Yes, I know I'm officially on hiatus. Inspiration is weird, and it struck me today. I'm still on hiatus, and will be for a while. When I'm off hiatus and go back to writing regular chapters, I'll let you know on my profile.

The official Chapter Ten isn't going to be written for a while, so to tide you over, here's a little interlude with glimpses into the mental states of the Animorphs, via their nightmares. More than a bit graphic, with generous body horror, so skip if you're squeamish. Thanks to tala .white .14 for the encouragement!

Nightmares

Cassie

Elfangor was in the tentacles of the monster again, dangling above its open mouth. The teeth, so long I couldn't see how they fit into its mouth, were wet and shining with saliva, dripping and oozing that ultimate sign of hunger.

Then, the tentacle loosened its grip.

Elfangor fell.

The teeth, razor-sharp, mashed together, chewing. Elfangor's blue body was torn apart like a piece of wet paper. Shreds of flesh, wet with blue blood, fell from the monster's mouth and into the waiting jaws of mutant wolves.

The wolves, with their twisted bodies and deformed heads, were circling the monster, occasionally jumping and snarling to catch the bits of Elfangor's body. The blue blood poured from their mouths, monster and wolves alike, soaking the ground, running over debris and reaching my feet, my ankles, my knees.

So much blood. So much pain.

I could hear Elfangor screaming, could hear the pain in his voice, the agony of being torn apart. His voice sounded a lot like my dad's.

The monster reached out a tentacle towards me, and for a second I thought I would be next. Then it darted to my left and picked up someone else. Someone I knew.

"Dad!" I cried. He looked exactly as he had the day he died, down to the same patch on the elbow of his shirt. He smiled at me as the monster lifted him, as though he was unaware of the tentacle wrapped around his waist, the teeth beneath his feet.

Another tentacle reached to my right and grabbed my mom.

"We love you, Cassie," she said, a smile like the one my dad wore resting on her face. She was lifted above the monster's mouth along with my dad.

Both tentacles let go.

"MOM! DAD!"

Now red blood joined the blue, both staying separate instead of mixing into purple. The red ran over the top of the blue, carving rivers and streams within the larger lake of blood.

More wolves were circling now, so many that I could see nothing more than a snapping, lunging pack of hungry heads reaching for my mother's hand, my father's stomach. Bits too small to be worth seeking were now floating in the blood. My mother's pinky finger drifted past me.

That was it now, wasn't it? Who else could be waiting here, ready to be devoured by the Visser? Surely there was no one. It was over.

Another tentacle reached out, and this time I was sure it would be me. But instead, Rachel was pulled from thin air, her blonde hair already soaked through with red. The blood covered her, soaked into her clothes, had worked its way into the cracks between her teeth. I could see because she was smiling. Not just smiling, laughing.

"I love you," she said, but she was looking slightly to my left, not at me.

The monster dangled her by her broken leg, then swallowed her whole.

I tried to scream, but already my throat was too full of blood to make a sound.

Jake

The world was spinning.

The ground beneath my feet was shaking so hard I fell, breaking my fall with my arms and getting the breath knocked out of my lungs.

The sky was warped, the moon swooping and turning like a bird in flight. The rubble around me indicated the Deadlands, but it was vanishing and reappearing so fast I couldn't name or recognize a single thing.

One thing was static, unmoving, unaffected. It was the alien, Elfangor, who was standing, his hooves planted in the dirt as though it wasn't rippling like drying laundry in a strong wind. He held the blue box out towards me, and I reached for it, but he was too far away. Before I could begin moving any closer, a tentacle reached out of the sky and snatched the box up, vanishing with it into the nothingness from which it came.

Then another tentacle lowered, wrapping itself around Elfangor.

The alien fought back, striking and slashing with his tail-blade, but it wasn't enough. The source of the tentacles appeared - the Visser's morph, only bigger than it had last seemed, towering over Elfangor, over the rubble of the buildings, over the whole Safe Zone. I was the size of an ant next to it.

Elfangor turned towards me.

[You must fight the Yeerks,] he said.

"But, I can't - I don't know how!" I cried.

[The Yeerks are parasites. Their one weakness is that they still rely on Kandrona rays, a type of radiation produced by their sun, to survive. Once every three days, they must leave their host bodies and go to a Yeerk Pool saturated with Kandrona rays to survive. If they are deprived of the rays for three days, they will die.]

He was repeating what he had told us before. The tentacle lifted him up, up, up, until he was suspended above the monster's mouth.

[Two hours,] he said, in a nonsensical burst of what he'd said earlier. [You must save humanity.]

The tentacle loosened its hold.

I could hear the Visser's voice, but only faintly.

[Find them! Kill them all!]

The world went dark and twisted.

Tobias

My room in the orphanage was dark, full of shadows, and so small my knees were tucked up to my chest and I was still pressed against the walls. I longed for the walls to recede, to give me room to stretch out.

The outside wall, the one with the window, was abruptly broken down, smashed to pieces by a giant tentacle.

I rushed to the hole where my wall had just been, looking for the source of the tentacle. Another tentacle rushed by, sweeping upwards from the ground, and this one was carrying something. No, someone.

Elfangor.

His blue body was small compared to the huge tentacle that was wrapped around him. He was striking it with all his strength, using his tail-blade and his legs, even his weak-looking arms to strike at the beast. If I had been on the receiving end of those blows, I wouldn't have lasted a minute, but the tentacle kept moving, not reacting to his attacks in any way.

I craned my neck up and saw the head of the monster, the morph Visser Three had used. Its mouth opened, teeth sharp and shiny. Elfangor was suspended above. For a moment, everything froze, and Elfangor was speaking to me in that way he did, inside my head.

[Tobias. This will not be easy. This will not be simple. But you must fight the Yeerks.]

I didn't question how he knew my name. I didn't question why he was comforting me as his death loomed ever closer. I didn't question anything. A feeling of warmth and comfort filled my body, and the look in his eyes told me he felt the same.

The tentacle released him.

The world was wet with blue.

Rachel

Blood. Guts. Screams of pain and shreds of flesh. Hungry Taxxons waiting below the mouth of the monster.

Elfangor was dying again.

And the Visser was laughing.

It was a sick laugh, one that didn't belong to such a horrible scene or such a horrible monster. He sounded like a child who had learned a clever way to do his chores without much effort. He sounded delighted with himself.

I could still hear Elfangor's screams of pain, and the excited noises of the yellow worms who fought each other for every scrap of Elfangor's body that fell to the ground. I could hear the others crying as quietly as they could. I could even hear my own voice, soft and low, trying to comfort them.

But the laughter was louder than anything. It was crowding the other noises out of my head, pushing them to the corners and taking up almost all of my brain. It pressed against my skull with physical force, and finally drowned out everything else.

The world went dark.

The screams stopped.

The people beside me went silent.

But still, the laughing continued, growing louder and wilder, until it was on the brink of hysteria.

Blue blood began rushing over my feet, rising up my legs.

The laughing grew even happier, as though delighted with the blood, the gore, the death.

The laughter continued to grow happier as corpses began floating in the blood, and bits of bodies picked and clawed apart. Humans, aliens, mutant animals - any and every creature I'd even seen was floating in the river of blood, eyes open and unblinking, mouths laughing as one.

Marco

My back was pressed against the wall. I could feel the bricks against my spine. My eyes were squeezed shut, tight, so tightly it hurt, but I could still hear.

Pain-filled screams rattled inside my skull, looking for an exit that they couldn't find.

I could feel the wet warmth of blood sliding down my body, trickling and spattering, thick like the blood the plague victims coughed up. It was a liquid that meant death. I could feel its gooey thickness melting into my hair, streaming down my clothes, gently sliding over my closed eyelids.

There was a hand on my shoulder, and my eyes shot open. My dad was sitting on the ground in front of me, eyes fixed on the horrible monster behind me, hand stretched out to touch my shoulder without his knowledge.

He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't have to see this.

His fingers dug into my shoulder like roots pressing into the dirt, clutching at me with desperation. His face was blank, like it was after my mother vanished, but I could feel his fear through his hand.

"Dad, it's okay," I said, not believing it myself. I rested my hand on his shoulder. He shuddered.

I felt something wrapping around me, attaching to my skin, my clothes. I was ripped out from behind the wall, lifted into the air, turned to face exactly what I had been desperate not to see.

The monster, the Visser, whatever he was - his mouth open, teeth dripping blue blood. I was lifted, the teeth mere inches below my feet.

I looked back to my dad. He still sat there, his hand still where my shoulder had been. His body was frozen, but his face came alive. I could see the worry, the fear, the desperation, as his mouth opened.

Before he could say anything, my world was and sharp and red and painful.

Out in the Deadlands, someone else stirred in their sleep, opened his sleep-muddled eyes halfway and looked around, checking his surroundings. He had not seen what the others had, had not been witness to Elfangor's death, but he had still had a horrible dream. He could only remember the gist, a feeling of dread and sorrow, and thoughts of his brother, but he brushed it aside. Dreams didn't mean anything. Surely everything was fine. Surely his brother was alright.

Surely he wasn't utterly alone, abandoned on an alien planet.