She came out of a fever dream, into a house that seemed too dark, and burning. The walls warbled in the blear of newly-opened eyes, crackled with a red-orange glow, and blackened with strange baroque patterns. Halcifer had shot her up with a full vial, she remembered suddenly, and the instructions came back to her in fits and starts. The words of warning, the godly rules, had been chanting through her sleeping visions in loops and cycles. Avoid mirrors. Don't eat the food. Look at Them only with purity of thought. Remember gravity. Remember gravity.
She crawled from the bed, flopping the last few inches to the floor, landing lightly upon carpeting that puffed away like ash. The phantom fire roared slowly overhead, spiraling tentacles of flame passing by like drowsy eels. Her purpose for accepting the injection returned to her, the glint of thread-thin, golden lines beginning to trace away from her fingertips, guiding her, singing their soft little songs under the constant snaps and pops of the false burning. She made her way down the hall, down the staircase, moving like a salamander, close to weightless. Remember gravity, she thought again. Remember gravity.
Two of Them came around a corner, nonplussed at her presence, Their limbs swinging in slow motion, and the eels of flame split and passed around Their heads serenely. They spoke down to her in a nonsensical language, emotive but meaningless, and tapped her curiously with red claws. She looked up from the golden tracery then, saw their beautiful unfettered forms, smiled and pushed away desire. They seemed taken aback at the sudden acknowledgment, and staggered away with a motion that was too fast, inhuman--all the while clutching at Their throats, Their lovely mouths bent impossibly with horror.
She returned to the golden lines, pulling herself along as a swimmer at the bottom of a lake, through a final hallway ending in a door. A mirror hummed in the foyer to her right--an oval like an empty socket--and its pull began to draw her sideways, lighting up the history of needle wounds along her arm. The oldest, long-healed punctures emitted a faint light, but the fresher tracks shone like ingots in the dark, and she noticed with some surprise that they made a familiar pattern. The mirror hummed louder and she doubled her efforts against it, finally dragging her way up to the doorknob ahead. She turned its icy handle and split the darkness with daylight.
He stood there, black against the electric blue of an impossible world, three long white horns curving up from his head. And she felt it was expected, designed to happen that way. The golden lines escaped the threshold and exploded into a hopeless expanding web, covering every Thing in the outside world. The house, with its haloed denizens and endless cupboards stuffed with ambrosia, began to crumble and burn in earnest, and when she reached high for his tentative hand she forgot the words of warning in their entirety. Up, and up, and up she flew, outpacing even her prayers for escape.
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