Eli used to think that monsters had names.
That was before the Bloom.
Now, the things that moved through streets, crawled through buildings, or hovered just above ground didn't fit into some neat category. They were human once. But the Bloom didn't remake their flesh—it re-wrote them like stories committed to a deranged writer, bending shape and purpose until they were unrecognizable.
But Eli had seen enough now to know there were patterns. Categories, even, though there was no one to confirm them. He had begun to categorize them himself. To himself. Silently. By way of staying sane.
It helped in labelling objects that were feared.
1. The Vessels
These were most common—towering, chunky masses of muscle and bone, often with no perceivable face. Their backs beat like hearts and limbs stumbled like damaged status. You didn't hear them speak. You didn't see them run. But ground shook when they moved.
Some had auto-hood-sized hands. Others had no hands at all—just smooth, battering limbs. Their flesh was rock-hard, blade-proof, and their only identifiable organs were glowing cores buried somewhere deep within their chests.
Eli had even seen one hold up a wrecked automobile on its shoulder like it weighed nothing. Another had stepped on a yelping dog and not even slowed down.
They were likely guardsmen, or shepherds, or mere unthinking brutes. But they were all terrifying.
2. The Lurkers
Thin. Fast. Twitchy
They crawled in darkness, hugging walls and ceilings with insectoidal precision. They were not walkers—their limbs were joined backwards, their fingers long enough to rake the floor even when standing upright.
Worst of all were their eyes. Not a few or several, but dozens, haphazardly distributed across their faces and chests—some winking independently, some never closing.
They stared. Stalked. Watched Eli from rooftops and beneath discarded buses but never attacked.
He didn't know why.
Once, one's eyes met his through a hole in a wall, only to see one's own face in their bright eyes—distinct, human, and fearful.
3. The speakers
Those were the rarest—and most unsettling.
They still had voices.
Not well. Their talk was fragmented, resonating, sometimes a variety of voices speaking all at once. But they were building sentences, phrases—bits of what they'd once been.
Some of them had dressed in clothes, or pieces of clothes, as if they clung to scraps of identification. One had passed by Eli on the street singing nursery rhymes. Another curled up in a gutted diner and whispered names in a voice that had sounded just like his mother's.
They looked most human. But their eyes were flat. Dead. Like mannequins who were hard-pressed to remember what living was.
Eli didn't know what they wanted. He didn't imagine they did either.
4. The Bloomed
They could not be defined.
Always moving, changing, inconsistent. One moment they were small, childlike things with smooth faces and haloes of shining light; the next, they'd expanded out to vast giant shapes with wing-bones, and eyes in their ribs.
They were pet favorites of the Blooms, Eli guessed—the exceptions allowed to mutate endlessly. They refused to obey regulations. They refused to obey gravity, too.
They drifted sometimes. Not on wings, but because their world bent to their fancies.
They terrified Eli the most.
Since whenever he'd look at one, it'd just freeze. and gaze at him. Not in disgust. Not in hunger.
With recognition.
As if it were waiting for him to catch up.
5. The Dead Mutants
And there were dead bodies.
mutants which had fallen inward upon themselves—faulted,evolutions perhaps. Or rebels which had sought to stay the change.
Distorted, incomplete. Tumors that possessed teeth. Joints that were secured by bone cages covered in skin. Others contorted even after dying, as if the Bloom had not yet released them.
Eli sidestepped them when he could. But they did teach him something.
Mutation wasn't guaranteed success.
There were risks involved in becoming other things.
And yet. he still wanted to become.
---
He sat on a broken bench in the shell that had contained a mall, tying an old scarf around his neck. Not because he was cold. But because he needed to feel at ease. Broken glass around him mirrored the ruined majesty of the world in a different light. Flesh vines crawled through mobile stairs. A pulsating egg sac bulged, held aloft, looking like a chandelier.
Eli stared down at his trembling hands.
Ten fingers. There was no scales, no claws. Still human.
And the city detested him because of it.
He took out the note again—the one he had discovered on the dead girl. Read it once more for the hundredth time.
> "We are not immune.
We are anchors. They want us to become.
It calls us.
We are the final key."
The Spire. He had no clue what it was, or where it even was, but if there were answers. they were to be found there.
Eli stood up, ready to begin the journey.