The Render

Sila scrapes bone for a living inside a dead creature's skeleton. When a wall breach soaks her arm in amber fluid, and she wakes up able to dissolve matter on contact, the Warden immediately offers her a deal: work for him, and he keeps her brother's bones from crumbling. She takes it. She should not have taken it. The deeper she goes, the worse it gets. People fused into the walls, still breathing, their faces turned like they heard something and never finished turning. A section of the creature that has started to beat. Her mother, who disappeared eight years ago, in the walls, breathing, connected. The creature is not dead. It is collecting people. It needs human minds wired into its body to stand up again, and when it does, the city inside it does not survive the process. Sila's power dissolves anything she touches. The creature needs exactly that power to complete its resurrection. These two facts are not a coincidence.