The forest hums with latent energy. At the center stands an oak as wide as a house, twisted and gnarled, its bark shivering with faint emerald light beneath the dying sun. A rent, black as space, rips two feet down the trunk, and space warps within it, like it were alive, breathing.

Faint, pulsing radiance shines out through the rent, a tenuous thread of possibility in a world run out of wonders. The visitor stays there for quite some time, then hunch through.

When s/he emerges, the air strikes them like a shockwave. The world outside is now raw and jagged, a place where geometry has come unraveled. Trees are titanic constructs of twisted root-masses and coursing, glowing filaments, their tops a neural web which crackles with light. The ground beneath is a juddering lattice of semi-organic matter, pulsating faintly with a rhythm which seems maddeningly close to a heartbeat. Above them all, the sky is a fractured purple roof, endless in its extent but rent here and there with cracks of brilliant white light.

It is shapes that move, at first vague, distant, hazy pieces of background-but then one sweeps up to break apart. There is something deeply alien to its structure: transparent overlays of its being reveal events and thoughts that flash faster than a nervous heartbeat; its eyes are firmament stars blazing in fictitious orbits.

The visitor’s throat constricts. 

The oak is a portal, but it is no sanctuary. It is a mirror. What s/he sees here is what their world may be.

For a moment, translucent layers flicker with images: collapsing spires, blackened forests, and desolate wastes.

With savage force, the ground buckles beneath them, and the visitor is flung backward. Landing with a thud on the forest floor, s/he gasps for air. The oak rises before him, unchanged—the jagged opening now sealed, as if it had never existed.

The forest is silent again.

The air ripples with their will. Walls stretch and twist like living things, bending to accommodate their desires. They move down the corridor, not walking but commanding the space to pull them forward. The floor itself curves beneath them, shifting like sand under invisible winds.

Every surface reflects not what is, but what they demand it to be. Mirrors shimmer, showing alternate versions of this moment: the corridor as a tunnel of stars, as a field of unblinking eyes, as a stream of liquid fire. They smile, and the images flicker away, obedient to their unspoken command.

Around them, machines whisper secrets in a language only they understand. Cogs spin backward; screens display futures not yet written. The air alive with their power hums in response to the slightest gesture.

A locked door comes into view ahead. They tilt their head, and the door unthreads as silk threads, unraveling into nothingness. The room beyond is a void: wide, shifting. Shapes emerge, dissolve—glass mountains, ink oceans, forests of bone. 

They step forward, and reality again readjusts itself. The void solidifies into a throne room; its walls shimmer with outlined symbols pulsing like living veins. The throne itself is not one form but a dozen, flickering between shapes: crystal, flame, shadow, light. They sit, and the throne becomes gold. 

Figures emerge from the edges of the room. Shadows wrapped in flesh, their faces obscured by masks of shifting patterns. These are the others, the ones that watch and whisper, following. They kneel, voices rising in a chorus of devotion: 

“You shape the world. You hold the strings. We are but echoes of your will.”

They raise a hand, and the room bends to their mood. The walls stretch outward, creating windows that show infinite possibilities: cities frozen in time, skies where moons collide, forests that breathe like living beings. With a flick of their wrist, they collapse it all into a single perfect image—a golden horizon under a blood-red sun.

But something resists. A crack splits the floor beneath their feet, and from it rises a voice—not soft, not melodic, but jagged and raw.

“Even power has its limits,” it snarls.

They laugh, the sound twisting the air into spirals. “Not for me,” they reply. The crack seals itself, the rebellious voice silenced.

Reality quivers, waiting for their next command. They lean back on the golden throne, their gaze fixed on the shifting horizon.

“Let it begin again,” they say, and the world obeys.

The reactor’s ruins, time begins to misbehave. Watches stutter, ticking backward, then forward again. The floodlights buzz, dim, and flicker as if drained of power. A visitor withdraws a probe. Inside the sample tube, the fragment pulses softly.

They retreat to the safety of the observation post, but the sample does not remain inert. It spreads across the containment chamber, thin filaments etching patterns into the glass, forming shapes that resemble letters, numbers, symbols—but in no language anyone recognizes. 

The organism reflects their thoughts, their memories, weaving them into its infinite sprawl. It isn’t just alive. It knows. It understands.

Days pass. The fungus reaches the core. The radiation levels plummet. The earth beneath the reactor grows warm, like a fever breaking. But strange things begin to happen. 

Some begin to hear whispers. Not in their ears, but in their bones, as though the fungus is speaking through them. It doesn’t use words but something older, something primal. A vibration, a hum of knowing. It reveals secrets—of time, of decay, of the deep machinery of the universe. 

The fungus has reached the observation post. It blooms across the equipment, delicate and spindly, forming towers that resemble cathedrals. The whispers grow louder, and the air itself seems to pulse with a vast, unseen heartbeat.

The visitors feel themselves changing. Their skin tingles; their thoughts blur and stretch. Time bends around them. They see themselves as they were, as they are, as they could be—splintered timelines converging into one. The whispers grow into a song, incomprehensible but beautiful, and they realize, too late, that they cannot leave.

The fungus sprawls in fractal tendrils, black as void, curling toward the fractured heart of Reactor Four. It pulses faintly, almost imperceptibly, as though breathing in the radiation that has poisoned this land. Here, where humans once trembled at the invisible death in the air, the organism thrives with an alien hunger.

Some visitors hover at the edge of the anomaly, their containment suits shimmering under pale floodlights. Instruments scream with data they don’t yet understand. The fungus consumes gamma radiation, metabolizing destruction into growth. A Geiger counter clicks faster when pointed toward its core, not from increased danger, but because the air itself seems to bleed silence. It is absorbing—pulling energy inward, devouring it like a black hole consumes light.

They suspect it began as a mutation, some desperate adaptation of life in this graveyard of mistakes. But now it grows beyond anything earthly. Beneath its surface, microscopic tunnels form an intricate labyrinth, glowing faintly with something that isn’t light. Something far older, far deeper.

One visitor steps closer, the air around the fungus tugging faintly at the protective suit, as if the organism senses the warmth of life. They hold a sample probe, trembling slightly, as they press it into the edge of the growth. The fungus reacts. Not with hostility, but curiosity. A ripple cascades outward, a wave of shadows folding and unfolding, as if the organism is…listening.