The Chrysalis

"The Chrysalis"

It was not sleep. It was not rest. When I wove the silk around my body, it was instinct—like the others, my mind screamed, but my muscles obeyed something older than thought. We had all gathered in the school that final morning, drawn by something we couldn't name. Twenty-three of us. Teachers, staff, even the principal—all feeling the same terrible pull. The world vanished in layers of thread, until I was buried alive in silence.

Then came the melting.

Lo, what sweet dissolution! I felt it—the unraveling of myself. Flesh slipped from bone like wax before flame. Bones turned to sludge. My lungs dissolved into honeyed rot. My heart stuttered, stopped, then reformed as something smaller, faster, alien—a clockwork of sinew and nightmare.

I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. But I could feel. I felt every cell break apart like prayers whispered to uncaring gods. I felt the things inside me wake up.

They had always been there. Hidden. Imaginal discs, I remembered them being called. Little folded seeds of transformation, like tumors with a plan—dark buds of becoming, patient as tombstones. They drank me like soup. They built limbs I did not recognize. Wings I had never asked for.

Time became thick, viscous—like honey laced with rot. It clung to me, distorted everything. Minutes bled into hours, or perhaps it was the other way around. Inside that absolute blackness, I was reduced to sensation, and even that was not my own.

The things inside me moved with surgical grace, peeling back flesh as if unraveling a mistake. They dismantled what I had been—cell by cell, nerve by nerve—and reassembled something new from the pulpy wreckage. O, what artistry in ruin! What craft in my undoing! I was awake for all of it.

Dreams came in slivers—chalk dust on my fingers, small hands reaching up with questions, the sound of children's laughter echoing through empty hallways. I remembered the weight of their trust, how they looked at me when they didn't understand photosynthesis or fractions or why caterpillars became butterflies. I had explained transformation to them so many times, never knowing I would become its victim. The memories felt warped, disjointed. Like stolen film reels projected onto a dying wall. None of it fit. None of it was mine anymore.

I clung to the echo of my name—the one they called out when they needed help, when they didn't understand. Miss Chen, they had said. Miss Chen, how do butterflies know how to fly? Miss Chen, do they remember being caterpillars? Whispered it, screamed it. But the syllables shattered before they could form, as though my identity was being actively erased. What cruel jest is this—that I, who guided tender minds through learning's labyrinth, should lose mine own path in transformation's maze! I groped for memories of guiding others through their own transformations—from ignorance to knowledge, from small to grown—but they slipped through the phantom fingers of a body that no longer existed.

And the worst part—the cruelest part—was the awareness. I was not allowed the mercy of unconsciousness. No, the things wanted me present. They wanted me to feel every new appendage pushing its way from my liquefied torso, every sinew and gland blooming in unnatural places. I was their canvas. Their womb. Behold, I am become the vessel of mine own horror—mother and child, sculptor and clay, all twisted into one writhing form.

Sometimes, they paused. Frozen mid-creation, as if consulting a blueprint scrawled in some forgotten genome. In those moments of stillness, I could hear them. Not voices, exactly—more like a hum behind my thoughts. A hive-mind murmur, calculating, constructing, becoming. Were the others hearing this too? My colleagues, suspended in their own cocoons somewhere in the building? Were they awake for this like I was, feeling their lesson plans dissolve along with their spines?

My eyes were stripped away and built again—compound, multifaceted. I saw too much. I saw the world as angels might—fractured, infinite, terrible in its completeness.

I do not know how long I was in the dark. But I remember the moment I woke as something else.

My skin cracked. The coffin split. I emerged, trembling and wet. The air was sharp—too sharp—each breath slicing through my lungs like glass. Light struck my eyes, and I screamed without sound. There were too many colors. Too many shadows. The world fractured into mirrored shards, each reflecting things I didn't recognize.

My limbs bent wrong. My legs were too thin, jointed in ways that felt insectile. A thousand tiny sensations buzzed across my body—delicate nerves firing beneath newly grown skin. My tongue reached out, long and coiled like a question mark, tasting the wind. It recoiled. I recoiled.

My wings—my wings—unfolded with a thousand veins pulsing beneath the surface. They quivered, wet and raw, every stretch of membrane humming with unfamiliar life. I could feel blood moving through them. I could hear it. What symphony of circulation! What music in my monstrous veins!

I stood—or tried to. My center of gravity was wrong. My back ached from the weight of things I hadn't known I was growing. My body had been redesigned without my consent.

It twitched like a puppet tugged by invisible strings. I stumbled through the ruin of my chrysalis, legs clicking against the earth. My wings dragged behind me, catching the light like oil on water.

Then, without warning, instinct took over. My wings beat once, twice—and I was airborne. The ground fell away beneath me, and I found myself hovering above the world I had once crawled through. The transition was seamless, terrifying in its naturalness.

I should have felt wonder. Liberation. Rebirth.

But this was not joy. This was not freedom.

Because I remember.

I remember crawling. I remember chewing. I remember being small. And now I hover above the leaves I once devoured, no longer one of them—no longer the one who helped the small ones grow. The irony is exquisite in its cruelty.

I, who once spoke of metamorphosis as miracle, have become the living mockery of my own lessons.

What wretched splendour I have become, A hunger clad in wings. Behold me, radiant as the bloom that feeds on death, My beauty steeped in ruin, My birth a curse sung sweetly through silken thread.