YOU BITCH!" Petal’s voice cracked like a whip through the hall. "You think you can just waltz into MY house, kill MY sister, climb MY fucking wall, and RUN?!"

Bonnie didn’t answer. She ran. Petal followed, boots pounding hard enough to send faint tremors through the floor. "Get back here, you limp-dicked ugly tourist! I’m gonna peel you like a grape and feed you to Dad!"

Bonnie skidded around a corner, nearly plowing into a suit of armor. She shoved it over, the crash echoing like a cannon. Behind her, Petal’s laugh was sharp and humourless. "You think a tin can’s gonna slow me down?!"

Another hall. Another turn. Bonnie’s lungs burned, and she was bleeding again, her shoulder screaming every time she swung Thorn for balance. She heard the scrape of claws on marble, Petal was speeding up.

"I swear to GOD, when I catch you, BONNIE EVANS!"

Bonnie didn’t stay to hear the rest. The hall ahead split in three directions, and she picked the left at random, her boots barely gripping the floor. She didn’t care where it went, anywhere was better than back into Petal’s hands.

For now.

Chapter Text

The hallway twisted left again, narrowing until the sconces gave out and the air turned heavy. The warmth of the main halls faded into a clammy chill that clung to her skin. Bonnie’s boots pounded over cracked tiles as she spotted a door at the end, tall, black wood, carved with a relief of something vaguely humanoid but with too many limbs, each joint bending the wrong way. She didn’t think. She just yanked it open and dove inside, slamming it shut behind her. 

The sound of Petal’s boots stopped just outside. A pause. Then a sharp laugh that didn’t sound amused.

"Oh, you’re in there?" Petal’s voice had dropped low, almost sing-song again. "Well… that’s just fucking perfect." Bonnie’s breath caught. She gripped Thorn tighter. "What the hell’s in here?!" Petal knocked once on the door, slow and deliberate. "Let’s just say… Dad didn’t build that wing. The castle did. It grows rooms when it’s… hungry.”

Her voice leaned closer to the wood. "Don’t worry, though! It likes to play with its food before it eats it." A hiss of petals, and the sound of her footsteps retreating. Petal wasn’t following her in. That terrified Bonnie more than if she had.

She turned, back pressing to the door. The room was long, ribbed with arching supports that looked more like exposed bone than stone. The walls pulsed faintly, like something behind them was breathing. Pale light filtered from no clear source, revealing shrouded shapes along the walls, dozens of tall, narrow 'cabinets' with fronts of cloudy glass. She stepped closer to one, wiping the dust away.

It wasn’t a cabinet. It was a coffin. And inside… a shape. Human, maybe, but warped, its limbs bent, its jaw unhinged, its eyes stitched shut with something black and threadlike. The skin was thin enough to see the veins beneath, and its chest… rose and fell. Bonnie stumbled back, nearly tripping over a raised line in the floor. She looked down, it wasn’t a line. It was a vein, thick and black, running like a root through the stone. It pulsed under her boot.

One of the coffins clicked. A spiderweb of cracks spread through the glass. "Oh, no," Bonnie whispered. Somewhere deep in the room, something else moved, not a quick shuffle, but a slow dragging, like nails pulling across stone. She didn’t want to know what it was. But the door was behind her, and Petal was out there.

For the first time since leaving the shed, Bonnie wanted nothing more than to curl up, close her eyes, and be anywhere else. Bonnie’s back hit the door. Her first thought was Petal can’t be worse than this. Her second thought was I might be wrong.

She slid a hand along the cold wood, listening for footsteps outside. Nothing. Just silence, broken only by the low, wet creak of something shifting behind the glass coffins. One click. Then another.

Then the crack.

The first coffin’s glass bulged outward in a slow, rubbery bend before it finally split, shards skittering across the bone-white floor. The thing inside drew a deep, ragged breath, fogging the air. Bonnie’s gut screamed out. She twisted to grab the door handle, and stopped cold.

The handle was gone.

In its place, the wood had grown over, smooth and vein-laced, sealing her inside. She slammed her fist against it, but it gave no more than a wall of solid bone. A long, wet dragging sound echoed from the shadows between the rows. Bonnie’s fingers found Thorn’s hilt. Her pulse was pounding again, every muscle wired tight. "If you’re coming," she muttered under her breath, "Then come on."

The coffin thing stepped free. Its stitched-shut eyes turned toward her like it could smell her. Limbs too long for its frame unfolded with a sickening pop, the fingers ending in translucent talons that tapped the floor like insect legs. Behind it, more clicks. More cracks. Glass fell in jagged rain as two more figures emerged, their heads tilting in perfect unison.

Bonnie didn’t wait. She bolted sideways down the aisle between the coffins, her boots splashing through shallow puddles of something she didn’t want to identify. Veins in the floor pulsed under her steps, the walls shivering faintly as she passed. One of the things screamed, a wet, guttural note that vibrated in her ribs, and the dragging stopped. They ran.

The first one slammed into the aisle behind her, talons scraping sparks off the stone. Bonnie swung Thorn backward without looking, the blade’s whip form slicing across its chest in a flash of black-green. The smell of scorched meat filled the air, but the thing barely slowed. She turned a corner and found herself in another long corridor, narrower, the ceiling lowering until she had to duck. The air here was warmer, wet. It was breathing louder.

She didn’t realize until she reached the end that there was no other door, only an opening in the wall, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.

The first thing’s talons scraped closer. Bonnie swore under her breath. She didn’t want to know where that opening led. But she wanted those stitched eyes behind her even less. She ducked into the wall.

It closed behind her like a mouth. The tunnel’s walls pressed in, warm and slick like the inside of something alive. Every step was a gamble, sometimes the floor was solid, other times her boots sank an inch into spongy, pulsing flesh. She expected more darkness. More breath. More stitched-eyed things coming for her.

She didn’t expect furniture.

The tunnel opened into a hollow chamber where the bone and mold fell away to reveal black stone, its corners shrouded in shadow. Against the far wall sat an old wooden desk, out of place in the living architecture, its surface warped from years of damp but still standing. A single oil lamp burned faintly on its corner.

Bonnie approached slowly, Thorn still in her grip. The desk drawers were swollen with age, but the top one slid open with a sticky groan. Inside, wrapped in old cloth, were several leather-bound notebooks. She took the top one and flipped it open. The pages were yellowed, the ink faded in places, but the handwriting was steady. Careful.

January 30, 2022.

If I write it down, maybe I can sleep. The snow is still in my teeth. I keep hearing her cry in the wind, even though she’s safe now. That village… it wasn’t real. Couldn’t have been. I keep telling myself that, but my hands remember the cold, the weight of the gun, the smell of the mold when it burned.

Bonnie’s breath caught. Ethan Winters. Before.

She turned the pages, skimming entries that grew darker with each week.

February 7, 2022.

Every time I close my eyes, I see her, the tall one in the castle. I feel her nails in my neck. I wake up swinging at shadows. Mia says I’m talking in my sleep, saying names I don’t know anymore. I don’t tell her they’re the names of the dead. 

March 3, 2022.

The mold’s in me. I know it. It’s in my bones, in my breath. Chris says it’s 'under control,' but how do you control something that thinks? Something that remembers?

Bonnie’s hand tightened on the paper. She’d only known him as the shadow in the cathedral, the man with gloves and no eyes, the voice that ordered her hooked and bleeding. Here… he was afraid. Like the monsters he fought.

The final pages were smudged, the handwriting jagged.

April 12, 2022.

I’m starting to understand it. The mold. It’s not evil, it’s… inevitable. It doesn’t care what it takes, it only cares that it survives. That it remembers. Maybe I was wrong to fight it.

April 23, 2022.

Mia doesn’t look at me the same anymore. Rose sometimes cries when I get too close. Maybe I should leave before it gets worse. Maybe I’m already gone.

Bonnie closed the diary, her fingers leaving faint prints in the damp leather.

Ethan Winters hadn’t been born a monster. He’d been made. Just like the village had made its other horrors. Just like this castle was trying to make her.

The thought made her stomach twist. She shoved the diary into her pack. She didn’t know why, maybe to prove to herself later that he’d once been human. Or maybe because she didn’t want the castle to keep it.

Somewhere beyond the chamber, she heard the distant scrape of talons. The stitched-eyed things hadn’t given up.

She tightened her grip on Thorn and blew out the lamp. If this place had taught her anything, it was that monsters didn’t need light to find you.

The tunnel was still. No breath, no shifting walls, no scrape of claws. For the first time in hours, maybe days, Bonnie felt like nothing was actively trying to kill her. The diary sat in her lap, its warped leather still warm from her hands. She stared at the cover without opening it again, the words she’d already read playing over in her head like they’d been carved there.

Maybe I’m already gone.

Her chest tightened. She’d fought, bled, clawed her way through Ethan Winters’ horrors, through his family’s claws and teeth, through this living nightmare of a castle. She’d hated him, still did, but now she knew he hadn’t started like this. He’d been scared once. Human once.

Something in that thought broke her.

She set Thorn down, tucked her knees to her chest, and folded in on herself on the cold stone floor. Her forehead pressed to her arms. The first sob was sharp, tearing out of her throat before she could choke it back.

The second came easier.

Then the rest followed in ugly, shaking waves, the kind of crying that left her face hot, her lungs aching, her breath catching in ragged gasps. She didn’t care if the sound carried down the tunnel. Let them hear. Let them all know she was so, so… tired.

Her fingers dug into her sleeves, nails biting skin. Tears blurred the dim outline of the desk, the shadow of the lamp’s smoke still curling in the air. She’d been angry for so long. Running on rage and adrenaline and stubborn will because if she stopped, she might have to feel how small she really was in all of this.

Now she couldn’t stop.

The sobs finally tapered into hiccuping breaths. Her cheeks were damp, her nose raw, her throat sore. She sat there a while longer, hugging herself in the hollow between heartbeats, until the quiet started to feel heavy instead of safe.

She wiped her face with the back of her sleeve, smearing tears and dirt. "Get it together, Bonnie," she muttered hoarsely, but there was no bite in it.

Thorn’s faint pulse against the stone drew her attention back. She reached for it, the weight grounding her again. She wasn’t ready to stand, not yet, but she would.

She had to.

Because sooner or later, the quiet would end.

When her breathing finally steadied, Bonnie pushed herself upright and started moving again. The tunnel curved deeper into the stone, until the damp smell gave way to something metallic, blood, old and clotted. She came to a chamber wider than the last, its walls ribbed with those vein-like ridges. At the far end loomed a door unlike any other she’d seen in Castle Winters: carved from black iron, its surface etched with twisting patterns that seemed to shift if she stared too long. Three narrow keyholes were set into the frame, each marked with a different shape, a jagged fang, a coiled root, and a crescent moon.

Bonnie stepped closer, Thorn drawn, and tested the handle. Locked, solid.

A slow hiss came from behind her. She spun just in time to see one of the stitched-eyed monsters lurch into the chamber, its chest split open like a rotted fruit. Inside, instead of organs, something glinted. A shard of metal.

The realization hit her like cold water.

"… No."

But she knew. She knew. The keys weren’t sitting in some drawer. They were inside them.

Another click, another hiss, two more shapes slipped in from the shadows, circling her like carrion birds. Their talons scraped the floor, heads twitching with that blind awareness.

Three locks. Three monsters.

Her shoulders slumped for half a heartbeat, exhaustion threatening to swallow her. Then she grit her teeth and stepped forward. "Fine. Let’s get this over with!"

The first came fast, talons flashing. She ducked low, swinging Thorn in a wide arc that took its legs out from under it. It hit the floor with a screech, flailing, and she drove the blade deep into the gash in its chest. Her mold-hand wrenched the shard free, slick and warm, before the body collapsed into steaming sludge.

One key down.

The second lunged from her right, claws raking her shoulder before she could dodge. Pain lit up her nerves, but she turned with the blow, Thorn’s whip snapping across its face. The talons caught her again before she could finish it, sending her skidding across the wet stone. She rolled, came up on one knee, and hurled Thorn like a spear into its chest cavity.

The impact was a wet crunch, followed by the sharp glint of the second key. She yanked Thorn free, catching the shard before it hit the floor. Her chest was heaving now, blood running warm down her arm. The last monster stood perfectly still at the far end of the chamber, stitched eyes fixed on her. It didn’t run. Didn’t growl. It just waited.

Bonnie tightened her grip. Her legs shook from exhaustion, but her voice was steady. "Guess you’re the one guarding the moon…"

It moved, not fast, but deliberate, each step echoing. Bonnie mirrored it, circling. The smell was thick, sweet with decay. When it finally struck, it was with both arms at once, talons scissoring in the air. She met it head-on, Thorn’s edge catching in the space between its ribs. They wrestled, the thing’s breath hot against her face, until she found the opening and drove the blade home.

The last key clinked against the stone, slick with black fluid.

Bonnie staggered to the door, hands shaking as she jammed the shards into their locks. Each turned with a heavy click, the iron shuddering as the mechanism released. The door swung open with a slow, grinding moan, revealing a narrow stairway spiraling upward.

Bonnie didn’t hesitate. She stepped through, leaving the chamber and its corpses behind, but she could still feel the weight of those three kills in her bones. The stairwell wound upward forever, each step steep enough to make her calves scream. Bonnie’s hand skimmed the damp stone wall as she climbed, Thorn still clenched in her other grip. Her breath came hard and shallow, every muscle heavy from the fight in the chamber below.

Then the air changed. It warmed. Smelled of candle smoke and lilacs.

The stairs ended at a tall archway spilling soft golden light into the spiral. Bonnie stepped through, and froze. She’d emerged into a wide gallery lined with tall windows. Moonlight pooled on polished marble, casting long shadows between the display cases and velvet-covered benches. For half a second, she thought she might be alone.

Then a voice cut through the quiet like a knife:

"Well, well, well. Look who finally crawled out of the fucking walls."

Petal Winters leaned against the far banister, arms folded, her coat hanging open to show a jagged tear across her top, dried blood crusted along the dark grey edges. Her blindfold was gone, and the bloody gleam of her eyes made the moonlight look pale.

Bonnie’s stomach sank.

Petal pushed off the banister, her feet moving in slow, deliberate steps. "You made me chase you over my wall, through my courtyard, into that part of the castle, and then, this is my favourite part, you just waltz right out like it was a goddamn field trip!"

Her voice sharpened, the words snapping like a whip. "Do you have ANY idea how much of my time you’ve wasted?!"

Bonnie’s grip on Thorn tightened. "Guess you should’ve caught me faster!"

Petal stopped a few feet away, her mouth twitching into a humorless smile. "Oh, pest… I’m gonna catch you now. And I’m gonna make sure you never forget it." Her head tilted slightly, and the bloody wetness in her eyes seemed to pulse in time with her voice. "You think killing my baby sister makes you some kind of big game hunter? You think running through Dad’s halls makes you clever?! All it makes you…"

She stepped closer, low enough to make Bonnie’s skin crawl. "… is mine!"

The gallery felt smaller suddenly, the space between them electric with danger. Somewhere far below, a door slammed, but Bonnie didn’t dare take her eyes off Petal. Because she knew, there was no more running left tonight.

Petal’s hand shot out, faster than Bonnie expected, seizing her by the collar. The pull was effortless, Bonnie’s boots scraped the marble as Petal half-dragged, half-lifted her toward the gallery’s far exit.

"You’re coming with me," Petal said, voice low and cold. "Dad’s going to see exactly what I’ve dragged in!"

The words hit like a spark on dry tinder. Bonnie’s mind flashed back to the dungeon, to the hook biting into her wrists, the feel of skin peeling from her fingers, the grinder’s wet crunch. Ethan forcing her jaw open. The taste.

Her breath came sharp. "No."

Petal’s head tilted, bloody eyes narrowing. "… No?"

Bonnie’s mold-hand grabbed the front of Petal’s coat, yanking her forward. "I’m not going back to him. And I’m sure as hell not letting you take me!" The first hit was messy, Thorn’s blade slashing across Petal’s ribs, hot blood splattering the marble. Petal staggered but recovered instantly, her snarl baring teeth too sharp for human. "Oh, you wanna play?!"

She swung, a bone-crunching hook that sent Bonnie sliding across the floor, breath knocked out of her. Petal was on her in seconds, stomping down hard, but Bonnie rolled, grabbing a fallen candelabrum from the floor. The flames licked high as she swung it up into Petal’s face. Petal screamed, animalistic, a jagged roar that made the windows tremble, clawing at the sudden burst of fire along her cheek and blindfold. Her coat smoked, the edges curling black.

"You bitch!" Petal lunged again, but Bonnie had already kicked open one of the tall windows. The winter air poured in, so cold it burned. Snow swirled into the gallery, the wind howling. Bonnie swung the candelabrum again, this time shoving it into Petal’s side and forcing her back toward the open window. The fire caught along the hem of her coat, climbing fast.

Petal’s screams stayed guttural, ragged, until her foot caught the slick snow just inside the frame. She fell backward into the blizzard. Bonnie followed, planting a knee into Petal’s chest, forcing her down into the drift. Flames hissed and sputtered in the snow, steam rising in thick white clouds. Petal writhed under her, one hand clawing at Bonnie’s throat, the other gripping the snow so hard it froze to her skin.

"You—" Her voice cracked into something almost human. "You… little… nothing—!"

Bonnie shoved her down harder, packing snow against the flames, trapping her in the freezing burn. The frost crept up Petal’s limbs while the fire still licked her torso, the two elements tearing through her in opposite directions. Her body convulsed. Her dark hair fell loose, strands stiffening into icy ropes. The black petals she was named for began to bloom across her chest and shoulders, huge, velvety flowers edged in frost, their centers glowing faintly red from the heat inside her. Steam rolled from them in thick plumes.

Petal’s voice rose again, but it was different now, not a monster’s roar, but a human scream. Pain, fear, and rage all tangled into something that cut right through the storm’s howl. "I’LL TEAR YOU APART! I’LL—!"

The frost finally took her face, crystalizing the blood in her eyes, locking her mouth mid-curse. The fire sputtered one last time, then guttered out, leaving her a statue of ice and charred bloom. Bonnie pushed off her, standing in the swirling snow, chest heaving. The flowers on Petal’s body cracked in the wind, petals breaking free to tumble into the storm, burning at the edges as they fell, vanishing into the white.

The world was silent again, except for Bonnie’s breathing.

She turned away from the frozen corpse, gripping Thorn tight. Somewhere in the castle, Ethan would feel this. And she wanted him to. The wind tore at her coat, snow lashing her cheeks, but Bonnie didn’t move right away. The shape in the drift still held her eyes, Petal Winters, frozen mid-lunge, her mouth locked open around a curse that would never finish. The fire’s last breath had left her flowers half-burnt, half-frosted. Some petals were blackened at the edges, others translucent with ice, their veins catching the pale moonlight. Steam curled up from the cracks in her chest, the heat deep inside her body still fighting the cold.

Bonnie’s grip on Thorn loosened. She stepped closer, her boots crunching in the snow. The fight’s fury was gone now, leaving only a hollow ache in her chest. Petal had been vicious, cruel— she’d hunted Bonnie like an animal, thrown threats like knives. But she’d also been… alive.

And now she wasn’t. Bonnie crouched beside her, brushing the snow from Petal’s shoulder. The skin beneath was hard as glass, the flowers brittle under her touch. For a moment, it looked like Petal might move, that the frozen chest might rise with a breath.

But it didn’t.

"I’m sorry," Bonnie said quietly. Her voice was hoarse, and the words didn’t feel like enough. "You didn’t deserve… this. Not like this."

She didn’t know if she meant the burning, the freezing, or the castle itself. Maybe all of it.

The wind caught a loose petal, spinning it between them before carrying it away into the dark.

Bonnie stood again, looking down at Petal one last time. "I hope… whatever’s after this, it’s better than here."

Then she turned, stepping back into the gallery, leaving the storm to take what was left of Petal Winters.

Bonnie had just crossed back into the warmer marble halls when it hit her, not a sound at first, but a vibration, a deep tremor that rattled the sconces and made dust sift down from the ceiling.
Then the roar came.

"YOU FUCKING LITTLE—!"

The voice was Ethan Winters, but stripped of every ounce of restraint, raw enough to scrape the air. The word slammed through the castle like a shockwave, shaking the chandeliers. Bonnie froze, one hand on the wall. She wasn’t anywhere near the throne room, but she could hear him as if he were in the next hall.

The crash of something massive shattering followed, stone? furniture? and then another bellow, sharp enough to sting her ears.

"FIRST HERB, NOW PETAL?! FROM SOME PUNY HUMAN?!"

His voice cracked halfway through the last two words, warping into something inhuman. Bonnie took a step back from the noise, but there was nowhere to go that the sound wouldn’t follow.

"YOU THINK YOU’RE CLEVER?!"

Ethan’s voice roared again. "You think you can just walk into my home, butcher my family, and crawl back out like you’re WORTH A DAMN?!" Somewhere far below her, something else broke, a wet, heavy smash, followed by the metallic screech of a door being ripped from its hinges.

His voice dropped for a second, lower and darker. "Now I know how Alcina felt…" The name twisted in his mouth like venom. "All those years ago, her girls ripped away by some useless little meat sack with a gun! I thought she was being dramatic! But no… no, no, no! Now I get it."

The next shout came so loud Bonnie flinched, her ears ringing.

"I’M GOING TO FIND YOU, BONNIE!"

She heard another crash, glass exploding, the echo of something, maybe a chair, bouncing off a wall. More words followed, ragged, each one punched out with enough force she could almost feel them:

"I’LL TEAR OUT YOUR TEETH! I’LL GRIND YOUR BONES! I’LL FEED WHAT’S LEFT TO WHAT LIVES UNDER THE FLOORS!"

Bonnie’s stomach twisted. She’d faced horrors in the castle already, but this was different. This wasn’t calculated menace. This was personal. Another violent crash, wood splintering, metal twisting, and then a final, animal roar that reverberated through every stone in the building. Bonnie exhaled slowly, forcing her legs to move again. She wasn’t sure if she’d just killed a daughter, or if she’d kicked an entire hornet’s nest straight through the heart.

Either way, the whole country could probably hear him.

The echoes of Ethan’s last roar still rolled through the halls when the air shifted. Not just the air, the walls. Bonnie felt it in her fingertips as they brushed the stone: a slow, pulsing thrum, like a heartbeat. The sconces flickered, flames bending toward her as if pointing the way. Somewhere above, she heard the low groan of beams shifting.

Ethan was moving. And the castle was moving with him. The first sign came when a corridor ahead warped mid-step, its marble floor rippling under her boots. The door she’d aimed for sealed over in an instant, the wood melting into black-veined growth. Behind her, heavy boots hit the floor in slow, deliberate strides. She didn’t need to see him to know who it was.

"Bonnie…" Ethan’s voice wasn’t shouting now, it was worse. Low. Eager. "You think you can hide?"

A shudder ran through the walls, and panels of molding peeled back to reveal narrow, twisting passageways where there hadn’t been any seconds ago. The castle was offering him shortcuts. She bolted left, choosing a hallway at random, only for the floor to pitch downward like a ramp. She slid, barely catching herself on a column before hitting the sharp turn— and saw it close behind her, sealing like a wound.

Somewhere deep in the stone, Ethan’s laugh rolled through like thunder. "That’s it. Run. I want you to run."

Bonnie’s chest tightened, each step heavier as the temperature in the halls dropped. Frost spiderwebbed across the glass windows, but the stone under her hands was hot, feverish. The whole building felt feverish. She cut through a gallery, shoving over a heavy table to block the far door, but the castle simply opened another doorway in the wall, the growth peeling back like petals to reveal the corridor beyond. Ethan’s shadow was already spilling into it.

"You killed two of mine," his voice snarled, closer now. "Two. Do you know what that makes you?"

Bonnie gritted her teeth, refusing to answer, sprinting for the farthest hall she could see.

"It makes you a project," Ethan said, his boots pounding now, the walls trembling with each step. "And I’m very good at finishing what I start."

Somewhere ahead, she heard a door slam, not from him, but from the castle itself. It was forcing her toward something. And she didn’t like where that might be.

Bonnie ran until her lungs burned and her legs screamed with every step, the castle’s shifting corridors herding her like a wolfpack closing in on prey. Every path bent toward the same narrowing direction, until she saw it.

A door.

Not the black-veined, pulsing growth that sealed most exits, but an old wooden door, warped and splintered, with a brass handle dulled to green. More importantly, it hadn’t been closed over by the castle. It felt… wrong. Out of place. She risked a glance back. Ethan’s footsteps were still pounding somewhere behind her, steady and unhurried. He knew she was trapped.

Bonnie shoved the door open and slipped inside. The change in air hit first, still cold, but dry. No mold, no rot. The walls here were stone, rough and uneven, patched in places with mismatched wood. The floor was strewn with blankets, old tins of food, scattered tools.

A survivor’s room.

Her eyes swept the mess, catching faded photographs tacked to the walls, people she didn’t recognize, faces smiling in better times. There were notebooks too, written in a dozen different hands, and the smell of oil and metal hung in the air. In the far corner, under a moth-eaten tarp, something gleamed. Bonnie pulled the cover back.

It was a weapon, handmade, must’ve been hundreds of years old, but deliberate. A long-handled axe, its blade forged from dark metal streaked with faint silver veins. The haft was reinforced with strips of leather and something harder underneath. Along the edge, words were carved in a language she didn’t know, but the moment her mold-hand touched it, a shiver ran through the weapon like it recognized her.

The weight was perfect. Balanced. Lethal.

On the wall behind it, scratched deep into the stone, was a single sentence:

FOR THE ONE WHO CAN END HIM FROM THE ONE WHO COULD NOT.

Her chest tightened. She didn’t know who had left it here, or how they’d known someone like her would come through, but she knew what this meant, this wasn’t just another piece of scrap to swing. This was made for killing Ethan Winters. A muffled thud echoed outside the door, followed by Ethan’s voice, low and close. "Bonnie…"

She wrapped her fingers tighter around the axe’s handle. For the first time since stepping into this nightmare, she had something that could actually end him. Bonnie tightened her grip on the axe and stepped back from the door. Ethan’s shadow spilled under the crack at the bottom, faint but unmistakable. 

She could hear his breathing, slow, steady, the kind of rhythm that meant he wasn’t tired. Not even close.

The survivor’s room had one other exit: a narrow slit of a window half-hidden behind stacked crates. It was just wide enough for her to fit through, if she didn’t mind tearing up her coat and maybe her shoulders. But she had already done great damage to them, a little more wouldn’t hurt. Bonnie moved fast, shoving crates aside as quietly as she could. The wood groaned, and she froze, listening for a change in Ethan’s steps. Nothing. Just that calm breathing.

The last crate tumbled over, revealing the window. A few of the stone edges were chipped, as if someone had already used it as an escape before. She slung the axe across her back with a strip of leather she tore from one of the blankets, then wedged herself into the gap. The stone scraped her arms raw as she forced herself through.

Outside was a sheer drop into a lower courtyard, empty except for frozen shrubs and a scattering of bloodied snow. She dropped, landing hard on her knees, biting back a curse as pain shot up her legs. Above, she heard Ethan’s voice again, closer now, like he’d found the door. "I can smell you…"

Bonnie didn’t wait. She darted for the nearest service passage, the narrow corridor smelling of cold ash and rust. She kept moving until the sound of his boots faded into the wind, her pulse finally slowing enough to hear her own thoughts. She found herself in an old maintenance wing, long abandoned, the windows shattered and frost creeping along the stone. Here, she took her first real breath since picking up the weapon.

The axe was heavier than Thorn, but it didn’t feel clumsy. Every shift of her grip sent a faint vibration up her arms, like it wanted to be used. She swung it once, the air hissing along the blade, and for the first time since Ethan’s rage had filled the castle, she felt… ready.

Not safe. Not free. But ready. A dangerous feeling.

She tightened the leather strap on her shoulder, tucking the weapon close. When she met Ethan next, it wouldn’t be as prey. The maintenance wing was silent, the frost crunching under Bonnie’s boots the only sound. She thought she had a little more time, enough to set her stance, feel the weight of the axe again.

She was wrong.

The shadows at the far end of the corridor shifted, and Ethan stepped out of them. No running this time, no slow, predatory circling— he came straight for her, boots hammering the stone.

Bonnie brought the axe up, bracing for the impact. His first swing was with his fist, and it felt like getting hit by a sledgehammer. She staggered back, ribs screaming, but her grip held. Ethan’s voice was low and shaking, not with fear but with rage so deep it rattled the air. "You killed her. Both of them. Do you know what you’ve taken from me?"

Bonnie swung. The blade caught him across the side, biting deep into his ribs. The vibration of the strike rattled her teeth, and black Mold and white fungus sprayed from the wound like steam. Ethan lurched, then looked down at the gash.

"You…" he hissed, almost whispering. Then louder, the words breaking: "She will live again. She will live again. She will—"

The rest dissolved into a roar as he grabbed her by the front of her coat and hurled her backward. The world became a blur of frost and stone before the window exploded around her. She hit the snow outside in a spray of glass, the air ripped from her lungs. Above her, Ethan leaned out the shattered frame, his form already… changing.

The black mold and fungus surged over his skin like a tidal wave, swelling his frame until his shoulders nearly filled the window. The seams of his coat split, flesh stretching into impossible shapes. His spine lengthened, vertebrae snapping with wet cracks as his height doubled, then tripled.

His torso split open from sternum to navel, ribs bowing outward like the arches of a cathedral. There was no heart inside, only a hollow cavity lined with weeping black tissue, the space where something precious had been. Where Mia had once been. Multiple arms dangled from his sides, some muscular and clawed, others shrivelled like melted wax. A few bore the grotesque outline of infant limbs, their skin slick and incomplete. They twitched aimlessly, reaching for nothing, for something that wasn’t there.

His face tore open down the middle, splitting vertically to reveal a second face inside, his human face, or what was left of it, crying and screaming at once, black fungus streaming from its eyes and mouth. The two halves of his outer face twisted around it like a grotesque frame.

From his back unfurled long strips of dark cloth, tattered and swaying in the wind like mourning shrouds. They caught the moonlight as they writhed, each movement as deliberate as a funeral procession.

When he spoke again, it came from both mouths, the outer one a guttural rumble, the inner one broken and human: "I was going to make you her. Her body, her life, her voice. You were going to bring her back to me."

He stepped fully out of the shattered window, the snow hissing under his weight. "But now… now you’re just going to die!"

Bonnie tightened her grip on the axe, forcing herself to her feet despite the glass cutting into her palms. This wasn’t the man from the diaries anymore. This was the cathedral of flesh.

And it was coming for her.

Chapter Text

The snow shuddered under Ethan’s first step, the weight of him sinking deep into the drift. Bonnie darted sideways, but one of the dangling arms lashed out faster than she could track. It caught her square across the ribs, the blow like being hit by a steel beam. She tumbled across the snow, gasping, vision flashing white at the edges. The cold bit into her lungs as she forced herself back onto her knees, the axe’s weight suddenly twice as heavy.

Ethan moved with a terrible, deliberate grace, not charging like a beast, but advancing like a predator that knew escape was impossible. His outer face sneered while the crying human face inside wept openly, black Mold dripping onto the snow and hissing as it melted into it. She swung the axe in a wide arc as he came within reach, aiming for the hollow of his open ribs. He twisted just enough that the blade buried into one of the dangling arms instead. The limb screamed, actually screamed, and Ethan ripped it away himself, tossing it aside in a spray of steaming Mold.

"Hurts, doesn’t it?!" Bonnie spat, panting.

He didn’t answer. The inner face only cried harder. Then he moved. Two of the larger arms clamped down onto her shoulders, the claws digging into muscle until she screamed. He hauled her upward like she weighed nothing, bringing her face-to-face with the hollow in his chest. It was like staring into a wound the size of a room, the black tissue inside twitching and pulsing as if it could reach her.

"Mia should be here," he said, the outer voice a growl, the inner one breaking. "Not you!"

He hurled her into the snow so hard she felt the ice crack beneath her. Pain flared white-hot up her side, something in her ribs had definitely given. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled instantly. One of his clawed hands came down, raking across her side from hip to ribs. Heat bloomed instantly, wet and sharp, she could feel the blood soaking her coat.

The axe was still in her grip, but her hands were numb now, the cold and pain working together to drain her strength. Her breaths came shallow, ragged, every movement of her chest sending knives through her lungs.

Ethan stood over her, towering like the cathedral his body had become, the mourning shrouds on his back swaying slowly in the snowstorm. "You don’t get to kill my family and walk away," he said, each word vibrating through the ground.

Bonnie’s vision swam, the white of the snow mixing with the dark blur of his towering shape. She tightened her grip on the axe anyway, even if she could barely lift it. She wasn’t going to die lying down.

Not for him. Not for Mia. Not for anyone.

Ethan’s massive frame loomed above her, the torn shrouds on his back whipping in the wind. The hollow in his chest pulsed like it was trying to breathe her in. Bonnie could barely keep the axe raised. Every breath burned. Every movement hurt.

And then she heard the voice.

"Well, isn’t this dramatic?"

From the edge of the courtyard, a silhouette in red stepped into the snow. The spider legs unfolded from her back in a smooth, predatory motion, gleaming black in the moonlight that managed to cut around Ethan’s massive form. "My, my," she purred, voice low and velvety. "Quite the family reunion."

"Ada," Ethan rumbled, both mouths speaking at once, the inner one weeping black Mold even as it snarled, "stay out of this." Her smile didn’t change, but her eyes behind the red glasses sharpened. "Can’t. She owes me… and I can’t collect if she’s dead."

Before Bonnie could even process the exchange, the snow beside her shifted. Rosemary Winters landed hard, pale hair flying, eyes bright with rage. She looked so much like a distorted echo of the girl from that painting that it was unsettling, except for the fury twisting her bloodied mouth. "You killed Herb. You killed Petal!" Her voice trembled with the force of it. "You took my baby sisters from me!"

"Rosie, get out of the fight," Ethan growled, a protective note cutting under the rage. Rose didn’t even glance at him. "Not a chance!"

She moved first, faster than Bonnie could track, swinging a blade of bloodied metal toward her head. Bonnie ducked, but the air above her split with the sheer speed of it. Ada’s spider legs lashed out, tangling the strike mid-swing just enough for Bonnie to roll to the side.

"Move, sweetheart," Ada murmured without looking at her. "I’m not doing this twice."

Bonnie sucked in a frozen breath, her fingers tightening on the axe. Rose came at her again, slashing in wild arcs, each one singing through the air. She drove Bonnie back toward the wall, Mold hardening around her limbs in jagged spikes. But the cold was her ally. Bonnie drew it in, feeling the bite of the winter air deep in her bones. The next time Rose lunged, she stepped in close, burying the axe’s haft in her gut, not to wound, but to pin her long enough for frost to bloom along her coat.

The ice spread fast, crawling up Rose’s arms, across her throat. She snarled and thrashed, but Bonnie shoved her harder against the wall, the frost thickening until her movements slowed. One last push, and Rose’s scream froze in her mouth.

Her body crystallized from the inside out, her eyes going glassy, skin turning brittle as the frost claimed her entirely. When Bonnie stepped back, the whole form shattered in a burst of ice, scattering into the snow at Ethan’s feet. The roar that followed shook the courtyard. Ethan’s cathedral frame reared back, shrouds flaring like wings. Ada, still smiling, tilted her head toward him. "You going to stand there grieving, or…?"

Bonnie didn’t wait for him to answer. She and Ada moved together without speaking, Bonnie charging low, Ada’s spider legs whipping forward to hook at his outer arms and force him to block high. It left his ribs, his hollow, wide open.

Bonnie swung the axe with everything she had left. The blade sank deep into the cavity where his heart should’ve been, biting through the black tissue. Ethan’s scream came from both mouths, one monstrous, one heartbreakingly human. Ada’s legs ripped him backward, tearing the wound wider. Bonnie wrenched the axe free and struck again, and again, until the cathedral of flesh crumpled, the shrouds collapsing into the snow like falling curtains.

Ethan’s shadow slipped from the moonlight, and for the first time that night, the sky was clear again.

The courtyard was silent except for the wet hiss of Mold and fungus dissolving into the snow. Ethan’s massive frame swayed, the cathedral of flesh groaning under its own weight. The black shrouds on his back sagged, heavy with frost, and the inner face, his real face, looked straight at Bonnie. The monstrous jaws around it flexed once, then fell slack. The human face inside was streaked with black Mold tears, his eyes raw with grief and fury. His lips moved before sound came, the words shaking like they didn’t want to leave.

"She was… all I had left…"

Bonnie stood over him, the axe still in her hands, her chest heaving. Her breath misted in the cold, hanging between them. "She’s gone, Ethan," she said quietly. "They’re all gone. And you made sure of it."

A shudder ran through his frame, his ribs bowing outward before curling in again. The open cavity in his chest pulsed, the black tissue contracting as if in pain. He was dying, but it wasn’t quick. The monstrous outer mouth twitched, trying to form words, but the voice came from the inner one instead, soft and broken. "I… was going to bring her back… You were supposed to… be her. You could’ve… made her live again…"

Bonnie swallowed hard, tightening her grip on the axe. "I’m not her, Ethan. I was never going to be her."

His outer arms dropped into the snow with heavy thuds, the melted infant-limb replicas twitching one last time before going still. The shrouds slumped completely now, their edges curling like burned paper.

"Tell her…" The inner face’s voice cracked, every word slower than the last. "… tell her… I didn’t stop… looking…"

Bonnie stepped back as his knees buckled, the whole massive frame collapsing into the snow. Steam rose from the black Mold and fungus as it began to melt away, revealing only the broken shell of what had been Ethan Winters.

The last sound from him was not a roar, not a curse, but a single, raw sob that echoed off the courtyard walls before fading into the wind. When it was over, the moon was no longer hidden. Its cold light spilled over the ruins of his body, over the shattered ice that had been Rose, over the blood and frost on Bonnie’s coat. Ada stepped forward, her red veil fluttering in the breeze. "Well," she murmured, voice as calm as if they’d just finished a card game, "that was messy."

Bonnie didn’t answer. She just stared down at the hollow where his heart had been, the space that would never be filled again. The courtyard still smelled of smoke, frost, and death. Bonnie’s shoulders ached from swinging the axe, her ribs burned every time she breathed, and her mind was still replaying the way Ethan’s body had finally fallen.

Ada, meanwhile, didn’t seem winded at all. She adjusted her red veil like she’d just finished a stroll instead of helping kill the Winters patriarch and his last living daughter. The faintest curl of a smile played at her lips.

"You know…" Ada’s voice was smooth, measured, almost conversational. "Considering I just helped you take out your worst nightmare, I think it’s fair to say you owe me." Bonnie dragged her gaze from Ethan’s remains, narrowing her eyes. "Owe you?" Ada stepped closer, her spider legs folding neatly back against her spine, gleaming faintly in the moonlight. "Mhm. Favors. Debt. Call it what you like. And I’ve decided to collect right away."

Bonnie didn’t like the sound of that at all. "What do you want?"

Ada’s smile widened just enough to make Bonnie’s stomach knot. "I want you to meet someone. My daughter." For a full three seconds, Bonnie just stared at her, the cold wind stinging her eyes. "You’ve gotta be kidding me…"

"That man— your son. The trader. Is he the only one?"

Ada paused. Just for a moment.

Then: "No. I have a daughter."

Bonnie blinked.

"Really?"

"Her name is Wawa," Ada said simply.

Bonnie tilted her head. "Like… a nickname?"

Ada nodded. "It means ‘baby’ or ‘doll’ in my mother’s tongue. She liked to play with names. Wawa kept hers."

"… And where is she?"

Ada’s expression changed, just slightly. The smile didn’t fade, but it grew… wistful.

"The fungus… hit her hard. She doesn’t speak much anymore. Not in the usual sense. Her body adapted, but her sense of self… fractured. She hides now. In a pillar near the roots. Carves her dolls into the walls."

Bonnie’s brow furrowed.

"That’s… kind of tragic."

"It’s art." Ada’s voice snapped just enough to silence Bonnie. "She’s beautiful. In her way. She still makes things for me."

"No," Ada said, tilting her head like she was savoring the moment. "She’s called Wawa. She’s… unique. You’ll see." Bonnie rubbed her face with one hand, muttering something that was probably a curse. "You pull me out of a fight with a cathedral-sized monster so you can… introduce me to your kid?" Ada leaned in slightly, her red glasses catching the moonlight. "Not just introduce. There’s a reason I want you two to meet. Let’s just say she could use… someone like you."

Bonnie groaned quietly. After everything, the fights, the frost, the blood, the screaming, now she was apparently on the hook for babysitting some spider-merchant’s kid.

The worst part? She wasn’t entirely sure she could say no…

The village lay in a jagged sprawl beyond the frozen woods, roofs heavy with snow, chimneys silent. Bonnie followed Ada along a narrow, ice-slick path that wound past crumbling barns and frost-bitten graves. The moon hung low now, no longer smothered by Ethan’s towering form, and in its pale light Bonnie saw it, the pillar.

It was taller than any structure had a right to be, its base as wide as a city block, vanishing into the clouds above. From this distance, the surface looked carved from some impossible mix of stone and bone, pitted with strange hollows that could have been windows… or mouths. They drew closer, and the smell hit her, coppery and sharp, heavy in the cold air. The door at the pillar’s base was easily thirty feet tall, fashioned from warped wood reinforced with iron bands. Blood streaked it from top to bottom, dark and flaking in the cold, as if someone had dragged bodies inside recently.

Ada stopped just shy of the door, her spider legs unfolding slightly, as if to stretch after the walk. She turned to Bonnie, her smile as sharp as the frost underfoot. "Before we go in," she said, her voice low but deliberate, "a word of advice."

Bonnie raised an eyebrow. "This about your daughter?"

Ada nodded once. "Yes. Do not— and I mean do not— comment on her appearance. Or the dolls. Unless…" She let the pause linger, her eyes glinting behind the red glasses. "…you have something positive to say."

Bonnie frowned. "… The dolls?"

"You’ll see," Ada said smoothly, as if that explained everything. "Wawa is… very particular about her friends. And her… art."

"Art," Bonnie repeated flatly, staring up at the massive blood-smeared door. Ada’s smile didn’t waver. "Good luck."

Before Bonnie could reply, Ada reached for the iron knocker, a massive spider cast in black metal, and rapped it once. The sound was deep, resonant, rolling up into the pillar as if it were hollow all the way to the top. Somewhere inside, faint but distinct, came the sound of tiny bells… and something that might have been laughter.

Bonnie’s stomach sank. Whatever was waiting for her inside that towering pillar, she had a feeling she’d take Ethan’s cathedral form over it any day.

The blood-streaked door groaned open with a sound like splitting bone. A gust of stale, cold air rolled out, smelling faintly of mildew, iron, and something sweet that had rotted long ago. Bonnie’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dim interior. The tower’s base was a cavernous hollow, its walls lined with shelves and shadowed alcoves. To one side, a massive staircase spiraled upward, clinging to the stone like a parasite. About halfway up, a broad platform jutted out, and on it, she saw it.

A spindle machine, ancient and rusted, sat beside an elaborate doll-making station cluttered with fabric scraps, spools of thread, and porcelain limbs. Dozens of finished dolls lined the rail, their glassy eyes catching the faint light from the flickering sconces.

And at the center of it all was Wawa.

She moved slowly, almost hesitant, her small frame wrapped in layers of faded, early-1900s clothing, a black high-collared blouse buttoned to her throat, a long skirt, and sleeves so long they covered all of her hands. Heavy wraps covered her neck and face. Two black spider legs arched from her back, twitching faintly when she turned toward them. Behind the coverings, her dark eyes were darting between Ada and Bonnie with a skittish, cornered look.

She seemed like she might bolt at any second. Ada’s tone softened just enough to be noticeable. "Wawa. I brought someone I think you should meet." Bonnie stepped forward slowly, careful not to let her gaze linger too long on the spider legs or the fungus-like patterns creeping up what little of Wawa’s visible skin was showing. "Hi," she said, keeping her voice level, warm. "I’m Bonnie."

Wawa’s eyes flicked down, then back up. Her hands twisted in the fabric of her skirt. "… Hello." The word was barely more than a whisper. The spider legs twitched again, curling slightly toward her sides as if for protection. Bonnie forced a small smile, glancing toward the platform crowded with dolls. "Those are… really well made. You’ve got a lot of skill."

A faint blush colored the skin visible above Wawa’s collar, though she didn’t respond right away. Instead, she drifted back toward the spindle machine, touching it like it was a comfort. "… They keep me company." Bonnie kept her tone light. "They look like they’d be good company."

For a moment, the tension in Wawa’s shoulders eased just slightly. The platform’s shadows shifted as the wind from outside curled up the staircase, brushing past the rows of dolls. Their eyes seemed to follow Bonnie. Which was really creeping her out.

At first, Bonnie thought it was just the platform, that the dolls Wawa spoke of were a small collection, maybe a few dozen at most. But the longer her eyes adjusted to the dim tower light, the more she realized the truth. There weren’t dozens.

There were thousands.

Every inch of wall space, from the bloodied base all the way spiraling up into the clouds, was lined with shelves and alcoves. And every shelf, every hollow, every crevice was packed with dolls. Glassy porcelain eyes, fabric bodies, delicate little hands curled unnaturally, they stared from every angle, filling the silence with their presence.

Bonnie’s breath hitched despite herself. She turned slowly in place, her pulse quickening as she realized there wasn’t a single bare patch of stone. At least twenty-one years worth of work. Wawa’s entire life, captured and preserved in porcelain. Each doll was different. Some wore handmade dresses stitched from scraps of lace and silk. Others were rough, misshapen, their painted faces cracked or uneven. A few clutched tiny objects, rusted spoons, scraps of ribbon, even broken teeth strung on twine. Some were small as a hand, others nearly the size of children.
And every one of them was watching.

"They… keep me company," Wawa murmured again, voice small and shaking. She rubbed the fabric of her sleeve against the edge of the spindle machine, like she couldn’t stand still under the weight of Bonnie’s silence. "I don’t… like being alone. They don’t laugh at me. Or… stare." Bonnie forced her jaw to unclench, smoothing her expression into something as neutral, no, as kind, as she could manage. "They’re… amazing, Wawa. I’ve never seen anything like this."

The older girl’s eyes flickered up at her through the wraps, searching her face for even the smallest trace of a lie. Bonnie kept her smile steady, even as the thousands of glassy stares pressed into her from every direction. Wawa exhaled softly, some tension easing from her shoulders. "Mama said one day… someone else might come. Someone who wouldn’t laugh." Her gaze darted down again, fingers tightening on the edge of the machine. "… Is that you?" Bonnie swallowed, glancing once more at the endless sea of dolls. Their painted faces gleamed in the low light like teeth. She made herself nod.

"Yeah. That’s me."

Somewhere above, out of sight, the tower groaned again, a sound like stone grinding bone. And every doll’s glassy eyes seemed to gleam brighter in the dark.

Bonnie forced herself to hold Wawa’s gaze, even as the weight of a thousand tiny eyes pressed into her from every direction.
The girl’s voice was soft, uneven, like she was scared her own words might hurt her. "They’re not just dolls," Wawa murmured, tracing a fingertip across the spindle’s worn wood. "They listen. They… understand." A chill crept over Bonnie’s skin. She swore one of the nearest dolls, a cracked-faced child with mismatched buttons for eyes, had just shifted its head the tiniest fraction, tilting to catch the light.
She blinked, and it was still again.

"They’re my friends," Wawa went on, clutching her sleeve like it was all that held her together. "Every one of them. I know their names. I remember when I made them. They keep me safe. They… protect me when I’m scared." As if on cue, a faint sound rippled through the tower. It wasn’t wind, it was sharper, thinner, like the brushing of hundreds of porcelain joints against wood. Bonnie’s throat tightened. She glanced upward, just for a second, and her stomach turned. The higher tiers of dolls weren’t still. Some rocked faintly in place, their limbs twitching against each other.

One doll on a nearer shelf, a little girl with braided hair carved in clay, her face painted pale, opened its mouth just slightly. No sound came, but Bonnie could’ve sworn it was about to speak. Wawa didn’t notice. Or maybe she did, and she didn’t care. "They never leave me. Even when Mama does. Even when the village screams. They’ll never leave. Not like…" Her voice trailed off, a faint sob catching before she swallowed it down.

The rows of dolls seemed to lean closer, their glass eyes catching every flicker of light. Their painted smiles looked wider in the dimness, too wide.
Bonnie’s pulse raced, but she forced her voice steady. "They sound like… good friends, Wawa."

At that, Wawa’s trembling eased, her spider legs curling inward just slightly, as though Bonnie’s words had softened something sharp in her chest. She gave a tiny nod, eyes glistening under the dim light.
The dolls around them stilled again, glass eyes fixed forward. But Bonnie couldn’t shake the feeling that if she said one wrong word, one false step, they’d all start moving at once. Wawa kept her hands folded tight against her chest, sleeves hiding her fingers, gaze darting to the floor whenever Bonnie’s eyes lingered too long. The spider legs twitched faintly, curling and uncurling like they were restless, unsure.

"They don’t look at me the way people do," She whispered finally, voice cracking. Her eyes flicked to the endless dolls before returning to the spindle machine. "They don’t… stare. Or whisper. Or laugh."
Bonnie hesitated, careful with her words.

"People can be cruel. Doesn’t mean they’re right."

Wawa shook her head quickly, almost violently. "They were right." Her hand drifted to the black wraps wound around her throat, tugging at the fabric as if it burned her skin. "I’m… ugly. Rotten. Mama says I should be proud, but I…" She trailed off, voice small, breaking. "… I can’t even look in a mirror." The wraps shifted as she spoke, the faint bulge of fungus growth pulsing faintly beneath the fabric. One corner had slipped, just enough for Bonnie to see pale, mottled skin underneath— tissue puckered and cracked, black veins threading across it like roots.

Bonnie forced her expression to stay neutral, gentle. "That doesn’t make you ugly, Wawa. It just makes you… you."

For a moment, Wawa’s eyes lifted, wide and searching, like she desperately wanted to believe her. But the doubt was heavy in her trembling shoulders, the tight set of her mouth. "I don’t want to be seen," She whispered. "Not like this. Not ever." All around them, the dolls seemed to lean closer again, as if absorbing the confession. Their eyes glimmered faintly in the candlelight, endless rows of silent witnesses to Wawa’s misery.

Bonnie stepped closer, softening her voice. "You don’t have to hide from me. I’m not here to laugh at you." Something broke in Wawa’s expression then, a shimmer of hope, fragile as glass. She didn’t uncover her wraps, not yet, but her grip on them loosened, just a little. Above, the tower groaned again, and the dolls rattled faintly in their alcoves, like they were holding their breath for whatever came next.

Bonnie’s eyes wandered back to the spindle, its old wooden wheel gleaming faintly in the dim tower light. The machine looked out of place among the dolls, but Wawa’s fingers had lingered on it again and again, brushing the wood like it was something sacred. "You really like this thing, don’t you?" Bonnie asked gently. Wawa froze, her hands retreating halfway into her sleeves as though she’d been caught. "… It’s mine." Her voice was defensive at first, brittle. "No one touches it. No one."

Bonnie nodded, raising her hands in a mock surrender. "Fair enough. But… maybe you could show me how it works? I’ve never used one before." For a moment, silence hung heavy in the air. Then Wawa blinked, her eyes wide. "… You… want me to show you?"

She hurried over to the spindle, hands moving faster than Bonnie had yet seen them. Her sleeves slipped back just a little, revealing thin wrists marred with fungus patches, but she didn’t seem to notice this time. "It’s old, but it still works. You just… you have to keep the rhythm steady. See?" The wheel creaked to life under her touch, spinning smooth and steady despite its age. The spindle whirred faintly as she pulled thread through her fingers with practiced ease. Her voice, usually so quiet, picked up an eager energy. "If you pull too hard, it snaps. If you go too fast, it knots. But if you listen—" She leaned closer to the wheel, her eyes bright. "— it hums. Like a heartbeat."

Bonnie watched her work, nodding. "Looks like you’ve done this a lot."
Wawa’s lips twitched into the faintest smile, small but real. "Since I was little. Mama says I have good hands. Even if…" Her eyes flickered down toward her wraps, the smile faltering, "… Even if the rest of me is wrong." Bonnie leaned against the table, careful to keep her tone warm. "Nothing wrong with having a gift. This is… pretty amazing, Wawa." For the first time since Bonnie had walked into the tower, the girl actually beamed. She somehow looked younger in that moment, less haunted, as though showing off her skill let her forget what she thought she was. All around them, the dolls remained silent and still, their glass eyes fixed on the two of them, like an audience waiting for the next move.

The wheel turned smoothly under Wawa’s hands, the faint hum of the spindle filling the massive hollow of the tower. The sound was delicate, soothing, like a lullaby carried on wood and thread. Wawa’s fingers danced with surprising precision, guiding the fibers through in long, patient motions. Bonnie didn’t try to interrupt or join in, she just watched, leaning on the edge of the worktable. Wawa had lit up the moment she’d realized Bonnie wanted to see, like someone had opened a window in a locked room.

"I like it when people… watch," Wawa admitted softly, though her cheeks flushed at the confession. "No one else ever does. Mama… doesn’t like the spindle. She says it’s a waste… but it makes me happy." Bonnie nodded slowly. "Then it’s not a waste." The girl’s hands faltered for a moment, the rhythm nearly breaking, before she steadied it again. Her eyes glimmered, almost wet. "… You really think so?" Bonnie’s smile was small but genuine. "I do."

The words seemed to land harder than she expected. Wawa blinked quickly, as though trying to swallow down something in her chest, then returned to the spindle with renewed energy. The hum of the wheel deepened, the thread pulling taut and even. "I never see my brother," she murmured after a pause. "He doesn’t want to come here. Says the tower… makes his skin crawl." She let out a breath that might have been a laugh, though it didn’t hold any humour. "I don’t go to him, either. I don’t go… outside. Not ever."

Her spider legs shifted faintly, curling inward like she was hugging herself. "So it’s just me. And them." Her eyes flicked toward the endless rows of dolls. "And Mama, when she comes." Bonnie followed her gaze, feeling the oppressive weight of all those fake faces again. But Wawa wasn’t looking at them with fear, she was looking at them like family.
"You wanted to see me spin," Wawa said suddenly, her voice soft but edged with wonder. “You… really wanted to see…" Bonnie nodded again, meeting her eyes. Well, where Bonnie thought her eyes were. "Yeah. I did."

For the first time, Wawa smiled without restraint. It was small, crooked, and fleeting, but it was a smile. And the dolls in the walls seemed to lean forward as if to witness it, their glass eyes gleaming faintly in the low light, thousands of silent witnesses to a rare, fragile moment of joy. The silence between them cracked like thin ice. Wawa’s lips trembled, her hands clutching at her skirt as if she could anchor herself. Then the first sob tore out of her, raw and unrestrained, echoing up into the hollow tower.

The spindle hummed softly, the thread steady between Wawa’s fingers. For the first time since she’d entered the tower, Bonnie felt like the girl had forgotten to be afraid, lost in her work, almost happy.
It was exactly because of that flicker of happiness that Bonnie asked the question. "Wawa…" She kept her voice careful, almost hesitant. "Would you let me see… under the wraps?"

The wheel slowed. Wawa’s hands froze mid-motion, the thread slipping loose. Her eyes snapped up to Bonnie’s, wide, startled. "… No one asks that," she whispered, voice quivering. "No one wants to see." Bonnie leaned forward slightly, her tone steady. "I do."

For a long moment, the only sound was the faint creak of the spindle wheel turning on its own momentum. Wawa’s spider legs twitched sharply, curling as though ready to strike or retreat. Her hands went to her collar, fingers trembling. "I’m… ugly," she said finally. "You’ll see. You’ll wish you hadn’t asked."

"I won’t," Bonnie answered, and she meant it. Slowly, Wawa loosened the knot at her throat. The black wraps unwound layer by layer, the fabric falling away with soft rustles that seemed deafening in the silence of the tower. When the last strip slid from her neck, Bonnie finally saw her.

Dark, wavy hair fell in uneven waves around her face, damp from being trapped beneath the cloth. Her eyes were startling, a deep, muddy blue, brimming with wariness and pain but luminous even in the dim light. Her cheekbones were soft, her lips full. She was… pretty.

But the fungus had marked her. Black veins crawled up the side of her throat, spreading into mottled patches of gray-green mold that bloomed across her jaw and one cheek. Her skin there was cracked, puckered, threaded with fine filaments that caught the light like faint cobwebs. The corruption didn’t take away her beauty, but it twisted it, a constant reminder of what she carried. Wawa’s hands tightened into fists at her sides, and her eyes darted down.

"See? Ugly."

Bonnie’s breath caught, not from disgust, but from the way Wawa’s voice fractured with those words. She shook her head firmly. "No. You’re not ugly. You’re… you. And you’re beautiful, Wawa. Look like your mother." Wawa’s eyes snapped back to her, disbelief raw in their depths. For a heartbeat she didn’t breathe, didn’t move. Her spider legs twitched, confused, uncertain. "You’re lying," she whispered, though her voice broke like she wanted it to be true.

Bonnie held her gaze. "I’m not."

For the first time since the door had opened, tears welled in Wawa’s eyes. She turned quickly, as if to hide them, but the dolls in the walls were already watching, thousands of glass faces reflecting the moment like a secret too important to keep.

It wasn’t a delicate cry. It was ugly, messy, the kind of sob that wracked her entire body. Her spider legs clattered against the floor, twitching with every shudder as if they were trying to shield her. "I’m hideous!" she wailed, the words strangled by the sobs. "Mama says I should be proud, but I hate it— I hate my skin— I hate what I am—" Her knees buckled and she collapsed in front of the spindle, clutching at her throat where the fungus bloomed like she could tear it out.

Bonnie’s stomach twisted. She wanted to say something, anything, but the words died in her throat. Watching this girl, so young and so broken, unravel like that made her feel horrible. Like she’d just dug open a wound that was barely holding together. "I never go outside," Wawa choked, gasping through her sobs. "I never see anyone. My brother won’t come! Mama doesn’t stay! I’m— I’m nothing! Just— just ugly and wrong and—"

Her spider legs slammed down against the wooden platform with a sound like splintering bone. Dolls tumbled from their alcoves, faces cracking as they hit the floor. The ones still on the walls seemed to lean in closer, their glassy eyes reflecting her collapse in perfect silence. Bonnie crouched down, reaching out instinctively, then stopped short. She didn’t know if touching Wawa would comfort her or make it worse. She didn’t know how to comfort someone whose entire life had been wrapped in shame and loneliness.

"Wawa…" she said softly, her voice breaking despite herself. "You’re not nothing."

The girl’s sobs kept coming, loud and ugly, filling the tower with the kind of grief that couldn’t be contained anymore. Each tear carved deeper into Bonnie’s guilt. Now she wondered if she’d only confirmed Wawa’s worst fears.

Bonnie clenched her hands against her knees, hating herself for how powerless she felt. She had survived monsters, escaped torture, fought horrors she couldn’t have imagined. But this? A lonely, miserable girl sobbing her heart out in front of her? This was worse. All she could do was stay. Stay, and not turn away like everyone else had. The spindle wheel, forgotten, slowed to a halt, the thread hanging slack. The dolls above seemed to creak with the weight of it all, as though the entire tower was bending toward Wawa’s grief.

Wawa’s sobs shook the platform, her sleeves soaked from wiping at her face, her voice hoarse and broken. The dolls above rattled faintly as though they couldn’t bear to watch without moving. Bonnie’s chest ached with guilt, sitting there while this girl shattered in front of her felt wrong, cowardly. She moved before her mind could argue with her body. Crawling across the wooden boards, Bonnie reached out and wrapped her arms around Wawa. The girl stiffened instantly, her sobs catching in her throat. Her spider legs twitched violently, scraping against the wood in startled reflex. "D-don’t—" she gasped, trying to pull back, but Bonnie only held her tighter.

"It’s okay," Bonnie whispered, pressing her cheek against Wawa’s dark hair. "You don’t have to hide. Not from me." The fungus was warm under her touch, oddly damp, the surface ridged like bark in places. The mold across Wawa’s throat pulsed faintly against Bonnie’s arm, alive in a way skin shouldn’t be. Every instinct in Bonnie screamed to recoil.

But she didn’t let go.

Because underneath all of it, beneath the rot and growth and corruption, there was still a girl shaking in her arms. A girl who just wanted not to be alone. Slowly, haltingly, Wawa’s fists unclenched from her skirt. She hesitated, then clutched at Bonnie’s coat with trembling fingers, burying her face in the fabric. Her sobs resumed, but softer this time, not the scream of despair, but the raw hiccuping of someone too tired to keep the walls up.

"It feels… weird," Wawa admitted in a tiny voice between gasps, as though afraid she was disgusting Bonnie. "The mold— it’s gross, it’s—" Bonnie shook her head fiercely. "It’s not your fault. It’s not you. You’re still you, Wawa." The girl clung tighter, her spider legs curling protectively around them both like black arches. For once, they didn’t twitch or shudder, they simply rested. The tower was silent except for the sound of Wawa crying into Bonnie’s shoulder. Even the dolls seemed subdued, their glassy eyes watching without judgment. 

For the first time in years, maybe ever, Wawa was being held. And for the first time, Bonnie wished she could take every hurt this girl had carried and shoulder it herself.

Wawa’s sobs had slowed to soft hiccups, her face still buried in Bonnie’s coat. The spindle sat silent beside them, the thread slack, while the dolls stared on in unblinking silence. Bonnie kept her arms around her, murmuring soft reassurances whenever Wawa trembled. Then, muffled against her shoulder, came a question Bonnie wasn’t ready for.

"Bonnie… do you know Rosemary?"

The name hit like a knife between her ribs. Bonnie stiffened, her breath catching. She pulled back just enough to see Wawa’s face. Her eyes were red, cheeks blotchy from crying, but behind it all was a flicker of hope, fragile, desperate hope. "She’s… she’s my friend," Wawa whispered, voice shaking. "More than… Or she was. She came sometimes. She wasn’t scared of me. Not really…" Her hands twisted in Bonnie’s sleeve. "… Can she come? If you know her, can you bring her? … Please?"

Bonnie’s throat closed. She wished she could lie. She wished she could give the girl even a scrap of that hope. But she couldn’t. Not after what had happened. She swallowed hard, choosing her words carefully. "Wawa… I did know Rosemary." Wawa’s eyes lit briefly, a soft gasp escaping her. Bonnie’s voice broke on the next words.

"But she… she’s gone. She’s not coming back."

The hope in Wawa’s face shattered in an instant. Her muddy blue eyes went wide, her lips trembling as though she hadn’t understood. "N— no. That’s— that’s not true. She— she can’t be—" Bonnie shook her head slowly, tears stinging her eyes now. "I’m sorry. She’s… she’s dead, Wawa."
The word hung heavy in the tower, louder than any scream possible. Wawa’s spider legs twitched violently, slamming against the floorboards in grief and denial. Her hands flew to her wraps, clutching them like she could crawl back inside them.

"No! No, you’re lying!" she sobbed, voice breaking apart. “She promised— she said she’d come back— she promised! Rosemary wouldn’t leave me!"
Bonnie reached for her again, but Wawa twisted away, curling in on herself. The dolls rattled in their alcoves, porcelain limbs clicking faintly, their glass eyes reflecting her anguish. All Bonnie could do was sit in the shadow of it, hating that the truth she’d spoken had hurt this girl even more than her loneliness already had.

Wawa rocked in place, arms hugging her knees, spider legs curling tight around her like a cage. Her breath came in ragged sobs, her face blotchy and wet. Bonnie’s chest ached. She couldn’t watch this girl crumble again… not after everything.

So, she lied.

"Wawa," Bonnie said softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. "I… was there. I saw her go. And her last thoughts… they were about you." The girl froze, blinking up at her through tears. "M— me?" Bonnie nodded, keeping her expression as steady as she could. "Yes. She wasn’t scared. She was thinking of you. She wanted you to know she loved you." The sobs eased into small, stuttering hiccups. Wawa’s shoulders shook, but the panic in her eyes dimmed. "… She did?"

"She did," Bonnie repeated firmly. "The fungus… it got her. It wasn’t her fault. She fought it as long as she could, but in the end…" She trailed off, letting the silence finish the thought. Wawa sniffled, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. "… I knew it."

Bonnie blinked. "You… knew?" Wawa’s voice was quiet, heavy with the weight of memory. "The mould was eating her alive. It made her… wrong. Angry. Hungry." Her eyes unfocused as she spoke, staring past Bonnie as if reliving it. "She smiled less. She stopped sleeping. And when she looked at people, it wasn’t… people anymore. They were food."

A chill ran down Bonnie’s spine.

"Nobody was safe," Wawa whispered. "Her teeth were sharp. Her jaws could crack bone like candy. She… she killed, and she killed, and ate." Her voice dropped lower, trembling. "… Except us. Except family. And me."

Clearly, Bonnie thought bitterly, remembering Rosemary’s snarls and how easily she would have gutted her.

"She told me once," Wawa continued, her eyes distant, "That she felt like she was dying. But her body wouldn’t listen. It just kept going and going, kept hunting. She said the mould didn’t know how to stop. Wouldn’t let her rest." The dolls around them seemed to lean in closer at her words, porcelain heads tilting in eerie unison. Bonnie clenched her fists, willing herself to stay calm. Wawa’s voice broke again, softer this time. "… So maybe you’re right. Maybe… maybe she thought of me at the end. I hope she did." Bonnie reached out, squeezing her hand gently. "She did. I promise." Wawa clutched her fingers in return, fragile and trembling. For the first time, she let herself believe it.

The silence stretched, broken only by the faint creak of the tower and the endless stillness of the dolls. Bonnie thought Wawa had calmed, that maybe she was finally finding some fragile peace. Then Wawa shifted. From inside her oversized sleeve, she drew something small but glinting in the candlelight. A pair of scissors, old, iron, their blades stained with dried, flaking blood. Thin threads clung to them, red and white and black, as though pulled from something alive. She held them delicately, almost reverently, her blue eyes wide and glistening. "Bonnie…"

Bonnie’s chest tightened. "Wawa, what are those?" The girl’s lips trembled, but her voice was steady. "Mama says scissors cut things apart. But… they can cut things together, too. If you use them right. I thought…" She swallowed hard, tears threatening again. "… I thought maybe you could help me. Help me see Rosemary again." The words cut Bonnie deeper than the scissors ever could.

She stared at the fragile, lonely girl in front of her, the girl who had clung to Rosemary, who had hidden her face in shame, who had filled twenty-one years of silence with dolls. And now, all she wanted was one impossible thing. "I loved her," Wawa whispered, hugging the scissors to her chest. "Even when the Mold took her. Even when she scared me. She was… mine. My only friend. Please, Bonnie. Please…"

Bonnie’s throat was raw when she finally spoke. "… If I do this, Wawa… you have to give me something. Proof. Something I can take with me, so Ada doesn’t think I—" She cut herself off, shaking her head. "So she doesn’t kill me for it. She’d have my head." For a heartbeat, she thought Wawa would refuse. Then the girl leaned forward suddenly, wrapping her arms around Bonnie in a trembling, desperate hug.

"I’ll give you anything," she said, voice muffled in Bonnie’s shoulder. "Just… don’t let me be alone anymore." Bonnie closed her eyes, hugging her back, even as her heart twisted. "You won’t be." The scissors trembled in Wawa’s hand as Bonnie took them, the threads brushing against her palm like whispers. The girl didn’t resist. She only clung tighter, her spider legs curling protectively around them both, her breath shaky but calm now, calm in the way of someone who had finally decided.
Bonnie’s hands shook, but she forced them steady. For Wawa.

The last thing she felt was the girl’s small arms squeezing tighter, and the last thing she heard was her whisper:

"Thank you."

Then the scissors closed.

The tower groaned like it was mourning. Thousands of dolls rattled softly in their alcoves, as if bowing their porcelain heads.

And Wawa slumped in Bonnie’s arms, peaceful at last.

Bonnie’s hands went cold when she saw the writing. It was a smear at first, a careful, red line across the blunt iron of the scissors, then letters, shaky but deliberate. W A W A, and beneath it, in smaller, more urgent strokes:

Don’t chase Bonnie. Mama, don’t.

It felt like a hand had closed around Bonnie’s heart. Wawa had used her own blood to make a plea the only way she could imagine would be seen. The tiny, awful neatness of it, like a child leaving a note on a tool, turned the world inside out. Bonnie knelt and cradled the scissors, fingers stinging from the cold metal, and for a long moment she could do nothing but stare at that blood-script until the letters blurred.

She moved because the girl she’d just held had been a person, and people deserved more than being left where they fell. The platform was cluttered with scraps and half-finished dolls; somewhere a porcelain head lay with its painted eyes staring at the ceiling. Bonnie pushed through the work-bench and the piles of thread, pulling at a rolled bundle that looked like someone had intended to hide it. Underneath lay a thin, folded blanket and a lumpy scrap of cloth that might have been a pillow once, hardly a bed, and nothing fit for anyone, let alone someone who’d just died in her arms.

It would have to do. Bonnie straightened the makeshift pillow and smoothed the blanket with hands that trembled more from grief than from the cold. She carried Wawa as gently as she could, the girl’s weight was light, as if sleep had settled on her finally, and laid her down on the little nest. For a second, the tower seemed to hold its breath: the wheel’s husk of a hum had gone utterly silent, and the thousands of dolls watched without blink.

Bonnie draped the blanket over the small body, tucking it close around the cheeks and throat as if she could hold warmth there. She smoothed the black wraps back into place so Wawa’s face was not an open wound to the world; the gesture felt trivial and necessary at once. Before she left, she folded the scissors in a scrap of cloth and slid them into her jacket, proof, if Ada wanted it. Proof, if anyone asked for a reason. Proof that the girl had begged for mercy she would never get.

Standing back, Bonnie let herself look at the tower again: the spindle like a sentinel, the dolls like a congregation of hollow witnesses. She whispered, clumsy and insufficient, "I’m sorry," and then, because it felt necessary, "I’m so sorry. I promise, Wawa. I’ll be careful." The words pooled in the cold air and left her throat raw. She turned away, shoulders tight, the scissors heavy and warm against her side, and stepped back toward the stairwell, toward Ada, toward the world that would never let this night stay small.