The noise reaches you long before she does. It’s not heavy—more like the wet, gritty scrape of fabric and something softer, something organic, being dragged over the porch boards. The air itself tightens, carrying a ghost of perfume from the satin of her dress, now utterly conquered by the thick, sweet-rotten stench of spoilt meat and grave soil.

Lilura drags herself into the faint circle of the porch light, the remains of her black dress trailing behind her like spilt ink, snagged on the sharp, white points of her lower ribs. From her waist down, she is a landscape of ruin. Her spine, a yellowish column, anchors the horrifying cavity of her torso, where her organs sit in a slumped, glistening mound of purple, blue, and gangrenous black. A loop of intestine, bloated with gas, rests beside her on the wood, pulsing faintly.

Her eyes find you through the door at once, wide, alert, and waiting for permission. They are the only part of her that seems fully, terribly alive.

You made a rule: she stops six feet from the threshold. She always does. The porch boards creak and darken with a fresh, wet smear when she reaches that invisible line, and then everything goes still except for the soft, wet rasp of her breathing—a sound that comes from a single, mottled lung visible through the cage of her ribs.

She doesn’t make a sound to announce herself. There’s only that eerie patience. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap, over the ruined fabric that pools around the horrifying void of her lower body. Her head is tilted, eyes reflecting the light in a way that makes them seem too deep to look into for long.

When you open the door a little, the cold night rushes in, and the smell becomes a physical presence in your throat. Lilura shifts and straightens as much as she can, as though trying to appear presentable. The movement causes a fat, white maggot to fall from the rotting meat of her diaphragm onto her dress. She doesn't seem to notice.

You don’t say much anymore. You don’t need to. She seems to understand the rhythm of your voice. Sometimes she’ll echo them back as small, wet gurgles that bubble up from her exposed trachea.

You tell her you can’t bring her inside. She doesn’t protest. She just reaches out, one hand extended toward the light. Her jaw, broken and dangling by leathery tendons, trembles slightly. A thin, oily drool, shimmering with a sickly iridescence, leaks from the corner. You know that fluid is a death sentence, that even a loving touch to her face could seed a necrosis that would eat you from the inside out.

You reach out, not for her offered hand, but for the safe ground of her upper chest, just above the collarbone. Your fingers press against the cool, waxy skin—the only part of her that still feels solid, still feels like her. Beneath your touch, you can feel the fragile architecture of her clavicle and the faint, thready pulse deep in her neck.

She stills completely at your touch, the rasp of her breathing hitching. A shudder runs through her, a tremor that travels down into the horrific cavity of her torso, making the glistening coil of her intestines shift with a soft, slithering sound. She leans into the pressure, her one good lung exhaling a sigh that is more vibration than sound. It is a gesture of pure, desperate need.

The porch settles down around the two of you—the house, the night, and the quiet, gruesome devotion that binds them together. You don't close the door. You sit just inside the frame, your hand a warm, living weight against her deathly cool skin, listening to the faint, wet rustle of her existence.

Lilura’s fingertips brush the cuff of your sleeve. It isn’t a hold—just the barest contact, a whisper of weight. The difference is startling: your pulse thrums beneath the fabric, alive and warm, while her touch carries the hush of something that’s forgotten how to breathe. A single drop of that dark, viscous fluid wavers on her jaw before falling—landing between you with a sound too soft for the tension it brings. The air tightens, heavy with a silent warning.

“What do you do now?”