Chapter 6: Whispers from Within

Chapter 6: Whispers from Within

Leo lay on the dusty floorboards, a discarded marionette whose strings had just been cut. The moon, now sinking towards the horizon, cast long, distorted shadows across the room. The air was thick with the lingering taste of ozone and an alien slickness that coated the back of his throat, a taste he knew would never truly wash away. The grotesque violation of the emergence had scoured him hollow, leaving behind a silence in his mind so profound it felt like deafness.

He could still feel her inside him. The horrifying unspooling and retraction had changed the sensation of her presence. The cold, leaden weight had been replaced by something… integrated. He could feel a faint, slow pulse deep within his gut, a rhythm that was not his own heartbeat. It was the slow, contented respiration of a sleeping god in the temple of his flesh. He was no longer a host to a parasite; he was the landscape it inhabited.

He dragged himself to his feet, his muscles screaming in protest. Every part of him felt stretched, used, desecrated. The blissful high of the feeding two nights ago felt like a distant, treacherous lie—a spoonful of honey to make him swallow a mouthful of poison. He stumbled into the bathroom and retched, but only saliva came up. He scrubbed at his tongue with a toothbrush until his gums bled, but the phantom taste remained.

As the sun began to cast a weak, grey light over the desert, a new kind of strangeness began. The silence in his mind started to fill with whispers. They weren't sounds, not words he could hear, but intrusive impulses, desires that bloomed in his thoughts with the vividness of his own.

He ran a hand along the crumbling plaster of the hallway wall, and a sudden, overwhelming urge seized him: to lick the wall. The thought was so powerful, so specific, that he could almost taste the chalky, mineral grit on his tongue. He recoiled, his hand flying back as if the wall were red-hot. That wasn’t his thought. It was a chemical craving, a geological hunger that had been inserted directly into his brain.

Later, staring out the kitchen window, his eyes fixed on a patch of tough, spiny weeds near the fence—the same fence where the rabbit had died. He felt a specific, undeniable pull toward them. He wanted to dig them up, to chew on their bitter roots, to absorb whatever nutrients they had drawn from the parched earth.

Disgusted, he turned away, his heart hammering. He was losing himself. The lines were blurring. Was he hungry, or was she? Did he want to walk into the other room, or was he being led? Every decision, every stray thought, was now suspect. He was a battleground, and he was losing territory with every breath. He was terrified of the hunger returning, of the monstrous pleasure that came with sating it. That ecstasy was the creature's most potent weapon, a reward for surrendering his humanity.

He needed answers. Mateo’s cryptic warnings were not enough. He needed to understand the rules of this nightmare. Driven by a desperate need for something, anything, to anchor himself, he found himself back in his grandfather’s study. The shoebox of moon photos lay where he’d dropped it, a mess of pale, accusing eyes. He ignored it. He ran his hands over the dusty bookshelves, the rickety desk, searching for something more.

A faint, persistent feeling began to nudge at him. A sense of wrongness. It was like a misplaced note in a familiar song. He was drawn to the corner of the room, to the worn rug covering the floorboards. The feeling intensified, a focused pressure in his mind, guiding his attention to a single, slightly warped plank of wood.

He knelt, his fingers tracing the edges. It looked no different from the others. But the whisper in his soul insisted. Here. He found a small gap and pried at it with his fingernails. One of them split, a sharp, stinging pain. The board resisted, then gave way with a low groan of old wood.

Beneath it lay a small, hollowed-out space. And nestled inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a book.

It was a thick, leather-bound journal, the cover worn smooth with time. There was no title, no markings of any kind. He unwrapped it, the smell of old leather and preserved paper filling his nostrils. He opened it to the first page. The script was the same as the notes in the shoebox, Abuelo’s spidery scrawl, but this was no collection of fragmented thoughts. This was a chronicle.

The first entry was dated sixty years ago.

“Father passed her to me tonight, under the full eye of the moon. The first molt was a trial, but the pain is a promise of the strength to come. She is a quiet passenger, but I can feel her sleeping. He told me to fear nothing, for she is not a burden, but a bond. She is the Old Blood, the starlight in our veins.”

Leo’s breath hitched. He devoured the pages, his frantic search for answers overriding his revulsion. The journal was a generational confession, a history of the curse… or as his grandfather saw it, the gift.

Abuelo never once used the word ‘parasite’. He referred to the creature with a strange, unsettling reverence. He called her ‘mi querida’—my dearest girl. He called her a ‘symbiote’, a ‘lunar daughter’.

“She asks for so little,” one entry read. “A taste of the world’s fading light, a sip of its essence, and in return, the gifts are manifold. The communion is not a taking, but an exchange. A small life is offered to preserve a greater one, a sacred and necessary transfer.”

The communion. That’s what he called the horrifying act of feeding. Leo looked down at his own hand, at the cut on his nailbed from prying up the floorboard. He had noticed it throbbing a moment ago. Now, when he looked, the skin was already knitting itself together, the angry red line fading to a faint pink scratch. It was healing at an impossible rate. A gift. The word echoed in his mind, seductive and vile.

He read on, learning the terrible, intimate details of his family’s secret. His grandfather wrote of senses sharpening under the moonlight, of an intuitive understanding of the desert’s rhythms, of a vitality that kept him working the harsh land long after other men would have broken. He described the emergence not as a violation, but as a ritual, a sacred baptism in moonlight that strengthened the creature and host alike.

Leo felt a wave of vertigo. His grandfather hadn’t been a victim. He had been a willing participant. A keeper. He had loved this monster. He had cultivated it, nurtured it, and then, with his dying breath, had passed it on to his grandson.

The last entries were written in a much weaker, shakier hand.

“My light is dimming. She is growing restless. I worry for Leo. The city has made him… thin. His blood has forgotten the taste of the moon. He will think this is a curse. He will not understand that she is the only thing that will keep him safe from the Silencers.”

Silencers. A new, chilling term. What were they? Who were they?

He flipped to the very last page, where a final entry was scrawled, barely legible.

“If he survives the first emergence, the whispers will guide him. He must learn. He is not the only one. The Old Blood runs in other veins. He must find the widow in Ocaso. She will teach him what I no longer can. She is our sister. She understands the price, and the power.”

The widow in Ocaso. A name. A place. A thread of hope, or a path to deeper damnation.

Leo closed the journal, the worn leather feeling warm beneath his trembling fingers. The whispers inside him were no longer a chaotic flood of alien cravings. They had coalesced, focusing on this new information with a singular, unified purpose. The creature inside him, his dearest girl, his lunar daughter, was pulling him in a new direction. It wanted him to go. It wanted him to find their sister.