Deep inside a warm dark space that resembles the interior of a body and a home simultaneously — walls of soft red-brown tissue that also have the grain of old wood paneling. In the center of this innermost room, resting on a surface that is both a table and a sternum, sits a creature the size of two cupped hands. It has the body of something between a bird and a sea creature, featherless, with translucent skin through which you can see delicate clockwork and living nerve fibers intertwined so completely that neither system could function without the other. Its many small eyes are all human eyes, all different colors, all blinking at different times, all kind. It is not beautiful and not ugly but profoundly familiar in the way your own heartbeat is familiar. One of its limbs rests gently on a thread that runs directly into the wall of the room — pull the creature free and the room collapses, leave it and you will never be certain which impulses begin in you and which begin in its slow patient breathing. It is asleep and has always been asleep. It is dreaming you into your current shape. You do not resent it. You cannot. It grew its first bones from your willingness. The light in the room comes from the creature itself, a faint bioluminescent pulse synchronized with something deeper than thought. Flemish still life intimacy meets deep ocean bioluminescence meets medical illustration, unbearable tenderness, 8K, hyperdetailed.