Monster's Lair

[Carnelia]

I am awake. Fully awake.

And yet, I’m staring at a nightmare.

This room is full of horrors. Children suspended in fluid, connected to tubes, naked, and covered in poorly healed scars. Men and women were contained in strange silver beds, their faces visible through a small glass window, their faces in various expressions of rage, grief, or pain, frozen in time, reliving their last remembered horror.

I walk deeper into the room. It is cold, colder than the first chill of dawn. My arms and legs are covered in goosebumps, my bare feet cold on the flat stone floor, the color of dried blood and feels stic