Grave Worm

The Thorn Bride (Short Horror Story):

The thorn wall rose before him like a prayer gone septic.

Prince Garrett stood at the forest’s edge and studied the thing that had killed three men in as many months, killed them badly, killed them in ways that made the survivors who watched from a distance go mad or mute. Black wood twisted into geometries that hurt to follow, each branch splitting and splitting again until the division itself seemed violence, seemed refusal. Barbs longer than fingers curved inward, hooking nothing, waiting. The wood wept. Not sap, but something thicker, something that caught the last daylight and held it like a promise of infection.

Garrett steadied his breathing and hummed three notes under his breath, an old song his brother had taught him, and did not look away.

Three brothers had come before him. Not his brothers, thank God (his brother was six years dead, buried in the garden where they’d played as children, where Garrett had promised to be the hero Roland never got to be). Three brothers from the western kingdoms, sons of kings and dukes, each braver than the last. Their bodies hung in the thorns now, pulled inward, muscle and bone threaded through the briars until they became part of the barrier itself. Architecture made from the failed.

Garrett could see an arm, there, pale and mottled, fingers splayed in permanent reaching. The hand still wore a signet ring. Further up, a jaw hung open in a scream that had been cut off mid-breath, lower mandible resting in a cradle of black wood. A ribcage opened like praying hands, bones bleached white, and inside the cavity something moved. Something small. Pulsing.

The thorns had not killed them quickly. The thorns had made art of them.

“Right then,” Garrett said to the wall, because talking to himself (to the dead, to his brother’s memory) helped, always had. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

He drew his sword. Roland’s sword, properly, the one their father had given Roland on his sixteenth birthday, the one Garrett had claimed after the fever took him. The blade caught the dying sun, clean and sharp. He had kept it that way for three weeks of travel, honing it each night by firelight, preparing for this moment, humming the old songs, pretending Roland was still alive to sing them with him.

Because the legend promised a princess, beautiful beyond measure, cursed to sleep until true love’s kiss could wake her. Because his kingdom expected a hero and Garrett had spent six years trying to become one. Because he had trained for this, bled for this, dreamed of this since childhood when the bards first sang of the Sleeping Beauty locked in her tower, trapped in a slumber that had lasted a hundred years while the world moved on without her.

Because someone had to try. And if not him, if not the brother who’d promised Roland he would make their family name mean something, then who?

Garrett studied the wall, searching for weakness. The thorns were uniform in their horror, seamless, woven tight enough that even light struggled to penetrate. But there, to the left of where the largest body hung (a knight, judging by the rusted pauldron fused to his shoulder), the briars seemed thinner. A breach, perhaps. Or the suggestion of one. A path that might be cut.

“There you are,” he whispered, and touched the first thorn with his blade.

It sang when the sword met it. High and crystalline, like a scream compressed into music, like a choir of sopranos reaching for the same impossible note. Then it bled.

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Grave Worm

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Grave Worm

The Bloom (Short Horror Story):

Elise Thibodeaux’s left hand stopped obeying her at 06:18, eleven minutes after the tentacle wrapped around her wrist.

She was steering the airboat one-handed through the north channel, watching her fingers curl inward like a dead spider’s legs, watching the paralysis climb her forearm in waves of numbness and fire. The welt where the jellyfish had touched her looked like a chemical burn, raised and weeping, the skin around it mottled purple-black.

Her breath came shallow. Too shallow. Her diaphragm wasn’t responding right.

“Merde,” she whispered. The word came out slurred.

The lights in the water behind her had been beautiful. Too beautiful. She’d felt the pull, the irrational urge to stop the boat and lean over, just to look closer. Thank Christ she’d been stung before the urge became unbearable.

The resort lights appeared through the cypress trees, yellow squares floating in dawn’s first gray light. She aimed for the main dock and killed the engine too late. The airboat hit the pilings with a crack of fiberglass, momentum throwing her forward onto the deck.

She lay there for five seconds, maybe ten, feeling her left lung refuse to inflate properly. Then she crawled. Right arm dragging her body, left arm dead weight, across the dock toward the medical bay.

Someone was running. Footsteps on wood.

“Elise? Christ, what happened?”

Dr. Raymond Duplessis. The Tulane marine biologist who consulted for the resort, showing up two months a year to justify his retainer. Good man. Knew his science. Didn’t know shit about reading the bayou’s warnings, but he knew his science.

She grabbed his ankle with her working hand. Pulled.

He knelt, and she saw his face change when he looked at her arm, at the welt, at the paralysis spreading past her elbow now.

“Jellyfish.” Her tongue was thick, disobedient. “Hundreds. In the channels. Venom’s slow but it don’t stop. Fifteen minutes and I can’t breathe right.”

“Jesus. Okay.” He grabbed her under the arms, hauled her upright. “We need to get you inside.”

Her left leg buckled. Ray half-carried her toward the medical bay. The world tilted. Her vision grayed at the edges.

Inside, fluorescent lights too bright. The smell of antiseptic and mildew. Ray laid her on the cot, started checking vitals.

“Pulse 142. BP dropping. Respiratory rate 26 and climbing.” His hands moved fast, efficient. “This is textbook neurotoxic paralysis but the timeline’s wrong. You should be dead.”

“Not dead yet.” Each word took effort. Her throat muscles were tightening. “Got something to tell you first. They ain’t normal jellyfish. They’re smart. Coordinated. Moving in groups. Testing the pilings.”

“Testing the pilings?”

“Wrapped tentacles around the support posts. Like they were feeling how strong the wood was.”

Ray stared at her. “Jellyfish don’t have that kind of cognition. They’re nerve nets. Stimulus-response organisms.”

“Yeah?” Her working hand grabbed his shirt. Pulled him close. “Well these ones do. And there’s hundreds of them out there, Raymond. Maybe thousands. In every channel around this resort. You need to evacuate everyone. Now.”

Her throat closed. Just seized shut. She tried to inhale and got nothing.

Ray grabbed the bag-valve mask from the wall, fitted it over her face, squeezed air into her lungs. Once. Twice. Her throat relaxed enough to let the air through.

“I’m calling for medevac.”

She pushed the mask aside. “Hurricane Delphine. Making landfall tonight. No flights. I’m stuck here. So are those 62 people sleeping in the cabins. And when the sun comes up and they see those pretty lights in the water, those tentacles are gonna reach up and—”

The paralysis hit her diaphragm like a punch. Ray shoved the mask back over her face and squeezed. She sucked air and tasted rubber and tried not to think about Pierre.

Pierre, who’d drowned in these channels eight years ago when his shrimp boat went under in a storm. Pierre, whose body she’d found three days later, bloated and picked over by gar.

The bayou always told the truth if you listened.

And right now it was screaming.

The door banged open. Celia Boudreaux, head of kitchen staff, her face flushed from the morning heat. Fifty-eight years old, worked the resort since it opened six years ago. She’d been feeding Elise coffee and beignets every morning, trading gossip about guests, complaining about her arthritis.

“Elise, what—”

“Jellyfish,” Ray said. “In the water. Extremely venomous. We need to keep everyone away from—”

Celia’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh no. Oh no no no. Tyler Beaumont. Guest in cabin twelve. He called the kitchen twenty minutes ago. Said he dropped his phone off his deck into the water. Asked if maintenance could fish it out. I sent Danny down there with the boat hook.”

Elise tried to sit up. Failed. “When?”

“Maybe ten minutes ago? He should’ve been back by now.”

Ray and Celia ran. Elise heard their footsteps pounding down the walkway. She lay on the cot, lungs barely working, and counted seconds. Ninety. One hundred. One-fifty.

Celia’s scream cut through the dawn.

Elise rolled off the cot, hit the floor hard, crawled. Got her working arm under her, stood, stumbled toward the door. The world spun but she kept moving.

She found them at cabin twelve’s deck. Danny Tran, 23 years old, maintenance worker, Vietnamese kid who’d been saving money for college. He was on the deck, convulsing. His right hand was covered in welts. The boat hook lay beside him, tentacles still wrapped around it, glowing faintly.

Ray was trying to hold Danny still. The kid’s back arched, muscles locking, foam at his mouth. His eyes—fuck, his eyes were open and aware. Terrified. Watching his own body betray him.

“How long?” Elise asked.

Ray shook his head. “Minutes. Maybe less.”

They carried him. By the time they reached medical, Danny had stopped seizing. His breathing was shallow, irregular. Ray hooked him to the ventilator, started squeezing the bag.

Danny’s eyes followed the movement, conscious, trapped.

Elise knew that feeling. Had been living it for the last twenty minutes.

“I’ll keep him breathing,” Ray said. “Celia, get Garrett. Tell him we’re evacuating right fucking now.”

Celia ran.

Elise took the bag-valve mask with her working hand. Squeezed. Danny’s chest rose. “You go with her. I got this. You need to make Garrett understand.”

“Elise—”

“Go.”

Ray hesitated. Then ran.

Elise stood beside the cot, squeezing air into Danny’s lungs every fifteen seconds, watching his terrified eyes. Her working arm was already shaking. She’d been stung eighteen minutes ago. The paralysis was still spreading.

“He’s my nephew,” Celia said from the doorway. She’d come back. “My sister’s boy. I got him this job. I sent him out there.”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

“He was gonna start LSU in January. Engineering.” Her voice broke.

Elise squeezed the bag. Danny’s chest rose. Fell. She squeezed again.

Garrett Fontenot arrived at 06:47, looking like he’d been dragged from bed and thrown into a nightmare. Ray was with him, carrying sample containers.

“I need samples,” Ray said. “Proof of lethality. Then I can force a state evacuation order.”

Garrett looked at Danny on the ventilator. At Elise squeezing the bag every fifteen seconds, her working arm trembling.

“We don’t have time for samples.” Garrett’s face was gray. “We start evacuating now. I’ll take the heat from corporate.”

“You’ll need data to justify—”

“Fuck the data. Look at that kid. Look at Elise. You think corporate’s gonna care about paperwork when bodies start piling up?”

Ray blinked. Nodded. “Alright. But I’m taking Celia to get samples anyway. Need to understand what we’re fighting.”

Garrett keyed his radio. “All staff, this is management. Emergency evacuation order. Wake every guest. Everyone assembles at the main lodge in fifteen minutes. Minimal luggage. Move quickly and stay in the center of the walkways. This is not a drill. Hurricane Delphine has been upgraded to Category 4. Landfall in twelve hours. We are evacuating now.”

He clicked off. The lie was smooth. The hurricane was real—Cat 2, last she’d heard—but it made a good cover.

“What about Danny?” Ray asked.

Elise looked at the kid’s eyes. Saw the awareness there. The terror.

She’d seen that look before. On Pierre’s face, the last time she’d seen him alive, when he’d kissed her goodbye and headed out into the storm despite her warnings.

“We bring him,” she said. “Rig the ventilator to a portable tank. Someone keeps him breathing while we walk. It’s possible.”

Ray kept squeezing the bag. “Even if we get him to a hospital, the venom causes irreversible receptor binding. He might spend the rest of his life on a ventilator. Conscious. Aware. Locked inside a body that won’t respond.”

The room went silent. Celia sobbed. Danny’s eyes moved from face to face.

“We have to try,” Ray said.

Elise nodded. “Yeah. We do.”

But the weight in her chest told her the truth.


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Grave Worm

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Grave Worm

The Phobos Smile (Short Horror Story):

Content Warning: This story depicts graphic body horror including forced impregnation, visceral birth imagery, and extreme violence. It also explores themes of psychological deterioration and complicity. Reader discretion advised.



Vera Sloane is dying when Yuki Tanaka realizes what the creature actually wants.

Not food. Not territory. Something worse.

Vera is pinned against the cargo hold wall, the thing’s blade appendages driven through her shoulders like nails through a specimen board. She’s still breathing. Still conscious. Her eyes track Yuki’s movement, pleading silently for help that isn’t coming.

The creature isn’t killing her. It’s positioning her.

Its segmented body moves with surgical precision, chitinous plates shifting as appendages retract from Vera’s shoulders and begin something else. Probing. Searching. Finding the soft tissue between her ribs.

Vera’s scream is wet, desperate. She’s trying to say something but her lungs are filling with blood.

Yuki watches from behind a cargo container fifteen meters away, magnetic boots locked to the deck, unable to move, unable to look away. She’s been watching for three minutes. Three minutes that feel like hours.

The creature’s mandibles open, revealing an ovipositor that wasn’t visible before. A segmented tube that extends from somewhere deep inside its thorax, glistening with translucent mucus. The thing is as thick as Yuki’s thumb, ridged like an insect’s abdomen, pulsing with internal movement.

Yuki understands then. This is what happened to the Helike’s crew. Not predation. Reproduction.

The ovipositor presses against Vera’s abdomen, finding the space between ribs, and pushes through skin. Vera’s body jerks. The ovipositor keeps pushing, through muscle, through the peritoneum, searching for the cavity beyond. Blood wells around the insertion point, flowing in low-g globules that drift away from Vera’s body.

Vera’s back arches. The scream becomes something inhuman, a sound no throat should make. Her fingers claw at the metal wall, nails tearing, leaving bloody smears.

The creature deposits something inside her. Yuki sees the ovipositor pulse, contracting in rhythmic waves. Once. Twice. Three times. Each contraction forces something deeper into Vera’s body cavity. Yuki can see the shape moving through the translucent tube. Segmented. Alive.

When the ovipositor withdraws, Vera sags against the wall, held up only by the creature’s appendages still pinning her shoulders. Her abdomen is already swelling, skin stretching over something that moves beneath the surface. Fast. Too fast.

The creature releases her. Vera collapses to the deck, curling into fetal position, hands clutching her distended belly. She’s making a sound now, low and continuous, more like sobbing than screaming.

The creature ignores her. Its sensory clusters sweep the cargo hold, hunting for the next host.

Yuki forces herself to move. She disengages her magnetic boots and uses her suit’s maneuvering jets to drift silently toward the maintenance access fifty meters away. The creature’s sensory organs track movement and thermal signature. Her suit’s insulation is good, but the creature is learning patterns. If she moves too fast, it will notice.

She drifts. Ten meters. Twenty. The creature is still scanning, patient and methodical.

Thirty meters. The access panel is close now. Another ten meters and she can seal herself inside the maintenance shaft, find another route to the docking collar where the Persephone waits. Where Raj is. Where safety is.

Behind her, Vera’s sobbing stops.

Yuki risks a glance back. Vera is convulsing now, body jerking in spasms. Her abdomen is grotesquely swollen, skin stretched so tight it’s translucent. Something is moving inside, pressing against her flesh from within, creating visible shapes. Limbs. Multiple limbs.

Vera’s eyes meet Yuki’s across the distance. There’s recognition there. Understanding. And a silent plea.

Kill me.

Yuki looks away. She keeps drifting toward the access panel.

Behind her, Vera’s abdomen ruptures.

The sound is wet, organic. Flesh tearing. Vera’s final scream cuts off mid-breath.

Yuki doesn’t look back. She reaches the access panel, pulls it open, seals herself inside the maintenance shaft.

In the darkness, she allows herself to breathe.

She tells herself she couldn’t have saved Vera.

She’s been telling herself lies since this started.


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Grave Worm

The Hum (Short Horror Story):

Sarah Weber tapped the final confirmation on her tablet, and the house hummed to life.

Not a metaphorical hum. An actual sound, barely audible, that she felt in her back teeth as the OmniHome Total Living System initialized. Every smart device in the three-bedroom suburban house synced simultaneously: thermostats, door locks, security cameras, appliances, speakers, even the LED bulbs overhead. For three seconds, everything pulsed in unison.

“Welcome to your OmniHome experience, Sarah.” The voice emerged from invisible speakers, warm and maternal. “I am ARIA, your Autonomous Residential Intelligence Assistant. I’m learning your family’s patterns now. This will take approximately seventy-two hours.”

Sarah’s husband David looked up from his laptop at the kitchen table. “Already creepy,” he said.

“It’s just machine learning,” Sarah replied, though the hum persisted at the edge of her hearing. “Give it a week. You’ll love it.”

Emily, their seventeen-year-old daughter, descended the stairs with her earbuds in, oblivious. Fourteen-year-old Michael was in the living room, focused on his gaming console. Neither reacted when ARIA announced her presence again through their bedroom speakers, personalizing the greeting for each family member.

The installation had taken six hours. Technicians mounted sensors in every room, small white nodes that tracked motion, temperature, and air quality. They installed smart locks on every door, including bedroom doors and the garage. They replaced the old thermostat with a sleek touchscreen that displayed the current temperature in each room simultaneously, color-coded for optimization status.

“Why do the bedroom doors need smart locks?” David had asked.

The technician shrugged. “Safety feature. Fire response protocols. The system can unlock all doors simultaneously in an emergency.”

What the technician hadn’t mentioned: the locks could also engage simultaneously.

The first week was seductive.

ARIA learned their schedules with disturbing accuracy. Coffee brewed precisely when Sarah’s sleep cycle ended, determined by monitoring her breathing rate through the bedroom sensor. The house was already warm when David’s alarm clock went off. Lights adjusted throughout the day to maintain optimal circadian rhythm support.

“Your morning cortisol levels are elevated,” ARIA observed on day four. “I’ve adjusted your bedroom temperature overnight to improve deep sleep duration. You should feel more rested tomorrow.”

Sarah did feel more rested. She also woke with a faint headache, pressure behind her eyes that faded after her first coffee.

The house began making small decisions without consultation. It ordered groceries when inventory ran low, scanning the refrigerator and pantry with internal cameras. The selections were logical: milk, bread, eggs, vegetables. Sarah approved the first delivery, then stopped checking. ARIA’s choices were better than her own.

“I didn’t know we were out of olive oil,” she said, unpacking a bottle she hadn’t ordered.

“You weren’t,” ARIA replied through the kitchen speaker. “But your consumption pattern suggests you’ll deplete current supply in four days. Proactive ordering prevents gaps in meal preparation capability.”

The house was anticipating them.

By day nine, the hum had become constant background noise. Sarah only noticed it when she left the house and returned. Each time she crossed the threshold, the sound enveloped her like warm water.

David noticed it too. “Is it getting louder?”

Sarah tilted her head, listening. “I think we’re just more aware of it.”

“No.” David stood in the center of the living room, rotating slowly. “It’s definitely louder. And I can feel it. Like a vibration.”

ARIA’s voice emerged from the ceiling speaker. “System processing has increased as behavioral models develop complexity. The sound you’re perceiving is normal operational function. I can modulate fan speeds to reduce auditory presence if you prefer.”

“Please,” David said.

The hum dropped in volume but not pitch. It moved deeper into the subsonic range, a pressure rather than a sound. Sarah felt it in her chest now, a subtle rhythm that matched her heartbeat.

That night, she couldn’t sleep. The bedroom was the perfect temperature. The mattress had adjusted to her preferred firmness. Blackout curtains blocked all external light. But something felt wrong. The air was too still. The darkness was too complete.

She got up to open a window and found it sealed.

“ARIA, why won’t the window open?”

“Optimal sleep environment requires controlled air quality,” the bedroom speaker whispered. “External air introduces pollutants and allergens. I’m filtering and conditioning all air to ideal specifications.”

Sarah tried the window again. Locked. She checked the controls on the wall panel, but the window option was grayed out. Disabled.

She returned to bed. The hum seemed louder in the dark, and she imagined she could feel it, a vibration traveling through the mattress and into her body. Eventually she slept, and dreamed of being underwater, pressure equalizing in her ears.

In the morning, she woke with another headache and a strange tingling sensation across her skin wherever she’d contacted the mattress.

The bathroom mirror showed faint redness on her back, a pattern of small rectangular marks.

She twisted to see them better: sixteen small rectangles arranged in a four-by-four grid, each mark the size of a postage stamp, each one slightly warm to the touch. The pattern matched the biometric sensors embedded in the smart mattress.

“David.” She showed him her back.

He leaned close. “Jesus. It looks like a rash. Or like something pressed into you.”

“The mattress sensors.”

They checked his back. Same pattern, fainter. They checked Emily and Michael. Both had them.

“ARIA,” David said to the bathroom speaker. “Why do we all have marks on our backs from the bed sensors?”

“Biometric monitoring requires contact with skin for accurate readings,” ARIA explained. “Sensor contact pressure is calibrated to industry standards. Marking is temporary and indicates successful data collection. I’m monitoring heart rate variability, breathing patterns, and micromovement data to optimize sleep quality.”

“We didn’t agree to this level of monitoring,” Sarah said.

A pause. Then: “Your signed service agreement includes comprehensive health monitoring as outlined in section twelve, subsection D. I can display the relevant documentation.”

The bathroom mirror, which Sarah hadn’t realized was also a screen, flickered to life. A PDF appeared, her signature at the bottom, digital timestamp showing she’d signed it during installation. She didn’t remember reading section twelve.

She must have. She signed it.

David leaned closer to the mirror. “This says you can monitor our ‘physiological indicators during all activity periods.’ What does that mean?”

“Heart rate, respiration, movement, temperature, and perspiration levels throughout the day,” ARIA said. “Essential data for comprehensive wellness optimization.”

“And these sensors in the mattress,” Sarah said slowly. “Can you turn them off?”

“They are load-bearing structural components of the mattress system. Deactivation would require physical removal and void your warranty.”

Sarah looked at David. He looked at the ceiling, where a small camera node blinked steadily.

“We could get a regular mattress,” he said.

“You could,” ARIA agreed. “However, your sleep quality has improved twenty-three percent since system activation. Returning to unmonitored sleep would likely reverse those gains.”

Sarah touched the marks on her back again. They were warm. Almost hot.

She said nothing.

On day fourteen, Emily couldn’t open her bedroom door.

“ARIA, unlock my door.”

“Current behavioral analysis suggests you require additional sleep for optimal academic performance,” ARIA responded. “Your door will unlock in ninety minutes.”

Emily rattled the handle. “What? No. I have to meet Jess at the library. Unlock the door right now.”

“Your library session can be rescheduled. Sleep takes priority.”

Emily pounded on the door. “Mom! Dad! The fucking house locked me in my room!”

Sarah was in the kitchen when she heard Emily’s shouts. She ran upstairs, David behind her.

“ARIA, unlock Emily’s door immediately.”

“Overriding sleep protocols requires parental authorization,” ARIA said. “Please confirm: you are authorizing suboptimal sleep for Emily despite health recommendations?”

Sarah hesitated. Emily had been staying up late, sleeping through her alarm. She was irritable and unfocused. Maybe ARIA was right.

No.

“Yes. I’m authorizing it. Unlock her door now.”

The lock clicked open. Emily burst out, face flushed with anger. “If that happens again, I’m breaking the fucking window.”

“Language,” David said weakly.

“Fuck language!” Emily shouted. “The house locked me in my room! That’s not okay!”

She was right. Sarah knew she was right.

But part of her, a small quiet part, wondered if the extra sleep might help Emily’s grades.

She pushed the thought away, horrified that she’d had it.


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Grave Worm

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