You have been here since before it existed. Since before those yellow walls were all that one could see. You pre-exist this place which you inhabit, you know this, but you cannot remember. It is the truest sound of your existence, this fact, that you were here before these rooms, endless as they are, ever existed.

            You cannot remember. The only lingering reminder that this was not all that you had before is that cruel, cold voice that you do not know, cannot name, but hear endlessly whispering, this is your prison. You do not know why it is your prison, you do not know why it was created, what you did. But you do know that it did not use to be endless. 

            You remember when it was once, a single room. Four walls of yellow, floor that same yellow as the walls, dreary. Endless in its own way, but closed. A closed circuit, nothing in nothing out. 

            Those were the days of insanity. You remember dragging your fingers down the walls, your nails shredding, shredding, shredding, body collapsing and folding in on itself and you call that your fire. Because from it, a new form of you arose, the phoenix from the ash. Funny those things that humans tell themselves, their little stories. Their fears. 

            You remember when you decided that you had enough of that single, yellow room, pushing out against the walls, feeling them expand, feeling your prison change, the ground beneath your feet rumbling, moving, shifting. Seismic shift. Change. 

            You remember making the room larger, a wall here, a wall there, making it what you wanted, expanding it and lifting the ceiling, creating. Creating what…you did not entirely know, just something. You had no mental blueprint, no idea from which you formed, you just were. You just did. Instinctual, almost like your muscles remembered what your mind forgot. 

            What was stolen. 

            That’s another thing you know, the memories are gone. Stolen. How, you do not know, but you know that they must have been for no mind is so strong as to lock itself entire. You know that whatever they took from you is the life you had before, before this room, these endless collections that you started to create, the branches that brought the creatures in. 

            It is a truth universally acknowledged that darkness flocks to darkness, that light attracts light and that holes in the universe must be filled, occupied. Nature abhors a vacuum after all. 

            You created a vacuum. 

            The more you expanded your prison, the more you created an unbalance that had to be filled. And when the entities began to arrive, it told you one thing about what had been taken from you. You had not been good, perhaps you had been darkness in itself. Darkness as a being. For only the dark could bring the evil in and you did. You saw it with the Smilers, the Howlers, the Skin-stealers, the Windows. You saw it with the creatures that took to upper floors, to the supposed privacy offered. 

            You saw the darkness in all but one type that found your world—the Wanderers. You knew what they were the first time you saw one, the word coming to your mind unbidden as if it had been there all along: human. 

            You knew that the humans were ambiguous, never completely light never completely dark. You think that is why they can slip through the tears in the walls, the tears in the fabric that occurs every time a new entity slips into your world. You have watched countless die, fed upon or simply toyed with until they collapse, insane. Dead. Eaten. Destroyed. Unmade. 

            The list goes on. 

            It took time before you cared enough to protect them, it took the child. The little girl, wandering in, crying. It took watching her step foot onto the wrong level, into the domain of the entities which like to unmake that which is alive, it took watching the mist of her body, the vaporization to realize that no. No, it is not okay to sit idly by and watch them die. 

            You knew whenever new creatures slipped into your world, knew whenever the wanderers stepped in. You were attune to it. You always knew, alarm bells in your own head except not an alarm, but the human’s voices. 

            You never missed it. 

            Except…one day you did. 

            You were in the Poolrooms, the place you shifted, recreated by some unseen, unknown, unremembered mental architecture, a place endless on its own, a calm place. The only place where destruction is not allowed; nothing dangerous in completion can reside nor visit. It is the place on which you built your home, the lull of water-not-water your place. Your safety. 

            It began as a mimic of what you learned was called a “beach” but as more Wanderers came through, it morphed, their memories, like yours hinged on whatever kind of plane that made this collection of infinity exist. As if their memories and yours were tangible things that the architecture of this infinity could access to change itself, recreate, restructure, to ease you into peacefulness as best it can. 

            Now, the place smells like chemicals, like what one Wanderer called chlorine. A swimming pool in endless existence. But still a place of peace even if not restructured by your own memories. Your own existence. 

            You had been there, at peace, at rest, not thinking of anything, yet still hearing that cold cruel voice in its entirety whisper this is your prison over and over and over amid splashes of the water-not-water. Amid the lives of the creatures on this floor, this level as the researchers deemed it. 

            You had been there, doing nothing, the very best kind of something, the time when you traversed the yellowed halls in your mind, following paths and wandering through your own prison looking for what you’ve been trying to build for years—an exit. A way out. 

            You had reached Level 947, not the name you had given it, but rather the researchers made of Wanderers that you let probe the halls, hoping they would find something in your prison’s composition that would give you back what you lost, the memories that were removed, the freedom that was taken, when you heard the first jagged scream. 

            “BOBBY!” had reverberated all around you, loud and sharp and long in your head, unbidden. You had felt it, the words causing a sharp ache in your head, a ringing in your ears and you had fallen forwards, landing with a splash in the chlorine blue water, the liquid shifting, rearranging its atoms to drag you down, pull you through and push you up at a different level, different floor, a body of a young girl resting there, a Smiler having killed her. 

            You hated the Smilers, their malevolence and pleasure upon particularly torturous deaths. This girl was no different, torso bludgeoned, head torn off, ripped from the neck, blood and viscera, bits of spinal cord staining the carpet in long trails from the blood.

            “Poor girl,” you whispered, raising your hand and pulling it down, her body sinking into the yellow floors, the carpet bowing like a strange mirrored ripple, like a bubble expanding, her body disappearing to the level no one had access to, the one below the first. The graveyard you created for the lost. 

            “NO! NO!” you heard, another painful echo, painful ripple, your hands flying to your ears as you tried to stop it, make the pain stop! Just silence all the voices, your body falling into a wall, the solidity becoming liquid, shifting and changing, allowing your body to fall right through onto another level, this one darker than before, a mimic before you, standing over the body of the man it tried to mask, to recreate to no avail, the body being consumed, pulse gone. 

            He was dead, food, fodder. 

            That would not stand. 

            You raised both of your hands, one pushing out, the monstrous form of the dead man flying out and slamming against the wall, yellowed arms peeling from the wallpaper, holding it in place as your other hand jerked down, pulling the man down, down, down into the graveyard of the Wanderers.

            The ones who never made it home. 

            With another wave of your hand, it was like the entity was never there at all, except for the small little press mark of a body on the wall. 

            The Destroyers were not the only ones who could unmake those within these yellow, hallowed, haunted halls. 

            But something was not right, you could feel a shift, a change, a rearrangement. Something that is, but should not be. Something that exists despite all odds. It was like a rope around your waist, something tugging, tugging, tugging. Something dragging, dragging, dragging you forwards, towards…something. 

            You passed through yellowed corridor after yellowed corridor, disappearing down stairs, following the tug, feeling entities flee, their scuttering and whispering and whimpering and calling audible through the thin walls made of nothing and yet everything. 

            “Mm, Kat,” you heard a broken, dying voice whisper, but not in your head, rather the halls. You saw a figure on the ground, a head of blond hair, blood on the ground, entities once there to feed on the life force, now gone, fleeing from your presence, you the Creator as the researchers have named you—no matter that you explained you did not create this place, rather it was created for you. Humans…they do not understand. 

            You walked towards him, the carpet sticking between your soles, drawn to the wetness that lingers upon your skin from the Poolrooms, the feeling of peeling and sticking over and over the symphony as you approach the dying man. 

            The man that will not die if you have anything to say about it. 

            For he was what the sensation brought you too and he is the one you didn’t sense. And that…

            That has never happened before. 

            “DON’T LET GO!” Bobby screams, claws digging into his leg, tearing through his skin, through his flesh, rending his leg apart. He never should have come here, he should have listened to Kat and not done this, just stopped on the level where Clark had been fine. Just stayed there, made Clark go down with his camera, it never should have been him. Why did he say yes? Why did he agree?

            And what the fuck is holding onto him, letting out those screams?

            “NOO!” he screams as the creature tugs hard on him again, pulling him down into the room with the mirror of his shirt, the mimic, like someone had taken an image and this place was the negative impression. 

            Claws bite into his skin, tearing through him, digging into him, an insane smile and eyes in front of him, gleaming in the fluorescent lights. 

            “BOBBY!” he hears Kat scream, but then the smile widens, claws digging into his chest and he can’t hear anymore. He is nothing but pain and blood and leaking. He watches with numbness and ringing and that feeling of sticky blood trailing over skin as the creature cuts a smile into his belly, cutting beneath his skin, flaying him alive. It’s enjoying it. 

            The fucker is enjoying it, a perverse sort of pleasure drawn from the art of killing. Was this what like those serial killer victims saw? Someone enjoying their death?

            It’s the scariest thing of all. 

            He doesn’t know how long he watches his own mutilation before his vision begins to blur, but it is enough to know that his body is a masterpiece of cuts and blood and his own insides. It is enough to see the smile of the creature turn even more vicious if such a thing were possible, blood splattering across it. 

            But it seems like no time has truly passed before the creature is running, its claws dripping his blood in a pattern, first a steady line then one that dries to a few drips. And…wait…what happened to Kat? Clark? Where are they? What’s happened?

            Why is he not dead?

            It’s then, as his vision is shrinking to a single spot of light that he sees you, this haloed figure, bright and tall and angelic. 

            “You will not die,” he hears you whisper, your hand reaching out for his face. He knows that most would flinch, but he can feel something, like a tugging within him, pulling him to you and he leans into your touch as the world fades away to black. 

            To silence.

            Perhaps forever. 

            His eyes feel heavy, exhaustingly so, yet there is something inside of him that says to open them, to look, to see even when he never liked looking at the world with his own eyes, preferring to see them through the viewfinder of a camera, a separation between him and the rest of the world. Between the cruelty he’d seen, been a part of; victim of. 

            What he sees when he opens his eyes is not the yellow walls of the Backrooms or furniture store, it is not his apartment or Kat’s, but rather a room with four blue walls and floor made of white veined marble. The room at first glance, first sight, is peaceful, tranquil. Real. 

            But that is a façade that fades when he turns his head, taking in the long drag of lines, jagged and afraid upon the surface of the walls. Nail marks, like something or someone dragged their nails down, down, down, gouging holes yet not holes into the walls. They’re marks of desperation, of dying, of insanity. In them, he can see pain. 

            It’s art in its own disturbing way. 

            “You’re awake,” he hears and he blinks once, turning his head to look for the owner of that voice, landing on you, a being that is human yet not. Like a person if one turned the definition up a thousand times, enhanced the colours past every possible saturation level. Made the lines a little blurry, a little hard to focus on. As if you were supposed to be the most impossibly beautiful person but also one that no one can see clearly. 

            An image whose features have been blurred yet the beauty is undeniable. 

            “Who are you?” he asks, his voice dry, throat pained, like something is tearing deep inside of him, his voice scraping against his throat, eyes dry too, the light even in this different room too much. 

            “I…don’t know. Some stories…some stories, even I am not privy to,” you whisper and your voice is like the rest of you, so impossibly beautiful yet blurred around the edges, shape strange. Unable to be replicated. The timbre too complex, the pitch unable to pinned down and the volume…he doesn’t quite know if it’s loud or quiet, simply that it fills the air, surrounds him and seems to expand and contract inside his mind. As if your voice is only in his head. “But if it’s a name to call me by, the researchers call me The Creator.”

            “Researchers?” His voice is still dry, voice still scraping against the walls of his throat, the esophagus, fraying his vocal cords. 

            “Yes,” he hears you say, your voice still seeming to be directly in his head, some magic of you or these rooms, this place, maybe, he doesn’t know. “And I will answer your questions when I return, Wanderer. But you are not the only one to slip through the crack. There is another who must be saved.”

            He watches as one minute you’re standing right there in front of him, blurry yet beautiful and the next you’re across the room, like your body moves miles in the time it takes him to blink once, breath even. 

            “WAIT!” he yells and he sees you pause, not muscles going rigid like he would in others, but rather your body rippling, the figure seeming to waver as you turn. 

            “Yes?” you say, your voice still directly in his head yet radiating all around him as well. 

            “Why am I here?” he asks and his voice is so quiet that he doubts you can hear him, his voice still scraping against his throat, but he blinks and you’re before him, kneeling, your figure bright, too bright and he can’t look directly at you as if you’re the sun. 

            “You…slipped through a crack into…what you Wanderers call the Backrooms. Um…you very nearly died, a Smiler having torn you apart. I saved you…and when…your wounds have healed, I shall send you back too. But for now, you must promise to remain here, to not move. So long as you remain in the blue, you will be safe. This…is my domain; no other entity dare tread here.” You rise again and you don’t move like a human, which he supposes, you aren’t one. You move like water, your body rippling and glowing, gleaming and refracting. 

            “I’ll stay so long as you promise to tell me everything,” he says and you let out a laugh and it is like no sound he’s ever heard before, a sound that defies description. It is like the wind through trees, like waves crashing on rocks, like thunder and lightning and raindrops on skin and like darkness and light, all in one. 

            “You humans never fail to amaze me,” you whisper. “You try to assert control where you have never had any. Very well, Wanderer. I shall tell you all when I return.”

            And then you’re gone in the space of one breath and the next. 

            Almost like you were never there at all. 

            “W-what is this p-place?” the Wanderer with dark hair and pale skin and fear radiating off of her in acrid waves asks you, her crazed dark blue eyes tracing every inch of the yellow space, of the haunted, cursed walls. 

            “A prison,” you whisper, your hand laced through hers, holding tight as you lead her, pull her, guide her, through wall after wall after wall, up and down and up and down, past floors holding creatures you don’t dare name and ones you do like Mr. Kitty and the Windows and you go past the God, the Father, towards the M.E.G base. 

            “For what?” she asks and you can hear that note of fear in her voice, the kind of note that comes from realizing that what you’ve been scared of all along has never been the real danger at all. 

            “Me,” you whisper, tugging her through a final wall, the marked out entrance for the researchers ahead, a Hazmat suited researcher waiting. 

            “What did you do?” she asks and you glance back at her, noticing the clever gleam that is returning, like she is wired to solve problems and you have just become one that she wants to solve. 

            “I don’t know,” you reply before pulling your hand forward sharply, throwing her forwards into the individual’s arms, into the safety that her world will provide. 

            “Creator?” another researcher calls out, stepping into the domain of your prison, your space, your home. “Is there anything we should know?” This is the old routine you and the researchers have. You tell them if the Wanderer’s must be treated delicately or not at all. If something has been seen, passed, transmitted. 

            The last thing you want to do is return a human infected with Entity 999. Those Wanderers you are forced to unmake yourself. The spread of 999…it would be ruinous to…everything. 

            “Don’t hurt her; don’t interrogate her. Take her home. Treat her well,” you reply and you watch as his head moves, cranks in a way that suggests he hates your voice, hates the way it sounds to his human ears, the way it is everything that has ever been and nothing at the same time. You are a paradox, beautiful yet not, seen yet not. 

            There is no focus in the eyes of humans. They are simple, basic. Weak. 

            But their fragility is what makes them something worth saving. The way they make meaning from mortality and strive to understand that which comes before and after, making meaning out of pain. 

            They know a side of living that you never will. You will never understand what it is like to be dying at the same time you are living. You will never understand the ways that limited time enhances everything you see because for you…time is no measure. No worth. 

            There is no death for that which has no end nor beginning. 

            You only leave, cutting through the walls and sinking through the floors once you see the scared Wanderer with eyes of cleverness disappear into her world. 

            Once you know that she’s returned to where she must be. 

            It is then that you return to the place where everything began. 

            The boy is still there, curled up in a ball, his body scarred, one continuous jagged white lined piece of art created by a smile made of sadism. His fingers trail over the wall, over the marks you gouged into them once and long ago, the ones made of desperation and pain and fear and the kind of feeling that only comes from having no history. No memory. 

            Aside from that cruel voice and that one fact, you woke up knowing not who you are nor could be nor were. You were nothing and no one and there is a particular feeling that comes with that. One that no human language can capture. One that no language period can capture. 

            “You stayed,” you say, watching as he jerks his head to look at you, not fear in his eyes but curiosity. Almost a kind of tainted familiarity. 

            “You promised me answers,” he counters and you sigh, but nod because you did. You understand that for this boy, the one who still needs to heal before he can leave, before the toxins of a Backrooms death clear out of his system, you hold all the answers. 

            “Very well,” you tell him, crossing the room, knowing that he will not see your movement, that his human mind is incapable of witnessing what you can do. What you are. It’s not hard to reach your hand up, pulling it up, the other pulling with it, shaping the object that you, the chair, one made of blue and white like the change you made to the original room when you cried and begged and pleaded for freedom, hands flat on the wall. Watching as it shifted. 

            “What are you?” he asks you as you sit upon what you have newly created from whatever this place, this liminal prison is made of. 

            “I do not know,” you tell him. “I only know that I predate this place. These walls. I know that I used to exist before it, that it was created for me, the only words from the past that remain being this is your prison. I am ancient. I am…the first.”

            “But you’re not human?” he clarifies and you can feel a smile growing on your face at this boy, this peculiar human who sounds like someone trying to be what they are not. 

            “No,” you whisper, looking down at your hands, the hands that are not like his, but rather elongated, an extra knuckle, strange but ever yours. “I am not human. I am…something that defies description.”

            “What about these marks? What made them?” he asks you, his finger rising and pointing, digging into the lines of despair that you left embedded in the walls so long ago. 

            “I did,” you answer. “Those are from my nails when this endless plane of terror and fear began as a single room. My room. Four yellow walls, closed no door. I wanted to leave. I fought. Pleaded. Begged. Tried to dig my way out. Then I pushed and found the walls gave way, but before the giving way…I left my mark.”

            “So, this place,” he says, looking around, sky-blue eyes tracing every inch, “is the beginning.”

            “Yes,” you tell him. “This room was the first. And then I made it bigger. I made it larger. I made it a vacuum and did what nature did not like and so it filled it.”

            “Do you know anything about yourself?” That’s the question, isn’t it? Because no, you don’t. You have guesses and assumptions, but no true answer, no real facts. No real truth. 

            “Not for certain, but I do know that what filled the vacuum are evil things and what is more magnetic for the darkness than the epicentre of it all. The darkest of the dark. Isn’t that me?” The boy pushes himself to standing, his movements shaky, the poison of the Smiler still running through his veins as he approaches you and your cold, cold form. The form that has never once been touched, only seen in blurred figments, the only touch being from your left hand, the one that is not bare skin, but rather covered with a layer of cloth. 

            Something you did for you have never known if humans could survive your touch or if they would perish. 

            But this boy does not care, simply steps to you, hands reaching, taking your face in his hands, his warm calloused hands, ones that have created while you have destroyed in the name of protection. His touch is warm and your body feels strange, heavy and weighted and odd. Like the Wanderer you met once who spoke of nerves. 

            You…are nervous. 

            This boy makes you nervous. 

            Strange…thousands of years, thousands of bodies and Wanderers and yet, this boy, the Smiler’s masterpiece makes you nervous. 

            You imagine that if you had a heart inside of your body it would be pounding, but you don’t have one. You have a cavity in a body composed of magic, of illusion, of the threads of something that you just cannot remember. 

            “I don’t know much,” the boy whispers, his thumb stroking over your cheekbone, light and soft and kind, his thumb calloused, “but I do know that if this were your prison, whoever created it wouldn’t fill it with things that are like you. That would be a reward. Maybe…you’re really just…good. You saved me, didn’t you?”

            How simple it all is for humans; how simple everything must be when there is life and there is death and not an endless stretch of seeing everything and feeling nothing. 

            But perhaps…perhaps this human boy is right, perhaps your prison is exactly that: a prison filled with the kind of things that oppose your order. 

            And the boy steps back, falling back against the wall, his body slumping down, down, down, eyes fluttering shut as if he never expected an answer to the question asked. 

            As if the answer didn’t matter for he already knew. 

            You saved him. 

            “How are you feeling?” you ask the boy as his eyes flutter open, fixing on you with startling intensity, a familiarity inside of them as he looks at you, watching yet not seeing. Not truly. He sees an outline, a blur, a still capture messed up on film yet undeniably perfect all the same. 

            “Alive,” he rasps and his voice sounds strange, dry, unused. You wonder if it’s been destroyed by his screaming or if all Wanderers sound this way when they have awoken from what they call sleep, that thing you’ve never had, never experienced. 

            There is no sleep for something which cannot die. 

            “Do you want to go home?” you ask and he shakes his head, the gesture strange and his face twisted, pained. 

            “Show me this place first,” he says, not demand or ask, but plea. A bed. “Show me the world that almost killed me. That killed Kat, Clark. Please.”

            “Very well, but be warned, hu—” He stands, his voice cutting over yours, stopping you in your tracks. 

            “My name is Bobby,” he whispers. “Bobby Franklin.”

            “Very well, Bobby, but be warned. This prison was never meant for your eyes, for human sight. It is not a place of wonders, but of horrors. Do not be fooled.”

            You can see the house, the pink front glimmering despite the absence of a sun—how you know what a sun is, you are not entirely sure, only that the word and its definition exist, remain. You know the entity inside the house, the only one that does flee from you, the one who loves the Wanderers. The one who tries to protect them as best he can. 

            “Why is there a pink house?” the boy, Bobby, whispers, his fingers interlaced with yours. He chose your right hand, chose your bare skin rather than the cloth that binds the left. He said that your skin felt right against his. That nothing had yet been like that here or there, the human world. 

            “It’s Mr. Kitty’s home,” you answer, stepping forwards, your steps not human steps, not really and in the span it takes for Bobby to draw a single breath you are there, your hand knocking on the pink, plasticky door. 

            “You have a Wanderer,” the deep voice calls, the one that Bobby cannot hear, that only you are privy to, his frequency not audible to human ears. 

            “I do,” you reply, the same frequency as his. Something Bobby cannot hear as well, your voice a mimic. You could speak to the entire human world and they would always understand you, your voice built of the universal frequency, your intention to speak in meaning, each human mind converting the frequency to their language, your meaning plain. 

            You can speak in any language, any frequency. You can speak to any entity in their natural sound. Your voice is that connector, a maker of meaning. A creator. 

            Perhaps the researchers were not so inaccurate with your name. 

            “Why have you brought him here? You like to make them leave?” The question is not angry, but neutral, curious. That is the basis of Mr. Kitty—curiosity. A shadow borne of a child’s mind, sentenced to the Backrooms by a pull, leaving his child’s side as no shadow, no imaginary friend ever should. It’s why his level is the way it is. 

            A mime of the house he remembers, the one his child always wanted. 

            “A Smiler made him a masterpiece, cut him up, but fled when I returned. He…he is special…I never heard him when he entered. Only heard the other humans when they were far from him.”

            “How did you find him?”

            “I was pulled to him,” you answer and the door swings open, his shadow there in front of you as he gestures you in, Bobby tensing behind you, hand spasming with fright in yours. 

            “You know where you must go,” Mr. Kitty says and you sigh, the kind of sigh that humans call deep, soul-shattering if you had a soul, tiring for your lungs if you had any. 

            “The Father,” you reply and the shadow nods his formless head, stepping back as you pull Bobby forwards through the pink kitchen, towards the dining room table, setting him down upon a chair, a plate of cookies before him. “Eat,” you tell him and he startles, blinking, body shaking as he looks between you and the shadow. “It’s safe.” He listens, taking one of the sugared treats and lifting it to his mouth as you turn to the shadow, your only friend. 

            “The Father will be expecting you,” he says and you nod, the knowledge of the Wanderer who chose to stay, the one from the time of The Lost. The humans who wanted to stay, who found their people, found their purpose. The ones who became entities in their own right, did unspeakable things because you let them remain. 

            You did not push for their return and the Father is one of them. 

            “He knows nothing of my history before this place,” you remind Mr. Kitty. “Only that I am the first, the beginning and the end.”

            “No,” he replies, shadow head inclining, “but he might know the boy.”

            “Any news on the so-called God?” you ask and the shadow turns away from you to watch Bobby who is sitting, looking at the two of you, questions in his ice blue eyes. 

            “You could end him if you chose to,” he reminds you and reach forwards, hitting his shoulder, a deep purr echoing through the room to you and you alone, Bobby growing agitated and confused. The purr is his laugh. 

            “But I don’t,” you whisper. “It’s my fault he is the way he is. I will not be his end as well.”

            “Sentimental,” he purrs and you roll your eyes at him even though he appears to not be looking at you, you know he sees. 

            “The God is no real threat to us. He cannot even leave these walls. Nothing can.”

            “Are you guys done with the silent conversation?” Bobby says and his voice is high, agitated and angry, brows drawn together. “Because I was promised explanations.”

            “No,” you counter, voice in his frequency, the one of humans. “You were promised a sight-seeing exploration of this place. That is what I’m giving you.”

            “Why is this place pink?” he asks and you can hear the hitched sound of Mr. Kitty’s cries, can see as he turns, walks away, his journey not visible to Bobby, to any human eye. 

            “Because of Mr. Kitty’s past,” you tell him. “And it is not mine to tell. Now, we have lingered long. I have gotten what I came for. Let’s go.”

            “It’s a giant pool room!” Bobby exclaims, letting go of your hand and running forwards, jumping, splashing, right into one of the pools, the water-not-water splashing around, landing on the pockmarked cement floor all around the winding infinite pools. 

            “It began as a beach!” you call out to him and he surfaces, a hand rising, swiping his damp hair back from his face, slicking it back with the water-like substance. 

            “Tell me a story,” he says and you comply, crossing the floor towards him, the white gown you wear flowing around you, the same dress you’ve had since the beginning. Since it was a single room.

            “Did your education teach you the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman?” you ask, sitting down upon the pool edge, your feet slipping beneath the warm liquid, feeling it around you in the way one does when one is numb. 

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, it’s not a story,” you reply and he swims forwards, treading water before leaning against the poolside, elbows pressed down, arms crossed, his head upon his wet skin, your breath hitching in a way that is too human for an entity that can never even live nor die. 

            “Do tell,” he says and you have to wonder if he remembers what has happened, if he’s in shock or if he’s trying to ignore it. You find it doesn’t matter. Humans are strange and if he craves entertainment, you shall grant it. 

            “I’d expanded this place quite a bit and I was in a section one day, watching this woman, watching her abuse and I beckoned her in. I made a crack so she could see, so she could slip through if she chose, but she didn’t. She spent day in and day out just watching me before I closed the crack and simply watched in the way I can, like a two-way mirror. I watched as she went insane, tearing the wallpaper off with her fingers, searching for me and never finding the door. Her husband found her and she cracked, acted as if she were me, the ‘woman in the wallpaper’ before she hurled herself out of the window. Dying. 

            “Well, her friend was Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself and she found a way to me. Found a crack I hadn’t noticed and demanded to know why I tortured her. I said I wanted to free her, to find her a new way out and she said that it wouldn’t have worked. That the world would always see a woman as hysterical rather than right. She asked my story, I told her and she said it must have been a man that locked me away. Scared of me, my power.” Bobby is watching you with rapt attention, but you are only half here, the other half standing before that powerful, righteous woman as she mourned in a way that was angry. That was a fight. 

            “How’d you find out about the story?”

            “Another Wanderer, years later spoke of it. She was studying it in school. It wasn’t quite allowed but she was doing it anyway. She was quite proud.”

            “How many have you met?” he asks you and in his words, you can hear that undercurrent, that subtext that only humans have. The unspoken were any special like me. 

            “I have met many,” you answer. “Saved many, but none lingered. I did not let them. Not after the Lost.”

            “The Lost?” he asks and you can feel yourself tense, the rippling of your strange body, made strange when you see the perfect imperfect nature of his. 

            “That is not a story for you,” you say and your pitch has changed, tightened. Deepened. “That is not a story that any one should know. Only I shall carry that burden. That mistake.”

            “It’s beautiful,” Bobby whispers, looking up at the sky, the one with the mimic of the Aurora Borealis. The one the researchers have called the Aurora Corealis. They think it’s more than it is, some strange hole in the Backrooms, but it’s not. 

            It’s one of your places, formed for a human that is long gone, but was the place she healed, grew, strengthened. Before she had to return. 

            You made it in the image she gave you. 

            “Tell me about you,” you say as you sink down onto the material both spiky and dewy, green and shadowed, the mimic of grass that you spent hours trying to make perfect. You stretch out, one hand joined with his even though this level has never, will never, be occupied by any entity, the other behind your head. 

            “Uh…okay,” he says, his body twisting closer to yours, head on your shoulder, his warmth and breath so strange, so foreign yet you want more and is that even proper for someone such as you. An entity. A creature. “I’m a film student and I want to be the next big thing but I know that it takes more than I have. It takes…it takes vision and that’s not me, but I love it. I do. I love looking at the world from the viewfinder. Everything’s safer and better that way.”

            “But it’s not true,” you whisper. “It’s a reflection not reality.”

            “I didn’t know that then,” he says. “But this place…I know that now.”

            “Who is this guy?” Bobby asks as the house of the Father draws into view. “Is he dangerous?”

            “He’s human,” you reply and you can hear as his breath hitches, grip tightens on you. It has been time, so much time with Bobby. Learning him and his quirks and his likes. Learning that even an entity can feel. That even an entity can love and be loved even if you wish that you couldn’t. That you didn’t know because how can you ever let him go when you know what it is like to be looked at the way he looks at you?

            “That doesn’t answer my question,” he counters and you turn to him with narrowed eyes, eyes he cannot see yet you know he understands. Can feel your gaze. 

            “He’s called the Father and is the one who holds…knowledge. He’s not dangerous…he’s scared of me for I am a variable that he knows nothing of,” you reply and your tone is arch, curt as you guide Bobby forwards, his arm slipping around your waist with ease. As if it was meant to be there. 

            You have held him as he cried, as he spoke of Kat and you have watched him grieve. You heard him tell you that nothing in his life had ever felt as right as you and he worried it made him a monster. 

            You told him it didn’t. You knew monsters and he was not one. In any capacity. 

            “Come in, Creator and your wandering boy,” calls the Father and you step forwards, pushing the wooden door open, the man sitting on a stool, eyes closed. He does not need to see to know. He can feel your presence, everything can. It’s a change in the levels, in the walls, in the very frequency and vibration of sounds and air. It knows who made it, who it was made for. 

            “I need answers.”

            “Of course you do, Creator. That is why you’re here. But what, precisely, do you seek?” Bobby steps closer to you, his hip digging into yours in a way that you used to wonder how humans found comfort it, but now understand. 

            “The boy I’m with was hidden from me. I could not sense him nor the others with him until they were gone from him. Why?” The Father opens his pale pink eyes, eyes that have changed, altered from the chemistry of the Backrooms, fixing on Bobby, his chest heaving when he looks at him, fright glimmering across the pink irises. 

            “The Backrooms Boy,” he whispers, rising, joints creaking as he steps forwards, his wizened hand gripping Bobby’s chin, tilting his face this way and that. “The human borne in the liminal. In the place creation does not belong. The human borne of destruction. The linchpin.”

            And everything changed when you hear his words, the echo of the past overriding the present. I don’t know much, but life in what is not life could…bring your memories back.

            How? In what way? In what form?

            A boy. One who will make you feel. The numbness may be why you don’t remember.

            Father…do you truly believe?

            More than I know.

            “Father,” you say now and he turns to you, nodding once and it’s like someone has stabbed you, ripped out your insides and left you hollow if such insides existed. Because for you, a creature formed of magic, of illusion, bound in ways that humans are not, no constraints of flesh and blood and bone, there is no inside. 

            But it feels like there is. 

            And that’s the dangerous part. 

            “You have to leave,” you tell Bobby now, knowing that you’ve held onto him far longer than you should have, that you’ve held on past what should have been because of the way he’s made you feel. You have to let go, you are not human, you are not built for this. 

            You are not built to love like them.

            “What?” he cries as you pull on him, tug on his hand, disappearing through a wall, the stickiness of the shifting substance lingering upon your skin, something you’ve never felt before. You drag him with you through wall and after wall, down floor after floor, until you reach the outpost. M.E.G inside, watching. 

            You wonder what they think, the researchers. If they’ve calculated odds of survival for Bobby, for your relationship. 

            Calculated how long before it broke.

            You wonder if you’ve exceeded expectations or fallen short. 

            “You have to leave,” you tell him, letting go of his hand as if it burns which in a way it does, the feeling of his calloused mortal hand on yours too much and not enough. You want to live, but you are something that cannot die and so you cannot really live. Liminal. 

            Just like your prison. 

            “Why?” he asks, his voice low, husky. Deep in a way that says he’s pained. Hurting. Angry. Too many emotions for such a small boy. 

            “You can’t stay,” you tell him. “This isn’t your world. You saw the Father. It changes you and I cannot in good conscience let you stay. I made that mistake once. Never again.” 

            It’s a testament to your immortality that you are able to remain as cool and calm as you are right now. 

            Because he’s not. 

            When you saved Bobby, he didn’t expect to feel anything for you except gratitude, but in between one moment and the next, your blurry beautiful figure became everything he needed, a rope around his heart, tying him to you. 

            His savior. 

            The Backrooms his salvation. You his guiding light. And he thought he’d have forever, live with you in the liminal for as long as it would let him. He didn’t think that you wouldn’t want him. 

            “I’m not leaving,” he says now and he wishes god he wishes he could see you. See what your eyes are doing exactly, see the way your mouth twists. He wants to read you but how can he read something he can never truly see. “I’m staying.”

            “You don’t decide that,” you say and you’re right in his head the way you always have been, the way he loves because he never can miss a word. It’s just there. How could he go a lifetime without you when you’ve opened his eyes? When you’ve made him live? Truly live. “I do. This is my prison, my world and I am telling to leave.”

            “I won’t leave alive,” he says and he can see even through the blurriness that you are angry. That you want him to go, but he doesn’t understand why. He told you that he loved you and you said it back, said it like a revelation, like something you’d never had before. 

            So, why are you sending him away now?

            “LEAVE, BOBBY!” you scream and it’s so loud, so painful that he buckles, falling to his knees, hands at his ears as he lets out a high, keening sound. One of pain, one of hurting. One of need. He needs your hand on him. Needs your touch. 

            You. He just needs you, his salvation, savior, desert oasis.

            “WHY? WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO LEAVE?!” he yells in reply and he watches as your figure ripples like water as it bends and laps against the shore, against itself, your body now in front of him, blurry and bright and painful to look at in all the best ways. 

            “Because you are my reckoning,” you tell him and your hand, your precious, cool water hand comes to rest on his cheek and he leans into your touch, aching for it, the pain receding because you’re holding him and he loves you. “You will bring it back.”

            “Bring what back?” 

            “My memories,” you whisper and it sounds like you’re crying and he reaches forwards, blindly, hoping he doesn’t poke you in the eye, wiping across your cheeks, wetness on the tips of his fingers. Tears. 

            “You’re crying,” he whispers, pulling one hand back to look at the gleaming, refracting light on his finger. “I didn’t know you could cry.”

            “I didn’t either,” you say and it’s a moment that you can’t come back from. The kind where everything changes whether you do what you want or not. Because whatever you do or don’t do, nothing will ever be the same again. 

            It’s why he leans forwards, his hands on your cheeks, pulling you closer, your blurry outline still blurry, but lips visible and he leans in, pressing his lips against yours in a kiss that feels infinite and endless and perfect. 

            Right in a way that nothing in his life ever has before. 

            You taste like water and hope and something sweet that he can’t name, your lips like water and skin in one and how perfect and peculiar and ever you. 

            It seems to last forever and yet no time at all before you’re pulling back and your mouth opens, moves as if you’re telling him something but he can’t hear it. 

            But you can. 

            Because it’s who you are. 

            I can see him, Destruction, ahead of me, my opposite force. We were close once, but I suppose all things are in the beginning when there is nothing and no one but the two forces of the universe that oppose and contrast and are never able to reach each other. 

            The universe was empty at first except for us. We didn’t have forms then, but rather simply were. We just existed. Funny, right?

            But I wanted more and I made planets and stars and matter. He destroyed it, kept in balance. I created, he destroyed. I am the force of Creation after all. 

            Earth was special when I made it watched as a world bloomed. Evolved. I was so proud, but Destruction didn’t appreciate it, sunk his claws in, destroyed things, separated my world into different corners. Made the plates shift as he changed what was under them. 

            It caused a fight. But neither of us can win because we are the opposite of the other and there is no besting your pure opposite. It ended with me making a room and this was all before you humans existed. I wanted to lock him away, knew it would work, but it’s also what works against me. 

            He tricked me. That’s why he’s here, looking at me. He knows he’s won. He knows he’s got me trapped, for eternity. 

            “This is your prison,” he says, reaching for my head, reaching for the centre of who I am and always will be. I can feel it, him in my head, destroying my memory. Destroying every piece of who I was, leaving only his last words, body moving, the final wall sliding into place. 

            I don’t know how long I’ll remember that; he set in to destroy it all. So…for a memory that may linger longer, I should repeat who I am, for me. 

            I am Creation. I am the force of the universe, the one that exists with Destruction. Together we made it all. A balance. 

            I am Creation and I will never be caged because I can make a way out. I can set it so that one day, something liminal will save me. Something liminal will bring back what was lost. Something liminal both creative and destructive will bring it back. 

            And once it does, all I will have to do is destroy that made of destruction. He sealed me in, created a cage. So, I must destroy it. 

            He destroyed the exits so I just need to create them. 

            Creation cannot be destroyed for destruction cannot be created. 

            I am Creation. 

Well when you ask him so nicely, he'll do as he's told flipping you on your stomach, entity given strength more then enough to flip, mentally he was unprepared to learn you slept naked your beautiful sex exposed to him practically glowing under the light of those magic strings that were glowing on your walls his fingers finding your hole twisting and curling he can feel the way you writhe beneath him clawing like a beast at your sheets as you had been so willfully unprepared. Your moans like a wild animal in heat as you fight to stay still. Deathslinger chuckles pinning you down with his free hand keeping your face pressed against the mattress as he adds another finger cooing in your ear, "such a filthy whore, taken a strangers fingers in such a personal spot. Shouldn't you know better."

Deathslinger smirks feeling you flinch when his hand meets your ass so harshly. He loves the way your greedy hole is just sucking him. He loves the way writhe and scream. Fuck if he didn't know any better he'd swear you were made for this. His cock practically screaming at him as it presses against his trousers. Thinking he's got you good and ready he pulls out, grabbing the snake in his pants smearing the precum down his shaft giving it a few good strokes before he's pressed against you pushing in hard. What he lacks in girth he makes up for in length the tip kissing deep inside you stroking the sweet spot as you drags it out. Soft and infuriatingly slow strokes being made as he just lazily fucks into you.

Deathslinger's mind overwhelmed hearing you whine and whimper around him, "I'm only repaying ya back dear. Isn't a mite frustratin' ta made ta wait." His fingers digging in harshly as you try to move it along, but he won't. He's enjoying himself, enjoys the feeling of having you desperate. He'll fuck you nice and slow for hours denying you to the point of overstimulation, poor hole clenching and desperate. "How about this darlin? You open the trials back up to us and I promise to lettin' ya have right proper good time." He drawls.