The last thing you remember before the pod is rain.

Not the dramatic, cinematic kind — not a storm that rolls in with thunder and portent. Just ordinary rain. The kind that catches you three miles from shelter with no hood and a pack full of dried herbs that are about to become very un-dried herbs. You remember thinking, with the bone-deep resignation of someone who has accepted that the universe treats her as a personal comedy project: Of course it's raining. Of course I didn't bring the oilcloth.

Then the sky split open, and the rain stopped mattering.

You don't remember being taken. There's a gap — a black, velvet nothing between the rain and the pod. No transitional memory. No struggle. Just rain, then darkness, then this.

This is a fleshy, organic cocoon that smells like copper and rot and something astringently chemical, like someone dissolved a pharmacy in a meat grinder. The walls pulse. Not metaphorically — they actually pulse, contracting in slow, rhythmic waves around your body, and the wet, membranous skin of the pod squeezes against your arms, your ribs, your face.

You can't move. Your arms are pinned against your sides. Your boots are buried in something thick and warm that you aggressively choose not to identify. The only thing you can move is your head — barely — enough to turn it a few degrees to the left, where a thin seam in the pod wall lets in a sliver of sickly amber light.

Through that seam, you see the room.

It's not a room. It's a chamber — a cavern of ribbed, organic architecture that looks like the inside of something that swallowed a cathedral. The walls are veined with pulsing blue-white light. The floor is slick, ridged tissue. And in the center of the space, illuminated by a column of amber radiance that drops from the ceiling like a searchlight, stands a creature that your brain flatly refuses to process.

It's tall. Humanoid, roughly, the way a praying mantis is roughly humanoid — the proportions are close enough to be wrong in every way that matters. Its skin is mottled grey-purple, slick and membranous. Its skull is elongated, bulbous, the cranium swelling backward and upward like an overripe fruit. And where a face should be, a nest of thick, muscular tentacles hang from the jaw, writhing slowly, independently, each one tipped with a tiny, seeking mouth.

A mind flayer. You don't know the word yet. You will learn it later, from people who say it the way you'd say cancer or earthquake — a word that carries the weight of civilizational dread.

Right now, all you know is that this thing is holding a person.

The person is human — a woman, young, her armor torn and her eyes wide with the white-rimmed, animal terror of someone who has moved past fear into something more primal. The mind flayer has one hand clamped around her jaw, tilting her head back with clinical precision. With the other hand, it reaches into a shallow basin mounted on a pedestal beside it and lifts out something small, translucent, and wriggling.

A tadpole. It's barely the size of your thumbnail — a pale, larval thing with too many legs and a body that pulses with its own faint, sickly bioluminescence. It squirms between the mind flayer's fingers, reaching, seeking, tiny legs grasping at the air.

The mind flayer brings the tadpole to the woman's face.

She screams. The sound is short, bitten off, choked — not because she stops screaming, but because the mind flayer's tentacles slide across her mouth, muffling the sound with wet, muscular precision. The tadpole is pressed against her eyelid.

You watch it burrow.

It's quick. A twitch, a wet click as the tiny legs find purchase, and then the tadpole is gone — sliding beneath the skin of her eyelid like a needle threading through silk. The woman's body goes rigid. Her eyes roll back. A thin line of blood traces down her cheek from the entry point.

The mind flayer releases her. She crumples. Two other creatures — squat, grey-skinned things with bat-like faces — drag her limp body toward a row of pods along the far wall.

The mind flayer turns. Its tentacles swirl lazily. Its empty, white eyes scan the chamber.

They find you.

It walks toward your pod with the unhurried precision of a surgeon approaching an operating table. You feel the pod's membrane contract around you — tighter, tighter — and for one bright, animal second, your entire being narrows to a single, screaming imperative: GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.

But you can't get out. Your arms are pinned. Your legs are buried. The pod holds you like a fist.

The mind flayer reaches your pod. A tentacle slides through the seam — cool, dry, unexpectedly smooth — and hooks under your jaw, tilting your head back with the same clinical detachment it used on the woman. Your neck is exposed. Your heartbeat hammers in your throat. You can feel the tentacle's tip testing the pulse point beneath your ear, and somewhere in the back of your brain, a distant, flickering part of you thinks: If I'm going to die because of my own incompetence, at least I'm doing it with style.

Which is insane. Which is the kind of thought you have when your brain has been pushed past the red line and is now free-associating in the cognitive equivalent of a car crash.

The mind flayer produces another tadpole. Smaller than the first — barely a centimeter, its pale body almost translucent, its legs clutching eagerly at the air between you and the creature's fingertips.

The tadpole touches your eyelid.

And something inside your skull detonates.

It's not pain. Or it is, but it's pain the way a lightning strike is light — technically accurate but completely failing to convey the scale. It starts at the base of your brain stem and radiates outward in a wave of raw, screaming, kinetic force that turns your vision white and fills your skull with a sound like tearing metal.

The tadpole never burrows. It can't. The moment its tiny legs make contact with your skin, your brain — your stupid, broken, apparently weaponized brain — generates a pulse of chaotic psychic energy that catches the parasite in a vice of pure kinetic force and crushes it into paste.

You feel it die. A tiny, wet pop against your eyelid, and then warm fluid running down your temple.

The psychic backlash hits the mind flayer like a battering ram. The creature staggers backward — tentacles flaring, white eyes widening in something that might be surprise or might be pain — and slams into the pedestal behind it. The basin of tadpoles crashes to the floor. Tiny, wriggling bodies scatter across the slick tissue of the deck.

For one second, the chamber is silent.

Then the world tears itself apart.

The ship — because it is a ship, you realize dimly, some kind of living vessel — lurches. The walls spasm. A deep, resonant groan runs through the floor, through your pod, through your bones. Through the seam in the pod wall, you see a flash of red — enormous, blinding, accompanied by a roar that shakes the fluid in your eyeballs.

Dragons. Githyanki red dragons, though you won't know that either until later. All you know is that something very large and very angry is tearing the ship apart from the outside, and the ship is responding by dying in the most dramatic way possible.

Your pod cracks. The membrane splits — a wet, organic rip — and suddenly your arms are free, your legs are free, and you're tumbling forward onto the deck in a graceless heap of limbs and adrenaline and the dead tadpole's ichor still warm on your face.

You run.

Not strategically. Not with a plan. You run the way a rat runs through a burning building — fast, low, following the air currents, trusting your body's ancient, lizard-brain conviction that forward is better than backward. The corridor walls spasm and buckle around you. Organic panels split open, venting jets of pressurized steam and something that smells like bile. The floor tilts. You stumble. Something crashes behind you — a structural support, a wall, a mind flayer, you don't look back to check.

A hull breach opens ahead of you — a ragged, burning hole in the ship's side, framed by torn organic tissue and the blinding white sky beyond. Through it, you see trees. Green. Far below.

Very far below.

You don't stop to calculate. You don't stop to think. A desperate pulse of kinetic energy erupts from your palms — uncontrolled, unpracticed, nothing but raw survival instinct made manifest — and creates a shimmering, unstable cushion of compressed air between you and the ground as you throw yourself through the breach.

The wind hits you. The sky swallows you. The trees rush upward.

The kinetic cushion shatters on impact with the forest canopy. Branches crack, leaves tear, something gouges your shoulder, your hip, your cheek. The last thing you feel is the damp forest floor slamming into your back with a force that drives every molecule of air from your lungs.

Then, mercifully: nothing.

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