Rigid

 The darkness in the room was absolute, heavy enough to feel like wet velvet pressed against my open eyes. I awoke not to the morning sun, but to an agonizing, unnatural rigidity.

When I tried to shift my weight, a jolt of pure, white-hot electricity shot through my pelvis. My hips were locked, fused together in a sickening, calcified immobility. It felt as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to my femur heads and welded the shattered bone fragments back together with rusted iron rebar.

I gasped, a jagged sound that tore at my dry throat. The air in the room didn't smell like my bedroom; it smelled of copper, ozone, and the sickly-sweet rot of overripe meat.

I managed to drag my torso forward using only my elbows, the friction of my skin against the floorboards making a wet, rasping sound. With every inch of movement, the sensation was less like bone-on-bone grinding and more like someone was pulling a serrated blade through my hip joints, carving through muscle and sinew with sluggish, deliberate intent.

I looked down. In the faint, bioluminescent glow creeping from the corners of the ceiling, I saw the source of the stiffness.

My skin had been pulled taut, stretched past its natural threshold like cheap plastic wrap over a bowl of spoiled fruit. Along the line of my iliac crest, the flesh was translucent, purplish, and stitched—not with surgical thread, but with thick, black, glistening wires that had been woven directly through the bone. My hips weren't just stiff; they had been repurposed. I was pinned to the floor, an anatomical sculpture in progress.

A low, wet clicking sound emanated from the corner of the room. It was the sound of something sharp—a dental tool, perhaps, or a rusted scalpel—tapping against a glass tray.

"Don't worry," a voice rasped, sounding like dry leaves skittering over a tombstone. It was my own voice, but deeper, distorted, as if filtered through a throat filled with gravel. "The integration takes time. The body fights the graft at first, but soon, you won't feel the weight of your own legs at all. You won't feel anything except what I choose to show you."

As the figure stepped into the dim light, I saw the back of my own head, attached to a frame of steel and rotting organic matter. The realization hit me harder than the physical pain: I wasn't waking up to a nightmare. I was waking up to the realization that I was the spare parts for a new, colder version of myself.

I tried to scream, but my jaw locked, my teeth clicking shut with the finality of a steel trap. The remodeling was moving upward. The stiffness had reached my spine.