They used to call me a biologist. Back when classifications mattered. Back when life followed rules.
Now I call myself a bestiarian.
I catalog the impossible.
Eichaudh's gaze did something to the world's womb. Creatures still crawl from the soil and the sea, but they are not born—they are remembered, half-formed memories of hungers that predate Earth. They don't evolve. They emerge, fully wrong. Fully awake.
The first I recorded was the Glassmouth.
It looked like a deer—mostly—but where its face should have been, there was a blooming fan of mirrored bone. No eyes, no nostrils. Just reflection. I watched it freeze a man mid-step just by turning to him. He didn't die—he paused. For three hours. When he moved again, he didn't blink anymore. Just whispered, "There's another me inside the mirror," over and over, until his throat gave out.
I sketched the Glassmouth into a journal. Didn't look at mirrors for a week.
Then came the Choirlings.
You hear them before you see them—babylike voices, soft, rhythmic, coming from the sky. You look up. You always look up.
That's when they drop.
They don't land. They drip. Like jellyfish made of wet cartilage and empty cribs. They wrap around you and sing lullabies in your childhood voice. One man smiled as it devoured his head. Said, "Mom?"
I survived. Don't ask how.
Then there's the Pale Repeaters. They don't feed. They just follow. They wear the faces of people you miss, and they echo things you never said aloud. One followed me for six days, whispering every secret I've ever hidden, in my mother's voice. I nearly let it hold me.
I've cataloged 103 entities so far. Some with names. Some without. Some I never saw—just felt. Like the Hollowback, which passes through places and erases all spinal columns. Or the Long-Faced Diver, which swims through earth like water and asks, in perfect English, "Where is your anchor?"
I never answer. I don't know what happens if I do.
I've sent some of my pages to the Broadcaster. He reads them on air sometimes, late at night, when the signals flicker. Part of me hopes no one hears. Part of me hopes someone does, so they'll know what not to look at.
Eichaudh doesn't need to kill you. His world will do that for Him.
But His creatures?
They show you how it's done.
And I keep writing. Drawing. Documenting the wrongness, even as it creeps closer, even as I begin to forget how normal ever felt.
I do it because someone must name the new beasts.
Because if we don't, they'll name us.