Chapter 8: The Jaws Beneath the Bliss

He took a step. The floor of his silent library was cool and solid beneath his feet. The Siren’s hand, a construct of pure, benevolent light, reached for him, promising an end to the friction of existence. Eric was there, whole and smiling, a silent testament to this place’s power to heal, to rewrite the broken code of the past. It was everything he had ever wanted. A world without the need for apologies, a connection that required no words. It was perfect.

And that was the bug.

It was too perfect.

A single, discordant thought, born from the deepest, most cynical part of his soul, pierced the perfect harmony. A line of malicious code that the system couldn't purge. The image of the peaceful, forgiving Eric in his mental paradise flickered. And beneath it, for a split second, was the memory of the other Eric. The real memory. The NPC at the stall, his face a mask of placid servitude, which had shattered to reveal a soul trapped in a silent, looping scream of pure agony before dissolving into a shower of corrupted pixels.

That memory was an objective fact. A piece of the real world he had carried in with him. It was jagged and ugly and it did not belong in this serene, beautiful library. The Siren’s song tried to smooth it over, to scrub it clean, but the memory was a shard of glass. The harder the music pushed, the deeper the shard cut.

Contradiction error. System integrity compromised.

The silent, perfect music in his head stuttered. A sour note, thin and high-pitched, sliced through the bliss. And beneath it, another sound began to surface. A low, rhythmic, grinding noise. It was wet and heavy, like a great millstone chewing on something soft and fibrous.

The serene library around him flickered violently, like a failing monitor. The cool, clean air was suddenly tainted by a familiar, coppery smell. The metallic sweetness of fresh blood. The sickly, chemical perfume of the drink June had swallowed.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to hold onto the paradise, but it was dissolving. The lie was too fragile to contain the brutal truth of what he had witnessed. He opened his eyes and forced himself to look past the beautiful illusion. He forced himself to debug the program.

The Siren of the Wires still shimmered on her altar, a beautiful mermaid of light and code. But the light was changing. The brilliant, divine white of her LED eyes was now stained with a deep, pulsing crimson. The gentle magenta glow that illuminated the stage was no longer a stage light; it was an uplight, reflecting a lurid, bloody color from something below.

The grinding sound grew louder. Crr-unch. Shl-urp. Crr-unch. It was the sound of a slaughterhouse.

The beautiful illusion peeled back like skin from a wound, revealing the cosmic horror reality festering beneath.

The stage was not a stage. The elegant, dark platform was a colossal, chitinous tongue, slick with gore and twitching with an alien life of its own. The towering speaker stacks on either side were not speakers; they were rows of immense, interlocking teeth, each the size of a car, stained and scarred. They moved with a slow, grinding motion, meshing together with terrifying power. The entire structure was a mouth. A colossal, world-eating maw, and they were standing on the precipice.

The Siren, the beautiful mermaid of light, was not a goddess. She was a lure. A shimmering, hypnotic anglerfish light, a beautiful lie designed to draw the desperate and the broken into the grinding jaws of the true creature. She was just the pretty face of a monstrous, insatiable engine of consumption.

Michael’s gaze snapped to the people at the front, the ones who had been the first to reach the altar. They were still there, swaying in ecstasy. But they weren't dancing.

They were being consumed.

The colossal tongue would occasionally lash out, snatching a dozen swaying figures and dragging them back towards the grinding teeth. Their bodies were pulled apart like dolls, limbs torn from sockets, torsos shredded. But they did not scream. Their faces, even as they were dismembered, were frozen in masks of pure, beatific bliss. The Siren’s song was the last thing they knew, a perfect anesthetic administered at the moment of their annihilation. They died happy. They died worshiping the thing that ate them.

And the blood… oh god, the blood.

What he had thought were deep red stage lights was a river. A chasm had opened at the foot of the maw, and into it poured a torrent of blood and viscera, the pulped remains of thousands of consumed souls. It glowed with a sickening, internal light, a bio-luminescent tide of death that flowed away into the darkness behind the altar. This wasn't a rave; it was an abattoir. A processing plant for despair.

The sheer, mind-breaking horror of it all slammed into Michael with the force of a physical blow. The paradise was a lie. The music was a trap. The god was a predator. They weren’t attendees at a festival; they were cattle in a feedlot, fattened on a bespoke cocktail of hope and bliss before being led to the slaughter. The entire dimension, the moonless sky, the endless field, it was all just a digital Venus flytrap, and they had crawled right inside.

Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. It was a primal, animal terror that completely eclipsed the manufactured bliss of the song. He had to run. He had to get out.

But he wasn't alone.

He turned, his movements frantic, and looked for June. She was right beside him, only a few feet from the edge of the blood-filled chasm. She was taking another step forward, her arms outstretched towards the beautiful, lying Siren, her face a perfect portrait of ecstatic surrender. The grinding of bone and the tearing of flesh was happening ten yards in front of her, but she couldn't see it. She couldn't hear it. All she knew was the flawless high, the song in her soul that was drowning out the screams of the dying.

He could run. He could try to find a way back, to claw his way out of this nightmare. But to do so would be to leave her here, another smiling victim to be torn apart and rendered into the glowing river of blood. He remembered the old, silvery scars on her arms, the painful jewelry of a life spent fighting a war inside her own head. She had come here seeking a final peace, and this place was about to give it to her in the most monstrous way imaginable.

The memory of Eric, the real one, the one he had failed, flashed in his mind. “Later, man. I gotta fix this bug.” He hadn't helped his friend then. He had turned away.

He couldn't do it again.

The choice was instantaneous. His own survival was secondary. He had to break the illusion for her, too. He had to make her see. He lunged, grabbing the thin fabric of her shirt, his knuckles brushing against the raw, bloody sigil on her hip.

He had to pull her back from the jaws of heaven.