The Egg Ritual
Lucid Codex Entry 007
It was already crowded when she woke up.
Not her room.
Not her bed.
The walls were dim and soft, red fabric dripping from them like melted wax. She sat up slowly. The fabric she wore clung to her skin...sheer, static-charged, clinging like it was stitched to the dream itself. It felt ceremonial. It felt wrong.
Next to her: her uncle.
Silent. Still. Nodding gently, as if they’d been in conversation for hours without words.
Then the guests arrived.
Two men. Uninvited. Loud. Rummaging through drawers like they owned them.
"Got anything to eat?" one asked, laughing.
Casual. Familiar. Wrong.
Then two more came in. One held something in his hand.
A white egg.
Too clean. Too smooth. Like it had never been touched by a chicken or dirt or time.
He held it up.
"It has to be bleached, this didn’t come from a chicken-butt," he said.
It was framed as a joke. But no one laughed.
The energy in the room tightened.
Someone mentioned the egg was for her uncle. A remedy. A ritual. Something passed down. Something old.
She smirked. Tried to break the tension.
"Don’t worry, I’ve got fresh ones. Straight from the source."
More people arrived.
Women this time. Older. Dressed in muted tones. Faces calm. Watchful...but not focused. Like they were looking through her.
The room pulsed with heat and breath and something unspoken.
She rose from the bed.
Still wrapped in red.
Still glowing.
A whisper curled in her mind:
Why am I wearing this in front of family?
But no one seemed to notice. Or they weren’t allowed to.
She moved around the bed, half-floating through the crowd, her feet bare on the warm floor. Then...crack.
She stepped on something.
An old phone case. Cloudy. Blue. Brittle like a relic.
She bent down.
"This yours?"
The man nodded once. She picked it up, offered to replace it.
"I’ll take you to the phone store," she said.
But even as she spoke, she knew...it was too old to be replaced. Obsolete. Like most things in this room.
She passed a mirror.
Stopped.
Her body looked… hollowed. Thin, but not starved. Ethereal. Glowing from within like red light through stained glass.
The fabric hugged her like skin. Her reflection didn’t blink.
She moved again. The man with the egg returned.
But this time, he held something else.
Stone. Heavy. Carved. A head...ancient and absurd. A face meant to be sacred but warped through time. Its features curled in a grin too wide to be holy.
“This one’s older,” he said. “Like the museum heads. Like that one that talks.”
He laughed.
She didn’t.
Because the egg now looked like the face. Same smirk. Same wrongness.
And it was still grinning.
No one told her what it meant.
No one told her what to do.
But everyone watched.
And waited.
Not for the ritual to begin.
For her to realize it already had.
