Delirium -nikraria- Official

She is not hunting you.

And the mirror-woman? She was standing behind me. Smiling with a thousand cracked lips. I am back in my room now. The pier. The rust-smelling sea.

And in Nikraria, during Delirium, that is far, far worse.

She is remembering you.

It started with the fog. Nikraria’s famous white breath, rolling in from the Sunken Quarter. The locals wear cloth masks dipped in vinegar and rosemary. “Keeps the memory worms out,” the innkeeper’s wife said, laughing. I did not laugh. I was here to map the old catacombs beneath the Cathedral of Unfinished Saints. A simple commission. Dry work.

A child in a yellow coat handed me a mushroom growing from a brick. “Eat it,” she said. “It remembers the before-time.” I put it in my pocket. Later, I found the pocket sewn shut. I had never owned a needle.

My watch still ticks, but I no longer believe in hours. My hand is writing this, but I am not telling it what to say. Somewhere below, the child in the yellow coat is laughing. The mushroom is still in my pocket—or rather, my pocket is now a mushroom. The distinction no longer matters. Delirium -Nikraria-

By Nikraria

On the second night, I woke to find my left hand writing in a language I did not know. The letters were spirals. Snail-shell sentences. It wrote: “The spine is a ladder. The blood is a staircase. Climb down.” I burned the page. My hand wrote it again on the wall in ash.

And then, in the hollow silence, something new grows. She is not hunting you

I saw the —the thing for which the city is named, though no one speaks its name aloud. It was not a monster in the common sense. No claws, no fangs. It was a woman made entirely of broken mirrors, walking backward down the main canal. Where her feet touched the water, the water turned to cold fire. She was singing a lullaby about the birth of the moon.

“No,” he said, tying a knot. “You are the Delirium. You always were. Nikraria is sane. You are the fever dreaming a city.”

I looked out the window. The canal was a spine. The cathedral was a skull. The fog was the exhalation of a sleeping god. Smiling with a thousand cracked lips