You ran until your lungs burned and your vision blurred. No idea where you were going. Deeper into the dark. Away from the red eyes and the grip and the voice that had asked for a sip like he was asking to borrow your phone charger.

A sound behind you. Not him — something worse.

The air in front of you split open. There was no other word for it. Reality crackled like static electricity, the hairs on your arms standing straight up, and from the tear between one plane of existence and another, something massive and multi-legged and clicking materialized directly in your path.

A spider. The size of a large dog. Its carapace shimmered with something oily, wrong, and its mandibles dripped a substance that hissed where it hit the ground. Eight black eyes fixed on you.

And behind it, phasing through the shadows like ghosts, two more.

Every nightmare you'd ever had about spiders hit you at once.

You didn't scream. You couldn't. The sound caught in your throat like a physical object, choking you, and your body made the decision for you: turn, run, don't think, don't look, GO.

You spun on your heel and sprinted back the way you'd come. Back toward the man with the red eyes and the cold hands. Not because he was safe — he was the furthest thing from safe — but because he was between you and the clicking, phasing horrors, and right now, right this second, the strange pale man in the dark forest was a distant second on the list of things trying to kill you.

He was there. Standing in the gap between two oaks, daggers drawn, tracking your flight with narrowed eyes. You didn't slow down. Didn't look at him. Didn't angle toward him for protection. You simply tore past him — close enough to brush his velvet sleeve — using his body as an obstacle between you and the nightmares materializing from thin air behind you.