Metamorphosis of Innocence: Gage Creed's Terrifying Transformation into Zelda

Gage Creed awoke to the sensation of rough, threadbare sheets beneath him. The air was thick and musty, a significant departure from the sterile, clean scent of his own crib. As his eyes fluttered open, he found himself not in his familiar room, but in a dim, oppressive space. He looked down to see he was still in his own clothes, but the room was unquestionably alien, unfamiliar. Confused, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, his tiny feet touching the cold, hardwood floor. It was then that a chilling presence made itself known—a shuffling sound, a low rumble that resonated through the room. Emerging from the shadows was a creature, a grotesque manifestation of dread and nightmare: the Wendigo. Its eyes, two hollow voids, fixed upon Gage with a knowing malice. "Gage! This is all your mommy's fault," it purred, its voice a chilling mockery of comfort. Slowly, its skeletal hand reached out to touch him, the sensation like ice against his skin. "Now you're gonna be mommy's older sister." A tingling spread from the point of contact, weaving through every nerve in Gage's small body. His clothes shimmered, then transformed, morphing into an old-fashioned dress that felt foreign and suffocating. Gage's hands and feet contorted painfully, becoming twisted and gnarled. “Mommy!” he cried, the sound emerging not as his own innocent voice, but as a rasping, tortured echo. “OW! Mommy! OW!” His skin turned rough, translucent almost, stretched tightly over a frame that was bending, deforming. His eyes sunk into shadowed pits that conveyed nothing of the wide-eyed wonder they once held. His teeth turned yellow and jagged, and his small, tousled curls thinned and fell, leaving strands of brittle, sickly hair. Gage’s back curved unnaturally, forcing him into a perpetual hunch like Zelda's. Unable to bear the transformation, the pain overwhelming him, he collapsed back onto the bed, the thin mattress absorbing his frail form. The agony subsided only as sleep overtook him, the meager comfort of unconsciousness enveloping his twisted shape. When Gage awoke again, he was still trapped in Zelda's crippled body, the pain a constant, throbbing reminder of his curse. Squinting his eyes shut, tears leaking from the corners, he focused on one desperate, overpowering thought: his mother. "Mommy..." he whispered, though his voice remained Zelda's, a soft breath amidst the silent judgment of the room. Yet in the torment of his misshapen prison, Gage clung fiercely to the one pure memory his three-year-old mind could grasp—the warm embrace of his mother, the love that no curse could erase.

In the wake of nightfall, the unsettling vista of the Creed home was awash in a disquieting gloom, burdened by an almost palpable air of dread. Gage Creed, the youngest of the Creed clan from the recently inflamed Pet Sematary, lay asleep, bundled innocently in his own clothes upon the eerily silent room that had once been his older sister's refuge. This, however, was not the rock-a-bye slumber of a sweetly dreaming child but rather a troubled sleep, fraught with an insidious tide of unnerving dread. Seemingly allied to the darkness, the creature known as the Wendigo emerged. Its every appearance was shrouded in not just terror, but a kind of symbiotic torment deeply entwined with the Creed family. With a voice that made the walls themselves seem to shutter in horror, it intoned, "Gage! This is all your mommy's fault. Now you're gonna be mommy's older sister." Reaching out with an elongated, clawed appendage, it touched Gage with the malice of its curse. An unseen force radiated out from the Wendigo, crinkling against the canvas of reality, and the innocent boy's body began to convulse as the transformation began. The boy's clothes morphed bit by bit into a sinister rendition of Zelda's dress, a haunting wardrobe that matched the fate he was about to endure. Gage's extremities began to contort grotesquely, twisting and thickening, matting into shapes of discomforting nightmares. His skin, once smooth and soft, began to roughen-up, matching the ghastly morphology that defined the dreadful syndrome that Zelda was afflicted by, while his eyes became eerily sunk, evaporating the innocent spark and replacing it with a terrifying void of emotion. One by one, his teeth began to distort, turning vile, coated with a sheen of frightening decay. As his vocal cords morphed, his voice grated into a raspy, eerie tone. His hair thinning, skeletal beneath a sickly pallor, he hunched painfully, a cruel mimic of Zelda's severe scoliosis. As the transformation crescendoed, Gage's newfound voice cackled out in Zelda's hoarse intonations "Mommy! OW! Mommy! OW!" Unable to endure the pain any longer, Gage heaved onto Zelda's untouched bed, surrendering to the private oblivion of sleep to escape from the waking nightmare. When he awakened, he was still cocooned within the horror of Zelda's form. Squeezing his eyes shut against the discordant reality, the newly turned Zelda-consuming-Gage whimpered, the instinctive calling for his 'mommy' echoing through the house, an epitaph of a transformed life. His every thought was clouded by confusion, agony and terror, all laced with an overwhelming desire for his mother's comfort—a heartbreaking plea that his three-year-old mind could not process beyond its simple but profound grasp.