[NEW STORY] PARASYTE X WORM: PROLOGUE

There had been a moment—brief enough that it could have been dismissed as a passing thought under ordinary circumstances, and yet intense enough to linger long after it should have faded—when Amy Dallon realized that what she felt was no longer simple frustration.

Frustration was a familiar thing, one she had learned to endure and accept without protest. It could be swallowed, stifled down, and rationalized away with tired excuses about stress and responsibility and the impossible weight of expectation, pressures that had long since become indistinguishable from obligation. It did not make her hands tremble or tighten her throat until breathing became an effort that required conscious thought, nor did it whisper insistent, poisonous suggestions that things would be better—simpler—if one small detail of the world could just be corrected.

Hatred did.

It sat suffocatingly in her chest as Carol Dallon spoke to her in that clipped, distant tone that never quite rose to open cruelty and yet never softened into anything that could be mistaken for warmth. There had been no shouting, no overt dismissal, nothing that could be pointed to and named as abuse without inviting argument and denial. Only the same cold disapproval that had always been there, honed to a fine edge by years of disappointment that Amy could never quite seem to stop provoking.

It would have been easier, in some ways, if Carol had simply been cruel. Instead, she was exacting in a way that made refusal feel ungrateful or, at worst, unforgivable. And Amy, for all the control she prided herself on, for all the lines she had drawn and sworn never to cross, felt something inside her slipping.

Her power responded to emotion, even when she wished it would not. It stirred beneath her skin, alive in a way that had never stopped unsettling her, eager and attentive and infinitely capable as if it had been waiting for precisely this lapse. 

She had never used it on a human mind. That had always been the line. The absolute, unbreakable line she even refused to entertain. But lines, she discovered in that moment, were easier to imagine than they were to maintain, and were more dependent on circumstance than she had ever been willing to admit.

Her thoughts slipped past Carol, skirting the idea with a care she did not fully examine, and settled on something more indirect. Something safer. A solution that could not be traced back to her quite so easily, not even by her own conscience.

If she could not bring herself to alter Carol…

Then she could create something that would.

The idea did not come to her fully formed. It settled into place piece by piece, each step following naturally from the last, guided by the horrifying intuition of her power. Amy did not need notes or diagrams; she understood biology in a way that bypassed learning entirely, seeing structures and processes as clearly as if they had been laid out before her in perfect detail.

A parasite.

The word came unbidden and with a certainty that left no room for doubt in what it was, even as something inside her flinched from it.

It would be small, subtle enough to go unnoticed at the moment of contact, and capable of entering a host without immediate detection and settling in before any real resistance could form. It would not kill—not unless she wanted it to—but instead rewrite the body from within, working cell by cell, guiding biological processes toward something new. Something improved. Something… closer to what it should have been.

Her hands trembled as she worked, fingers touching the writhing worm she had chosen, though in truth the physical medium hardly mattered. It was merely a starting point from which she could build a function far more complex, the changes she made precise to a degree that no human science could replicate.

For a moment, just a moment, she considered giving it direction beyond its basic instinct, a command that would guide it toward the outcome she had originally envisioned.

Toward Carol.

The thought lingered longer than it should have. Then, with a sharp inhale that bordered on a gasp, Amy recoiled from her own creation as though it had already done something unforgivable.

What was she doing?

The question struck with a clarity that cut through the haze of anger, leaving behind something colder and far more damning. This wasn’t frustration anymore, or even hatred, not in any form she could excuse. This was something else entirely. Something she had always promised herself she would never become.

The organism rested where she had left it, inert for now, though she could feel the potential within it, waiting only for the right conditions to awaken. It was… beautiful, in a way that made her stomach twist. 

Alive.

“I didn’t mean—” she started, and then stopped, because there was no version of that sentence that rang true.

She had meant it. Every step of it.

That was the worst part.

Amy closed her eyes, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead as though she could force the thoughts back, undoing the last several minutes through sheer will. The disgust came quickly and without restraint, directed as much inward as it was toward the thing she had created.

She could destroy it.

It would take nothing more than a touch, a moment’s focus, and the structure she had built would unravel into useless, lifeless matter. There would be no trace left, nothing to suggest that she had ever come this close to crossing a line she had always believed absolute.

Her hand hovered, caught between action and inaction, while time dragged longer than they should. Yet, she did nothing. 

Maybe it was because it was her first attempt at something so… intricate, a demonstration of her power pushed to a level she had never quite dared to explore before. Maybe it was the insidious pull of curiosity, the desire to see what it might become if allowed to function as intended. Or maybe —and this was the thought she tried hardest not to acknowledge—it was because some small, shameful part of her was not entirely ready to let go of what it represented.

Whatever the reason, she did not destroy it. Instead, she made a different choice, one that felt safer only because it required less immediate confrontation with what she had done.

She let it go.

The act was carried out with a gentleness that felt at odds with what it entailed, allowing the parasite to slip free of her influence and into the wider world beyond. It had not really been designed for independence. Without guidance, without a host, its systems would degrade quickly under the strain of sustaining itself.

It would die.

By morning, she told herself, it would be nothing more than a failed experiment, a mistake that had resolved itself without consequence.

Amy turned away from the place where she had left it, already trying to push the memory aside, to bury it beneath the countless other thoughts that demanded her attention. There were patients to see, responsibilities to uphold, and a life to return to that did not include this moment, this lapse of judgement, this quiet and terrible admission of what she was capable of becoming.

Behind her, unnoticed and unconsidered, the parasite endured.

It should have withered. It should have failed. Instead, driven by the same relentless adaptability that had guided its creation, it persisted just long enough to encounter what it required.

A host.

A girl walking home alone, her thoughts turned inward, and her guard lowered in that small, vulnerable way that came from being too accustomed to being overlooked to expect danger from something so small. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about her, nothing that would have drawn notice under different circumstances, yet at that very moment, she was chosen. 

That girl was Taylor Hebert.