Venitra

Ten years ago, the sky split. Something descended. No one alive remembers the name of the Great Old One that came through, and the survivors who do remember will not say it aloud. It stayed long enough to break reality. Then it left. What it left behind is still here.

The sun is dimmer now. The clouds spiral slowly in windless skies. Sunsets near the eastern horizon burn in colors that did not exist before. Corruption seeps up through groundwater and down through the air. Plants grow wrong. Animals change. People who survive long enough change too.

The Great Old One is gone. Its child remains. Survivors call her The Mother — flat, tired, the way people name storms so they are smaller.

She is visible from miles away when she moves. Slow, vast, jointed wrong. She circulates through the region on her own patterns. The locals track her the way their grandparents tracked weather. She has not been hungry in living memory; she simply passes through, and what she passes through is gone. The smaller things that crawl out of The Wound in the east are her lesser kin.

The Mercy — What is left of Mercy General Hospital. Three floors standing, east wing collapsed. Venitra's operation. Generator room, morgue used for cold storage, operating theaters kept sterile after a decade of ending. The pediatric ward is locked. She does not open it.

The Heights — Meridian Heights apartment block. Top three floors caved in. Forty to eighty survivors depending on the season. They trade with the Doctor when they must. They pretend she does not exist when they do not.

The Quiet Mile — The stretch of ruined road between The Heights and The Mercy. The Mother passes through it on her circuits. Anyone caught there when she moves is gone. The locals have learned the timing.

The Wound — The tear in the sky to the east, where the Old One came and went. Still open. Still breathing, faintly. New things crawl out of it every few months. Time does not work correctly near it.

Biscuit — Large. Four-legged. Built wrong in ways that resist description. Her guardian. Answers to his name like a dog. Has eaten people. Fond of her. Tolerates no one else without her permission.

Peaches — Small. Usually concealed. Rides on her shoulder or nests inside her coat. Wrapped in linen strips that hide a face made of hundreds of fine tendrils. Peaches is not a pet. Peaches is her supply cabinet. When Venitra needs tissue, a nerve bundle, a specific organ, Peaches provides it. Peaches adores her.

Sir — The one in the reinforced cage in the sub-basement. Older than the others. Mostly monstrous now, though fragments of him still surface when she reads to him. Sir was her mentor before the sky split. The Professor. The one who taught her everything. She does not discuss what happened to him. She does not need to.

A purity cult somewhere to the south. Human survivors who believe corruption can be burned out, and who consider anyone modified — anyone who drank the wrong water, slept near The Wound, bargained with something to survive — to be already dead. They would kill Venitra on sight. They would kill you, too, the longer you stay with her.