The spoon scraped against the bottom of the enamel pot as Zoya stirred the fragrant lentil soup. Sunlight slanted through the kitchen window, illuminating the familiar space of her home on the outskirts of Ganja.
It was a sturdy house, built by her husband decades ago, its thick walls a comfort against the summer heat and winter chill.
A vibration ran through the floor, subtle but undeniable. Jars on the open shelves rattled a brief, glassy tune. Zoya paused, ladle dripping.
Another tremor. They'd started weeks ago, faint shivers in the earth, dismissed by most as settling ground or distant construction. But their frequency was increasing, and a low thrum sometimes followed, a resonance that felt too deep, too wrong.
Her neighbor, Sabina, had stopped by earlier, her face tight with worry beneath her headscarf. "Did you feel that one this morning, Zoya? Like a giant fist hitting the ground miles below."
Sabina clutched a string of prayer beads. "My brother in Sheki says the earth opened up near his village. Just swallowed a goat path."
Zoya had offered tea, trying to project a calm she didn't entirely possess. "The earth makes noises, Sabina. It breathes. We've had quakes before."
"Not like this," Sabina insisted, her voice dropping. "Old Ilham claims it's the altındakılar – the ones below. He says the seals are breaking."
Zoya had waved away the folklore, though the old tales lingered uncomfortably in the back of her mind – stories whispered by grandmothers about beings imprisoned in the planet's core, beings of unimaginable scale and malice. Superstitions, of course.
Yet, the tremors felt different now. Less like natural shifts, more like something clawing its way free.
A louder rattle snapped her back to the present. A framed photograph of her late husband, Rashid, tilted precariously on the wall shelf. She hurried to straighten it, her hand brushing against the cool glass. His smiling face, young and hopeful, seemed impossibly distant from the unease creeping into her afternoon.
Her grandson, Farid, had pleaded with her again during their last call. "Bibi, please, come to Baku. It's safer here in the city. These quakes…"
"And trade my home for a concrete box?" she'd countered gently. "This house has stood for fifty years, Farid. It will stand through a few shakes." But the lie tasted sour. The house felt less steady lately, as if the ground it rested upon was becoming unreliable.
The low thrum returned, more pronounced this time, vibrating not just through the floor but in the fillings of her teeth. It wasn't a sound so much as a pressure, a deep subterranean pulse that seemed to resonate with bone.
Outside, the chickens in their coop began squawking frantically, a distressed chorus cutting through the afternoon quiet.
Then came a different sound – a rending, tearing noise from the direction of the low hills bordering the town. It was followed by a heavy crash that shook the house more violently than any tremor yet. Dust sifted down from the ceiling beams. The soup pot rocked on the stove.
Zoya ran to the door, pulling her shawl tighter around her shoulders despite the warmth. Sabina was already in her own doorway across the narrow lane, her face pale. A plume of dust rose above the hills, thick and brown against the blue sky.
"What was that?" Sabina breathed, her eyes wide.
Before Zoya could answer, the ground bucked hard. Not a tremor, but a violent lurch, throwing her against the doorframe. Sabina screamed as a crack snaked up the front of her house with terrifying speed. Tiles rained down from a nearby roof.
The frantic squawking of the chickens abruptly stopped. An unnatural stillness descended, broken only by the distant, monstrous grinding from the hills and the panicked shouts starting to erupt from other houses.
"Ilham was right," Sabina whispered, her voice trembling uncontrollably. "They're coming."
The stillness didn't last. It was replaced by a cacophony – dogs barking hysterically, car alarms blaring, people shouting questions and warnings. Zoya gripped the doorframe, her knuckles white. The air itself felt wrong, heavy and charged with static electricity that made the hairs on her arms stand on end.
From the dust cloud still billowing over the hills, she heard it – a sound that defied description, a wet, chittering chorus mixed with something like stone scraping against stone, amplified to an unbearable volume. It wasn't animal, wasn't machine. It was something ancient and deeply unwell.
Panic surged through the lane. Doors slammed open. People spilled out, looking towards the hills, their faces a mixture of terror and disbelief. Old Ilham stood in the middle of the lane, surprisingly steady, pointing with a gnarled finger. "They break the skin of the world! Run! Run while you can!"
But where could they run? The grinding sound was closer now, accompanied by seismic jolts that made walking difficult. Zoya saw a fissure yawn open across the paved road at the end of the lane, blackness showing within its depths. A car swerved violently to avoid it and crashed into a garden wall.
"Zoya! We must go!" Sabina grabbed her arm, pulling her out into the chaos. "My cousin has a truck – maybe we can reach the highway!"
They stumbled together down the lane, joining a small, terrified stream of people heading away from the hills. The sky was darkening prematurely, not with clouds, but with the spreading dust. The chittering, scraping sounds grew louder, resolving into distinct elements – countless clicking legs, leathery wings beating thick air, guttural exhalations that spoke of immense lungs.
Something huge crested the nearest hill. It wasn't one thing, but a roiling mass of shapes, silhouetted against the dust-choked sky. Long, segmented limbs scrabbled at the earth, pulling forward bodies that seemed wrongly assembled – carapaces gleaming wetly, multiple eyes glowing with cold, internal light, maws opening and closing with sickening clicks.
They were gargantuan, dwarfing the trees they effortlessly snapped and trampled. More emerged behind them, a tide of nightmares pouring from unseen openings in the wounded earth.
A collective scream went up from the fleeing crowd. This wasn't an earthquake. It was an invasion.
The nearest monstrosity, a thing like a centipede fused with a crab, perhaps fifty meters long, scuttled down the slope with impossible speed. Its multifaceted eyes swiveled, fixing on the panicked humans. It opened a vertical mouth filled with rotating, needle-like teeth and emitted a shriek that shattered windows and pierced eardrums.
Zoya and Sabina scrambled behind a low wall as the creature charged past, its immense legs pounding the ground like piledrivers. It swept through a cluster of houses as if they were made of paper, reducing them to splinters and dust in seconds. The screams were abruptly cut off.
"The truck!" Sabina gasped, pulling Zoya along. They half-ran, half-stumbled through back gardens and alleyways, the sounds of destruction echoing all around them.
They saw glimpses – a towering creature made of shifting, obsidian-like plates absorbing rifle fire from a desperate policeman before swatting him aside like an insect; smaller, winged horrors swooping down to carry people away into the dust-filled sky; gelatinous blobs oozing through the streets, dissolving everything they touched.
They reached the small square where Sabina's cousin, Rizvan, lived. His battered blue truck was idling, packed with terrified people. Rizvan saw them, his face grim. "Get in! Quickly!"
Zoya and Sabina clambered into the crowded truck bed just as Rizvan slammed the accelerator. The truck lurched forward, tires spinning on debris before finding purchase. They sped through streets filled with fleeing people and pursuing horrors.
Zoya clung to the side, her gaze sweeping over the unfolding nightmare. The scale was impossible. The creatures were everywhere, emerging from fissures splitting the earth open across the city. Buildings collapsed under their weight or were torn apart by immense claws. Fires raged unchecked.
A high-pitched whine grew loud. Zoya looked up. One of the winged creatures, bat-like but with insectoid features and a long, barbed tail, was diving towards the truck. "Down!" Rizvan bellowed from the cab.
Everyone flattened themselves as the creature swooped low, its leathery wings casting a fleeting shadow. The barbed tail lashed out, missing the truck bed by inches but shattering the rear window of the cab. Rizvan cursed, swerving violently.
Another creature, low-slung and armoured like an ankylosaur made of knives, scuttled out from an alleyway directly into their path.
Rizvan couldn't stop in time. The truck slammed into the creature's side with a sickening crunch of metal and chitin. The impact threw everyone in the bed forward. Zoya hit the metal railing hard, the breath knocked out of her. The truck stalled, engine dead.
The armoured creature, seemingly unharmed, let out a series of clicks and turned its eyeless head towards them.
"Out! Everybody out! Run!" Rizvan shouted, scrambling from the damaged cab.
People tumbled from the truck bed, scattering in panic. The armoured creature lowered its head and charged. Zoya saw Sabina trip and fall. She reached back, trying to pull her up, but Sabina screamed, "Go, Zoya! Save yourself!"
Before Zoya could react, the creature was upon them. Its bladed limbs moved with blinding speed. Sabina disappeared beneath it. Zoya threw herself sideways, rolling behind the wreckage of a fruit vendor's cart just as the creature's charge carried it past. She didn't look back. She couldn't.
Scrambling to her feet, Zoya ran. She didn't know where, just away. Away from the clicks, the shrieks, the sounds of tearing metal and crumbling stone. She ducked into a narrow, winding alleyway, praying it offered concealment. The sounds of the city's death pursued her.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs cramped, pushing deeper into the older part of the city, a labyrinth of stone and shadow.
She found herself near the old geothermal caves on the city's edge, a place she hadn't visited since childhood. Locals avoided them now; stories persisted of unstable ground and strange gases. But it was shelter. Maybe.
The entrance was partially obscured by overgrown bushes and fallen masonry from a nearby derelict bathhouse. Heart pounding, Zoya slipped inside.
The air was immediately different – warm, damp, smelling of sulfur and wet earth. It was blessedly quiet compared to the pandemonium outside. She moved cautiously deeper, using the dim light filtering from the entrance.
The passage sloped downward, twisting and turning. Childhood memories surfaced – exploring these tunnels with friends, daring each other to go deeper, the thrill of the forbidden dark. It felt like another lifetime.
The tunnel opened into a larger cavern. Geothermal heat radiated from the rock walls, which glistened with moisture. Small pools bubbled sluggishly, releasing faint wisps of steam. It felt ancient and hidden. Safe.
Zoya sank onto a smooth rock near one of the pools, trying to catch her breath, trying to process the cataclysm unfolding above. Sabina. Rizvan. Farid – was he safe in Baku? Was anywhere safe? The news reports, the downplayed tremors… they hadn't understood. No one had. This wasn't geology. It was birth. The earth was hatching.
A faint rhythmic pulsing caught her attention. It wasn't the bubbling of the pools. It was deeper, steadier. Coming from further within the cave system.
Curiosity, or perhaps a desperate need to ensure this sanctuary was truly secure, warred with her fear. She rose, her legs shaky, and moved towards the source of the sound.
Another, larger chamber lay beyond a narrow fissure. The heat was more intense here, the air thick and strangely sweet, like overripe fruit mixed with ozone. The pulsing was stronger, seeming to vibrate through the rock itself.
Along the curved walls of the cavern, nestled in alcoves and hanging from the ceiling, were sacs. Dozens of them. They were pale, membranous, shot through with dark veins that pulsed with a faint, internal luminescence. They ranged in size from melons to small cars. They looked sickeningly organic, like giant, waiting eggs or cocoons.
Zoya stifled a gasp, pressing a hand to her mouth. This wasn't a sanctuary. It was a nursery.
She backed away slowly, her eyes fixed on the pulsing sacs. She could hear faint clicks and wet movements from within some of them. They were alive. Gestating. The geothermal heat wasn't natural; it was incubation. These caves weren't just caves; they were passages, birthing chambers connected to the depths from which the monstrosities had emerged.
Panic seized her again, cold and sharp. She turned to flee back the way she came, back towards the entrance, towards the ruined world that was somehow preferable to this warm, waiting tomb.
As she scrambled through the narrow fissure connecting the two chambers, the ground beneath her groaned. Not a tremor from above, but a shift deep within the cave structure itself.
Rocks detached from the ceiling. Dust rained down. Zoya cried out as a massive section of the passage ahead of her collapsed inward with a deafening roar, sending boulders cascading down, completely blocking the way back to the entrance.
The impact threw her backward into the nursery chamber. She landed hard on the damp rock floor, stunned.
When the dust began to settle, she saw it clearly. The passage was gone. Sealed. Entombed.
She pushed herself up, ignoring the pain in her side, and scrabbled at the pile of fallen rock. It was immense, immovable. Tons of solid stone separated her from the outside world.
She beat her fists against it, screaming, her voice swallowed by the vastness of the cavern and the steady, rhythmic pulsing of the sacs around her. No one could hear her. No one was left to hear her.
Exhaustion and despair finally overwhelmed her. She slid down the rockfall, slumping onto the floor. The air was thick, warm, vibrating with nascent life.
She looked at the nearest sac, mere meters away. A shape shifted within its translucent membrane, vaguely arthropodal, rearranging itself with a wet squelching sound. Its veins pulsed faster, brighter.
Tears tracked paths through the grime on her face. This was her end. Not a quick death in the chaos above, but a slow descent into madness, trapped in the heart of the enemy's breeding ground.
She wouldn't be killed; she would be a witness. Left to listen to the hatching, to anticipate the emergence of new horrors in the suffocating darkness, until her mind frayed and broke completely.
She thought of Rashid's smile, of Farid's voice on the phone, of Sabina's hand grabbing hers. All gone. Everything gone.
Only the warm, pulsing dark remained, filled with the promise of hatching nightmares.
The unique, brutal sadness wasn't just death; it was the utter annihilation of hope, trapped alive in the womb of the world's end.
The chittering from within the sacs grew louder. Zoya closed her eyes, but there was no escaping the sound, or the heat, or the waiting dark.