Time Ghouls

Xia Lun's eyes narrowed slightly. There was no question that Doctor's words contained a staggering amount of information.

They indirectly confirmed that the island was indeed caught in a loop, and that each cycle lasted half a year.

"What do you mean by 'Sacrificer'?" Xia Lun continued, his thoughts racing.

Doctor's eyeballs trembled slightly, like a fruit fly twitching its legs. His left eye turned left, and his right eye turned right. "Heh heh, only the first question is free. This is your second question now. If you want an answer to your second question, you'll have to pay a price."

"What do you want?" Xia Lun narrowed his eyes. He lowered his hand slightly, resting his thumb lightly on the cold hammer.

"What do I want?" Doctor's eyeballs stopped moving. He chuckled, his laughter still as soft and strange as tanned human skin, imbued with an unsettling otherness. "Oh, broaden my understanding."

Xia Lun said nothing. With the ghost of a smile, he looked into Doctor's pupil-less eyes.

Silence spread through the cave like mist. The soft sound of breathing was jarringly loud in the darkness.

"Yes, expand me," Doctor repeated after a long while. "We are human. We all live within narratives woven from memories and delusions. We live within causal connections of our own imagining, so..."

Doctor paused, then spoke in a dreamy murmur, as though chanting a hymn.

"Give me a story, a new story about whales. In my dreams, I saw a church made of whale bones. Its towering spine formed triple pointed ribs, and its rotting eyeballs were stained glass refracting starlight. I wandered through its corridors... so give me a new story about whales. Let me expand that dream, expand myself, expand this world."

The faint smile froze on Xia Lun's face.

He