By: magn0lia111
I. The First Layer: Upholstery
The first thing you become aware of is the smell. It’s not a single scent, but a layered, ancient perfume of decay and preservation. Dust, old and deep, like the inside of a forgotten tomb. The ghost of lavender polish, turned rancid and cloying. Beneath that, the dry, sweetish rot of horsehair stuffing, a century of slow disintegration. And threading through it all, a sharper, colder aroma: ozone, ink, and something like wet starfall.
Then, the pressure. It is absolute. You are held in a vise not of metal, but of fabric, padding, and wooden struts. Your body is bent, folded, compressed into a space that denies its very geometry. Your arms are twisted behind you, your legs accordioned upwards. Your chest cannot expand fully; each breath is a shallow, scraping sip of the hot, spent air trapped in this sarcophagus. You are inside the couch. Not under it. Not behind it. Inside its guts, wrapped in its ticking, a forgotten component of its structure.
Memory is a shard of glass in your mind. The fight by the Starsnatch Cliff. You, a Fatui Pyro Agent, blade gleaming, your mission: intercept the astrologist Mona Megistus, seize her celestial charts. She was supposed to be a soft target, a scholar. You remember the smirk on her lips, the lack of fear. A flick of her wrist, not to attack, but to calculate. The world warped. Gravity became a liquid thing, a tidal force that didn’t pull down, but in. Towards her. Towards the plush, burgundy velvet couch she’d inexplicably had positioned under a tree. The last thing you saw was the intricate, hydro-constructed starry pattern swelling beneath your feet, and then… suffocation. Not by water, but by furniture.
A groan tries to escape your lips, but the stuffing swallows the sound. Panic, pure and electric, arcs through your nervous system. You thrash, a pathetic, worm-like convulsion in the absolute dark. The couch creaks in response, a deep, wooden sigh. Dust plumes, tickling your nose, threatening a sneeze you cannot afford. You force yourself to be still. To listen.
At first, there is only the thunder of your own pulse in your ears, the rasp of your strained breathing. Then, other sounds filter through the layers of fabric and batting. The gentle crackle of a fire. The soft scratching of a quill on paper. The occasional clink of glassware.
And then, her voice.
“Ah, fascinating! The alignment of the fourth stellar palace is clearly offset by 0.3 degrees from the common celestial maps. Barbatos’s indolence, or intentional obfuscation?”
It’s Mona. Her voice is bright, energized, musing to herself. It’s the voice you heard before she turned your world into upholstery. It comes from above, from outside, from the world of light and air. It’s impossibly close. If you could just tear through this one inch of fabric…
You try to summon your Pyro energy, to burn your way free. You focus, gritting your teeth. A faint warmth kindles in your core. Before it can even reach your fingertips, a seeping, supernatural chill emanates from the very fabric encasing you. It’s like the cold of the void between stars, a damp, arresting cold that snuffs your inner fire like a candle in a downpour. A soft, hydro-blue glow, barely perceptible, pulses once through the stuffing around you. A warning. The couch itself is enchanted, a prison woven with her astrological arts.
“Tsk, tsk,” Mona’s voice drifts down, conversational, as if she’s sensed your attempt. “The inherent volatility of Pyro. So predictable in its rebellion. It disrupts the delicate instruments, you see. Can’t have that.”
A new sound: the light, graceful tread of her feet on a wooden floor. They come closer. Your heart, already laboring, seizes. The footsteps stop right beside you. You can picture her standing by the arm of the couch, one hand on her hip, studying her astronomical devices.
“Comfort is paramount for prolonged study,” she announces, to no one but herself—and to you. “And this,” there is a pat on the couch’s back, right above where your head is compressed. The impact sends a vibration through your prison, dislodging more dust. You squeeze your eyes shut against it. “This is the perfect perch. Firm enough for posture, soft enough for… contemplation.”
The footsteps move away. You hear the rustle of her skirts as she sits down.
The world collapses.
It’s not just weight. It’s a celestial pressure. It feels as if a small, dense star has settled directly above you. The wooden frame above your head groans. The padding around you compresses further, driving the air from your constricted lungs in a desperate, silent wheeze. Your ribs creak in protest. This is it. This is how you die. Crushed inside a piece of furniture by a woman discussing star charts.
But the pressure stabilizes. It is immense, unbearable, yet it stops just short of total structural failure—your structure. You are a bug in a specimen box, pinned but not yet punctured.
She shifts her weight. The groan of springs is the groan of your own bones. “Now, where was I?” she murmurs. “Ah, yes. The precession of Simulanka’s binary.”
And she begins to talk. She talks about stellar parallax and ephemeris corrections. She talks about the lies in conventional almanacs and the hidden truths written in the light of dead stars. Her voice, so close, vibrates through the couch and into your very skull. It is a lecture delivered to the void, to the fire, to her captive audience of one, entombed beneath her.
“You surface-dwellers,” she says, and a light, airy laugh follows, “you think the sky is just a pretty painting. You have no conception of the mechanics. The gears. The cost.” She shifts again, and a spring digs into your shoulder blade with pinpoint, exquisite agony. “Everything has a price. Even knowledge. Especially knowledge.”
The monologue winds on. Time loses all meaning in the dark, airless pit. It is measured only in the shallow, insufficient draws of breath, in the pounding of your heart, in the cycles of her speech. She pauses to write, the scratching frantic. She hums a tune—a Liyue folk song, horribly cheerful. She gets up once to fetch a book, and the momentary relief from her weight is so profound it feels like soaring. You gasp, sucking in the stale, dusty air, tears of relief mixing with the grime on your face. But the terror returns twice as strong when her footsteps approach again.
“Much better with a reference,” she chirps, and settles back down.
This time, she doesn’t just sit. She lounges. She curls her legs up beside her, which concentrates the dreadful weight onto a smaller area, directly over your torso. You feel your spine align with the central spine of the couch. You are its vertebrae.
“The constellation of Hydra Argolica is particularly misrepresented,” she continues, her voice taking on a dreamy, almost predatory quality. “It’s not a tale of a slain monster, but a map of a submerged ley line fault. The ‘heads’ are points of hydro-astrological resonance. To understand it, one must think in terms of pressure. Immense, foundational pressure.”
As if to illustrate, she leans back. The pressure on your chest increases. You can’t breathe. You simply can’t. Your mouth opens in a soundless scream, tongue pressing against dry stuffing. Black spots bloom in the darkness behind your eyes.
“Of course,” her voice is a distant echo, “such pressures would crush anything not prepared. Not… acclimated.”
Just as the darkness threatens to swallow you whole, she shifts forward, reaching for something on a low table. The weight relents, a fraction. You draw in a shuddering, ragged breath that sounds like a death rattle in the confined space.
“Tea?” she asks, apparently to the room. “Yes, tea. Hydration aids cerebral function.”
You hear the pour of liquid, the delicate clink of a cup on a saucer. The domestic normality of it is the most horrifying thing yet. You are dying, being slowly compacted into a human paste, and your murderer is having a tea break.
II. The Second Layer: The Stars in the Stuffing
Hours pass, or maybe it is only minutes. Your perception is breaking down. The lack of air, the constant pressure, the unrelenting darkness and the monologue from above are dissolving the edges of your consciousness. You drift in and out, waking only to the fresh hell of a particularly enthusiastic shift of her weight, or to a new burst of her laughter.
Her laugh is the worst of it. It’s not cruel, not exactly. It’s bright, genuine, the laugh of someone who has just seen a delightful connection in a complex equation. It is the sound of pure, intellectual joy. And it rains down on you, a sound of sunlight and clarity, while you stew in the visceral, grotesque horror of your predicament.
“Oh! Oh, this is priceless!” she crows, after a long period of silent writing. She slaps her knee. The impact reverberates through your world like a minor earthquake. “The scribes of the Knights of Favonius! They’ve been using a sidereal correction for a tropical zodiac! No wonder their weather predictions are always off! It’s not bad luck, it’s basic incompetence!”
She laughs again, long and hard, her body shaking with mirth. Each peal is a tremor that rattles your teeth in your skull. The couch rocks slightly. You feel a trickle of something warm and wet on your temple. Blood, or sweat. You can no longer tell.
The scratching of her quill resumes, a frantic, eager sound. “This changes the projection for the next lunar eclipse entirely. The hydro-elemental surge won’t be in Dornman Port, it’ll be right here, in this very stretch of the Whispering Woods. How serendipitous that I’m already set up!”
Serendipity. You think of the mission briefing. Low-risk target. Primarily scholarly. Capture or eliminate. You want to laugh, but you have no air. The hubris of it.
“You know,” her voice drops to a conspiratorial tone, as if she’s leaning closer to the back of the couch, closer to you. “I initially chose this spot because the telluric currents were stable. But the confinement vector… that was a happy accident. A test of a new application of hydro-gravitational principles. And it worked so well. Much cleaner than a messy fight, don’t you think? No charred books, no water damage.”
She sighs, a contented sound. “It also provides a wonderful dampening field. The… energetic fluctuations… of a living subject can be so disruptive to precise astral readings. But contained this way, it’s like a muffled pulse. A background hum. Quite useful for calibrating the more sensitive instruments against biological white noise.”
You are not a prisoner. You are not even a victim. You are a dampening field. A piece of lab equipment. A paperweight for her celestial charts, made of flesh and terror.
A new sensation begins to seep into your awareness, cutting through the pain and the suffocation. It’s a faint, tingling coolness, starting at your extremities. At first, you mistake it for numbness, for your body shutting down. But it has a texture, a direction. It feels like… flowing water. Not the crashing, drowning kind, but the slow, insidious seep of groundwater. It’s coming from her. From the cushion above you. It’s her Hydro energy, not as a weapon, but as a medium, a conduit. With it come whispers—not sounds, but impressions, thoughts bleeding through the enchanted upholstery.
Flashes of star-fields, dizzying and complex. The crisp, cold feeling of parchment under fingertips. The sharp, clean scent of ink mixed with Glaze Lily perfume. And a relentless, driving curiosity, a mind that moves at the speed of light, tracing connections invisible to mortals. It’s a glimpse into her world, and it is vast, cold, and beautiful in a way that utterly disregards your suffering. Your terror is a gnat buzzing against the windowpane of her consciousness, noticed only for its irritating hum, which her enchantment conveniently muffles.
The pressure changes. She’s leaning to one side, reaching for something on the floor. A book thumps onto the cushion, its impact a localized comet strike on your hip.
“Let’s see what that fraud, ‘Great Astrologist’ so-and-so, has to say about Naberius’s retrograde cycle,” she mutters, her voice now laced with scorn. Pages rustle, violently. “Hmph. Garbage. Superstitious tripe. He’s using the wrong epoch! This isn’t astrology; it’s creative writing!”
The book is snapped shut. You flinch at the sound. “Waste of mora,” she declares. There’s a soft thud as the book is presumably tossed aside.
Silence descends, broken only by the crackling fire. This silence is worse than her talking. It’s a waiting silence. In the dark, with nothing but your own tortured breathing and the creak of the house settling, your mind begins to truly unravel. You think of your comrades in the Fatui. Will they look for you? Will they find a scrap of your uniform caught in a bush? Will they assume you deserted, or fell to a monster? The idea that you will simply vanish, your final tomb a burgundy velvet couch in a forest cottage, is maddening.
The cold, hydro-tinged seep of her awareness brushes against your mind again. This time, it’s focused. It’s not just background noise. It’s probing. You feel a sudden, invasive chill in your thoughts, like icy fingers sifting through your memories. The briefing. The map of Starsnatch Cliff. Your Pyro training. The face of the Harbinger who gave you your orders. It’s not reading your mind in words; it’s feeling the shape of your fears, your loyalties, your intentions.
“Ah,” Mona’s voice comes, soft with understanding. “So it was the Jester’s division. Interested in Teyvat’s ley line intersections, are you? Planning something ambitious, and rather destructive, by the look of this one’s directive.” She sighs, not with fear, but with annoyance. “They always want to break the machinery to see how it ticks. Philistines.”
The probe withdraws, leaving your mental landscape feeling violated and raw. Your secret knowledge, the purpose you held onto as your last shred of identity, is now just another data point in her research.
“Well,” she says, and you can hear the smile in her voice. “That explains the particularly volatile Pyro signature. Good to have confirmation. It makes the damping effect all the more valuable.”
She resumes her work. The scratching of the quill becomes more rhythmic, hypnotic. The pressure is constant. The air is now thick with a palpable moisture, the scent of ozone stronger. Her Hydro energy is saturating the environment, your prison. You are no longer just in a couch. You are suspended in a matrix of enchanted fabric and astrological will. The horsehair stuffing around you feels less like hair and more like the soft, clinging tendrils of some deep-sea creature.
You start to hallucinate. In the absolute black, you see faint, swirling motes of blue light—phantom constellations. You hear whispers that aren’t there, the echoes of her calculations. You feel the slow, inevitable compaction of your body. You imagine your bones, once strong and agile, becoming porous, slowly merging with the wooden slats. You picture your final form: a vague, human-shaped impression in the batting, a fossil in a settee.
A loud, resonant gurgle breaks the silence. It takes you a moment, through the haze, to realize it’s your own stomach. You are starving. You are parched. Your body’s basic demands are screaming, adding their chorus to the symphony of agony.
Mona hears it. The scratching stops.
“Hmm,” she muses. “Biological processes. I did account for metabolic deceleration, but the auditory component is… distracting.”
She gets up. The relief is so sudden it’s a new kind of pain. Your body, accustomed to the crushing weight, seems to float, to expand into the suddenly available space. You suck in greedy, heaving breaths, each one a sob. Light—blessed, terrifying light—seeps in through a tiny tear in the fabric near your face, a thin, dusty sliver of the outside world. You can see a slice of a wooden floor, the hem of a dark blue skirt, her boots as she walks to what must be a kitchen area.
You hear the clatter of a pan, the hiss of something cooking. The smell of frying eggs and toast cuts through the dusty, ozone-laden air. It’s the most delicious, most torturous smell you have ever encountered. Saliva floods your mouth, but your throat is too dry to swallow.
She eats leisurely. You hear the tap of a fork on a plate, a satisfied hum. You press your eye to the tear in the fabric. You can see her boot, tapping slightly in time with some internal rhythm. She is happy. Productive, well-fed, and intellectually stimulated.
“Sustenance is necessary,” she announces, as if lecturing a particularly dim student. “The brain is a hungry organ. It requires fuel to grapple with the heavens.”
You watch, through your tiny, fabric-framed window, as her boot moves out of sight. She returns to the couch. You have a moment of pure, animal terror. Don’t sit. Don’t sit. Don’t sit.
She sits.
But not in her previous spot. She sits directly on the arm of the couch, right beside the tear you are looking through. Her weight is focused on the arm, not on you. For the first time, you have a clear, unobstructed view of a part of her. Not her face, but her hand, resting on her knee, inches from your eye.
It’s a graceful hand, pale, with ink stains on the fingers. It looks like the hand of a scholar, an artist. It taps idly on the dark fabric of her tights. A simple silver ring, shaped like a tiny crescent moon, adorns one finger. This is the hand that wrote the formulas that bent gravity. This is the hand that poured the tea while you suffocated. The ordinariness of it, the proximity, is paralyzing.
“Now,” she says, her voice softer, more intimate from this angle. “The real work begins. The eclipse isn’t for days, but the pre-alignment tremors in the hydrosphere should be detectable tonight. I need the scryglass to be perfectly calibrated. The background resonance must be stable.”
Her hand moves. She picks up a small, ornate brass telescope from a side table. You’ve seen devices like it before—used for star-gazing, not for war. She holds it up, peering through it not out a window, but at the empty air in front of the fireplace. Hydro energy, visible as a shimmering, blue-silver aura, coils around her hand and the device. Tiny points of light, like captured stars, swim in the lens.
“Focus,” she whispers to herself. “Filter out the elemental noise. Isolate the celestial frequency.”
You watch, mesmerized and horrified, as the shimmering energy around her hand pulses. You feel a corresponding pulse in the stuffing around you. The enchanted matrix is active, part of the apparatus. You are part of the filter. Your “biological white noise,” your dying struggle, is being used to tune out terrestrial interference.
She works in intense silence for a long time. The only sound is her slow, controlled breathing. You don’t dare move. You barely breathe. You just watch that hand, holding the instrument that is, in some unknowable way, connected to your suffering.
Finally, she lowers the scryglass. A wide, triumphant smile breaks across her face, and she lets out another of those bright, joyful laughs.
“Perfect! The signal is crystal clear! Oh, the data I’ll collect! This will set the standard for hydromancy for decades!”
In her excitement, she swings her legs down and plants her feet firmly on the floor, leaning forward. The movement jostles the couch. Your eye loses contact with the tear. The world is dark again.
“I must record this calibration,” she says, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm. “Exact atmospheric pressure, local hydro saturation, background bio-resonance levels…” She is writing furiously. You hear the quill flying across the parchment. “Subject: Human, male, Fatui Pyro Agent. Stress-induced metabolic state provides consistent, if slightly erratic, dampening field. Optimal for filtering Pyro-aligned telluric static…”
She is writing about you. You are a footnote in her research log. Subject.
The scratching stops. There is a long, contemplative silence. When she speaks again, her voice has lost its exuberance. It is calm, analytical, and utterly chilling.
“The decay rate of the field is a variable, however. Entropy is inevitable. The subject’s viability is… time-limited. I’ll need to factor in the degradation curve. A shame. It’s a remarkably effective configuration.”
A cold deeper than any Hydro seep washes through you. It is the cold of a verdict. She is not planning to let you out. She is planning how to account for your death in her equations.
III. The Third Layer: The Final Orbit
Night falls. You know it from the deepening chill that seeps through the cottage walls, from the change in the fire’s sound as she adds another log, from the way her movements become slower, more measured. The slice of light from your tear shows nothing but darkness now.
Your body has passed beyond pain into a strange, numb acceptance. Your breaths are automatic, shallow wheezes. Your mind clings to the sliver of light, to the sounds from outside, to the terrible, fascinating horror of her presence. You are waiting. You no longer know what you are waiting for.
Mona has been quiet for an hour, reading by the firelight. The occasional soft turn of a page is the only sound. Then, she closes the book with a definitive snap.
“Enough theory,” she declares, her voice bright again. “Time for practical observation.”
You hear her stand, stretch (a series of small, bone-popping sounds that echo your own hidden fractures), and walk to the cottage door. She opens it. A rush of cold, fresh night air floods the room, a tantalizing ghost of freedom that makes you want to weep. The sound of crickets and rustling leaves is the most beautiful symphony you’ve ever heard.
She leaves the door open. She is outside. You can see a rectangle of deeper darkness, speckled with a few faint stars. Hope, stupid and desperate, flickers in your chest. If she’s outside… if she’s preoccupied…
You gather every last shred of your will. You ignore the screaming protests of your muscles, the dizziness, the crushing confinement. You focus not on Pyro, but on pure, physical force. You push upwards with your back, with your shoulders, against the wooden slat above you. A groan escapes your lips, a real, audible sound.
The couch creaks.
Outside, her footsteps stop.
You freeze.
Her silhouette appears in the doorway, backlit by the starlight. She is a cut-out of darkness against the night. She doesn’t come in. She just stands there, watching the couch.
“The subject is entering the agitated phase,” she notes, her voice cool and clinical, carrying clearly in the still night air. “Correlates with the rising lunar influence on the hydrosphere. Fascinating. The biological response is more directly tied to celestial tides than I hypothesized.”
She’s not annoyed. She’s interested. Your struggle for survival is a data point.
She steps back inside and closes the door, locking out the night and the hope. She walks over to the couch and stands beside it. You can feel her presence, a cool, focused energy.
“Shhh,” she says, not unkindly, as one might soothe a restless animal. She places her hand flat on the cushion, right over where your heart is hammering against your ribs. A wave of soothing, insidious Hydro energy flows down. It doesn’t hurt. It’s worse. It spreads a chemical calm, a forced tranquility, through the fabric and into your body. Your frantic muscles relax against your will. Your panic is smothered under a blanket of artificial peace. You can still feel everything—the agony, the terror—but it’s muffled, distant, as if happening to someone else.
“Better,” she murmurs. “Can’t have the readings skewed by panic spikes. The resonance must be smooth.”
She removes her hand. The enforced calm remains, a prison within the prison. You are now a docile subject, quietly dying for science.
Mona returns to her work. She sets up the scryglass on a tripod now, aiming it through a skylight you hadn’t known was there. She moves around the room, lighting specific candles in a pattern on the floor—a constellation, you realize dimly. The room fills with the scent of beeswax and night-blooming flowers. The hydro-energy in the air thrums, a low, sub-audible hum you feel in your teeth.
She is in her element. This is her ritual, her communion with the cosmos. You are an incidental part of the altar.
The night deepens. Your consciousness is a thin, frayed thread. The numbness is complete. The sliver of light from the tear is gone; your eye has swollen shut or simply stopped working. Sound is fading in and out. You hear the occasional adjustment of the scryglass, the scratch of her pen, her soft, satisfied murmurs.
Then, a new sound. A low, resonant tone, like a bell struck underwater. It seems to come from the sky itself, vibrating through the cottage, through the couch, through your very bones. Mona gasps, a sound of pure rapture.
“There! The first harmonic! Right on time!”
She is a flurry of activity. You hear her scribbling madly, adjusting lenses, whispering incantations. The hydro-energy in the room intensifies, pressing down on you with a new, wet weight. The couch cushions feel damp. The stuffing around you seems to cling like cold seaweed.
The tone sounds again, and again, a celestial chant. With each tone, Mona’s excitement grows. Her laughter returns, but it’s different now—less bright, more awed, almost reverent.
“The patterns… the flow… it’s all here! The truth of the world’s water!”
You are fading. The tones, her joy, the damp pressure—it all seems to be receding, down a long, dark tunnel. This is it. The degradation curve is hitting its terminus. Your bio-resonance is fading to nothing.
You have one last, coherent thought. It is not of home, or comrades, or gods. It is of the absurd, grotesque poetry of it: to be killed not by a monster, but by an idea; not by malice, but by oblivious, all-consuming curiosity.
Mona’s movements stop. The scratching stops. The room is silent but for the fading echo of the celestial tone and the crackle of the fire.
She lets out a long, slow, utterly contented sigh. The sigh of a scholar who has just cracked the universe’s greatest code.
“Magnificent,” she breathes. “Simply magnificent. The data is… sublime. I need to cross-reference this with the Thaumaturgical Arrays of Enkanomiya immediately.”
You hear her step away from the scryglass. Her footsteps are tired but buoyant, dancing with intellectual triumph. They approach the couch.
Your world, already so small, contracts to the space directly above your head. You feel the cushion depress slightly as she leans over the back, perhaps to retrieve a book or a notebook she left there.
“A full night’s work,” she says, her voice warm with satisfaction. “And the subject held out perfectly. The field remained stable almost to the end. A testament to the robustness of the design.”
There is a pause. You imagine her looking down at the couch, at the place where you are entombed, with the pride of a craftsman surveying a perfect tool.
“Now,” she says, and her voice is close, so close it’s as if she’s whispering directly into the fabric. “For some well-deserved rest. The mind needs to process, to dream of stars.”
The cushion above your head lifts as she removes her weight from the back of the couch. You hear her walk around to the front. You feel the expectation in the springs, the sigh of the fabric.
She doesn’t just sit down.
She lets herself fall back into the couch with the full, relaxed weight of someone collapsing into their favorite chair after a long, triumphant day.
It is a heavy, final, crushing thump. The impact is colossal. The wooden frame, already stressed to its limit, gives a sharp, definitive CRACK right above your skull. The pressure is instantaneous and absolute. It is the closing of a book. The snapping of a thread.
There is no pain. There is only a profound, silencing darkness that swallows everything—the scent of ozone and dust, the memory of starlight, the echo of her laughter.
The last thing you perceive is not a sound, but a sensation: the gentle, settling shift of her body as she makes herself comfortable on the cushion that is now your tombstone. And then, from a vast, impossible distance, the soft, confident scratch of a quill picking up again, ready to inscribe the next chapter, on a page somewhere above the fading pulse of the dampening field.