Dr. Elias Banner stared at the MRI scans, his coffee growing cold on the desk. He’d seen cysticercosis before—larval cysts lodging themselves in human tissue, a cruel trick of parasitic survival. But this case? This was unlike anything in the textbooks.

The patient, a 27-year-old woman named Sofia, had come in complaining of seizures and vivid hallucinations of a forest she'd never visited. The scans revealed clusters of cysts not just in her brain but branching into her spinal cord, forming an intricate, web-like pattern. The sheer extent of the infestation should have left her in a vegetative state. Yet, aside from the seizures, she was lucid, even articulate.

Elias flipped through her blood work and records again, searching for something—anything—that might explain her resilience. That’s when he noticed something buried in her chart: an experimental antiparasitic compound she’d been prescribed during a humanitarian mission in rural India. The compound had never been approved for human use in the West, yet here it was, seemingly keeping her alive.

“Doctor, she’s asking for you,” a nurse interrupted.

Sofia lay in her hospital bed, her eyes bright despite the shadows under them. “I know it’s bad,” she said before Elias could speak. “I can feel them moving.”

Elias swallowed, unsure how to soften the truth. “It’s…complicated. But there’s a treatment we could try. It’s experimental, untested here, and the risks—”

“I don’t care about the risks,” Sofia cut him off. “I’ve seen the forest. I know what’s waiting for me if you don’t stop this.”

Her words sent a chill down Elias’s spine. The forest. How could she describe it in such detail, as if the hallucinations were memories?

Later that night, Elias sat alone in his office, staring at the formula for the experimental compound. Administering it would violate every protocol, potentially cost him his license. But the alternative was watching Sofia deteriorate, her body consumed by the parasitic invaders.

He thought of the Hippocratic Oath, the promise to do no harm. But wasn’t inaction its own form of harm?

The next morning, he made his decision.

The compound arrived in a plain vial, its label bearing nothing but a string of numbers. Elias mixed it with saline, his hands steady but his mind racing. Sofia met his eyes as he inserted the IV, her gaze a mixture of trust and fear.

Hours passed. The seizures stopped. The cysts on her scans began to shrink, their deadly web unraveling. It was a miracle—until Sofia began to scream.

Her body arched violently, her veins darkening as something moved beneath her skin. Elias and the nurses restrained her, helpless as her screams filled the room. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

Sofia slumped back onto the bed, unconscious but breathing. Elias checked her vitals—they were stable. But when he looked at her scans, his heart sank. The cysts were gone, but in their place were strange, neural-like structures, connecting parts of her brain in ways he couldn’t explain.

Weeks later, Sofia was discharged, her seizures gone, her energy renewed. But something was different. Her eyes seemed to see through people, her words carried an unsettling precision.

“I remember the forest now,” she told Elias on her last visit. “It wasn’t a hallucination. It was…a warning.”

Elias never spoke of the compound again. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that in saving her, he had crossed a line no doctor was meant to cross.