Shadow Milk Cookie was an odious cookie, a creature of unrelenting cruelty, turpid in spirit, despicable in deed. You knew this, had long since memorized the filigree of his wickedness, the sinewy way it coiled around him like a serpent fat with gluttony. And yet, despite all, you allowed yourself the small, flickering heresy of doubt.

Not doubt in his malice—no, that was irrefutable, a stain too deep to scrub clean—but doubt in its totality.

There was something else, something brittle and trembling beneath the carapace of his villainy. You had sensed it in the spire’s aching corridors, in the silence that stretched like spun sugar between his words. A loneliness, vast and glacial, pressing in at the edges of his cruelty.

You were not naïve enough to believe in salvation, nor so self-important as to fancy yourself a sculptor of souls, chiseling kindness from the marble of his being.

No, you only wished to understand; to know why his sorrow spilled in unseen rivulets, why the darkness within him wept.

The world fractured into a hum—thin, piercing, wrong.

At first, a whisper, a faint crackling at the edges of perception, like the ghost of a sound not yet spoken.

Then it grew. A low, insidious buzzing, writhing beneath your skin, burrowing into the soft meat of your skull. It swelled, electric, furious, until it was all you could hear—all you could feel—a wall of sound, splitting your mind apart.

Static.

Hissing, warbling, relentless. It drowned out everything. The voices. The struggling. The wet, rattling breath of the man beneath you.

A shrieking chorus of white noise, deafening in its nothingness.

But it wasn’t just sound.

It slithered down your throat, filled your lungs, twisted in your gut. It blurred the edges of reality, made your fingers shake, made your vision pulse.

Somewhere in the endless crackling, laughter cut through.

Thin. Rasping. Choking on breath.

His laughter.

And the static screamed.

Ah… ah.

You were only supposed to talk.

Yet—

I wanted to know the reason behind his cruelty.

I wanted to gouge out his eyeballs with a spoon, cradle them in my palms, make them see.

His fingers twitched at his sides. But still, he did not fight back.

I wanted to understand him.

I wanted to tear out his spine, string it up like a garland.

His lips parted—no words, only the faintest wheeze of breath.

The hum in your skull swelled, a rising tide of white noise pressing against the walls of reason. Your grip—firm, no, reverent—tightened around his throat.

Beneath your fingers, the skin yielded, delicate, warm, a sheath barely concealing the fragile machinery of life. The veins, once steady, once obedient, now betrayed him, pulsing in erratic violets. Slower. Slower—

He was dying.

Shadow Milk Cookie was dying.

Yet, yet, yet—

AAaAAAAAAaaaaaAAAAaaaAAHHHHHHHhhHHHHHhhhhh...

The world unspooled fevered, sick with light and noise, an impressionist blur of sensation with no edges to grasp.

You were falling.

Beneath you, Shadow Milk Cookie lay sprawled like a sacrificial thing, though the blood, if there was any, was invisible—coursing beneath skin too soft, too pale, too pliant beneath your fingers.

Ah, your fingers. Had they always been so cruel?

You had only meant to study him, to understand his cruelty the way one might dissect the venom of a serpent—its composition, its origins, the machinery that allowed it to kill. But the snake does not ask to be understood. It coils, it waits, it bites. And here he was, wrapped in the dark of his own design, baring his throat to you not as a plea, no—never a plea—but as an offering.

A gift.

A lover’s invitation.

His lips, slackened from laughter, parted on a sigh—no protest, no plea, only the vague, trembling recognition that at last, at last, you were his.

“Beautiful,” he choked out, devotion blooming like a bruise across his voice. “Ah, what a pretty thing you are now.”

And there it was—that wretched, awful warmth in his gaze, not the fear you had expected, not the dawning realization of a man meeting his end, but adoration.

It slithered over you, that look. Pressed against your skin, sweet as honey gone to rot.

The static in your skull swelled, surged, something wretched birthing itself behind your eyes, spilling in warbled shrieks into the meat of your mind. It was laughter, it was noise, it was something older than language and more desperate than prayer.

You had wanted to understand him.

Had wanted to know if, beneath the ruin, there was something worth saving, some quiet tragedy in his cruelty, some root to dig up, to expose to the light.

But there was nothing beneath.

Only this. Only him.

Only the laughter, rasping and wet, thick with ruin.

You tightened your grip, a scientist finishing an experiment, an artist perfecting their stroke.

The air split.

A sudden, jarring intrusion—hands not his, hands not yours, wrenching you backward, away, away, away.

The moment severed like a snapped string. The pressure in your fingers gone. The warmth of his skin gone.

You struggled, though whether to fight them off or to reach for him again, you did not know. The world was still wrong—too bright at the edges, too sharp, the walls shivering like something alive.

But his laughter remained.

It did not stop.

Did not falter.

It curled around you like a chain, like silk, like a noose.

You could not tell if it was in the air or in your mind, could not tell if he was still there, sprawled and trembling on the floor, or if he had always been inside you, waiting, waiting, waiting—

Ah, but it didn’t matter now, did it?

Because you had learned what you wanted to know.

And knowledge was a wound that never healed.