After hours in her empty clinic, Olivia is drawn into a hidden underground city where brush elves are losing ground to spreading decay and a warning leads her toward a darkness that should not be there.
Night had settled over the city, and Olivia was still alone in her clinic, finishing the last of the day’s reports with the kind of exhaustion that made the fluorescent lights feel too sharp. Not a single patient had come in for twenty-four hours. No toothache, no emergency, not even a last-minute request for floss. For a new dentist, that silence felt less like a relief than a warning.
She was reaching for her coat when a soft knock sounded from the bathroom.
Olivia froze. The door was supposed to be locked.
It opened a fraction, slowly, as if whatever stood behind it was testing the room for courage. Then something small slid into the light: no taller than her hand, shimmering faintly, with hair fine as white thread and a robe stitched from what looked like sponge. It looked up at her and smiled, revealing a perfect row of tiny, bright teeth.
"Olivia," it whispered, "you have to help us. We are brush elves. We live beneath the city. For a week, dark stains have been spreading across our homes, and our friends have started disappearing."
Olivia stared at it, certain she had misheard, or was seconds away from waking up in her chair with a crick in her neck and the smell of disinfectant in the air.
But the creature was already kneeling by the floor, pressing its palm to a seam in the tiles. A hidden latch clicked open. Cold light spilled up from below, pale and impossible. Olivia stepped closer and saw not pipes or foundations, but a stairway descending into a maze of glowing corridors.
She followed the elf underground.
The city beneath the city was unlike anything she had imagined: houses shaped like molars, bridges arcing over channels of running mouthwash, fountains misting the air with mint. Tiny lanterns burned along the streets. Everywhere she looked, there were signs of strain. Some of the houses were mottled with slow-moving decay. Doors hung half-open. In the windows, frightened faces watched her pass and vanished again.
The elf led her deeper toward a black stone tower at the centre of the city.
"You must speak to King Pastelon," it said. "He knows the recipe for the paste that can save us."
Then, just as they reached the darkest corridor, Olivia heard it too: a low murmur rising from somewhere ahead, thick with movement, as if something waiting in the dark had heard her coming.