They ran.

  The corridors, slick and veined like the inside of a great stone lung, stretched onward—indifferent. Underfoot, marble smeared into a blur, and behind them came the clatter: tiny feet, too precise, too rhythmically malicious. An automaton’s heartbeat.

  Lucas’s voice cracked, raw from overuse. “Just go.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Emily snapped, not out of anger but instinct, her shield flung up in time to swat away a pair of shears that whistled for his eye like a kiss.

  They were children—small-boned, ill-prepared, temporarily brave. But the castle made no accommodations for childhood. No storybook mercy. Only machinery and old blood beneath new polish.

  Magic fizzled at Lucas’s fingertips—futile, cosmetic. It bought her enough breath to burn through the last of her core: Anti-fatigue. Her lungs ached. Her ribs thudded like a drumline of panic. But she ran.

  They had to run.

  Until the floor dissolved beneath them.

  Then: velvet. Not marble.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Emily’s knees dug into it with a choked grunt. The air had changed—no longer fetid with machine oil and copper, but perfumed, almost decadent, like the interior of a coffin lined in satin.

  “Lucas—” she wheezed.

  “I’m here.” He crawled beside her, skin blotched, trembling. Alive. Just barely.

  Silence.

  And then—

  The dolls bowed.

  All of them. As though some unseen bell had been struck inside their heads. They dipped in unison, servos hissing, before retreating into shadow, deferential and obedient to something not present. Or worse—present but unseen.

  “That’s not better,” Lucas said, though his whisper died half-formed.

  Emily looked up.

  The room had been prepared for dreaming. Gold-threaded wallpaper. A chandelier like a jellyfish suspended in mid-collapse. And the bed—a four-post thing shrouded in translucent fabric, trembling ever so slightly as though breathing.

  On the bed: a silhouette.

  Feminine, perhaps. But wrong.

  The figure sat upright, humming. Not to them, but to something closer. Her hand moved across her own belly in slow, spiraled reverence. Pregnant.

  Emily felt her instincts recoil. Every ancestral part of her urged retreat. Her blood turned metallic.

  Then the humming stopped.

  The figure turned.

  > “My, my,” said the voice, not aloud but within. It sliced through their skulls with the precision of a pianist striking a single dissonant note. “Curious little things, aren’t you?”

  Emily whimpered, helpless. Lucas clawed at his scalp as though the sound were burrowing in.

  The curtain stirred. A hand emerged—long, obscene in its grace, its knuckles too smooth, the fingers too slow. The nails gleamed like surgical implements.

  It waved. Mocking. Or maternal.

  Then Emily moved.

  Not of her own will. As if she were a marionette—pulled by threads stitched under the skin.

  Lucas grabbed her arm. Foolish, lovely boy. He came with her.

  The hand cupped Emily’s cheek. The touch was glacial. Elegant. Curious.

  > “So small,” the voice mused, now impossibly close. “So fragile. Yet here you are. Still standing. Still... soft.”

  From between those fingers, something coalesced: a ring. Black, oily, haloed with the gleam of something that pretended to be precious.

  It slid onto her finger. A violation disguised as a gift.

  Lucas screamed her name. It changed nothing.

  The light inside the room pulsed once—like a dying eye blinking.

  Then: darkness.