Megalith

Most likely, Zet tried to open his eyes. Though not before his body realized it wasn’t where it had just seemed to be. Or rather, wanted to be. Like a Steadicam, his vestibular pivoted perception into alignment, forcing his head - and everything currently crammed inside it - to be seized by the vertigo of a skipping stone, thrown so deftly that its ripples never settled, only spread farther and farther out across the surface. Heaviness of the dream unshakable….

Inhale.

The faint rustle of paper, recycled a million times over, whispers between his folded fingers. Listen to it, turning the drug’s instruction leaflet over and over; he watch the rhythm of her breathing.

Exhale.

Her damp warmth touches his chin. Her body is a crumpled heap, twisted into an unnatural position. You might think she was asleep, but she won’t be sleeping for a long, long time. A nightmare. She asks Zet to read it again - how the pills she took are supposed to work. The ones she convulsively punched out of the blister pack. First one, then a second, and after a pause, a third.

The only clean glass within reach… He did wake up again.

And Outside, in the Megalith, light seared through every crack in the entrance - the door, the window frames. A drone, like the chitinous shell of some great beetle, pressed down from the ceiling. His hand, were it not so pinned down, would have grumbled its way upward, toward the drone. To swat it away. To do something, anything; a blind wave of the hand, as if the sound were hovering, tangible, just within reach of his ear.

Zet Nishem, for some reason, became convinced that to clear away the heaviness - like sand when you’ve been buried up to your neck - you had to disturb it even more. To throw yourself into something utterly unbearable. It would pass quicker that way. You’d lose yourself in it.

The handle, insufferably worn, finally yielded, releasing a dense knot of sounds, smells, and sensations into the room. The drone clung to his temples like a burr; the heat touched his entire body at once, squeezing the air from his lungs. Voices, far too clear from any distance, conspired with a venomous orange light to plunge Zet into a thick silt of desperate hustle.

The narrow corridor was, to everyone’s surprise, crammed with far too many people. Nishem retreated to the railing, brought the relieving vapor to his lips, and tried to find some sense of himself in the middle of it all.

The Megalith is in a hurry to live, as if to spite them all. It swells like a great bellows, sucking in an entire floor of workers, grinding them up within its guts, and by evening, spitting them back out, tattered and utterly spent. Zet felt a shove to his shoulder, too hard to be an accident. It was Serven. “Slacking again, wreck?” he barked. Nishem watched the smear from Serven’s protective suit linger on his shoulder for a second before evaporating. When he looked up again, there was no one there to answer.

Zet have to break through to the central towers, claw his shattered body out of this heavy haze of the work district. Just one more deep drag of the vapor, breathe in some semblance of life.

Everything is wrong. Morning is when everything that can possibly be wrong conspires to create a perfect storm. Too much light, an unfamiliar noise, the confusion and the crowds, it’s already too late to go back to sleep, and there are the useless glances and questions, the answers that no one needs, the obligation to go somewhere, the morning fog woven from heat and the curse of having woken up at all, and then, when you’re fully awake - the foul weather waiting in the depths of the Megalith, born of the cold flashes from its pulsating veins of cooling pipes - and of course, the excessive, crushing weight of your own body.

He scrubbed a palm across his face, as if the clumsy, chaotic movement held some hidden logic. And it did. To wipe away the unease that had been pooling in the corners of his eyes all night. To try and wrestle his hair into something resembling a style.

Hopeless clouds, like streaks of gray wax, blurred the peaks of the buildings that clawed at the sky. Central Part. The Megalith.

Zet slept on a mattress made of his own pain. He floats somewhere on the verge of existence and oblivion. If Nishem stops creating it, it will stop holding him afloat in a viscous sludge of insurmountable nightmares. There is nothing worse than thinking about what lies at the bottom. If a bottom even exists…

The sound of a door opening shattered the bar’s muddled reality into a before and an after. Zet dragged his perpetually exhausted body inside.

He threaded his way forward, past the bar, toward the single tables. His eyes moved slowly, searching for a justification for his presence here. Sometimes, they moved more sharply. A darting glance. Zet casually swiped a hand across the table and picked up the menu. He waved it in the air, toward the window, as if brushing away phantom crumbs from buttery croissants, olive pits, and granulated sugar stuck to the slender waists of glasses. There was nothing on the menu, of course. It was just a careless gesture, a feint, as if he actually intended to read it. He never took his eyes off the bar, as though it were the only thing that mattered. Which was true. He spun the menu on the tabletop until its corner tapped against the sugar bowl. Zet threw up a hand, a single finger raised. The waitress, lazily tucking a dark curl from her forehead, started toward him. She’d been standing there, silently polishing a highball glass. The girl tucked a corner of the towel into her apron. She wore tight, faded jeans and black military-style boots, the gap revealing a sliver of pink ankle. Nishem’s eyes traveled up her body. As she stopped at his table, his gaze settled on the colorful rim of a sock peeking out from her boot.

His eyes moved higher. To her eyes, and her slightly wrinkled nose. She was wrinkling it at him.

Zet said, “The usual.”

The waitress bristled. “You could’ve come to the bar yourself.” and gone.

But she returned. The glass slid across the wood, a deliberate slowness, rehearsed. The irritation that pinched her features had... dissolved. Now, just frank curiosity. She leaned in, her jeans brushing the scarred table.

“You know,” she began, her voice a low hum under the bar’s chaos, “for someone carrying the whole Megalith, you look right through things.”

Zet was still. Furniture. A weary stain in a world of sharp edges. He was accustomed to being ignored, dismissed. This directness - an anomaly. A malfunction in the static.

She smirked, pushing that dark lock of hair back. “Or maybe you’re looking for something. Most people in here are just forgetting.” She straightened, turned, retreated. Wiping down an empty table.

It was a game, he realized. An observation, then the silence. It was unnerving. For the first time since entering, the insufferable pain mask he wore felt less like his own skin and more like a costume everyone could see right through.

She came back, leaning closer this time, her chin resting on her fist. “What’s her name?”

The question struck him. Not a sound, but a physical blow. The bar, the girl, the drink - it all dissolved. Smeared into a searing flashback.

On his knees. The cold floor. Before him, a crumpled form, the breathing too shallow. The metallic reek of three nightmare pills. The sterile, million-times-recycled rustle of the instruction leaflet in his trembling hands. The raw, unbearable weight of her suffering pouring into him, becoming his own.

“You’re far away,” the bartender’s voice pulled him back. She hadn’t moved. Her eyes, dark and knowing, held his. She pushed harder, her voice dropping to a whisper that seemed to bypass his ears and land directly in his skull.

The narrative didn’t shift; it fractured.

The bar did fade. The sounds and smells, the oppressive drone - gone. Replaced in an instant. They were standing on a viewpoint platform, suspended in a vast, silent cavern deep within the Megalith’s secret architecture. The air was cool and clean. Utterly, impossibly clean. Devoid of the oppressive dampness, the constant, intrusive, chitinous buzzing that was the background radiation of his life.

Below them, a vast basin held a source of emerald water, impossibly pure. Great underwater pipes, like the arteries of a sleeping god, pulsed faintly as they drew water into the protocity’s nervous system.

They stood there silently, soaking in the profound wrongness of the place. A sanctuary. A pocket of reality that should not exist within the grinding, industrial misery. A place of peace.

Suddenly, Zet felt a warm breath on the back of his neck. The bartender girl, gently blowing, a feather-light touch that sent a shiver through his entire being. Time seemed to pause, stretching into a thick, viscous moment. In that stillness, something deep within the structure gave a violent shudder.

The platform shook.

The girl tripped, a small gasp escaping her lips as she fell forward, her arms wrapping around him in an instinctive, accidental hug.

And in that second, which lasted for half an eternity, Zet felt the warmth of another human being, a connection not predicated on pain or duty. He saw the impossible emerald of the water below, felt the clean air in his lungs, and for a fleeting, crystalline moment... the heaviness was gone.

Then, the world ended.

With a deafening, grinding roar, the Megalith around them began to crumble. The cavern’s ceiling fractured, giant metal struts twisting like dying insects. The walls shattered into pieces, collapsing inward in a dramatic, slow-motion avalanche of steel and stone. The viewpoint platform buckled beneath their feet, tilting violently. Her arms tightened around him - no longer a gentle embrace, but the desperate grip of the falling.

They started to fall down, two figures locked together, tumbling into the emerald water and the beautiful, terrifying ruin of everything.