He was anticipating the next injection.
He remembered now. The old prison had been about bars and silence. This one… this one was about intimacy. About being known .
Kaelen looked up. A face leaned down from the amber gloom. It was beautiful in the way a polished skull is beautiful. Features of a woman, but the eyes were compound, fracturing his reflection into a thousand tiny, screaming Kaelens. Her hair was not hair, but filament-thin antennae. She wore a gown of woven chitin that clicked softly as she descended, her movements a series of precise, predatory angles.
“Warden Sess,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. Insect Prison Remake -v1.0- -Eroism-
She raised a slender, many-jointed finger. From the wall, a tendril of living resin unfurled, tipped with a needle that wept a glistening, honey-like droplet. It wasn't a drug. It was a provocation .
A whisper, dry and chitinous, skittered from the ceiling. “Ah. You’re awake.”
“This is Eroism-v1.0,” Sess purred. “Not eros as you know it. Not love or lust. The essence of desire. The raw, unformed need that precedes all pleasure and all pain. We will inject it, and then we will watch your redundant little heart learn to beat in new, desperate rhythms.” He was anticipating the next injection
He looked up at Sess. Her gown of chitin had parted slightly, revealing not skin, but a second layer of smaller, writhing insects—book lice, she called them—that groomed her exoskeleton in a frantic, loving dance.
“Warden. Curator. Muse.” She tilted her head, a gesture both human and insectile. “The old system failed because it punished the body. We punish the… flavor of the soul. You are emotionally redundant, Kaelen. You feel the same things, in the same order, for the same reasons. Boring. We are going to breed new responses into you.”
The needle touched his neck.
“You see?” she said, stepping closer. The resin walls pulsed with a slow, amber light. “The prison isn’t the cage. The cage is the old you. We are the remake. And you, Kaelen, are going to be a beautiful, trembling, new thing.”
He gasped. His body arched. It was agony. It was ecstasy. It was the pressure of a kiss that exists only in the moment before lips meet.
He was in a cube. Ten meters each side. The walls weren't metal or stone, but a translucent, amber-hued resin. Embedded within them, frozen in eternal rigor, were insects. Not ordinary ones. These were specimens with too many joints, eyes like cut gems, wings that seemed to fold through dimensions. A praying mantis the size of his forearm, its scythes locked in a perpetual strike. A wasp with an ovipositor like a jeweled stinger, poised inches from a paralyzed, humanoid larva. This one… this one was about intimacy
Suddenly, he could feel every insect embedded in the walls. Their final, frozen agonies. The mantis’s hunger. The wasp’s sterile, mechanical lust for implantation. And beneath it, a new sensation—a phantom touch. Not Sess’s hand, but the idea of touch. A caress that hadn’t happened yet, echoing backward through time. His skin remembered pleasures he’d never known, and his nerves anticipated pains that would never come.