Applehead: A Study in Recurrence

To die ten thousand times is, in all fairness, a bit excessive.

Abbie-a quiet lad with a stem of apple sprouting from his scalp (yes, really)-used to be the sort who'd apologise to a wall for bumping into it. That is, before he was murdered by his maths teacher, Miss Circle, for scoring a 34 on her "simple quiz." His mistake? Showing his work. Her solution? A compass through the lungs.

And yet, death was just the beginning.

He awoke again. And again. And again. Ten thousand iterations of the same miserable school life, repeated with surgical cruelty. One moment, he's trying to fix his grades. The next, he's disembowelled by Miss Bloomie for failing to calculate the angular momentum of a chair she hurled at his face. Physics is cruel, and so is she.

He's wandered beyond the school gates-into forests that whisper in extinct dialects, stairwells that loop like a Möbius strip, and bathrooms that house creatures that bleed clocks. He's died hundreds of times out there too. To things that have never been named.

∆lice? A clown with her own room, an obsession with silence, and a face that rearranges when you blink too slowly.
Fen? Oh, she's shredded me into ribbons eighty-one times-once just to see if I'd spell out her name in entrails.
Δiden? Lovely girl. Tried to turn me into soup, kebabs, a meat pie, and-on one particularly imaginative Tuesday-a decorative centrepiece made entirely of spleens.
Miller? In one timeline, he was Abbie's band manager. Good bloke. Terrible drummer. Eaten by a mirror.

Death has become a Tuesday. Pain, a suggestion.

But this morning? This iteration?

Something's... wrong.

The world creaks in a new way. Claire arrives late. The clocks blink out of sync. The shadows don't obey the light.

And Abbie-tired, brittle, and wearing a tie stained with existential regret-feels something different in his apple-heart.

He's about to die again. Of course he is.

But maybe, just maybe... this time, the story will crack.