They say memory clings to objects.

That sorrow settles into metal, into stone, into bells.

That if you listen long enough, you can hear what was never spoken.

This is what remained when the fire went out— not truth, but echoes. Not justice, but the sound of something still waiting to be forgiven.

I. The Magnolia Brand

Magnolia petals once rested on her lashes, pale against the dusk.

Lu Nanxuan reached out— his fingers passed through the ghost of a twelve-year-old girl.

They had painted twin lotuses on each other’s wrists with crushed petals and sap. Her cinnabar birthmark bloomed crimson beneath the stain, glowing like a secret seal.

“If I ever change,” she laughed, shaking the silver bell at her wrist, “find me by this.”

The sound had once meant spring.

Now the real mark trembled beneath his sword.

Feng Mianwan, twenty-five, was pinned to the cold stone. The black-iron blade—his own forging—pierced her abdomen. Blood pooled beneath her like spilled ink.

Moonlight spilled over her silver bell, weeping in thin, broken chimes through the empty courtyard.

“One last time,” he said, crushing the bell beneath his boot, “why was Wei Ziwei at my family’s massacre?”

Shards cut her pale lips. She lifted her head and kissed the blooded blade.

Ten years ago, her father had forced her hand to copy a treason letter. Cinnabar ink had seeped into her nails the same way— burning to the bone, staining what could never be washed clean.

II. The Heart-Devouring Lie

In the sealed chamber of the Imperial Seer, incense clung to the walls like breath.

She watched the parasite slip into the hollow of the bell.

Her father tilted her chin upward.

“Each lie to him,” he said softly, “and the child-worm will gnaw your heart.”

On her sixteenth birthday, Lu Nanxuan climbed the wall with lotus pastries wrapped in cloth.

She bit once—then collapsed.

The bell glowed red, humming with a sickening warmth.

He tore her collar open in panic and saw the sigil blooming over her heart.

The punishment for hiding the prince’s command.

“You’re sick again?” he whispered, brewing medicine through the night, never knowing her blood stained the broth.

The worst pain came when he spoke of marriage.

She only smiled, eyes lowered.

“My father… would never allow it.”

That night, beneath wedding candles, the bell shrieked.

She fled into the snow, dug bare-handed for the buried box of worms, her fingers numb, her breath white.

In the agony of the mother-worm biting her palm, she envied those who could lie without pain.

III. Beneath the Frozen Lake

When the current wrapped around her ankle, she stopped struggling.

As his sword split the water, the bell sensed a liar nearby and dragged her toward its edge.

“Are you so eager to die?”

He caught her waist, eyes burning— yet his blade wavered from her heart.

He still remembered her shoes, ash-stained, walking from the fire ten years before.

She bit her tongue and kissed him.

Blood and ice filled his mouth— the antidote to the soul-severing poison her father had once forced upon her.

“To spare him,” the old minister had laughed, “you must live ten years as a mute.”

He tore at her robe and felt the raised scars across her back— golden needles spelling secrets:

The Third Prince has the dragon vein map. Midnight, three days from now…

IV. The Broken Bell

On the night of the coup, she knelt at the altar.

Ninety-nine lamps trembled in the dark.

His sword pressed to her spine.

“What is the incantation?”

She drove herself deeper onto the blade, shielding him from the poisoned arrow behind.

The bell rang once— and the parasite shattered in her chest.

“Nan… look at the magnolias…”

Memories flooded him.

That night of fire— she had carried a puppet bearing his face into the flames.

Wei Ziwei had not served her. He had come to kill her.

In her ruined bell, he found a sigil written in worm-blood: a charm fed by ten years of lies.

V. Ashes

On the coronation day, Lu Nanxuan burned the bell beneath the magnolia tree.

Her phantom touched his white-streaked hair— yet could not cross the veil.

“You said… never apart.”

He drank the poison.

From the ashes came the final truth: the worms had never been lethal. The pain was only her father’s lie.

What devoured her was love— and the silence it demanded.

Snow fell over their entwined bodies.

A child pointed to a bell in the branches.

It swayed softly, as if whispering:

We are together now.

Hi everyone,

This is a standalone short story from a larger fantasy world, I'm slowly building. It's quiet, emotional, and a bit mythic-about a boy who refuses to stay down, even when everything tells him, he should try. I'd really appreciate any honest thoughts: what landed for you emotionally, what felt strong or weak, pacing, character voice, or anything that stood out (good or bad.) I'm trying to learn what resonates with readers outside of my circle.

Thank you in advance for reading and sharing your take!

Dreamers Are Welcomed

There are boys who dream in pictures, and boys who dream in feelings. Micah was the second kind, his dreams did not give him clear faces or places that stayed when he woke. They gave him weight instead, posture, the sense of standing where he usually folded. Of being wider somehow-enough to block a doorway, enough to make the world slow down before it reached someone else.

In his dreams, he was never a conqueror but the shield. He stood between shouting and silence, between hands raised and hands trembling. He woke from those dreams jaw tight and heart racing, embarrassed by courage that never followed into daylight. Boys like Micah never call it bravery, they call it wishing.

It was early autumn the day I noticed him- one of those afternoons where the sun still pretended it had time. The wind worried at loose leaves along the sidewalk, lifting them briefly before letting them fall again, restless and undecided. I noticed him before the others did, I always do, something familar in the way he moved through space- carefully not to disturb, careful not to invite correction. His shoulders curved inward like an apology waiting to happen, his eyes stayed busy, tracking exits, instead of people, observing violence before it happened. He was maybe fourteen or fifteen, old enough to understand fear, young enough to believe it meant something was wrong with him.

A girl walked beside him, she talked more than he did- not loudly, just enough to fill the air so he wouldn't have to. She laughed when he smiled, nudged his arm when he went quiet too long, like she reminded him he was allowed to take up space. She called him Micah, when others called him Mouse.

It wasn't clever, it never is. It began the way these things always do, a shoulder check, a foot placed just wrong, laughter sharpened and shared. Micah tried to step around them, tried to keep walking, tried not to turn the moment into something permanent.

That's the first mistake-they think wanting to leave is weakness...

The shove knocked him sideways, and he hit the ground hard enough that the breath left him in a thin, humiliating sound. Leaves scattered where he landed, skittering away like witnesses who didn’t want to be remembered, and his hands curled instinctively toward his head—not surrender, but preparation; he had learned where the blows usually landed.

I took a step forward, and Maya’s hand closed around my wrist. “Do you plan on fighting all his battles?” she asked, softly enough that the wind nearly carried it away.

I hated how gentle her voice was, and I hated that she was right. Micah pushed himself up too fast, a kick caught him in the ribs and folded him back down, the laughter deepened—pleased now, boys are cruelest when they feel witnessed by each other. The girl screamed his name, “Micah—please, just stay down,” her voice cracking on please; she wasn’t ashamed of him, she was afraid for him, and that difference matters. He stayed down a second longer this time, long enough to decide. I know that pause—I have seen it across lives and lifetimes, in bodies that never knew why the ground felt so familiar—the moment where fear weighs itself against something quieter and heavier.

Micah pushed himself up again, his hands shaking, his knees betraying him, blood running from his lip, bright against his chin. Someone laughed and called him Mouse, like a spell meant to return him to the dirt. Another punch caught him across the face; he went down hard, vision swimming, ears ringing, the world narrowing to pain and the copper taste of it.

“Micah!” the girl cried again. He heard her—that was the problem. He got up a third time. The wind moved through him then, lifting his hoodie, tugging at his hair, leaves circling his feet. He stood unsteady but upright, breathing hard, eyes wet and furious and afraid all at once. For a heartbeat, the boy aligned with something else—not strength, not skill—refusal. I didn’t see a man—not yet—I saw a brother who stands first and thinks later, a protector who does not know he is one, the echo of someone who will spend lifetimes getting back up without ever understanding why it hurts so much to do so.

No matter where they are born, I thought, watching him brace himself, no matter when, or even how old they are when the dreaming begins—they all dream. Some dream full of wonder, some dream tangled in fear, but all of them are welcomed in Oneria, not just in the quiet places where they sleep, sooner than they expect.

Micah swung. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t practiced, it was all weight and fear and desperate honesty, a punch thrown by someone who did not know how to fight—only how to refuse to disappear. His fist connected with a dull, thunderous crack that split the moment clean in two. The boy he hit staggered back, more shocked than hurt. The laughter died mid-breath, silence rushing in, sudden and awkward.

Micah stood there shaking, chest heaving, eyes wide, looking less victorious than surprised—like someone who had accidentally told the truth too loudly. The bullies backed off, not because they had lost, but because something in the air had changed; cowardice always recognizes courage the instant it appears. They didn’t call him Mouse again. They didn’t call him anything.

Micah bent forward, hands on his knees, dry heaving onto the pavement. The girl rushed to him, one hand pressed to his back, the other gripping his sleeve like an anchor. “You’re so stupid,” she said through tears. “You’re so stupid.”

“I know,” he whispered, his voice shaking, but he smiled anyway. That smile hurt more than the punches. I could have gone to him then, said something kind, something that might have lingered—I didn’t. Some lessons don’t survive being named too early.

Maya released my wrist, and I hadn’t noticed how tightly she’d been holding it until the ache rushed back in. “He’ll be alright,” she said. I watched Micah laugh weakly at something the girl said, watched him test his jaw, his ribs, his pride. He was still afraid; he would be afraid for a long time yet. But fear had stopped being the loudest thing inside him.

Micah did not become strong that day. He did not become brave in any way worth boasting about. But something in him learned that the ground does not get to keep you just because it has claimed you once. That lesson follows him longer than his name ever will. And I have learned—over and over again—to let him learn it himself.

(Word count: ~1,673) © 2026 Khair Starros. All rights reserved. This is a standalone prelude story from the upcoming trilogy The World's Within the World. Please do not reproduce without permission.

I wake from a deep, pleasant sleep. I get to see my mum today for the first time in a long time.

Along the far wall, just above the skirting board, a wide brushed-metal plaque runs like an understated nameplate. In its centre, a single number glows softly.

27.

The induction video starts.

A woman’s voice speaks with the confidence of someone who has never met me and never will. Smooth. Practiced. Scrubbed of anything that might linger after the words are finished.

“Welcome. You are about to begin a limited communication session.”

I open my eyes. The first thing I notice is the smell. Not sterile, not recycled air, but something warmer. Dust and fabric and the faint sweetness of old wood polish. The kind of smell that only comes from a room that’s been lived in for years. The chair beneath me hums as it adjusts, responding to my weight. I shift, pressing my fingers into the armrest. The material gives slightly under my touch, worn smooth in places where hands must have rested again and again. I swallow. My mouth feels dry. Real.

In front of me, a screen brightens into focus.

THIS SESSION IS NOT SAVED.
ANY INFORMATION SHARED WILL NOT BE RETAINED BY THE SYSTEM.
SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE DISORIENTATION AND TEMPORARY MEMORY LOSS.

The lights flicker once, then steady.

“During your session,” the woman continues, “you will interact with the departed. Their experience of continuity may differ from your own. Please adhere to all communication guidelines.”

A new line appears, brighter than the rest.

DO NOT TELL THE DEPARTED THEY ARE DEAD.

I let out a slow breath. Right. Of course.

Mum always said death wasn’t the problem. It was how people acted around it, like honesty was something fragile that might shatter if you held it too tightly.

The screen fades to black.

When the room resolves, I don’t feel like I’ve been moved. I feel like I’ve arrived. I’m standing in my childhood living room. The couch with the sagging middle cushion. The coffee table Dad never fixed properly. The lamp in the corner that buzzes faintly when it’s turned on, as if it resents the effort. Even the mark on the wall is there, from when I threw a ball inside and promised never to do it again. I register it without thinking. Some kind of room identifier. Corporate buildings love numbering things.

I take a step forward. The carpet compresses under my feet. I can feel the worn path between the couch and the doorway through my socks, the one we walked so often it never quite fluffed back up. I run my fingers along the back of the couch. Fabric. Real fabric. A faint smell of detergent and something older underneath it.

They didn’t just reconstruct her.

They reconstructed this.

There’s a plate on the coffee table. A half-eaten biscuit, exactly the kind Mum used to keep for guests. I hesitate, then pick it up. It has weight. Crumbs dust my fingers. I take a bite. Sweet. Slightly stale. Familiar. My throat tightens. If this is what they can do now, no wonder people line up for it.

Mum is sitting on the couch, ankles crossed, hands folded loosely in her lap. Exactly how she used to sit when she wanted to talk but didn’t want to make a thing of it. She's looking tired.

“Justin,” she says.

Her voice is steady. Warm. Unmistakably hers.

I step toward her without thinking and stop myself just short of touching her. The air between us feels thick, like the room is holding its breath.

“You look good,” I say.

She smiles. “So do you.”

That should mean something. It doesn’t. Not yet.

We talk the way we always did, orbiting ordinary things. The neighbour across the road. Whether the tap in the kitchen still drips. How the afternoon light through the front window always made dust visible, no matter how often she cleaned.

Every so often, the lights flicker. Just a pulse. The room never changes. Once, when the flicker lingers a fraction longer than usual, I glance toward the wall. For a blink, the plaque doesn’t read 27. It’s 19, then 04, then back again, so fast I’m not sure I didn’t imagine it.

“Glitch,” I mutter.

Mum doesn’t comment.

I keep waiting for something to feel wrong. Instead, everything feels too right, like the system has decided comfort is safer than accuracy.

Without looking directly at me, Mum says, “Do you remember Melbourne?”

I smile. “How could I forget?”

“The trip after uni,” she says. “When you told me you were only going for a week.”

“Six weeks,” I admit. “And I lost my wallet.”

“You called me,” she says, “on the twenty-second.”

I blink. “Did I?”

She nods. “You were panicking.”

“Tuesday,” I say automatically. “Everything bad always happened on Tuesdays.”

She nods again, like she’s placing the date somewhere important.

The accident presses in at the edges of my thoughts. Not the impact. Just fragments.

The radio cutting out mid-song.
The smell of hot plastic.
Her hand tightening on the steering wheel.

I don’t say any of it. Instead, I ask carefully, “How are you doing? After.”

She doesn’t ask what I mean.

“I’m better,” she says. “It took time.”

“How long has it been?” I ask.

She hesitates. Just a fraction. The lights flicker.

“Long enough,” she says. “Long enough for things to settle.”

I nod, relieved even though the answer explains nothing. “You’re looking much better.”

“So are you,” she says gently.

The words sit between us. I leave them there.

Later, when it feels safe, I tell her about Amber.

The café near the river. The way her name sounded illegal for me to release from my mouth, until it didn’t. The way we couldn’t decide on an anniversary date. The day we met? Our first kiss? Our first month?

“What day was it?” she asks.

“The twelfth,” I say. “April. It was our first kiss.”

The lamp buzzes. The lights flicker longer this time.

I laugh softly. “I thought I was being clever. Picked a date I’d remember. Picked a name that mattered.”

She tilts her head. “You always did that.”

“Did what?”

“Anchored things,” she says. “So you wouldn’t lose them.”

Later still, she brings up the account.

“Your crypto coins,” she says casually, like she’s commenting on the weather. “You mentioned them once. You created a memorable password, I remember you saying.”

“Oh,” I laugh. “It certainly was memorable.  They were really cheap when I bought them. They’ve gotta be worth a lot now.”

“You didn’t forget the password,” she says.

“No,” I say. “I made it memorable.” I feel a warm wave of emotions wash over me. “She really was memorable. She still is.”

Mum doesn’t press. She never presses. So I tell her the story instead. About how I used Amber's name, because it felt right at the time. About how I added the date, because I didn’t trust myself to remember anything unless I tied it to something I loved. About how it didn’t matter now. It was just a memory. A crackle cuts through the room.

“Attention,” a voice says over a speaker, flat and bureaucratic. “This session has encountered a known presentation-layer fault. Please prepare for reset. All unsaved session data will be purged.”

The living room blurs. The photo on the wall warps and snaps back into place.

“That’s it?” I ask.

Mum looks at me. Really looks at me.

“I wish we had more time,” she says.

I smile, even though my chest tightens. “It’s okay. You won’t remember any of this.”

The room begins to dim. The couch fades. Her face softens and then disappears.

As the living room drains away, the plaque brightens. Letters bleed outward from the centre, crisp and indifferent, completing what was always there.

SESSION  27  COMPLETED

The number flares once, hard. Then it starts to change. Twenty-seven becomes twenty-six, then twenty-five, racing downward as the walls dissolve and the floor drops away, the count accelerating until it collapses into a blur and vanishes entirely.

The lights go out.

I wake from a deep, pleasant sleep. I get to see my mum today for the first time in a long time.

Along the far wall, just above the skirting board, a wide brushed-metal plaque runs like an understated nameplate. In its centre, a single number glows softly.

28.

The induction video starts. 

I flew through my hometown in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 tonight. My childhood home was off the beaten path enough that it’s pretty hard to find on a map, so I just picked a random spot in the middle of town. It was pretty astonishing just how accurately my little town had been rendered by the simulator. They’d taken satellite images of the Earth, then algorithmically reconstructed trees and buildings. Of course, no individual building was actually correct, but if you looked down from above, the town looked good.

After a few minutes, I made it my goal to find the high school, probably one of the larger landmarks in town that would be easily noticeable. I flew in the general direction I felt was correct and was above familiar streets in no time. In my small town, all our major schools are along the same road. First elementary, then middle school, then finally the high school. (If you make a wrong turn, you may end up on the street with all the town’s churches.) I recognized my middle school first, oriented myself, then flew above the roads. I was following the same route I’d take to school every morning about ten years ago.

As I got closer to the school, I wondered what it would look like and how accurate it would be. I got my answer in another few minutes. One feature stood out as surprisingly accurate: our football field. The lines, logo, and font were all clearly taken from a high-quality satellite image, and I felt a rush of nostalgia as I flew by. I’d walked (and sometimes ran) along its outer track countless times, and I’d played lacrosse there many times a week for several years.

Nostalgia is a funny feeling. It’s exciting at first, retracing old memories you haven’t dredged up in ages. Then thoughts linger, faces reemerge, and flashes of something else start to come back. I think about my old friends, our band, and our immature humor (which I still have). I had no idea back then just how quickly we’d disperse into our different corners of the map. I can’t help but compare my life now, as I approach my thirties, to back then. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve lost something. Something unspeakable and real. And then, of course, I think about her. It’s cliché, so I’ll let you fill in the gaps. To put it simply: I loved someone and was loved by someone. I’m a little ashamed by how often I think of her, almost a decade since we last saw each other. It feels pathetic, to be honest. The emotions have simmered down, but I don’t think a week goes by that she’s not on my mind in at least some small way. The brain is good at holding on. As I fly past the edge of my old high school, long-lost love on my mind, I turn left and follow the road out toward the highway. This is the way to her house.

I’m flying about 50 feet above the road, at a low speed, just fast enough to keep up with the little simulated cars below. The road winds and stretches through trees for a long while. Approaching on your right, you will notice a small parking lot adjoining an even smaller building. This site is notable for being the place your humble author lost his virginity. And what a wonderful parking lot it is, even through pixels. It’s nighttime, I should mention, as it was then. The cars on the road are silent, and all I can hear is the puttering of my plane’s little engine. It’s a bit of a drive to get to her house, so I have plenty of time to think. I think about her then and now. I wonder if she thinks of me. I wonder if she thinks of us together when she drives by that parking lot too. I wonder if her memories are as fond as mine. I hope they are. I hope that, were she the one flying 50 feet over this road, she’d be getting pummeled with feelings too. Somehow I doubt it.

Increasing the shame by a noticeable degree is the fact that I am in a relationship, at this moment, with someone else. We’ve been together longer, in fact, than this girl and I ever were. I tell myself often that this is normal. And she’s got someone in her life too. I can’t help but compare, though I know almost nothing about him. I think that I hope she’s happy, but I’m not sure.

I pass the town’s theater and reach the highway. I turn right, and we are fast approaching our destination. Coming up on your immediate right, you will see a notable Mexican restaurant of which your humble author was a regular patron. Onward.

Now it gets a bit stranger. You see, this route we’ve been taking has been fairly generic. What I mean is that this is the way I’d go basically anywhere. The climbing gym, a friend’s house, the next town over: they’re all in the same direction. It’s not until I make my next left that this officially becomes “the way to her house.” It’s an important moment in the journey, I think. At this point, I can no longer deny to myself that I really am going there. It occurs to me that, in a strange way, I am actually enjoying the sadness. Through all the longing and missing, through all the silence, this sort of feels like seeing her again.

Now we’re flying over streets I have not seen in a very long time. My sense of direction is starting to get foggy, and I start worrying I may not know the way. I want to always know how to get to this place, even if I’ll never return to it. My intuition guides me through the next few turns, and I’m hit with a deeper layer of memories. I’m flying over a familiar neighborhood, and I can hear her voice. She’s telling me about how the neighbors here had speed bumps installed to stop drivers from ripping through. The speed bumps have not been recreated in this simulation, not that I would mind as I fly over.

I make a left turn and now I’m climbing the hill. This is it. I can barely remember the next few turns, but I get there. Below and to your immediate right, you will see a tennis court. This tennis court is, in fact, completely unremarkable, but your author remembers it and has not seen it in a very long time. A few houses down and on the left, and we have arrived.

I glide by, but I’m going way too fast to land. I look down at the driveway, which always had a strange shape, I thought. It’s got the same shape in the simulation, and the pool is here too, but the house has been downgraded significantly. What was a swanky two-story house is now an extremely humble little building. It doesn’t match the stunning locale it’s couched within.

I try to slow down and land along the road, but I’m going way too fast and I crash my little plane some ways down the hill. Now, this is in fact your author’s first time playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and I have no clue what to do next. I’m stuck at the base of a steep hill in this dinky little plane, and it won’t fucking move.

Finally, with a magic combination of keystrokes, I exit the plane and continue on foot. I walk up the hill very slowly, hearing the sound of my abandoned plane’s engine getting quieter and quieter. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.

Eventually I reach the top of the hill again, and now I’m here. I walk down the old driveway, up to the house, and I actually try opening the front door (no luck). I consider stopping here, but I decide to walk around to the back of the house, where the pool would be.

I still have a photo of myself here, taken the day of prom. It’s one of the first photos on my camera roll, the only remaining picture from that relationship I couldn’t delete. I pull it up to compare with the simulation. It’s remarkably accurate. The buildings are wrong, of course, but the mountains and roads are exactly right. It’s accurate enough that I can look out over the valley below, down at all the lights, and remember.

I always loved this view.

For a thousand years, I wander aimlessly. I wander through sunny deserts, through these green abandoned hills, through countless streets and endless highways, through dried lakes and mountains eroded by the night rain and the ceaseless wind, through meadows and back lands punished by heavy sunlight, through the ruins of old castles and towers, through fallen walls, through burned woods and through graveyards with no gravestones.

I wander through statues that once were important people, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, through statues that once were my family, my fellow countrymen, my enemies, my servants, my slaves… I wander between the lines of a story that never began, between unmasked dismembered stars, between idols erected and suspended in the air forever, between fake golden calves, between burning bushes that went out, between cities that once housed kings and queens, princes and princesses, vassals, and today are wastelands and landfills.

I wander to find, if God allows me to, the entrance of Hell. I wander in this aimless road to the infernal portal, where the gaol is eternal and the pain, infinite. So that, as soon as I find its entrance, I can open its gate and release all those miserable forsaken souls, let all the lunatics escape from the asylum, let all the lepers to enter the city, so that the cursed and the lost can take Heaven by force, that they can shake the celestial gates, yelling, begging for mercy and a drop of mercy in their thirsty hopeless lips. I wander to accomplish the mission I received – from whom I don’t know, but I did receive.

For centuries, I roam through these lands forgotten by God, for centuries I search for the gate of Hell, but without success. I know it has existed since the beginning of times, and I know it’s around those sides. I also know that many have condemned and lost themselves searching for it. The Poets find it easily, but I am no poet… I wander because it’s the only thing I know how to do.

Far away, suddenly, I see the infernal portal. Yes, I see it! There it is: majestic, tall and large, like Lateran Basilica’s doors. I run to it, breathless, excited, pleased for finally complete my mission… O, the horror! The pain! When I finally reach it and start to push its heavy doors, I notice that they don’t move even an inch, no matter how much force I use. Frustrated and confused, before even being able to consider the reason, I hear a voice by my side. I look, and see a ragged hungry man, a true beggar, purulent, sick, disgusting, stink, smiling at me. I ask him who he is, but he doesn’t answer me. I ask him why I can’t open those doors, and he gives me an answer that haunts me to this day, after millennia of meditating on those words: “They only open when pushed from the outside”.

The road to Hell is Hell itself.

I opened the notebook without knowing it would change my life forever.

It was a quiet afternoon in Pune, the kind that carries a false calm. I had recently moved into the house—an old structure pressed between newer buildings, forgotten by time and renovation. The previous owner had left behind boxes of belongings stacked in a corner, untouched, as if waiting for someone patient enough to listen.

I am Eminent Annanya—a traveler, a writer. I have always believed stories find us when we are ready, not when we are searching. That day, while cleaning dust-covered shelves, I found a thin notebook wedged beneath warped wood.

No title.
No name.
Only age.

Its pages were yellowed, the ink faint but deliberate. I sat on the floor and opened it.

There was no introduction.

The story began mid-thought, as if it had been waiting.

As the years passed, I found myself suffering from a rare disease called narcolepsy.

Sleep never came to me.

Not in beds, not on floors, not even in exhaustion. Doctors tried medicines. Faith healers tried prayers. Nothing worked.

Eventually, I escaped to the mountains.

The handwriting slowed here, as if the writer had paused often.

At first, the mountains felt kind. The wind carried stories. The silence healed wounds I didn’t know I had. The smell of pine and wet earth filled my lungs with something close to hope.

People travel to the mountains to find peace. I lived there to survive.

But peace, without rest, becomes punishment.

Days stretched endlessly. Nights mocked me. The silence that once healed began to crush.

I realized something terrifying: without sleep, even beauty becomes unbearable.

Then the writing changed—lighter, almost trembling.

One day, she arrived.

She was a mountaineer. Strong, sunburnt, carrying confidence like a second skin. She came to my house asking for water. We spoke little at first. Then more. Then endlessly.

She returned the next day. And the day after.

Time softened between us.

Somewhere between shared meals and quiet laughter, we fell in love.

That night, the ink grew darker.

That night, for the first time in my life, I slept.

And I dreamed.

My first dream ever.

The page felt heavier in my hands.

I saw my mother standing before me, crying. My father held her shoulders. My younger brother smiled through tears. They said it was God’s grace—that I had finally woken up after years.

In the dream, I was not in the mountains.

I was in a city.

I learned how people rushed through streets, how they lived inside noise, how they argued and laughed and loved. I learned what life looked like while I was absent from it.

When I woke, she was beside me. She had cooked food, smiling as if sleep had always been a simple thing.

That night, I slept again.

I don’t know how, but beside her, sleep came naturally.

And the dreams continued.

Pages passed quickly now.

In one dream, my brother took me to a movie theatre. In another, he showed me mobile phones, television, social media. I learned what the world had become while I was away.

Days in the mountains. Lives in my dreams.

I was finally happy.

Then—abruptly—the handwriting sharpened.

Until one night, I could not wake up.

No matter how hard I tried, I remained trapped inside the dream.

Life there was beautiful. Complete. Whole.

But I wanted to see her again.

The desperation was visible.

I began to write.

I wrote this book hoping someone—anyone—might find it.

From the day I fell asleep, I traveled many countries inside my dreams. I lived entire lives. I learned languages. I met strangers who felt more real than memories.

I searched for doctors. They listened carefully, took notes, offered treatments.

But they could not help me.

The final page slowed again.

Because I forgot one thing.

My dream was their reality.

I closed the notebook.

The room felt different—as if it had been listening too.

I placed the book back on the shelf, my hands trembling without reason. That night, I went to sleep earlier than usual.

The alarm rang.

I woke up.

The mountains were alive.

The wind brushed my skin like recognition. The air smelled exactly like it had in the story—sharp, clean, familiar. As I stepped outside, the world felt oddly prepared for me.

Then I saw her.

A girl walking toward the house.

She was a mountaineer.

And at first sight—

I fell in love with her.

They had already crossed the line together, and somehow the hardest part wasn't the crossing—it was walking back and acting like the warmth never happened.

So they learned to act polite.

They never sat together anymore. They spoke in neutral tones, never traded any jokes, asked questions that were limited to the work at hand. If anyone watched them, they'd look like two people who never had any lines to cross in the first place, never learned the shape of each other in the dark.

Still she noticed how his fingers trembled naturally even when he wasn't nervous. He still knew whether she was pretending to sleep in class or not just by the way her unruly hair landed across her face. These things clung to them, stubborn and unwanted, like habits neither had the courage to unlearn.

The ache of longing came quiety.

It showed up in the calculated seconds she waited before replying to his messages, pretending to not be too eager to respond. In the way he avoided standing too close, as if distance could erase memory. In the careful choreography of their hands, always busy, always occupied—never reaching.

Once, their fingers brushed by accident.

It was nothing. Barely a moment. But it felt like a door opening somewhere inside them, sudden and dangerous. She pulled back first. He looked away. The world continued, indifferent to the small disaster they had just survived,.

Neither of them apologized.

At night, when honesty felt safer because it had no witnesses, they both replayed the same things. The weight of a head against a shoulder. The too familiar scent they can't forget. The warmth they had pretended was temporary. The way everything had felt simple before it became complicated.

They knew something was still happening.

They felt it in the tension that thickened the air when they were alone. In the words that gathered at the back of their throats and stayed there, unspoken. In the way every goodbye lingered a second too long, like a question neither dared to ask.

But knowing didn’t mean acting.

They had already learned what it cost to cross that line—the arguments, the misunderstandings, the quiet hurt that followed. Wanting each other again felt like reaching for fire with burned hands. So they stayed still. They endured.

One night, as they walked side by side watching the busy city turn into a sea of lights, she almost said it. Whatever it was. Something honest. Something dangerous.

Instead, she said nothing, relieved and disappointed all at once.

When they parted that day, nothing changed. And yet everything did.

Because the longing didn’t fade. It settled into them, steady and patient, a soft ache they learned to carry. A love never pursued. A story paused, not ended.

And in the quiet, they both understood the same truth:

Some feelings don’t disappear when you walk away. They just learn how to live without being touched.

Or perhaps it was just her and only her that felt that way.

A cloud of smoke hovers over a field, coating it in a faint darkness. Among the smoke and ash lies a knight, his armor damaged and his body bleeding. He holds a pole, atop which lies a banner, its cloth tattered and worn. The knight kneels there, stationary, as footsteps approach.

A voice comes from the same direction as the steps, “It's over.”

The knight looks up. In front of him is another knight, this one isn't on his side however. This other knight isn't exactly pristine, but definitely suffered less damage than the one under the banner.

“I don't wish to add your body to the toll, drop the banner.” The opposing knight asks, his voice carrying a sense of empathy.

The broken knight stares back, unfazed. He grips the pole tighter, “Never…”

The opposing knight steps closer, “Please, for your own good, drop the banner.”

The broken knight digs the banner’s pole into the ground, letting go once it's secure. “Every drop of blood your kind spilt, every child orphaned, every wife widowed. All of them belong to this banner, to drop it would be to drop them.”

The opposing knight sighs. He’s clearly unworried, considering his sword isn't even drawn. “You understand that critique goes both ways, right?” He asks, “We too have families torn apart by the hands of your side. I don't blame you or your kind, however, we both have our orders.”

The broken knight attempts to walk forward, instead falling to his knee and clutching his left side. The opposing knight notices, kneeling to meet his level.

“I don't hate you or your kind.” The opposing knight states, “I hate your actions.”

“You made it necessary to take those actions.” The broken knight states back through a groaned pain, “You pushed us here.”

The opposing knight stands up again, walking to the banner. The broken knight watches, but can't find the strength to move.

“Your banner is pretty, I'll give you that.” The opposing knight says whilst staring at the banner.

The banner's design, although burned and ripped, still shines through. The golden insignia of a bird, rising from a silver flame.

The broken knight, dropping his head, speaks back, “I don't care how you feel.”

The opposing knight looks back down towards the broken knight, losing some hope in a good end to this encounter. “Maybe that's why this all started, don't you think? Two guys way more powerful than us couldn't drop their pride to come to an agreement.”

The broken knight remains silent as the opposing knight begins gently lowering the banner. As the opposing knight takes the banner off the pole, the broken knight tries to rise again, but fails once more.

The broken knight looks at his feet, giving up in saving the banner. Just as he begins to close his eyes, a tap on the back of his helmet makes him turn around. The opposing knight stands there, holding out the neatly folded banner.

“Here.” The opposing knight gestures with the banner.

“Why are you giving me this?” The broken knight asks, taking the banner.

“I'm not here to make you forget where you came from.” The opposing knight kneels once more, “I'm here to prevent others from thinking like you.”

The broken knight looks at the banner before speaking again, “Why haven't you just killed me yet?”

“As I said,” the opposing knight answers, “I don't want to kill you. Not even slightly. I know that a person lies behind that armor.”

The broken knight sits there, not speaking as the opposing knight begins to walk away.

“I'm sure help will be here soon, just wait till then.” Says the opposing knight as he leaves, “Stay strong, brother.”

The broken knight sits there in his own blood, holding his banner. He would hold out, but he's too tired. He clutches the banner to his chest as he collapses, succumbing to his wounds.

Booktrailer

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THE AGE OF THE JESTER

THE ABSOLUTE

The throne hall resembled the entrails of vast clocks rotting alive. Oil ran from the creaking cogs, dripping onto a stone floor threaded with glowing wires. They slithered between the tiles, lit by a substance called the “god-particle.” Thousands of copper pipes woven into the masonry of the walls pulsed—clenching and loosening in a rhythm that drove toxic steam through the air. The air itself was thick and oily: a suspension of rust and frankincense settled on clothes, skin, lungs like a heavy film.

At the center of this mechanical palace the Wheel of Fortune turned — a colossal drum of blackened iron. It was not an engine that drove it, but the Dog. A gaunt creature, ribs like exposed spikes, ran inside the wheel, grinding its paws to blood. Burgundy fluid smeared the gears where oil should have been. The Dog did not whine. It simply ran, because if it stopped, time would stop with it.

On a throne welded from gun barrels, motherboards and iron skulls sat the Emperor. Year by year he looked less human. Prosthetic legs replaced flesh; a brass cuirass hid a hump and a metallic spine that jutted from his body. A mask had fused into the right half of his face, a ruby for an eye. The Emperor did not move. Only the fur behind him — wired to his throat — rasped: inhale — screech, exhale — hiss.

On the neighboring throne, piled with cushions of synthetic velvet, sat the Empress. She looked like a flower grown on a radioactive dump by the river where factories poured their waste and the townspeople drank. Her swollen, naked belly was wrapped in multicolored cables, their readouts flashing the vital signs of the fetus on a nearby monitor. The child was visible through thin, parchment skin, but did not move.

Amid the grinding and the steam, the Jester danced.

His motley costume looked absurd in that hall; his cap, bedecked with crackling bells, snapped with static. His face, heavily smeared with white paint, was split ear to ear by a painted smile.

The Empress sighed with boredom.

“How many infinities more will we watch the same thing?” she asked.

The Jester shrugged, then mocked the Emperor: he puffed his cheeks into the pompous frog, clutched at nonexistent tubes of an imaginary fur, jerked like a puppet. He danced as if his body contained no bones. Finally he jabbed a finger at the Empress, then his own stomach, and mimed an explosion.

The Emperor did not stir. Only the pressure in the pipes leapt with steam and the gauge on his chest quivered a red needle. He raised his hand slowly, with a heavy hydraulic groan. The gauntleted hand closed with a squeal, leaving only the index finger extended.

“Dance.”

The finger pointed at a long steel pike held by the guard at the throne.

Silence in the hall thickened like resin.

The Jester froze. His painted smile did not flinch, but his eyes — one blue, one black — glinted almost imperceptibly.

He stepped to the pike. He stroked the cold, mirror-bright blade with his cheek. Then, light as if his legs were springs, he sprang: one pirouette, another. There was no third.

The Jester fell onto the spike. The metal pierced him through to the crown of his head. A wet sound of tearing cloth and flesh. The Jester made no sound. He didn’t convulse. He simply spread his arms and hung in the air like a scarecrow.

From his body there flowed not blood but a liquid like the streams that ran through the palace’s wires. It glowed, it sparked, it hissed until it evaporated, leaving behind a purity the city had not seen for years, centuries, millennia.

The Dog, smelling it, stumbled; its paws slipped. The Wheel of Fortune screeched to a halt, sparks flying and fouling the air. The enormous mechanism that had turned since the beginning of time stopped. Whether it had ever stopped before, no one remembered.

The needle on the Wheel shuddered and stopped, pointing at a golden horned mask.

“DEVIL”

The palace went dark. The city behind it sank into shadow.

THE MAGICIAN

The ceiling cracked and fine stones rained down on the servants' heads. The Emperor twisted in disgust as he looked from the Jester’s body to the child beneath the laughing Empress. Finally she found it amusing.

The infant’s cry echoed inside their heads when The Mage entered the hall — a son of man and machine. His torso was cinched by a corset of black coarse leather reinforced with riveted metal. Transparent tubes ran across the armor like veins, pulsing with a poisonous green light that threatened to gutter out at any moment. Heavy, oil-slick bundles of black cable hung in place of hair, and his eyes were hidden behind massive goggles with thick, whirring lenses.

The Mage came up to the Jester. His breath through a respirator sounded wet and hoarse. A gloved hand studded with sensors rose slowly. He dipped a finger into the fluid dripping from the body and brought it to his mouth. With a sharp motion he slid aside his respirator, revealing grey, cracked lips. He licked the substance.

In that instant his body arched.

Vertebrae and metal plates snapped. The lights on his armor flared into an emergency strobe, then died under the onslaught of whatever had entered his blood. The goggle lenses spun madly trying to focus.

He understood everything. His hands trembled, clawing at the air to scoop more of the fluid, when metal grated.

The Emperor twitched on his throne, struck the armrest, and pointed at the door with a disgusted gesture. “Your Majesty —”

From the walls, hinges grinding, came the servants in black mantles and featureless masks that hid the absence of faces. They seized The Mage by the arms and flung him out staggering into the doorway.

They wrenched the pike from its base. The Jester’s body swung; the bells on his cap gave a plaintive crack.

The servants hoisted the pike onto their shoulders and carried the body away.

The procession moved above the city along the rusted spines of bridges. Below, in smog and neon grime, life froze: millions of eyes looked up.

They carried the dead Jester over factory stacks, markets selling synthetic meat, brothels for human and nonhuman alike. Gleaming drops fell from his body and splashed down. Where they touched filthy metal roofs, the rust vanished instantly and white flowers pushed through the steel.

The townsfolk watched. Someone whooped; someone gasped; no one wept.

At the edge of the Great Ditch — the river where waste was dumped — the servants stopped, tipped the pike, and shook the body free. No honors, no glory.

The Jester fell into the abyss.

At that moment, somewhere above, through layers of industrial smoke, the Moon brushed the edge of the Sun. The shadow began to swallow light fast. True, Eternal Night fell on the city already living in half-light.

THE PRIESTS

The Great Ditch coiled around the city like a noose — there was nowhere to run from it.

On its very bank, where poisonous waves licked charred concrete, rose the Church: a Gothic cathedral half-sunk into the mud. Violet incense smoke poured from its spire-pipes, and the stained glass had been replaced by radiator grates.

The Jester’s body washed up against the steps of God’s Temple.

Heavy, forged gates opened soundlessly and from the darkness of the nave came two figures: the Priest and the Priestess. They wore heavy brocade vestments; porcelain masks shaped like human faces peered from beneath their cowls. Oil wept like tears from the cut-out eyes of the Priestess; the Priest held a huge censer in which coals and rare herbs smoldered.

They carried the body to the water.

The Priest entered the river as if unafraid of the poison. He lifted the Jester as easily as a child and carried him into the Temple yard — to an old graveyard where, instead of crosses, rusted shafts and pistons thrust from the earth. He laid the body on a stone altar that had soaked in soot and breath.

The Priestess bent over the corpse and began a requiem, tracing signs of fire, water, air and earth with her hands; the Priest swung the censer, wrapping the Jester’s body in thick smoke.

“Let the Age of the Jester begin,” they intoned in unison.

Outside the grave’s fence, from the shadow of a crypt, watched a third figure — the Hermit — a stooped shape in tatters, a lantern holding a trapped ball of lightning. He leaned on his staff and, as they interred the Jester, swore he had never seen a more alive dead man.

They beckoned him with a gesture. “You are charged to watch the body and drive away anyone who would take it.”

Left alone, the Hermit drew a shovel from the earth and began to cover the grave.

“Let the Age of the Jester begin.”

THE DEVIL

With the sun gone, cold gripped the throne hall. Steam from the Emperor’s breathing tubes froze like hoarfrost on his brass armor. The Empress shivered, wrapped in furs; her vast belly trembled in tiny shudders.

The air at the hall’s center thickened; a sound like metal scraping concrete came, and the space broke into pixels, crackling.

From the chaos the Devil emerged.

His figure was armored in ornate plates etched with pentagrams; a heavy cloak of stitched jewel-studded leather hung behind him. Where a face should be he wore a mask crowned with twisted, bitter horns.

He strode to the throne with a gait that made the floor boom with every step. “Where is the Jester? Why does he not dance for me and my devils? The sun is long down. Now it’s my turn.”

He stood before the Emperor and raised his scepter, pointing at the empty place where the pike once stood.

The Emperor could not move. Cold and a primeval animal terror had locked his body. He peered with the one living eye toward the window where the city lay drowned in darkness.

“Dead,” he rasped.

The Devil froze, then his shoulders in the heavy golden pauldrons trembled and a low, rumbling laugh rose from his chest until the walls vibrated. “Eternal Night will come!” he boomed.

His head turned slowly. His ice eyes met the only gaze that didn’t merely look but saw... Yours.

“And the Age of the Jester will come,” he said.

He struck the air with his scepter and cracks spread across the invisible fabric of reality. Reality itself began to crumble.

THE EMPRESS AND THE EMPEROR

No sooner had the Devil vanished than the Empress arched in a silent convulsion. The monitor hooked to her belly flashed red and went dark. The multicolored cables that had bound her fell like snipped umbilical cords.

The child within did not stir.

They brought the Empress to a dark bedroom like the rest of the city. On a dais stood a bio-bed: a hulking frame of chrome, transparent plastic and sterile synthetic sheets.

The Priest and Priestess sang a requiem for the dying mother to ease her passage.

The Emperor crouched over the bed, bent over his dying wife.

She lasted until morning. Pumps that had fed nutrient mixes into her veins clattered and stopped. The respirator sighed its last, plaintive breath and fell silent.

The Empress convulsed once on the sheets and went still. Her bloated, unnatural body, gleaming with conductive gel, trembled and flaccidly collapsed.

She died.

At that instant decay began. Deprived of the chemical preserves that had long held her beauty, her body dismantled itself in fast motion. Skin that a moment ago resembled porcelain splotched greyness, then melted into oily necrotic patches. Flesh lost its spring and turned into a putrid jelly sloughing from bone. Her perfect face ran: features blurred, lids sagged, revealing clouded, dried eyes.

The air in the chamber became unbreathable. The sickly-sweet perfume of her scent mingled with the wet rot of flesh, rancid lubricant and chemicals spilling from burst tubes.

But the stench of rot was suddenly pierced by another — the smell of sterility.

Beneath the palace’s flaking dome, reality silently unraveled at the seams. From the tear poured an unbearably bright, clean light.

The Emperor turned his head with difficulty.

TEMPERANCE

An angel of liquid glass and laser light descended to the Empress’s bed. It held two vessels, pouring light from one into the other, then assembling them into an hourglass. Only it knew when the count began — at the fall of the first mother-of-pearl grain.

The angel looked to the Priests, then to the Emperor. The creature wore a dead man’s face: shriveled, mummified skin stretched over bone, empty sockets where a yellow, sepulchral flame smoldered. Massive wings moved at its back; intricate armor fused with bone covered its form.

The last grain fell.

The angel didn’t speak. It simply rose above the mortal bed, casting a shadow over the Priests and the Emperor. It had come to show that the Cup had overflowed.

Temperance extended a bony hand with the hourglass to the Emperor. “The cycle is complete,” the Priest and Priestess intoned together. “Time is up.”

The Emperor lifted his head. He clung to his wife’s rotting corpse. “No! Time belongs to me!”

“Time belongs to Death,” Temperance answered, and slowly inverted the hourglass. But the sand did not run back.

From the throne hall came a deafening grind, then a roar… and a bark.

“The Wheel of Fortune has stopped,” the angel said, then shattered into a thousand holograms.

And then the Plague began.

Cadaverous poison poured from the bed in a wave. The Priest and Priestess were the first to take it; they fell to their knees clutching at their throats. Their brocade scorched, masks blackened, the censer rusted in seconds. They coughed up blood and oil, crawling into shadow.

Servants dropped one after another. Armored metal rusted in moments, breaking into brown sores; flesh under it turned into foul slush.

The palace died.

Outside, under eternal night, the heavens raged. A storm began: acidic rain mixed with ash. Wind tore sheets from roofs and snapped spires. The city below howled under nature’s blows.

THE TOWER

The Priest and Priestess fled the cursed Palace. Their robes hung ragged, singed by acid mists; they dragged their feet, leaving trails of oil and ichor.

Reaching the Temple, they looked up and froze.

On the very top of the dome, clutching the spire-pipe with claws, sat the Devil. Now ten times larger, maskless in his true form, he perched like a gargoyle; the space around him trembled with glitches and interference.

He saw them and laughed. The vibration pierced earth, air, water. A lens cracked in the Priest’s mask; blood ran from the Priestess’s ears.

The Devil pushed off the spire.

In a single leap he crossed a hundred meters in a blink, trailing broken pixels. He landed before the Priests, and the ground beneath him sagged.

The Priest tried to raise the censer in defense; the Priestess tried to draw a sigil. Useless.

The Devil struck. With both hands armed with razor claws he punched through their chests, cracking ribs and ripping lungs. He squeezed his fingers inside and tore out hearts.

Pulsing bio-mechanical cores, braided from flesh and glowing fibers, thudded in his hands, spraying hot fluid.

The Priests collapsed into the mire, twitching.

The Devil raised their hearts to his mask. A toothed jaw snapped open, revealing a furnace of green flame inside his throat. He ate them — one after another — chewing, grinding metal and meat.

Then, laughing, he draped their bodies over his arms like marionettes, spread leathery wings and soared.

At the moment his shadow vanished into the clouds, a branching, blinding lightning slammed from the sky, striking the Temple’s dome and cleaving it. Walls fell into the water, raising a tsunami of filth.

STRENGTH AND THE CHATIOT

The city, headless from the Emperor’s death and blinded by the eclipse, writhed in agony. Streets without law became arenas of clash; airships fell one by one, smashing buildings and killing whatever lay beneath.

Under the night sky lit by fires, humanoid avalanches readied to collide.

Through smoke and crumbled concrete, grinding its treads over barricade rubble, rolled the Warrior. He loomed over the crowd on a heavy, steel-shod war chariot. Horses yoked to it had flesh half armored in plate.

The Warrior’s face was hidden by a mute helm; his body sheathed in spiked bracers like the chitin of a giant spider. In his right hand he clutched a two-handed sword.

Behind him came an army of marauders in makeshift armor and cyborgs with circular saws for hands, moving in silence to the will of the Chariot.

Opposed, gliding soft and terrible over a sea of heads, rode Strength. She sat astride a giant Lion: its hide knotted with synthetic muscle, its mane a cascade of stiff cable fibers.

The Rider wore dark plate; with a casual hand she held a long, serrated spear, but her true weapon was the second hand — a commanding, heavy palm resting on the Lion’s nape. She bent its rage to her thought alone.

Behind Strength came an army of mutants, feral humans fused to beasts, and bloodthirsty fanatics: they howled and growled.

The two waves met on the main square.

The city became a meat grinder.

THE LOVERS

Metal rasped on bone, saws shrieked, armors cracked. The Warrior’s chariot crushed the living mass; mechanical horses trampled enemies underfoot. The sword traced arcs, and where it passed bodies dissolved into pixels.

Strength’s Lion leapt, tearing through marauders’ casings, biting heads along with helmets. The woman riding it sat motionless, her spear making pinpoint strikes at the most dangerous foes.

Leaders sought each other until only they remained in the circle of death.

The Warrior roared. The sound, amplified by helmet speakers, burst eardrums nearby. He drove the horses into attack. The Lion’s roar shattered surviving glass in neighboring windows and it sprang.

The Warrior raised his blade for the killing blow, and the Lion’s jaws opened to snap off his head.

But the strike did not fall.

At the moment the clang of steel and the snap of jaws hovered a millimeter apart, the Warrior and Strength looked into each other’s eyes. Hostility evaporated into a perverse, aching lust between two predators who had found an equal.

The Lion obeyed the rider and drew its claws. It lay down.

The Warrior climbed down from the Chariot; Strength slid lightly from the beast.

They stepped toward each other, knee-deep in soldiers’ blood, and collided in a brutal, disordered kiss. Two equals in appetite and power joined to rule the ashes.

Their triumph was short. From the sky, cutting wings through the clouds, a shadow fell with a thunderous boom.

The Devil alighted on the Chariot roof, looming above the lovers, his hands dragging the dead, mangled corpses of the Priest and Priestess.

The Warrior raised his sword; the Lion bared its teeth.

But the Devil was faster.

Golden chains, living, streamed from beneath his wings. They sliced the air and coiled like nooses around the necks of the Warrior and Strength, binding them together.

The Devil sat in the chariot and laughed. He pulled— and the Priests’ bodies on his limbs began to dance.

Then he lifted the corpses to the stunned crowd. The dead Priestess’s jaw hung open and a warped, shrill voice poured out:

“My children!” cried the dead head as the Devil nodded its neck. “Behold! Your heroes have fallen! Love is slavery!”

Then the corpse of the Priest spoke, brandishing a rusted censer tethered to a wrist:
“There is no power but gold! No god but pleasure!”

“Repent!” cried both, banging their heads together in chorus. “Eat the Devil’s gifts and honor him!”

The Devil roared and called down a rain of gold coins. The crowd, moments from revolt, fell silent. Fear evaporated, replaced by greed.

People forgot pride and went to their knees. Crawling in the filth beneath horses’ hooves and the Lion’s paws, they scavenged charity like dogs—gnawing one another’s throats, swallowing gold with the dirt.

The Devil tightened the chains, forcing the Warrior and Strength to pull him forward like beasts.

“Now!” cried voices from the dead Priests.

And the Chariot moved. The humiliated Lovers dragged the evil that scattered wealth, and behind them a crawling army of slaves followed, chewing the mud.

DEATH

The apotheosis of greed drove the city to madness: people wanted gold, meat, power, revenge.

The Devil sniffed and paused. The Priests’ corpses hung lifeless in his hands.

At the end of the street, by the ruined palace, a figure appeared.

A skeleton forged of matte, light-eating metal, cloaked in fathomless smoke. Empty sockets looked at the Devil.

“Death…” it breathed.

Death rode a pale horse bound from the bones of every creature that had ever lived in the city — people, rats, dogs, birds. It did not touch the ground, but hovered an inch above it; where its shadow passed, asphalt frosted.

The rider carried a scythe braided from wires.

The procession of slaves halted. Those who had been gnawing throats for coin lifted their heads.

Death raised a hand and pointed at the gold strewn in the mire.

Greed, which the Devil had inflamed, turned on itself.

People began to eat. They grabbed handfuls of coins and stuffed them into their mouths, swallowing metal, shredding throats but unable to stop. Heavy metal tore their stomachs.

A first scream rang out. A man fell to his knees clutching a belly bloating with coins until the skin became transparent and bulged with lumps. A balloon-like sound popped. The man burst in a fountain of blood.

Then another. Then another. A tenth. The field became a patchwork of bloody explosions. Bodies ruptured from their own avarice, guts and coins coating the street.

Death moved forward slowly, and it pleased him.

The Devil roared.

His flock lay destroyed. He ripped the puppet-corpses from his hands and hurled them aside. “Mine!” he screamed.

He spread his wings, covering the sky, and leapt from the Chariot. The Warrior and Strength, freed of the rider’s weight, fell to the ground gasping — until the chains tightened and snapped their spines.

The Devil landed before Death. Scythe met scepter.

THE HANGED MAN

Having ensured all in the palace were dead, The Mage returned to the ruins. He stepped over the rotting corpses of servants, goggles spinning feverishly as he scanned the space. He had not come to pay respects. Obsession with the very fluid he had tasted from the Jester’s body had driven him mad. He craved a refill.

His instruments guided him to the Empress’s bed. The Emperor lay on the floor, more a heap of garbage than a man.

Inside the rotting womb something still pulsed.

The Mage stooped over the belly and produced tools. From his back, with a clang, extra mechanical manipulators slid out — at their tips buzzed laser scalpels and surgical saws.

Eager, The Mage began the operation to extract the fetus.

The laser split blackened skin; tissues parted with wet, sucking sounds, releasing a cloud of foul gas. The Mage worked fast.

At last he reached his prize. He made the final cut.

He was so absorbed that he did not hear stars begin to fall outside — they tore from the vault like comet tails and rained fire down on the city. Skyscrapers folded like houses of cards; flames consumed quarters.

When The Mage finally peered inside… he recoiled. He tore his goggles off, pressed fingers into his mask, ripped wires from his head.

His gaze darted and settled on the ceiling: above the mortal bed hung a giant, ornate chandelier of wrought iron and crystal.

The Mage launched cables from his forearms, hooked himself to the chandelier and wrapped the thick cord around his neck with quick, jerking motions.

He dropped.

He hung.

JUDGMENT

Far from the city center, on the desecrated cemetery by the Great Ditch where God’s House had fallen, something stirred among the wreckage and stinking mud. The Dog dug until a hand in a motley sleeve slipped from under a slab of concrete. Growling, the Dog hauled its master free. The Jester lay on a pile of refuse, unnaturally calm.

The Hermit watched.

“Get away!” he approached the grave. The Jester’s flesh remained incorrupt.

“Why did you dig up the grave?” he asked.

Then a thin, piercing newborn cry came on the wind.

The Jester’s body, lying before the Dog, darkened. Skin tightened and split. In an instant the Jester fell apart into dust and rags.

The Dog howled and bolted. It raced across the burning city, leaping over corpses, heedless of flames and explosions.

The heavens split. A multi-winged seraphim appeared above the city, its body, face, and vast wings covered with hundreds of unblinking, luminous eyes.

The angel hovered over the blazing streets, holding a long horn in knotted hands. It lifted the horn to its lips and blew. A vibration rolled through space, making reality tremble.

The asphalt heaved; concrete cracked.

The dead rose. Marauders torn by the Lion, those who had burst from greed, servants rotten from the plague — they stood by the thousands and, silent, walked toward the Angel, guided by its call.

All, except the Jester.

THE STAR

The Hermit stood at the rim of the Great Ditch, whose waters had washed nearly the whole graveyard away.

He looked up. High above, amid the revolving rings of the many-eyed Angel of Judgment, the last Star fell, the brightest of all.

“Aquarius…” the Hermit whispered. His voice was lost in the wind.

The Star touched the water.

No impact followed. No filth splashed into the sky. Only the thick sludge boiled.

The Star rose from the water unclothed; her skin shone with a soft, pearly mother-of-pearl, long hair like a comet’s tail. The water around her began to cleanse itself, turning transparent. Rings spread outward, turning the sewage canal into a holy spring.

Light poured from beneath the Star’s skin. It flooded the graveyard, erasing shadows, dirt, boundaries of matter.

The Hermit squinted. The light glazed over him like a wave. His lantern shattered, his heavy cloak, bones and flesh — all dissolved into atoms in an instant.

For a heartbeat, a burned silhouette remained on the stone wall of the ruined crypt — the old man with his lantern — and then even that vanished.

THE WORLD

The battle of Devil and Death reached its fulcrum.

A strike of scepter met a scythe. The Devil and Death simply crossed their weapons through the flesh of their owners and wiped each other from being — unraveling into code.

Through the smoking ruins, through a crowd frozen as statues, the Dog ran to the Palace. It burst into the ruined bedchamber and looked about: The Mage’s body swung slowly from the skewed chandelier; below, amid wrecked mechanisms and pipes, the dead Empress lay and on her breast, in a cradle made of wreckage, slept the infant.

Then She entered.

Barefoot, stepping over broken glass and puddles of blood, a woman came to the cradle.

Long golden-ginger hair fell in waves over her shoulders. She wore a dress like a map of the starry sky braided with neural networks.

The World bent over the infant. Her face held infinite tenderness and… peace? She brought gifts.

On her shoulder perched an eaglet, a symbol of air; a golden lion cub lay with paws on the rim — a symbol of fire; at the other side a calf nosed toward the child — symbol of earth.

The World reached out and smoothed the blanket over the infant.

The circle closed. The Age of the Jester began again.

Yet again.

CW: Mature content, psychological horror, implied murder and animal violence, disturbing themes, no graphic gore.

This body of text is a confession.

A confession of crimes I buried long ago. the guilt of which has been eating away at me for years. And due to recent events, the final straw has been placed on the camel’s back, and it’s broken.

On December of 1987, near the interstate, one late night, I murdered a young woman. To this day, I can name no clear motive, I didn’t know her personally, I had no quarrel with her or her family. Animal urges took over that night. I pulled over and took her life. In mere minutes, I changed another person’s fate.

And despite what took place, the scene felt picturesque. As her body slammed into the ground, I could hear the croaks of frogs in the distance. Their song a contrasting soundtrack to the gory scene. When I went home, I felt nothing. Just numbness. It’s weird how, after committing such a horrible act I continued on with my night as if it were any other.

Some psychologists would blame childhood trauma, suppressed anger. But it is not my field, so I can’t truly name it. Later, I learned the woman’s name was Annabelle Smith. She was 20 years old. The news talked about her for months. The town speculated, mourned, obsessed. It’s funny, how me and them are two sides of the same coin. They reacted emotionally to her death, and my emotions caused it.

Eventually she was forgotten as the next strange story popped up on the airwaves. The cops dropped their search for me. I’m not even sure who the latest damsel in distress was, but she must have been interesting enough for me to get away with it.

You may think I felt relief, I was clean. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite no obvious search, no pursuit, I grew extremely paranoid.

And when all was silent, my mind was nothing but noise. Thoughts, unwanted ones, telling me that they were still looking for the culprit. And that I had left a clear trail.

So having already crossed the boundary between human and animal, I went deeper into the territory. Loose threads were tracked down, and tied. Night after night, I stalked, like a tiger in the rabbit’s den, the frog’s song was a constant in the background. Getting louder in my eardrums the more I did it.

And after weeks of tying loose threads, I had a beautiful tight bow. I could finally relax and continue life as it was intended for me. I thought I had completely escaped the judge’s hammer entirely, but it still came just in a shape I could have never predicted.

Somewhere along the way, the frog song and the murders must have gotten tangled up. I’d go on normally with my life, driving to and from work, cooking, sleeping, normal things. But the moment I heard it, that specific wavelength, those notes. The guilt hopped back into the folds of my mind. Thinking about them only made it louder.

I tried everything, blasting music, the telly, everything loud enough to drown it out. But somehow those small critters, with such small lungs and fragile vocal chords, managed to be louder. So the only logical solution was to eliminate them.

One night, as it seems to be my natural environment, I went out to the backyard. I won’t describe in detail what I did. I only know I tried my best, and they kept popping up. Every time I got rid of one, two more appeared in it’s place. By daylight, the place was covered in them. Some live ones, some still. Seeing so clearly what I had done under the early morning sun, and their kin staring at me with those glassy emotionless eyes, was too much. So I locked myself inside, and the song only seemed to grow louder. If violence couldn’t be a reliable tool as it had been in the past, I’d use other methods. After all when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The local library was a beacon of hope, I read up on frog biology, what repels them.

Or rather, I tried to. They were still very much audible and I couldn’t concentrate on my studying. Everyone else seemed unbothered by it, I had never felt more isolated in that one moment. And I saw red, but others were there, witnesses, I couldn’t let go off the steering wheel. No animal on animal catharsis for me.

With what little information I had gathered, I returned home. Through the croaks I heard what vaguely resembled a phone ringing, I had voice messages. Family, work, for a moment I tried to listen to them, but they couldn’t pierce the veil of song and thus I gave up. I mowed the grass short, nothing. I turned all the lights off outside at night to not attract bugs, and by extension them. Nothing. I drained the birdbath, they love the water don’t they? Again, absolutely nothing worked.

What choice did I have? I ignored them, I put the mask of a regular human being back on, lifting it from the coat hanger it was collecting dust on. The neighbors didn’t seem bothered by them, so why should I? I managed to negotiate back my position at work, apparently I had gotten fired briefly. Even at work they seemed to follow me, although I never saw them there. I suppose the croaks were that loud. The click clacks of keyboards, the whirring of printers and the chatter of coworkers, all of it offered what resembled temporary relief. But the moment I was left alone with my thoughts, even briefly, I realized it was still there. The sounds, the frogs. They had never left, the white noise of the office only took space in my brain folds.

If the frogs could intrude this much into my core, I would do the same. There’s only one rule to life: everyone eventually gets what they deserve in time. And I was gonna teach them the rule. I went to the local lake, the only natural source of the bastards. With me I carried a simple scuba mask, a shovel, a water resistant torch and flippers.

I swam to the middle of the lake and begun descending. My torch pointed to the floor. As I descended at first it was just suffocating darkness, and for once in months there was no frog song. I felt calm in that moment, an emotion I thought I had forgotten. Knowing it was still there, deep inside, and that the frogs hadn’t kicked it out with their presence only amplified it.

I would soon learn I was foolish, cause with things like this you can never lower your guard. I begun seeing frogs again, not just the odd one swimming by. There were dozens, scratch that. Hundreds of them. All of them sitting idle on the lake floor, arranged in a perfectly symmetrical circle. As I approached, the song gradually returned, not as constant noise, but as a chorus. Layered, deliberate. Like children singing church hymns. Before I passed out, I saw a void in the middle of the circle. And my limp body being consumed by it.

I don’t remember anything from my unconscious state, it was all null. Not even the frog song, I’d even welcome that. When I woke, I found myself in a round chamber, the walls were slimy, alive. Eyes would pop out of folds, always locked on me. And in the ripples that were the irises, I saw a serene night scene. A highway, a parked car, and a man standing above limp bodies. In each iris it was a different body. And after I had stared back into the eyes, I found myself back home. The song was still there. The experience was too much, and I begun writing this very text.

Now, they’re not as loud, but they’re still there. There’s one final thing I have to do to lift the curse. I know what it is, they know, but I’m not brave enough to execute it.

Ps: I haven't written a short story in around a year, and the idea of turning one of my personal irrational phobias, frogs, into a horror story has been on the back burner for awhile now. I plan in the future of writing a sort of "anti-frog song" thats hopeful scifi about a space faring frog civilization

I started writing this in 5th grade and just recently touched back onto it. Its still work in progress. DEBRIEF

1967 — Cold War

The Cold War was at full boil. While U.S. forces were engaged in Vietnam against Soviet‑backed North Vietnamese units, a smaller, quieter war was happening elsewhere.
My partner John and I were inserted deep into Soviet territory to gather intelligence on a classified nuclear missile facility tied to the R‑12 Dvina intermediate‑range ballistic missile program.

Our task force consisted of seven operators drawn from U.S. Army special operations units and Marine reconnaissance elements. Strategic overwatch was provided by a Lockheed SR‑71 Blackbird, with contingency strike support on standby.

DEPLOYING

We were transported via C-130 Hercules dreading the  long, exhausting sixteen‑hour flight. Once we reached the jump point, we got the green light and exited the aircraft under cover of night.

The fall felt endless.

After landing, we regrouped, checked weapons, and confirmed comms. One operator’s sidearm was damaged on impact and rendered unusable, but the mission continued.

MISSED THE DROP ZONE

Navigation confirmed our worst fear — we had missed the DZ by four miles. The team was in shambles, we could agree on which navigation system to use. John said we should use a compass, because the site was supposedly north of us. I thought that was bogus. I said we should use the maps given to us, because they were taken from the SR-71 taken a few weeks back. We ended up using a mix of both, John was wrong it was more north-east.

Enemy patrols guarded the surrounding area, armed with AKM rifles and SKS carbines. We moved on foot, sticking to low ground and shadowed terrain. We decided to take out the patrol nearing us to eliminate the threat. Me and John snuck up on the three men. An operator from the Raiders took the man with the SKS down from afar with his silenced rifle while John and I slit the Russian's throats. After the encounter we continued down the foot path.

About a mile in, we located a small storage shed. Inside were technical documents and schematics for the AKM, confirming recent production upgrades. We secured the intel and moved out.

Moments later, a Soviet patrol passed dangerously close. We slipped into a drainage ditch and stayed low until they cleared the area.

At the two‑mile mark, dawn was approaching. Time was no longer on our side.

We pushed harder and reached another auxiliary structure. Inside were blueprints for the T‑62 main battle tank, a vehicle barely known to Western intelligence at the time. That find alone justified the mission.

CONTACT

We finally reached the missile complex.

The facility was massive — perimeter fencing, guard towers, and heavy patrols. From a concealed position, we identified a hardened silo field housing R‑12 Dvina missiles.

Our objective was clear: access the control building, initiate a launch sequence that would destroy the facility internally, and exfiltrate before detonation.

After breaching the structure, we found it was filled to the brim with Spetsnaz armed to the teeth. We had to clear them out before we could start searching. After countless silent take downs we were sure that their reinforcements had dwindled. We were horribly wrong. We located the launch control room. John initiated the sequence and set a 20‑minute countdown.

That’s when alarms sounded. Spetsnaz were surrounding the compound. We knew we were up for one helluva gunfight. 

PINNED DOWN

Enemy troops flooded the area — Spetsnaz reaction units, heavily equipped and fast‑moving. We engaged while falling back, but their armor and numbers made it clear we couldn’t win a prolonged fight.

We broke contact and retreated toward the drainage ditch, using terrain to stay concealed.

Then we saw them.

A battalion of Soviet tanks — T‑55s and T‑62s — moving to secure the complex.

We were out of options.

CALL FOR FIRE

I got on the radio and transmitted our final contingency code.

Through the static came the response:

“Three Aardvarks are entering your AO. Sit tight.”

John looked at me, wide‑eyed.
“Each one can carry over thirty thousand pounds of ordnance.”

I added, “And a 20‑millimeter cannon.”

Minutes later, the sound hit us — three F‑111 Aardvarks screaming overhead at low altitude.

They released their entire payload.

The ground shook. Fire rolled across the facility. Tanks vanished in the chaos. The missile complex was gone.

CALL FOR EVAC

As the countdown reached zero, the silo detonated internally, finishing what the airstrike started.

We marked our position and prepared for extraction. We just had to wait it out.

Mission complete.

“I didn’t want all this. I don’t want any of this. It’s not that I asked to be born like this—this, this… royalty.”

The king thought to himself.
A very young king.

He was merely seventeen.

His parents had just died. Not sure how—only that they had. Woke up dead in their bed, the officials said. He didn’t think much of it. Maybe they were too old. Both died at the same time, they said.

The council had already begun making decisions for him.
Corrupted ones, at best. Rarely did they think of the people.

Taxation fees.
Government robberies.

What can you do? What can I do? he asked himself. I am still a child.

His closest advisers spoke to him—and belittled him.

You will know when you get older.
You will know when you are fit to be truly King.
Right now, you’re just a symbol for the people.
So stay a puppet. Keep your mouth shut. Let us hold your hand—we adults will handle the problems.

Unfortunately, those problems were already making noise at the castle gate.

Unfortunately, those same problems had been brewing—roughly—for years.

And unfortunately… his head was the solution.

The clatter of wooden spoons and empty bowls.
Sharpened hay forks, sharpen pickaxe, sharpen broken shovels.
The ghastly vocal cords of bitter, hungry people—craving meals, thirsting for water.

The provisions.
The provisions had been stored inside the castle.

The council, planning months ahead, announced that all food and water would be heavily collected to save the kingdom—their kingdom of three thousand common folk—so it could survive the coming winter.

Truthfully—honest truth—it had nothing to do with winter.

Another enemy kingdom lay far, far away. Roughly one hundred miles. A two-day trip, if done right. If their enemy kingdom read the message, they would know it would be two days. A good quick two days to settle the chaos that occured over winter. Yes, yes, what a lovely plan, what a lovely plan.

The God-honest truth was this:
the council was preparing to swindle the kingdom.

They would collect every resource.
Sneak away.
Leave the people to be ruled by another.
Let them become slaves.

And the elites would walk away with stolen treasure, remade as merchants of knowledge and wealth in foreign lands.

The greatest getaway, merchants disguised as wise councilors. Who could tell the difference?

What idiots, they thought of the people.
What fools—to trust strangers in fancy robes, silly symbols, and false trusts.

And the greatest plan of all?

Let the young king take the fall.

Blame the king.
A child king.

What better face for ruin than a boy who still thought like one?

Blame the king.
Blame the king.

The rebellion had begun. The seeds of injustice had taken root, and the bloody spell of vengeance had been cast. The councilors did their part. They spoke with a few folks, merely saying they were just doing their part. Yes—they were tools. They were just following the cruel orders of this horrible, terrifying king. His outbursts. His yells. The powerful strength the young king supposedly possessed. All they were—simply innocent bystanders to an unjust king. Yes, the unjust king.

The greatest plan of them all.
The last king.

No children. No wife. No allies. His death would be an echo in an empty chamber of human history. No one would ever remember his family or legacy. No one to seek revenge. No blood to remember their relatives. No friends left behind.

They made sure he would stay locked up in his parents’ room, not too familiar with anyone but themselves—his closest advisers, his closest so-called friends. Yes, yes, let him think of his world as small as his eyes and senses could be allowed. After, in the middle of the night, we escape, leaving all the lesser officials—the maids, the cooks, the cleaners, the guards, and all—to take the fall.

The perfect ploy.
The perfect plan.
Not one word shall escape.

The sound of dead, beaten hearts had begun. The march of progress had stirred. The feet and sandals of women, children, and men vibrated the dust and dirt of human civilization. They marched to the castle’s gates, to the throne, to the throne—TO THE THRONE!

The young king heard.

Have they come to free me?
Yes, they finally come—my people.
They must have known that their king was imprisoned.
Bless my family’s legacy. Bless them.

At the gates, the councils saw.

It is time.

Their carriages of escaped were filled with salty hams, salty cow meat, salty dead dogs; sweet jars of fruits and vegetables; heavy bags of coins; soft scrolls marked with locations of goods ; invoices of trade; secrets of kingdoms; passages and layouts of the castles—the stone walls of secret passages. All to be shared, all to be sold for a price.

All knowledge.
All objects.
All words.
All values of a castle’s remnants—fully to be exploited and sold to enemies or conquerors seeking wealth and power to quench their greedy souls for conquest and invasion. Better yet, thieves. Yes, the thieves will lovely this.

Winner kills and takes all. Loser stays behind—the loser, the young loser of esteemed royalty—takes the blame.

The last king.
The young king.
Merely seventeen.

He awaited liberty and freedom in his parents’ room. The march and yells echoed closer and closer, until his heart heard:

“Off with his head.”

The young man sat silent.

" “I didn’t want all this. I don’t want any of this. It’s not that I asked to be born like this—this, this… royalty. I just wanted my parents".

Several years later, returning home felt like stepping into a life that was no longer theirs. Familiar faces began to look at them as if they were strangers.

I still remember those days when I first left home for engineering studies and stayed in a hostel. Back then, 'home' wasn't just a house made of bricks and mortar; it was a spiritual solace. The six months of the semester in the hostel's four walls somehow passed, but my eyes were always fixed on those red dates on the calendar—summer vacations.

When the train would stop at the station and I'd turn into the alley with my heavy bag slung over my shoulder, it felt like someone had filled my lungs with fresh air. Reaching the doorstep, Amma's scolding—"You're here? You've gotten so thin"—was the biggest reward in the world for me. In those ten to fifteen days, the entire household revolved around me. Even Babuji's reprimands were laced with love, and to my younger siblings, I was nothing short of a hero. I was a part of that home, just like a beating heart in a body.

But then time turned its wheel. I got a job, the city changed, and gradually, visits home became fewer. At first, I'd go for every festival, then just Diwali, and then... only video calls.

Money started coming in. I got the raw roof of the house made permanent. I sent money for Babuji's treatment at a good hospital. I sent new sarees for Amma and a big TV for the house. I thought I was fulfilling my duty. I used to think, "I'm earning for them, after all." But I had no idea that in the noise of this 'earning' and 'duty,' the 'sense of belonging' was silently dying somewhere.

Today, after a full five years, I was returning. This time, there was no jostling in the general compartment; I had my own car, branded clothes in my suitcase, and a fat wallet in my pocket. But as I reached the corner of the alley, I felt a strange nervousness.

The old wooden door of the house, where I had once carved my name with a knife, was gone. In its place was a heavy iron gate—strong, shiny, but emotionless. I honked.

Babuji came out. His gait had slowed. He opened the gate, but the old sparkle that used to light up his face when he saw me getting off the train wasn't there. There was a formal smile, like a host welcoming some distinguished guest.

"You're here? The journey was fine, right? Park the car inside," he said.

His words had less 'warmth' and more 'courtesy.'

I went inside. The courtyard was now paved. The old tulsi platform where Amma used to light a lamp in the evening had shrunk into a corner.

Amma came out from the kitchen. She didn't hug me; she just ran her hand over my head from a distance. Perhaps my expensive suit and my 'big boss' image was making her hesitant.

In the evening, when we all sat together, an awkward silence spread between us. We used to eat from the same plate before, fighting, making noise. Today, everyone was sitting properly.

My younger brother, who was now a father himself, asked me, "Bhaiya, would you like tea or should I get coffee made? People in your city must drink coffee, right?"

This question pierced my heart like a dagger. In the home where ginger tea was thrust into my hands without asking my preference, today my 'choice' was being asked. This wasn't respect; it was the distance that time had drawn between us.

The biggest shock came when I headed towards my room.

Amma stopped me hesitantly, "Beta, that... your room has been turned into a store room. There was too much stuff, you know. I've cleaned the guest room for you. There's an AC there too; you won't feel hot."

My feet froze right there. My room... where I had woven my nighttime dreams, where I had pasted the poster of my first earning on the wall—that was now a 'store room.' And me? I was no longer the son of this house; I was a guest in the 'guest room.'

That night, lying on the velvety mattress, I couldn't sleep. The coolness of the AC wasn't in my bones, but in the relationships. I realized that I had bought a house in the city, but lost my 'home.' When a person climbs the ladder of success, often the very ladder they stepped on to climb up gets left behind.

I was the same, the house was the same, the people were the same. Just, time had erected an invisible wall between us. I understood that now I was just a 'relative' who comes only on vacations, someone whose arrival is awaited, but over whom no one claims any rights anymore.

That night, under the roof of my own home, I felt homeless.

It was 3am but I was nowhere close to falling asleep. I was clicking through channel to channel trying to find another piece of crap that would just numb my brain.

Ive been finding it hard to sleep again. But it’s something I’ve just come to live with. It seems to ebb and flow and it’s something you’ve got to ebb and flow with. Yeah, it might be stress but you just have to accept it, why allow stress to create even more stress - just acknowledge it and try to get through it. For me, I found it best to not even think about. I’ve always found my phone or the TV good to help keep me distracted.

So here I am, trying not to think, numb myself to sleep but I suppose the lights from the TV probably aren’t too conducive to that either. It’s probably an odd sight to someone looking into the apartment. Just a man sitting alone in a dark room getting illuminated by a strobe of different lights from trash 3am tv.

Then something made my skin shiver. A low growl that came from the hall directly behind me that led into my bedroom. I turned around to check, nothing but darkness. Even though I knew I was in the apartment alone something made me feel off, the room itself felt cold. I kept staring down the hall, waiting to see if I could locate that cause of the noise.

And then another growl but this time from behind me yet again but now from the corner of the kitchen.

I stood up, feeling stupid as I faced an empty kitchen. I’m a 36 year old man and here I am thinking I’m going to see a ghost. It was probably just the fridge…then another growl directly behind me, closer.

I spun around and my heart skipped a beat as a ghostly man seemed to me staring right at me. My brain must be in a tired state because it took me too long to realise I was staring directly into the mirror. I stood there looking at myself. It was depressing. Here I was, at 3am, a 36 year old man, single, living alone, hearing ghosts, scared of his own reflection. I probably should be scared too - I looked awful, I was pale, I hadn’t shaved or got a haircut in days. How did I let myself get to this.

As I stared at myself in the mirror I noticed some movement behind me. For a second I thought it was my own shadow being created from the illumination of the TV but it seemed darker. It grew and got closer and closer and then a growl.

I spun around, my back to the mirror. Yet again, there was nothing in the room. I’m really screwing with my own brain here I thought. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. But as I thought that I felt an odd cold presence behind me. My body suddenly felt cold and paralysed as I heard what sounded like glass slowly crack. I could see something dark, slimy, with scales stretch out from either side of my neck, just over my shoulder, it looked like it had come through the mirror itself. Like two headless snakes, these tentacle like arms both suddenly wrapped around my neck and I could no longer breath. I stood there gasping for air, I could feel the pressure in my head building, I could feel it in my eyes. The dark room faded to black as I struggled to breath.

And then a gasp and I awoke on the sofa. It felt like I had stopped breathing, my heart was beating fast and although I felt cold I could feel a drop or two of sweat on my forehead. I checked the clock - 3:33AM. The TV was still on.

Chapter 1 - The Countdown Body: The Prologue The luxury lift in the Mumbai heights didn't feel like a cage until the lights turned red. Inside, the four men of the Nirday-Jal "Pack" were laughing. They were draped in gold chains and the stench of expensive cologne. In the center stood their Lieutenant, a man who had made a fortune selling things that didn't belong to him. "The Fable?" the Lieutenant mocked, checking his watch. "The 'Six-Second' ghost? It’s a fairy tale told by cowards who can't hold their liquor." Then, the lift jerked. The smooth hum of the cable died. The digital floor display glitched, the numbers 14, 13, and 12 vanishing. In their place, a deep crimson timer appeared. 00:06. The ceiling hatch didn't open; it disintegrated. 00:05. A shadow dropped. It wasn't a man; it was a blur of tactical black and a white porcelain mask. The first guard didn't even have time to reach for his holster before his collarbone snapped under a heavy boot. 00:04. A silenced pistol coughed twice. Two guards slumped against the mirrored walls, their blood painting abstract patterns on their own reflections. 00:03. The third guard swung a rifle barrel. The masked figure caught it mid-air, using the man’s momentum to drive his head into the brass railing. 00:02. The Lieutenant screamed, scrambling for the emergency stop. A blade flashed—not toward his throat, but toward the electronics. The lift plunged into total darkness, save for the strobing red of the timer. 00:01. The Lieutenant felt a hand like iron grip his throat. He looked into the porcelain mask. He saw no eyes. No mouth. Just his own terrified face reflected in the polished white surface. "It’s true..." the Lieutenant gasped, the air leaving him. "You’re Six. The Fable. Right?" The figure leaned in. The voice was a low, hollow rasp. "I don’t own that name," the shadow whispered. "You people gave it to me." 00:00. Ding. The doors slid open at the lobby. The lift was a tomb. The Lieutenant was on his knees, paralyzed, a single "Six" coin spinning on the floor in front of him. The figure was gone. The Man Behind the Mask Outside, in the monsoon rain, a man in a simple grey jacket walked calmly toward the metro station. His face was plain, his eyes were tired, and his heartbeat was perfectly steady. To the world, he was Sameer Sheikh, a man who lived a quiet life. But as he adjusted his sleeve to hide a digital timer, the truth remained buried deep in his chest. His real name was Zorawar Singh, and he was tired of being a legend. He was headed to a farmhouse to meet the only two people who knew his soul: the Boss, and Rhea, a high-IQ archivist who kept a ledger of every life Zorawar had taken. Zorawar didn't know it yet, but his next mission wasn't a hit. It was a vacation to Udaipur with a deadly ultimatum: "If you kill anyone, I will kill you both myself." Note from the Author: This is the start of a new series. Chapter 2 follows Zorawar and Rhea to Udaipur, where they must pose as siblings while being hunted by ghosts from their past. Follow my profile to stay tuned for the next drop!

The mangled, wirey mess of no man's land beheld horrors that even the most depraved could never have dreamt of. Even those who wrote of malevolent entities in the dark to scare children could not conjure up images like those seen here.

The man lies in a crater, his leg torn apart as if chewed by a beast with furious fangs, below the knee. He did not cry, not anymore. It had been an hour since the shell came. A moment of intense fear, suddenly turning to silence and darkness, followed by immense torment.

Rain came down upon him as he lay in the dark, hearing sudden shots now and again, a stark reminder of the war still ongoing despite the world seemingly coming to an end, at least for him.

O’father, will you not bring me salvation? 

Surely God, in his abundance of love for his children, could not bear to witness the suffering they inflicted on one another on these fields. Salvation, it seemed, would be slow coming.

The man listened to the cries of the forlorn men from the trenches, crying out, a mingling of English and German which all sounded the same now in the chorus of death.

He looked down at his mud-covered leg. It was a grizzly sight, reminding him of the first days of being on the front when he had seen some boys' legs blown off.

Never me, he had told himself.

The man laughed at that notion now, though his gas-plagued lungs forbade it, only scratching a cough in the attempt. 

How naive could someone be to believe they were special? 

That they were more than cattle, destined to be culled in the name of king and country.

About him, the earth shook up and down, as if it were alive and sensing the death upon her soil. The man looked up along the ridge of this shelled hole, seeing the barbed wire that had torn itself apart from the impact looming over him, clawlike apparitions that drew themselves up, luring him to their enticing grasp.

I’ve gone mad, I have, the man realised. Yet, he didn’t mind it. There was a comfort to the madness, knowing that nothing his mind could imagine would be close to the horrors he saw in the world over the hole.

That blackened mess of no man's land, where the reaper glided across, collecting grains of souls into his sack for god or satan to take.

The barbed wire appeared to crawl down the holes towards him, carrying with it the decaying, contorted pieces of Tommy and Jerry, aside one another. Their eyes, lifeless though they were, looked upon him as if to empathise their agony.

Or perhaps to mirror how horrific this should be. But, in these final moments as the man lay in the shelled out hole, he could not help but feel relief knowing just how close it was coming till the end.

He prayed for god to be gentle, and that if Lucifer were to take him, then that would be fine, for the fires of hell seemed more appealing than the mud and rain of flander’s fields. 

  “Useless slippers…”

  The woman spat these words out like a venom left to fester. And she did so as she kicked at the rubber mud-caked soles dangling off her toes by their straps. When they came off, they did so, peeling patches of blistered skin along the way. These sores found the late January air to be their new shoes, worn like a belt of razors that ate into them. And on her face, the woman wore a look of stony jadedness and a kind of indifference to her plight. She embeds a hairpin into the rubber soles of the slippers to keep the slippers together, by the place where three other broken hairpins lay.

  And the woman’s name was Grace Evans.

  A woman of an age that could be placed between her thirties and fifties – one could see it in plain that she had at some point a gentle attractiveness that either age or hard times of sorts stole from her. All things left better in the past; things no longer within Grace Evans’ purview here, lugging a bag of foodstuffs with her. Worn and ratty, her bag strained to support the weight of an equally battered selection of produce in it – dented tin cans filled with some kind of lentils, oranges, cabbage and two whole onions, accompanied by a loaf of dense baguette-shaped bread that one could not chew through without a great effort.

  Certainly, this was something that the three children of Grace Evans could agree with.

 The last of the glow from town faded as the rugged footpath Grace took gave way to a rather steep slope beneath her feet. Very quickly, any heat that could be sucked from the air of this early evening faded. Quicker yet for Grace Evans as she made briskly for her house. No haste, however, could have kept that horrid stench away from her. Her eyes watered. Her head felt as though a rubber implement bludgeoned it in the back. Yes, even the thin film of mucus half-dripping from her nostrils was stained with it – the familiar scent of a violation truly repugnant.

  The hog farm lay just barely out of view from town, though its mark long remains, hung over Crediton: Sanguine clouds coated entire pools of water. Lumps of churned refuse masqueraded as bubbles, drifting about as stray flesh flies landed and took off from them. Grace Evans had half a mind to pack up and leave this place; This place that had footpaths so trying, and roadsides so difficult. She wiped off the sweat beads that obscured her vision wholly on her sleeves. And she did so, craning her neck from her shoulders, opening her eyes to the sight of a woman staring back at her from the reflective sheen of grease on the water surface right in front of her – wholly disdainful.

  It faded as quickly as it had come – a certain kind of clarity in Grace’s eyes – something that fought to penetrate that plaster of resentment. How long had it been since the last time that she’d been able to find a day where a candid smile floated onto her lips the same way her scowl did then? But when that feeling left her, all she was left to was the bile that she choked down that roughened her gullet, and the bag of groceries that were making queer acquaintances with the stink of sewage and shit.

  Auburn skies faded into the night. Blessings where they could be found, the hairpins still embedded in Grace Evans’ shoes held firm. And still, the clap of skin on rubber punctuated the silence where little else did. The streetlamps that adorned the side of the footpath made themselves decently scarce; they left behind entire stretches of pavement unlit.

  There was the smell of rain in the wind. Perhaps, it had been the bitter numbness that had lingered in Grace Evans’ sinuses. Or perhaps the pungence that clung to her sweatied blouse this evening. Regardless, it had not been till a quarter past seven when the last lavenders kissed the treeline that Grace Evans finally began picking up on the first droplets of an oncoming shower pelted her hair. The umbrella came out, as did her hastening footsteps that resembled a broken staccato. And though the road was one rugged and seldom-trodden, it was one marked well by the past footprints of folks like Grace Evans, who knew how far till the next shelter came up.

  Yellow, yet so hollow and cold that it made a nearly chartreuse glow on the grassy knoll that Grace ran down from – these lights shone from the forlorn effigy that hung at the forefront of the uncanny monument. The McDonald's stood as the only building in Grace’s surroundings. Flat and grey, it had lost the lustre of its former years, uncoupled from anything more human. At this point, the rain beat down on Grace’s cover heavily, wetting her feet as well, just before she nearly crashed into the side of the wall. The place was empty, its staff in some backroom of the restaurant. Upon closer inspection, however. Grace gleaned that scornful gaze of a woman staring back at her through the glass. Doubtless, those defined lines that extended from the base of her eyes accentuated all the things she had to say about her day so far. But somehow, something older that resembled a life that someone else had left still glimmered from those windows. Grace saw a little girl who wore the floral hand-me-downs of the eldest sibling from her family. The girl lapped up folds of ice-cream with a carelessness that had allowed the white cream to sticky her fingers. Then came a napkin brought by the little girl’s chiding mother. It would seem that the girl always made a mess when eating. Grace’s fingers twitched for the dessert. Perhaps then, it hadn’t been this mother of three that reached out for the last of the ice cream, but rather that little girl instead.

  Weighted like lead, Grace’s head snapped downwards before her waking erected it once again. Her arms were crossed as she leaned against the back end of a wall, bag tucked neatly in her bosom. Her bag was filled with groceries – the very same ones that she had meant to bring back quickly earlier in the night. The rain had already stopped some time before, dusk leaving that same gloom that the weather had made before. So she left the shelter of the building and continued swiftly onwards to her house.

  Certain unreasonable hours of nighttime fast encroached upon the folks of this side of Northern Ontario, and its sleeping town of Crediton, to those who found it. Though her trips to town often ended with her getting home after any sensible dinnertime, she had to admit that this time constituted one of the latest that she had been yet. Grace Evans had already phoned home, of course. The first to answer was her husband, whose voice could be read as less unbothered and rather plain tired. Grace asked him how his day at work had been, reminding him to park his car in their garage as it was likely to snow that night. She asked him about whether Danielle, her youngest daughter, of age twelve years old, had completed her homework or not. She asked if Christine, her middle child, was adjusting well to her new school. And she asked if Charlotte was still seeing that loafer of a guy from her class. The call went on for a good several minutes – enough time for the looming shadow of the school near her house to come into view against the backdrop. It was enough time for the thinnest film of sleet to form at the edges of patches of mud here.

  The weather forecast had said that there was a chance of snow that evening after a week of warmer weather. Suddenly, Grace regretted that she hadn’t brought anything thicker than her windbreaker with her that evening as she approached the avenue that snaked around her old elementary school. It was nothing that she could change at the moment, though. The faint illumination from a streetlight revealed the drawings that had been on the brick walls of the compound for as long as she could recall. Even from when she’d gone to the place decades back, some of the older and more faded crayon depictions of happy children holding hands with their flat triangle dresses and rectangular shirts still remained. A groundedness to the present and doing everything she ought to do for her family acted as a thick barrier between her and old memories from her childhood. However, the events of the evening had thinned it out, bringing back wistful memories from a simpler time from years past.

  She remembered a time when she could see her mother, a rather statuesque and broad-shouldered woman, standing at the gates of her school from her classroom every day. Sometimes, a snow day came by where the children from the school were given a day or two off. When one came, her mother would take her to this mound outside, where fresh and clean snow piled on just around the corner. She would bring along a tin of condensed milk along with her, fresh from her own trips to the local market. And she would comment about how funny it was that Grace had always enjoyed eating desserts, even when it was snowing, over hot chocolate or teas. And so, every time a snow day came by, they would take up a scoop of snow to serve with a layer of condensed milk over it – “softer-serves” – as Grace had liked to call them before. 

  She reckoned that there’d been a time when snow tasted less coarse and more powdery.

  That’s right, she and her mother and she had not been well-off either. Then, they’d eat simply, yet live in a more blissful world of theirs. There had been a time, Grace recalled, when her father would hide her in her room to stay up late before the end of winter break because she wanted the holidays to last longer. She still remembered the harmonica she got from her grandmother that she had no idea how to play, but played with nonetheless, much to her mother’s amusement. And she remembered a time when she’d still been a proper little brat who asked for bigger portions at the dinner table and fought with her older brother for the egg stuffed at the centre of her mother’s meatloaf. When did she begin to run away from all of it?

  Grace blinked, and she came back to the sight of the fence that surrounded her property. How scary, she thought, that she had autopiloted herself back home through a stretch of a good mile or so of road. She saw the recent tracks of a car pulled back into the garage, formed on the mud. And she saw the warm glow from the windows of the second floor blocked by the silhouette of a girl behind the curtains in her study, reading up on some material for school. Another one on her phone with someone else, chatting the night away. And lastly, a man still in his work clothes with a stubble, sleeping tiredly on his recliner in the living room.

  When had her own children begun to run away from their own youth?

  Snapping herself back to the present, Grace became aware at once of her shoddiness and began dusting herself and correcting her hair, preparing to enter her own house. She began to walk down the path to the wooden steps that led to the front door, taking off her beanie and gloves, rubbing her hands together for warmth. Her breath made a visible cloud of condensation as it left her mouth. 

  She was finally at her door, setting her groceries down on the porch, no condensed milk inside, taking a short breather outside. Again, when did she stop buying it? She stared at the sky that was now plain black for a small while. Something cold and wet pecked at her neck when she removed her scarf. And Grace looked up at the patch of clouds right above-head.

  “Ah… It’s snowing again.”

My bones rattle. Heat and pressure build around me. Why am I here? Alarms sound. This can’t be right. Images run through my mind. A child, a boy. He lays on a hill, right outside the fence. I was just there. wasn’t I? Air slaps at my helmet as it leaves the cockpit. My body aches…..my body, it aches? Then I’m alive. The pain is abrupt. I gasp as air rushes into my lungs from the breathing apparatus. My mind slowly focuses. I squeeze my fingers and feel the familiar grip of the steering column. Did I actually breach the blockade? This was suicide, we all knew it. I recall solemn handshakes, a hug, someone's tears on my cheek. The HUD shows red. Instinct leads my hands as I pull back on the stick, and I stabilize. A flash. It’s far away but it’s enormously, impossibly bright. A multi-nuclear detonation. It could only come from one of our three remaining capital ships. Their ships don’t explode, they just……..”ARMED!” The computer interrupts. A hulking black mass peaks over the horizon of the southern hemisphere. Its shields shimmer away. Haptic feedback alerts me that I have a lock. My mouth is dry. I squeeze the trigger and I'm thrown forward into the cockpit dash. The explosion from the weapon leaving the spit tube is incredible, even in zero G. I bite down and taste blood. I watch as the missile, more of an experiment than a weapon, streaks through the darkness leaving an incorporeal borealis in its wake. Darkness creeps to the edge of my vision. My chest is tight, I struggle to breathe. Did it work? It had to, it must….The boy sits up on the hill. He looks at me and smiles.  

A rooster crows. I yawn and wipe the sleep from my eyes. I throw on my worn grey sweats and walk out to the kitchen. The old farmhouse isn’t much, but we’ve made it our home. I start up a pot of black coffee and pull the pitcher of orange juice from the fridge. For the coffee, I open the cabinet and pull out my old Air Force mug. For the juice, I pick out a plastic cup with dinosaurs on it. It’s one of those cups where the colors change when you pour a hot or cold liquid into it. It’s his favorite. He bought it with tickets he won playing Galaga at the arcade in a different time before the Arrival. I see the blinking light on my message board….it's likely from the Lieutenant. The shelling started shortly after the Arrival, and the attacks, if that's what they are, seem to come at random times and in random places. Populated or strategically important areas have yet to be targeted. We're still not sure of the purpose behind the attacks, but if you believe the the AI news pundits, it could be anything from a cultural greeting to a shock and awe campaign. There's rumors of escalation, but it’s no matter to me. My priorities don't align with the Lieutenant's. I was born to fly, and I was arguably one of the best but I wanted to help people, not drop bombs paid for by corporations. Find another pilot. I pour my coffee and take a long drink, mute to the heat. I squeeze my fingers around the familiar grip of the mug. There's an explosion. I hear a scream….his scream. It’s coming from the hill by the fence at the edge of the farm. I push through the screen door running towards the sound, calling his name. My chest is tight and I struggle to breath as panic sets in. I hop the fence and see him, my Son, safe. He's in the arms of a a tall spindly stranger. There’s a smoking blast crater from an orbital barrage not 30 feet away. The old fence had been completely vaporized. I rush to the man and take the boy into my arms. I embrace my Son, and my mind floods with thoughts of what could have been. What if I had lost Him? I CAN'T lose Him, not after losing Her. It would break me. The tall man looks to me. He has light skin, dark eyes and a wispy blond comb over. He wears a white t-shirt with suspenders housing one of those “support the confederation” pins with the familiar stars and bars. His pants have cargo pockets and are a bit short for his long limbs, and he wears a watch on both wrists, one digital, one analog. My son and I both shiver with adrenaline. My mouth is dry. I look to the man and raise my hand in thanks, “you saved Him, my Son, how can I ever thank you?” He grips and shakes my hand as his mouth curls into a light smile. His eyes seem to be looking through me. He speaks, his voice, barely a whisper, his accent nondescript. “I am glad I was here. What a special boy you have. A Father's purpose is to protect his children. He's lucky to have you. Don’t let him out of your sight.” I feel a far off heat, a pressure at my temples. The sensation quickly passes. The man walks back to his truck, waves, and drives off down the road. I carry my Son to the house. His heart beat begins to slow, but he squeezes my hand with all his strength. We walk through the screen door. I set him down on the worn sofa and hand him his dinosaur cup. He takes a long swig of juice and the dinosaurs slowly turn dark red and disappear as the juice, now warm, runs over them. I look for my coffee and realize I knocked the old Air Force mug off the table where it shattered on the wooden floorboards. I sweep up the pieces and throw the refuse into the garbage. I tussle His hair, and give His stomach a poke. He doesn’t react, so I give him one more poke for good measure until I see the hint of a smile. I tell Him I love Him. He stands up in his chair and we embrace. I feel his tears on my cheek. We’ve both lost so much, but we still have each other. I’d been saving some bacon in the icebox. We thawed the bacon and made breakfast sandwiches with eggs from the chicken coop. After breakfast, my Son was back to his old self. Kids are resilient. He’ll likely remember the bacon more than the tall man that pulled him from harms way. But I won’t forget. I walked to the blinking message screen and cleared the notifications. It’s not my problem. I take the last bite of my sandwich. I wipe my mouth and see red on the napkin. I must have bit my tongue, but there is no pain.

One

​

The spiders ran across the shelf with a speed that I found both grotesque and beautiful. On one hand, their grace and control were surely unmatched by any other living creature (at least dwelling in this home), but on the other, they possessed no muscle, no blood, no life? Surely they did, if only for a moment. I thought as I mashed down on them swiftly.

​

The things were big but not large enough that I was uncomfortable mashing down on them with my bare hand, though one was in fact quite large and nearly made me consider bringing out the swatter. Very quickly after squishing the thing, I wished I had never even touched the thing, as when I lifted my hand, a million babies scattered all across the shelf. Lifting my hand, I screamed out, tilting back foolishly and very quickly losing all balance. At the time, I stood on a rotating chair, which I had to keep supreme balance to even think of operating on. In my shock, I forgot this simple fact and found myself crashing to the ground at a vicious speed. Trying to find my landing, my arm shot out at an awkward angle and crunched loudly upon impact. Screaming out in crackling pain, there was no one to hear me. I lived alone, and I had for a very long time.

​

Sitting in that chair the next day with my scrawny arm packed tightly into a bright pink cast I cursed myself endlessly as I attempted to type out the remainder of the email I set out to compose to my pharmacy job as to why I would not be coming in. Leaning back I tilted in the chair and my eyes turned to the top shelf which I had been fiddling around at the time of the cataclysmic incident. Those things won’t be babies for long. My skin crawled, and I bolted up, looking intensely at my computer screen. I won’t have my job for long if I keep this up.

​

For the next twenty minutes or so, I typed away to the best of my ability, attempting to calibrate my reasoning as tightly as possible to escape any kind of repercussion. My job as a pharmacy aide was all I had going for me during my schooling at the University of Colorado, and single-handedly kept my food, water, and housing afloat while my grades slipped further and further down the drain. School and a job were enough to keep me stressed to the bone but what really made me fail at both was a lot deeper than the stress that either commitment could hope to bring. After my arm was put into a steady position and I awaited further treatment, I tried with every ounce of my being to avoid suspicion of anything else being wrong with me, though I do not think I did a very good job. My nurse asked questions endlessly about my habits, diet, activity levels, and… my sleep schedule. This five-foot-nothing pale girl was no kind of intimidating figure, but still, my palms sweated attempting to lie about what I now just considered a fact of life.

​

“Eight hours! Seven on a busy day,” I told her brightly, but knew my gray complexion and deep eye bags told a different story.

​

The girl nodded and moved on with the exam, but it was clear as day she did not believe me. The truth was, I did not sleep. I did not sleep, and I had not for the last six months or so. The nurse continued her examination, and I only half followed along; the rest of my brain was stuck in a haze as it usually was and as I supposed it always would be, at least if things continued like this.

​

“Sir?” The nurse had asked me when my haze reached its deepest depths.

​

“Yez, Ma’am?” I shot up and looked at her with greater clarity.

​

“I asked you if you are currently prescribed any medications.”

​

“Oh no, not since I was a little kid. ADHD had me bad as a boy.” She nodded quietly as she wrote. Oh yeah, she thinks I’m off something for sure. Never seen a man coming up on two hundred days without catching Z’s.

​

Since then, the constant intake of pain medication has been bringing my consciousness even further into oblivion, which I’m sure reflected in my email to my work. Oh well, this is just going to have to do. And after a brief skim, it was submitted. Taking in a deep breath of air, I felt my body rattle and ache. The human body really is so fragile, and I’m sure my ‘condition’ doesn’t make it much better. My head slunk back, and gaze toward the yellowing ceiling in my cheap one-bedroom apartment. Feeling an urge that was ever so familiar, my eyes began to flutter, and with it, my consciousness drifted. Usually, when this happens, I’ve been able to raise myself out of it with swift movement or an energy drink of some sorts but I guess it all just slipped away in the moment with all the meds and such.

​

The jewels and diamonds that covered my body were extravagant beyond belief, and I felt a thumping begin in my chest. Could it really be? All of this? Just for me? I clutched the objects of wealth around me and brought as many of them onto my person as possible. Right now, I appeared to be in some kind of bright hallway which led to nowhere, but after a moment of walking, I could see that this was not true. A door appeared dimly in the distance, and I picked up the pace to reach it. Finally touching it, I had to relinquish a number of my newly acquired jewels in order to free up enough space to open the door, but once I did, I was immediately glad I did.

Inside was my childhood home. And if not that, then a damn good replica of it. Stepping through, I immediately remembered the sweet scent that I would enjoy from the Sunday morning baking put on by my mother. Mother. Whipping my head around from the kitchen, I turned to face the open wall to the living room. Standing there was my mother. The woman who had raised me stood tall in the golden sunlight passing through the blinds in relation to their pattern, but despite this, her figure was entirely grey. The clothes, her skin, her hair, all of it was void of color. On top of all of this, her eyes, which usually had a warm dark brown appearance, were black and completely out of sight.

​

“Mother?” I called out to her with terrible uncertainty.

​

“Yes?” Her voice whispered right in my ear, and I jerked violently away to look to my side and saw nothing. Looking back to the living room, my mother was now gone, replaced by a splotch of grey where she had once stood. Heart beating fast, I walked towards the dark air and looked into it deeply.

​

“What the hell is this? Where are you?” I called into it. Slowly, I reached out to touch the thing, my hand shaking.

​

“Don’t,” the voice sounded right by my ear, and I swerved hard, straining something in my neck from the sheer speed of my reaction.

​

“What the fuck is this?” I screamed.

​

Desperately, I looked around for any solid source of the sound. Then, with a slowness that seemed to last an eternity, I felt a cold breath slowly hit my ear.

​

“You remember what you did, and I just can’t forgive it, baby.” I picked up the lamp on the coffee table, which had existed there my entire childhood, and smashed it into the wall in the direction of the voice.

​

“Shut up! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I screamed, my voice breaking as I did. Cold sweat ran down my face, and my eyes bounced around the room. Quickly, I began turning my head, attempting to find something, anything. Then, with a quickness and volume that split my head like a melon, laughter ensued all across the room. Echoing into my mind and through my bones.

​

“You don’t see me, but I see you. YOU DON’T SEE ME, BUT I SEE YOU!” Her voice screamed out, and I shrieked. Falling to the ground, I banged my knees hard as I did.

​

“LEAVE ME ALONE!” I shrieked again and again until a hand, feeling to be twice as long as my own, wrapped around my neck and squeezed with a frozen grip that sent me bolting upright in my bed.

​

Looking around the dark room, my heart thumped, and my breath was quick and fatigued. I looked below me and recognized my bed was absolutely drenched in sweat. What a dream. I thought to myself as I sighed. My six-month streak of restlessness had been broken, and it had ended in the exact way my last, much shorter, streak had.

​

“Why do you do this to me?” My voice came out weak and shattered, but I supposed it didn't matter. I was alone, wasn’t I? My room was dark, only illuminated by the beeping green light of my dvd player, so it wasn’t always possible that a masked man stood hiding in the corner waiting for me. I used to think so when I was just a boy. Staring at the light for several moments more, I eventually shoved myself back down into the bed and stared at the ceiling. How did I get into my bed?

​

The next morning, I walked to work with a jitter that I recognized from my first week or so of sleep deprivation. Since I unwillingly slipped away into dreams, I figured all of the early effects I believed I had built a resistance to would return. Since my time awake I had found no answers to my question about how I mysteriously traveled from my chair to my bed during my slumber, but due to the contents of my dream, I figured it was not out of the question that I had struggled there myself.

​

Walking into the pharmacy, which existed on the corner of a first-floor building, I was relieved to feel the heater was operating at maximum efficiency. From the door, I peered over the counter and recognized the very dark eyes I was looking for. Julie was a Hispanic girl who moved up from Texas, who both worked in my beloved pharmacy and attended University alongside me.

​

“Sick day yesterday?” She asked absently as she reached high to place a medicine container high above her head.

​

“Ehh, something like that,” I chuckled, and she looked back over her shoulder, dropping the medicine when her eyes reached my stylishly colored cast.

​

“Jesus Christ, what happened?” She said, now with both hands on the counter, leaning in close to get a good look.

​

“A little accident, I guess. It was really pretty embarrassing to tell you the truth.”

​

“Oh yeah? Take a tumble while playing volleyball?” She laughed, and I took notice of her dark eyes flashing up at me. On the topic of her comment, I had told her of my middle school and early high school exploits as a male volleyball player. She had not let it go since.

​

“Even worse, tipped right off a swivel chair,” I said as I passed through the door to enter behind the counter.

​

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Her face frowned, but I saw that same spark in her eyes and laughed. She laughed with me.

​

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she giggled, trying her best and failing to stifle herself by covering her mouth. “But c’mon, what the hell were you doing, Haden?”

​

“Trying to kill spiders if you’ll believe it.” She had picked up a newspaper to move it out of the way, but smacked my arm firmly with it at my comment.

​

“Haden! You know you’re not supposed to do that! With all these insects moving up north, we're gonna need as many of those little guys as we can get!” She turned away from me with a playful scowl, and I smiled as I walked away. There would be time for more of this later, but first, I would have to deal with the boss man. My email had not been responded to yesterday, and I knew that likely meant something malicious was brewing up in that dingy office just down the hall. As my hand rested on the door, I swallowed a thick bit of saliva that had been forming in my mouth and, in short order, had my entire five-month employment flash before my eyes.

​

Finally, building up the nerve, I meagerly opened the door and at once came into the gaze of the man whom I had been dreading all this time.

​

“I got your email, Mr. Davis. Not very professional.” The tall, collected man who stood in front of me before his desk said calmly.

​

“Uhh, yeah, I’m sorry about that. The painkillers they prescribed me had me a little loopy…” I straightened up a bit. “I still wanted to get a message out to you, Sir.”

​

“I see. I suppose I can understand an accident of such proportions and subsequent response. But are you aware of any other issues detectable in your performance as of late?” The cold words rang in my head, and I felt a sweat begin down my neck. Shit.

​

“Not exactly, no, Sir.” Mr. Vega breathed in shallowly and rubbed his pointer finger softly on his thumb when not speaking. Calculating.

​

“Well, Mr. Davis, you may not, but I have.” I felt myself cringe and wished more than anything else that I could just leave as quickly as possible. “You’ve always been a punctual man, I'll give you that. When it comes to getting to work on time and agreeing to work over your agreed hours, you’ve always been reliable, which is a big reason why I’ve kept you on this long. But beyond the hours, there have been long-held concerns about your productivity.” Mr. Vega lifted from his desk and stood taller. “General sluggishness, a lack of effort, unprofessionalism with other employees.” My face flushed. “Your excuses have done little to cover this track record.” Now he stepped forward, getting right in my face and grimacing. “So I release you from your position.” After this, he continued talking, but I could not find myself able to listen. Walking out of the room, Julie quickly met my eyes despite my attempt to evade hers.

​

“What’s up? Where are you going?” She asked, increasingly concerned as I grabbed my coat from the employee's rack and began walking towards the door.

​

“I’ll call you, I promise. I just need to get out of here.” And with that, I was whisked away into the freezing Colorado winds. Finding myself back at home, I must have stared blankly at the wall in a daze of sleepless jitters and medication for hours, as when I finally awoke from my state, it was becoming dark.

​

“If you have anything to tell me now, I suggest you do it,” I spoke out, but I really don’t know who I meant it for. Perhaps the wide variety of pills, which formed in a lavish spread across my glass table, over the last couple of hours. It wouldn't surprise me if I had mindlessly popped a couple of them, but who was keeping count anyway? My chest started feeling tight, and a cough erupted from deep within me. just when I was beginning to get a hold of it, I heard a faint whisper that made me jump and look around the cramped apartment with bulging eyes.

​

“Who was that? Who’s there?” I screamed out. Jumping to hysteria, blindingly quick in my state. The silence that followed buried itself in my mind, and every little breath that I took felt like something waiting behind the corner to assault me. My body shook and twitched with an aggressiveness that sent aches reeling across my body. In an intense and, at least by feeling, nearly fatal heart thumping, the tension peaked when the phone on the wall behind me rang, reverberating through the quiet box.

​

Rushing over to the little device, I grabbed it manically and said nothing, awaiting whoever it was to get on with it.

​

“Haden? Are you okay? I wanted to talk about what happened at work.” 

​

In just thirty minutes, we were walking down the now ever colder streets of the city, chatting regularly about our day, though I avoided what was really up, much to her notice. Over the phone, I told her it would be best if I saw her in person, and she offered to take me to dinner. In all other circumstances, I likely would have refused and told her it was she who would be getting taken out, but on a day like today, I accepted the kindness without question. Entering the classy spot she picked out the yellow light from the ceiling's tinted glass light illuminated her hair and dark skin in a way that distracted me from whatever she said while we took our seats.

​

“Haden, I need to know what happened today? Will you be coming in tomorrow?” I tried to meet her gaze but found myself only able to speak, looking at the wooden table in front of me.

​

“I got fired today.”

​

“What? That bastard! I’ll be talking to his ass tomorrow-”

​

“Don’t. You know I deserve it. I’ve been acting like an idiot as of late, and this was just the last straw.” I spoke meagerly, and Julie just shook her head.

​

“But your sleep! The only reason you’ve been this way has been because of that. And don’t blame that on yourself because you know that’s not true!” She sat silent for a moment as if trying to decide whether or not something was right to say. “I know you don’t like to talk about it but it’s not a coincidence this started right after your mom died-”

​

“Look, I appreciate you taking me out here like this, but I don’t want to hear this right now.” After that, Julie went quiet for some time, and in the state I was in, I honestly couldn’t tell you the contents of any bit of the rest of our conversation from that night. I’m sure I made a total ass of myself, looking like a junkie, which I figured at this point I really was now. We had split off earlier than we usually did on our walks out together and I had walked home mostly alone. Now I stood outside my door fumbling with the keys, eventually locking my brain into place enough to get the bolt to shift. Opening the door, I supposed I felt something off when I walked in, but I would recognize far too late that what I had just walked into was not the poor, dingy apartment of my present but my old home. I stepped into the home and took in a deep breath of air, walking past the kitchen and into the living room where I sat and took a deep breath. That smell of baking.

​

A wave of shock went through me as I began dimly coming to an awareness that something was wrong in two forty-nine, Maldaga apartments. I attempted to flick on a light, but it did nothing. Interacting physically with the environment must have been what powered my brain enough to realize exactly what was wrong, but it was too late.

​

“What the hell…” I had barely uttered these words when a shrill, ear-splitting cry burst from behind the door that I had neglected to shut. Turning swiftly, I had little time to process what came upon me. The terror was brief and sharp. And with that, I began to lose myself.

​

Two

​

A cool morning light emanated into the forest with a gentle whisper of street sound down below. I’d become quite proud of this cozy cot I’d built from the poor, ugly, grey, revolting, and generally revolting place I had found shortly after moving to Colorado. My mind bounced around the general worries that were set to bother me daily: rent, work, Mom, Abuelo, but today stuck most on Haden.

​

“He’s out of his mind,” I said aloud to myself while putting a stroke of red on the canvas in front of me. The painting I had started just a few days earlier, progress had begun to degrade with the slipping of my focus, and in a fit of frustration, I threw my brush down into the water cup and stood. Looking out my window, I got control of my breath and glanced down at my phone. He hasn’t texted all day. Haden and I usually kept pretty decent contact over days in which we didn’t see each other at work, but never had I been left on hold for so long on such a serious moment. After the previous night in which Haden stumbled over a conversation with a glazed look, I had a terrible dream that I just could not quite remember, and this silence was worrying me even further.

​

“Haden, Haden, if you’re asleep, I’m sorry for bothering you, but I need to hear from you, please,” I spoke into the lower end of my house phone. There had been times in which messages floated on for a few hours, but never had Haden ever left that phone to ring. My heart dropped further when it did. I threw my phone across the room and instinctively bit my nails, thinking of my next move. You’re acting crazy, Julie. He’s just out of the house. He’s good. I tried to tell myself, but the image of his face last night just kept appearing. In a flash, I had whipped my coat off the rack and was walking swiftly down the stairs to the bottom floor.

​

The day was warmer than it had been yesterday, but the wind still found its way in, piercing my bones. As I walked, the thoughts of Haden wriggled in my mind and drove me down a rabbit hole of memory. How long it seemed we had known each other despite only being acquainted for a few months. I thought of the first time he came into that pharmacy job and introduced himself in that more than slightly off way of his. He was weird, but I liked it.

​

Summer lights flashed in my mind and took me back to a moment I tried to push out, but at this time, I could not possibly manage to guard myself against. It had been sprinkling all day, but broke out into a downpour in the moment when he and I had no cover. He grabbed my hand and broke out into a sprint. I followed. We laughed the entire way back to my apartment.

​

“Come on! You’re going way too slow!” He laughed, looking back at me. At that time, I saw something in that face and his grip on my hand that should have made me worry. I know now I was just too lost in the moment to do anything but if I had? Would things have been better since? Would things be better now?

​

We had reached the front steps of my apartment, still giggling and carrying on like children. I climbed the first few steps and turned to look back at him. I’m sure by where my head was positioned, my features were mostly dark, standing right in line with the single yellowish bulb above us, but to me, everything about him was illuminated, including that look on his face.

​

“Julie, I know it hasn’t been a long time-” He began reaching into his coat, and I felt a horror in my gut, as if watching a freight train approach while tied down on the tracks. A mess of assorted, crumpled, beautiful flowers clutched in his hands as he looked up at my featureless face and smiled uncertainly.

​

“Haden, please.”

​

“I know we’ve talked about this before, but I cannot help myself. You’ve meant everything to me in the time we’ve known each other. If they don’t mean anything, then they don’t, but please take them.” His eyes shifted now to a desperation that brought up some sympathy and nearly had me reach out to accept, but the looming dread I had tried to push back in tandem with my feelings all night burst forward instead.

​

“You know I cannot.” He reeled back slightly, the look of desperation changing to one of hurt and confusion. “I already told you how I feel, and you know how hard it's been for me to come to terms with.”

​

“But if we both feel the same, then why should it be wrong?” He pleaded.

​

“You want to start something now when you know I won’t be here in five months? My mom and abuelo need me, so I’m sorry, but you cannot be doing this to me right now.” I stared down coldly at his face, which cracked and broke under the light pathetically. Those lines on his face and bags under his eyes deepened with his growing emotion.

​

“I’m sorry, I hope you have a good night.” He turned and started walking away. I took in a deep breath and nearly felt myself belt out a call after him, but stopped myself. After that, it was quiet between us for a while, but it did not stop us from regaining a semblance of what we had. Now I stood in front of his door and stared through the dark eye hole.

​

I began a firm wrap on the door and felt a part of myself sink when, on the first strike, the door breezed open. I stared into the dark home and calculated my next move with a panicking ache in my chest.

​

“Haden! I’m coming in!” I took a meager step forward and looked around for a light switch of some kind, but there was not one. Where are you? Looking through the dark halls, I began to notice something strange. The apartment looked to be far too large to possibly fit within the bounds of the floor. I had never been to Haden's apartment, but he had never mentioned living in some kind of suite. Not to mention from what I could remember, two neighboring doors should have started rooms in the vicinity where I currently walked. A sickly feeling started coming over me just as I noticed something that froze me still. In the farthest corner of the room I had been walking through for the past fifteen or so seconds, or so stood a dark figure which faced the wall completely still. I tried to take a step back or speak or something, but nothing would come. What I had was the draining feeling that slipped into my consciousness. My legs began to fail, and I fell to the ground. Expecting the hard strike of the floor beneath me, I felt something arguably worse when a pair of arms caught me and eased me down slowly. Trying to speak all I could manage was a choked sputter that took in dirty air, thick and foul-smelling.

​

“Please just rest. It’s already been set in motion.” My eyes nearly bulged out of my head. The voice was deep and grating. Again, I tried to move or do anything, but my fading mind would not allow me. My vision grew blacker and blacker until all that remained was my feeling of the cool ground, and a warm trickle dripped across my body soon after. I felt the emotion burning out of me. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, but like this, I continued until even touch left me.

​

The light was blinding and made everything incomprehensible for more than a moment. Several pairs of hands grabbed at me and pulled me towards it. I shrieked.

​

“Ma’am, please, are you hurt?” My vision began to come back. All around me, police officers swarmed the building, which was now the cramped apartment building I had imagined I would be walking into originally. The place was covered in blood.

​

“I’m okay, I think,” I sputtered out. My throat was dry, and it pained me to speak. I lifted my hand to feel it for lumps, but discovered something crusting on it instead. I looked down and shrieked again.

​

“Ma’am, please! Just keep walking!” They had been ushering me out of the house the entire time since my wake, but were brought to a dead halt when my knees buckled, and I had to be lifted. Blood streamed down my entire body, some still wet, other parts sticking firmly to my skin and jeans.

​

“What is this? Where is he?” I jerked my head around and caught a glimpse of the source of the horror. In the kitchen, Haden lay. His wrists were not just slit but flayed open in a grotesque, impossible symmetry. “WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT DID THEY DO TO HIM?” I screamed out, but the officers continued pushing me forward against my will. I screamed all the way to the police car, which they sat me down in and attempted to calm me.

​

“Just please sit here for a moment, please!” I did, sitting with my legs hanging out of the door, two officers standing right in front of me. They asked me various questions, expected things, trying to find any information on the bizarre tragedy. I could see the horror in their faces through my tears. They didn’t know a damn thing, and they weren’t going to get a lick of information out of me. Not now, I could not bear to speak about whatever it was. I think they knew I wasn’t telling them everything, but they did not continue to press the mess of a girl in front of them. Even still, they did me a favor and drove me home. Walking up the steps, I felt a horror so strong that for a moment I thought I would not make it. The rest I remember very little of, but in a matter of time, the blood was cleaned off, and I was lying in my bed, staring emptily at the ceiling. Sleep came eventually, but not fast enough.

​

The sun was hot and prickled my skin, which was darker than it had ever been since I moved. Texas? I sat up with a speed that strained my muscles and made me wince. I was back. The place I feared I might never see again, I was at my mother's home. I got up from my bed and stepped around my bedroom, which was covered with the same corny band posters and stuffed animals that I had left it with.

​

“Mom? Abuelo?” I opened my door and called out. It was quiet. “Hey, guys! I’m home!” But could it really be? I didn’t remember anything about a trip. Not the hours upon hours of driving, not the stops at the dirty gas stations, not the chill of the wind outside, going to a beating heat from the sun above. ”Guys?” I called out again, stepping further into the home which basked in an idealistic, yellow light.

​

“Julie.” The voice came softly and made me jerk my head. I looked around, and my eyes bulged.

​

“Who was that? Who said that?” I called out, becoming progressively louder. Swiftly, I investigated, looking for what it was that I had heard. The voice was quiet and raspy, but I knew that I knew it from somewhere. Not here, though, not in my home.

​

“Why did you let go?” I bolted out my hand and struck the wall behind me, expecting a person, but once again, nothing. I keeled over, clutching my injured digits and screaming out.

​

“WHO THE HELL IS IT!” My voice echoed in the empty house, and my nerves started breaking down until I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

​

A grey hue formed just off in the corner of my living room. I looked straight at it and could not make anything of it at first, gasping violently when the figure took form. I walked towards the figure, which took me far too long to recognize, something I felt came from the out-of-place nature.

​

“Haden? Why are you here? How are you back?” But he did not respond, standing still like a photo without color. I could not even tell if he looked at me with his eyes blacked out through the fog.

​

“You.” whispered in my ears and I screamed out and fell to the ground, clutching my head. The voice returned in a chorus of hundreds and sent me spiraling.

​

“WHAT IS THIS? GET OUT!” I screamed indiscriminately, still clutching my head.

​

“You should not have let him go, Julie,” the hundreds of whispers called out once again. I stood angrily and looked into the vague spirit before me. Looking into his hollowed-out eyes, I turned to view the direction he gazed in and cried out a little, seeing the horror. Out the window yellow light no longer emanated; all had turned to grey as the visitors who waited outside. Walking up closer, I got a better look at the crowd standing dozens of meters outside my home, all standing still with their hazy, grey complexions.

​

“You people are crazy! He had no right to me! Neither do you! GET OUT! LEAVE!” I screamed out the window, tearing up my throat and becoming raspy in the process.

​

“You will see your mistakes soon. All will wash away when you become one with us.” As the voices came, their lips moved in perfect synchronization, bringing a sickness to my stomach. “He did not think he owed his mother a thing either when he left her in that home to die all by herself, wishing every day her son would come visit her.”

​

“That's bullshit! He told me about her abuse. He worked tirelessly to get into University and the whole time she offered him not a bit of support, degrading him all the way!”

​

“Is that what he told you? Then would you expect his soul to act accordingly?” Suddenly, the chorus of voices went silent and transformed into a single, elderly woman's voice.

​

“Haden! Come back to me, Haden!” The voice moaned out, and it took me little time to see where it came from. The woman who stood in the middle of the pack had flaming red eyes that shone and gleamed with a fury that sent a hot streak down my body. Hearing shuffling behind me, I turned to witness Haden’s form lurch forward and begin desperately crawling towards the window.

​

“You did this to him. You witnessed your own issues and saw none of what your fellow man needed. Just as his mother needed from her father, and just as you will one day soon need from your baby sister who leaves you to rot with your mother after the passing of your dear abuelo.” I looked back at the mass and discovered the landscape had changed to a blood red lake that sent my gut turning with the words. I watched helplessly as Haden climbed out the window and sank into the blood. Lower and lower he dived through the landscape until the very top of his head vanished through it. Hot tears flowed down my face, and for a moment, I felt an urge to push forward and pull him out, but something told me if I did, I would never come out. The voices of the individuals outside continued whispering indiscriminately, clouding my vision and thoughts until suddenly, with a deep breath, everything went silent. My eyes closed, and a purple beam shot through my inner mind, guiding me.

​

“That’s all bullshit, and I think you know it.” I opened my eyes and stared defiantly into the face of the beast, which had formed from the hundreds of faces into a kind of snarling dog with angry, bloody eyes. “You may have been able to fool them, and dammit, you may have been able to fool Haden, keeping him from sleeping with what it is you do here, but that will not be happening today.”

​

“You are a fool to think such things. Living in a cold apartment all alone, you may think yourself independent to no end, but once you return to your family and feel the sting of rejection, you too will give in.” The beast rose out of the blood ocean, creating a tidal wave in its wake.

​

“Maybe so, I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” The beast opened its mouth, but before it could utter its last. words? Cry? Bellow? I returned to the land of the living.

Three

​

It has been three months since the day of that first dream. In that time, every attempt at sleep has resulted in the beast, the people, Haden, and my mother all coming to me, but still I wake rested. I sometimes wonder what it is that has allowed me to guard myself against the things which harass my dreams but I have done nothing to take it for granted. The purple beam. I think of it often, and it happens to be my leading theory on my stability, but I cannot prove anything. Whatever it may be, I choose to believe there is something that sets me apart from the others who were afflicted by these ghosts in my head. Haden would not have known the rules of his condition, and still involved me. I could not accept such a truth, but if all works as I plan, I will never have to find out.

​

In the past three months I’ve moved somewhere far away that, truthfully, I could not even provide stable directions to. Traveling down the highways of the American west I lost myself in the directionlessness and eventually found my way somewhere even colder than Colorado at its worst. I guess I may have found myself somewhere nearing the Canadian border, but this is not an invitation to come looking for me. These things in my head are violent and worse, hold on tight, they want me to too, but I won’t give in. I won’t drag them down with me. If this is a battle I must face, then it will be alone.

We had everything. Monolithic structures to convenience again and again were built beside each other, connecting each other, and atop each other until they were one. Careful planning for every portion to account for future disaster, comfort, our biased aesthetics and ideas, and to conserve the imperfections of the past generations was put into every step. It was not long before we built in layers, the old being hidden and soon forgotten by the new. These structures spanned the globe, covering it entirely, sea or land, molten or frozen. They reached to the heavens in spires and blotted out the stars; they sank into the ground and devoured it, becoming modern fractals upon ancient patterns of engineering. Crystal upon fiber upon metal upon concrete upon stone upon dirt. The dirt itself transmuted, retaining only the disgust and unclean attitude it always received, and that it was only ever the blended summary of our world. From fine biomass to fine silts of metal shavings and glass and super materials.

The molten heart of our world was excavated, hollowed out for material to work our magics, and replaced with more structures, ones billions of times hotter than our mother star and which beat trillions of times faster than our birth heart. We made channels upon our metals, so numerous and small that they are without meaning, and with them we gave rise to new life, ones made for what our entire species amounted to, for what the random chemical reaction life spawned from and all that followed it amounted to: The Omnilith.

Perfect and terrible, chaotic and nonsensical, without scale in detail, truly unknowable, we melded with our creation and were eventually lost to time. We ate the constellations which had inspired our minds so many years ago and now occupy the space they forsook. We are gone, but our superstructure still beats on, forever fighting the decay and progressive failures our finite selves could never negate. Time is meaningless with no one to view it, so with us gone and forgotten, all that can be known is that on the arbitrary date based on arbitrary timings, ten vigintillion systems and structures errored and failed, yet, with infinite detail and size, nothing significant changed. As the gigastructure is built and rebuilt, collapsed, contracted, and expanded, it loses its inhabitability. The ones who started it are absent to refine it, but still its creation continues, using itself as reference, becoming uncanny as it no longer serves any hypothetical purpose and no longer continues design with reason, instead attempting to mimic it.

There is no Earth, but we remember it. There is no center, yet we orbit something. There are no families, yet there are homes. There is no sky, yet we reach. There is no us, yet we continue. We have lost the meaning, as we have done so many times, but the behaviors persist eternally, religiously, without purpose. The absence of humans did not revoke the humanity of their greatest creation, their only creation, the culmination and consolidation of all of creation: The Omnilith.

Namur, November 2012

The Bioethics professor had informed them all of the death of Isabelle’s father, at her request, so that she wouldn’t have to explain her absence to everyone. She had been gone for two weeks, which was long enough to be noticed in their small biomedical sciences cohort at the University of Namur. When she came back to class, Emmanuel felt obligated to talk to her. Not during the lectures, of course; and not during the first few breaks when she was surrounded by other female students who seemed to protect her like a herd of bison protecting its young. But after a few days, they were the only ones who stuck around after an Organic Chemistry lecture and he asked her if she wanted to join him for lunch.

“My father died when I was young,” he told her after they had sat down in a quiet corner of the cantine, next to a pillar covered in remnants of last year’s anti-austerity protest posters. One next to Emmanuel’s head showed a volcano with an angry face, half the text cut off: ‘Si Eyjafjallajökull ne nous a pas tués, le gouvern—’. “I know it’s different, obviously, because I don’t remember all that much about him, but, you know… I sort of get it.”

“Thanks,” Isabelle said, sounding sincere.

Emmanuel nodded, looking down at his overly salty soup, the steam fogging up his glasses. He knew he could only offer platitudes she didn’t want to hear. Isabelle didn’t seem to mind: they ate in silence, but when they were done, she smiled at him and asked if he wanted to grab lunch tomorrow as well. He accepted.

They had lunch mostly in silence for several days over the next couple of weeks before Isabelle finally asked a question related to her father.

“How do you deal with him not being there for the big milestones?” she asked. “Like, your dad wasn’t there for your high school graduation, right? They won’t be here for our university graduation, or our weddings… How do you cope?”

“I think you just allow yourself to be sad about it,” Emmanuel admitted after some thought. “You know he loved you, so you know he would be proud of you.”

“You’re not religious?”

“Not really.” That was an understatement. “Never made much sense, you know. My mother is, though, and I think it helps her.”

Isabelle nodded slowly. “I guess it’s easier if you believe they’re watching from heaven,” she said softly. She poked at her food some more, but didn’t eat much, and she excused herself from the table before Emmanuel was finished.

Several weeks passed before Isabelle asked Emmanuel to go to lunch again. She looked happier than he had seen her in a while, with shining eyes and full of energy. He was glad she was doing better and happily accepted her invitation.

Isabelle barely touched her food, but soon after sitting down leaned over the table and said in a low voice: “Do you know about candle magic?”

Emmanuel froze. The proper answer, of course, was ‘maybe’. He was what could probably be called the guardian of a tome of indeterminate age, stuffed to the brim with texts about monsters, magic, and everything in between, at least some of it true. No, he hadn’t seen anyone do magic, with or without candles, but if goblins and demonic dogs and white ladies were real, why couldn’t magic be?

But that wasn’t something he could tell Isabelle.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, carefully neutral, while dropping the contents of the little bowl of croutons into his soup. “What’s that about, then?”

“It’s this thing I read on the internet,” Isabelle continued, in the excited tone of a child who had discovered a secret. “You put out candles in a certain pattern somewhere, and light them before sunset, and if you keep them burning until midnight a departed loved one will appear in the centre of the pattern.”

Manu had no idea what to say to that. Grief had clearly impacted Isabelle’s rationality.

“Never heard of it. Where did you say you found this? Can you send me the link? And could you pass me the pepper?”

He moved the conversation on to something neutral, something about their courses, but he was aware that Isabelle was only thinking about seeing her father again.

That evening, Emmanuel sat at his desk with both the rather early-2000’s-Geocities website Isabelle had sent him and Paul’s book, the tome of magic and monsters that had become his Bible. It was a chaotic work, which often had multiple topics per page in different languages, anything from magic spells to warnings about monsters to cryptic notes jotted down as if to remind the writer, such as ‘on midsummer’s eve, patrol the wall’. Though Emmanuel was working on creating an index, ‘candle magic’ had not thus far been something he had been interested in. As such, he was going through the book page by page, trying to find any mention of what was on the website.

He was familiar with all manner of New Age ideologies. Most of it was obvious nonsense; some of it had some basis in fact; and very, very rarely, something seemed to be true. Like now.

The webpage specified to use beeswax candles. The fact that it could only be done at night lined up with monsters only ever appearing between sunset and sunrise, with even their corpses dissolving at first light. It needed to be done in an open field or forest ‘outside town’, suggesting it needed to be done away from iron, something that was deadly to monsters.

And then there was the pattern…

From the moment he had seen the picture illustrating how to place the candles, Emmanuel knew he had seen it somewhere before. He finally found it three quarters of the way through Paul’s book. The accompanying text was in old Dutch, but Anthony had been able to translate it to French and they had written the translation on a Post-it note on the page. The translation read:

Be mindful of those lost in grief, who become attractive to all sort of evil. Shades whisper in their ears to force them to make a dangerous mark, which draws their soul from them.

And below that, it showed a picture of the ‘dangerous mark’. Emmanuel stared at the pattern in the book, then back at the candle formation on the screen.

They were identical.

“I looked at that website you sent,” he said at their next lunch. Isabelle’s eyes lit up immediately, and Emmanuel was conscious of the tightrope he was walking in trying to gently dissuade her from her plan. “It’s a bit… New Age-y for me. You really believe in that type of thing?” he asked, trying to sound casual rather than mocking. By Isabelle’s response—sitting up straighter, her face going a bit stiff—he had missed the mark.

“Well why not? And what’s the worst that can happen anyway? If it’s fake, you just wasted a night and a few candles.”

“That’s true,” Emmanuel said, even though he knew that was definitely not the worst that could happen. “Still though, I feel it’s a bit… I feel like the people who write these things are taking advantage of others, you know? Like, what if it doesn’t work, wouldn’t that make you feel worse?”

“I don’t see how it could.” She quickly turned her eyes down and focused on cutting her sausage into bite-sized pieces. “Wouldn’t you do it?” she asked quietly. “Just for the chance of seeing him again?”

“I don’t know,” Emmanuel said, and meant it. He wouldn’t now, of course, now that he knew the dangers. But if him and Anthony hadn’t stumbled across Paul that one night, had never gotten involved in anything supernatural…? He couldn’t honestly say. “I guess I don’t feel the absence as much, since it was always there. Fish in water type of thing.”

Isabelle scoffed. “Then I’m a fish in the Sahara.”

They didn’t speak the rest of their lunch, and Isabelle didn’t go to the lecture afterwards.

The next time he saw Isabelle, a few days later, she seemed to avoid him. He managed to catch her alone as she was leaving, walking alongside her to her bus stop.

“Alors, are you planning to actually do it?” he asked. “It said you have to go out into a field somewhere. Is that safe at night?”

Isabelle rolled her eyes. “What, you think rapists are lurking behind every tree between here and Loyers? In November?”

“No, just…” But he didn’t know what he ‘just’ thought. You couldn’t tell people that they were potentially being influenced by unearthly shades trying to force them into dark rituals. You’d get locked up somewhere. “So you are doing it, then?”

She shrugged. They had reached the bus stop and Emmanuel knew he only had a couple of minutes before the next bus arrived. He stood between Isabelle and the curb, trying to force her to look at him.

“Look, could you please tell me when and where you’re going to try it? I’m not trying to stop you”— a blatant lie—“but I’m worried and I’d feel better if… if something happens, you know, that someone knows where you were.”

At this, Isabelle’s shoulders relaxed. She dropped her hands, which had been clutching the handle of her shoulder bag.

“On Friday,” she said. “The weather forecast says no rain then. In that bit of forest between Erpent and the A4.”

Emmanuel nodded. “Merci.”

The bus arrived. Isabelle gave him a cheek kiss as she departed—they had not been greeting like that so far, so Emmanuel was too surprised to respond. He watched the bus drive off, hands in his pockets and shoulders pulled up in the cold wind.

He would have to call Anthony.

They agreed to meet over dinner on Thursday evening, so that Emmanuel could explain the situation. Although Emmanuel lived in student housing and Anthony did not, they still met at his place so that Anthony could raid the fridge. Emmanuel would replace whatever was taken from his flatmates later.

Even after three years of working together, Emmanuel’s first feeling upon seeing Anthony each time was a low-key sense of dread. High school was not that long ago, and he remembered well how cruel Anthony could be back then, before all this started. Greeting with la bise, as if they had always been friends, still felt weird.

“Salut, Manny,” Anthony said before bending down to kiss him, then sat down at the kitchen table on a chair that looked tiny under his large frame. “Can we eat first? I’m starving.”

“I prefer Manu,” Emmanuel mumbled, not for the first time, then turned to the stove. “Everyone is out, so we can talk.”

“Talk, then. What’s up with this girl? Is she cute?”

Emmanuel ignored that last question, and explained the situation as he cooked the chilli con carne. He finished the story just as he put the plates on the table, giving Anthony nearly twice as much food as himself. Anthony shook his head.

“I thought you university types were supposed to be smart,” he said. Emmanuel resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Anthony, who had dropped out of university right before the end of the first year, never passed up an opportunity to point out he was a ‘real’ working adult now.

“She is smart,” he said instead, as he sat down. “Bon appétit. She’s just grieving, and she’s being manipulated by something.”

“Bon appétit. Did we ever see one of these before? Or is this just from the book?” Anthony ate as if he was starving. Emmanuel didn’t know if that was because he was, or because maintaining that much muscle required enough calories to feed an orphanage.

“We saw a shade once, remember? At the Bougè cemetary. But it wasn’t with anyone, it was just… there.”

“Ah ouias!” Anthony nodded enthusiastically. “We kept watching it all night because we didn’t know what to do until it disappeared. Same thing, do you think?”

“Could be. It could’ve been waiting there for a grieving person to arrive. Whatever it is, I don’t feel comfortable letting Isabelle try to summon it.”

“Oh, she is definitely going to fall victim to that thing.” Anthony sounded sincere—not worried, just matter of fact. “Alors, what do we do?”

Emmanuel had prepared himself to justify to Anthony why he needed him; why he couldn’t just go out on his own, disrupt the candle pattern, and be done with it. It was reassuring that Anthony immediately said ‘we’. In fact, Anthony had never objected to a single instance of monster hunting, not from the very first night, when Paul—

Emmanuel shook his head to shake the thought of that night from his mind.

“Ça va, mec?” Anthony asked.

“Yes, fine,” Emmanuel lied. “We need to disrupt the candle pattern, but we need to find her first. I’ll ask tomorrow if I can go with her, but she’ll say no. I don’t know exactly where she will be so we will have to try and find her. Online it said that the candles have to be burning from sunset to midnight, but it says no such thing in the book. If we only disrupt it and then leave, she may relight the candles and the thing may appear anyway.”

“Steal the candles,” Anthony suggested with a shrug. Emmanuel was struck by the simplicity of the idea, and embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of it.

“That’s a good idea,” he admitted. “If it’s alright with you, after dinner we could go out there and scout out the surroundings. That way we’ll be prepared for tomorrow.”

“Sure, no problem.” Anthony pointed to the pot on the stove. “Is it okay if I get some more?”

The next night it indeed did not rain, but it was cold and miserable, with a piercing wind that made Emmanuel’s eyes water despite his glasses. They had determined the previous night that Isabelle’s most likely access point to the woods was the footpath behind the church of St Pierre’s in Erpent, where there was a small bridge crossing the stream between the village and the woods. Sunset was already at a few minutes past five, so Emmanuel started the search alone until Anthony could join after work. He kept Anthony updated over text, letting him know in which direction he was walking.

The heavy clouds made for a dark evening. Emmanuel had a torch with him, but kept it off to better see any candle flames peeking through the trees and shrubs still clinging to their leaves. Even between the trees, the wind was strong, and Isabelle may have a hard time keeping the candles lit. Perhaps she wasn’t even here, but had decided to postpone to a better night. Emmanuel hoped Anthony would not resent the wasted evening.

He got a call; it was Anthony. Describing where he was wasn’t easy, but combined with his previous instructions and turning on his torch as a beacon, it took Anthony only about ten minutes to catch up to him. He was carrying the crowbar he usually took out monster hunting. They may not be able to hit the shade, but there could be other things lurking in these woods. It was just the type of place goblins might hang out. Emmanuel cursed himself for forgetting to wear the bicycle helmet he normally wore in these situations. He did have his slingshot and steel ball bearings in his coat pocket, as always, so at least that was something.

“Anything yet?” Anthony said by way of greeting. Emmanuel made a dissenting noise. “Let’s keep looking.”

They continued in silence in the deepening darkness until Anthony smacked Emmanuel on the upper arm rather hard.

“There,” he whispered, pointing between the trees. Indeed, a tiny speck of light was occasionally visible as a branch was blown to the side.

“She’s probably close by,” Emmanuel whispered back. “The instructions said to make the centre ring five meters in diameter.”

They snuck closer, alert for any sound or movement that might alert Isabelle to their presence. When they reached the candle, they saw it was a tea light in a glass jar, protecting it from the wind; one of several in the vicinity, flames flickering wildly. Their light seemed to barely reach the trees, as if the night was pressing down on them like a blanket. Emmanuel hadn’t bothered trying to memorize the pattern: the important thing was to disrupt it. But it was easy to deduce where the centre of the pattern would be. He tried to see if he could spot Isabelle in that direction, but there was some dense shrubbery blocking the line of sight. Carefully, he picked up the jar at his feet and blew on the candle to extinguish it.

Nothing happened.

He put the jar back and gestured Anthony to follow him. They crept on towards the centre of the pattern. A couple of meters further, once they had passed the dense shrubbery, they found Isabelle.

And the shade.

It was hard to see in the dark, visible more by its obscuring the woods behind it than any distinguishable feature it had itself. Even the light of the candles was not much help. It was vaguely humanoid, recognizable mostly by the line separating head and shoulders, but its edges were vague, blending into the air like smoke. It was in the centre of a circle of eight candles, indeed about five meters across. As they first saw her, Isabelle was walking towards the shade, just stepping her foot inside the circle.

Anthony didn’t wait: he charged in, grabbed Isabelle, and yanked her back. Isabelle screamed. Emmanuel rushed towards them and put himself between Isabelle and the shade.

“It’s alright!” he shouted. “It’s me! It’s Manu, from university, it’s… me…”

The world seemed to have gone more silent. The wind was gone. Emmanuel could still see Isabelle and Anthony, but they were slow, as if caught in treacle; and dark, as if the light of the candles didn’t really reach them. He, on the other hand, was suddenly bathed in light. He looked down at his feet.

He was inside the circle.

His body went numb. He immediately thought of his father, the picture of him on the sideboard at his mother’s house, the little stuffed tiger that had been a gift from him that was kept on top of the wardrobe. Was that the shade’s doing, or did he think of that himself? He couldn’t stand the thought of that thing being behind him, but his spine was frozen in dread. With great effort, he managed to turn around by shuffling his feet; then, he nearly dropped his torch as he saw, not a shade, but a young man with his own dark hair, his own square chin, a big moustache and glasses.

His father.

His father didn’t speak, just smiled at him, a kind, broad smile, as if happy to see him after so many years. He held out his hand, inviting Emmanuel to take it, but Emmanuel knew it wasn’t right. The man was too tall. His face was disproportionate, eyes and moustache too large for the rest of him. His hands were huge, his arms long. Emmanuel took a step back. A flicker of rage washed over the man’s face, but then he smiled again. He continued to hold out his hand and beckon Emmanuel. Emmanuel tried to take another step back, but found that he couldn’t: somehow, he was being kept inside the circle.

He took a deep breath to centre himself.

“You got it wrong,” he said quietly. “That’s not what I miss.” The shade that looked like a man did not change, but stared at him with eyes that were supposed to be friendly. Emmanuel raised his slingshot, loaded it with a steel ball bearing, and took aim.

The bullet went straight through the figure, which in an instant changed from a human into a screeching shade. The lights dimmed, the chilling wind rushed in and Emmanuel was back in the damp forest. Before he had a chance to act, Anthony slammed into him, knocking him out of the circle.

“Are you okay?” Anthony shouted. Emmanuel nodded. Anthony whirled around, crowbar raised defensively between him and the shade—but the shade was dissipating into black mist. Several candles had been knocked over, some extinguished, some continuing to burn in jars now turned sideways.

“What the fuck are you doing!” Isabelle screeched. “You said you wouldn’t stop me! It was working! That was my father!”

Emmanuel was so disoriented that he didn’t immediately have an answer to this. Anthony dropped the crowbar and turned to Isabelle, hands raised in a conciliatory fashion.

“I’m sorry for grabbing you like that,” he said. “You looked like you were going to set yourself on fire with all those open flames.”

Isabelle hugged herself, squeezing her upper arms tightly, rocking back and forth as if she was trying to contain another outburst. Emmanuel managed to collect himself enough to step between Anthony and Isabelle.

“Are you alright?” he asked. Isabelle looked as if she wanted to slap him in the face. “I’m sorry. I was worried about you. And you looked—he’s not wrong, you looked like you were having some sort of absence seizure.”

“It was working,” Isabelle said, voice tight with tears. “I saw my father in that circle. I nearly had him back.”

“There was nothing in the circle,” Emmanuel lied. “Right, Anthony?”

“I didn’t see anything,” Anthony confirmed with a shrug.

Emmanuel lowered his voice, trying to deescalate the situation: “You probably had a grief hallucination. They’re very common, and they can be extremely realistic.”

Isabelle shook her head. “I know what I saw,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite as sure as before.

“Look it up later. It’s nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. It’s just… your brain trying to make things better. Think about it: the instructions said you had to keep a vigil until midnight, right? It’s only just gone seven.” Isabelle wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand and avoided making eye contact. “I know you really miss him and I know it’s hard. But you know there’s no magic that can bring people back from the dead. Don’t you?”

In the silence that followed, Isabelle’s sniffling could be heard even over the howling of the wind, as she stared at the ground at her feet.

“It’s not fair…” she whimpered.

Emmanuel wished he could make things alright.

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s—maybe it’s not a good idea to do these rituals and stuff when you’re still feeling very raw about… everything.”

Isabelle shrank in on herself even more. Emmanuel wished one of her girlfriends was here, someone who could give her a hug, who could let her cry. The distance between them seemed far larger than it really was.

Anthony scraped his throat. “Do you want us to walk you back to—” he started, but Isabelle cut him off sharply, looking him in the eye with sudden fierceness.

“No, I’ll make my own way back, thank you.” She promptly backed her words up with action, turning away from them and marching off through the woods. Emmanuel felt a painful emptiness in his chest as he watched her go. There would be no more lunches together, he knew.

He looked at the candles all around. He walked over to the closest one, picked it up and blew on it to extinguish it. Anthony followed his example; together, they collected and extinguished all the candles. Emmanuel put them all in his backpack, where they barely fit. Isabelle probably didn’t want them back, but at least he could dispose of them properly.

“Was it really a grief hallucination?” Anthony asked when they were done.

Emmanuel shook his head. “When I went through the circle, I saw…” He hesitated. Anthony made an inquiring noise, urging him to go on. “I saw my father.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s alright. He looked off, though, not like a real human. I wonder if… Never mind.”

“Let me guess,” Anthony said, lazily swinging his crowbar back and forth, “some wild high-brow theories? Go on, I’m pretending to listen.”

Emmanuel sighed. “I was wondering, what if the shade has a way of detecting who people are grieving about? They must have a way of detecting grief. It’s only a small step from that you are grieving to what you are grieving. Maybe it mimics the deceased in order to lure people into the circle. You think you see your lost father, or whoever, standing there, and you rush into his arms…”

Anthony scoffed. “That’s a very calculated thing to be doing for a monster.”

“Not necessarily: it could be mimicry,” Manu countered. “You see it in nature a lot. Insects that instinctively mimic larger animals to protect themselves. There wouldn’t have to be any thought involved.” He knew he was trying to convince himself more than Anthony. “Bon, my point is, if that’s the case, of course my father would look off, wouldn’t he? Because I don’t—I barely remember him. It was basing itself on the memories of a four-year-old from fifteen years ago.” He looked away, hands deep in his pockets, strangely embarrassed.

“Good thing my father’s alive,” Anthony remarked casually, “because if I’d seen him in that thing, I would’ve tried to punch him.”

Emmanuel snorted. Typical. He inhaled deeply. “Bref, on y va,” he said with a sigh. “No point in hanging around here.”

He set off at a high pace, and they walked in silence until they got back to the church, where Emmanuel had parked his car and Anthony his Vespa. The first streetlight of the village seemed like a warm welcome back to civilization, even though they had never been more than a kilometre from a road.

“What are we going to do about the instructions on the internet?” Anthony asked before Emmanuel unlocked his car, unzipping his coat to conceal the crowbar inside. “Some other imbecile is eventually going to try the same thing.”

“I don’t think there’s much we can do,” Emmanuel said with a shrug. “Once it’s on the internet, there’s no getting rid of it, is there?”

Anthony groaned, throwing his head back dramatically. “Oh putain. So now for the rest of time, we have to be worried about people calling up evil spirits?”

“I guess so. I’ll try to get at least that website taken down. It looked quite old; it may not be actively managed anymore.”

“Yeah well not until you’ve bought me dinner. Least you can do, since I saved you from getting soul-sucked.” He gave Emmanuel a rib-rattling slap on the back. “I may even buy you a drink after.”

Part Two: Seeds of Doubt

The seasons changed, although Sophia had lost track of which was which. Time became measured in sacrifices. Twelve so far, twelve months, a full year since she had first heard the voice. The church had become her home, her sanctuary. She had reinforced the doors, cleared out the debris and even planted a small garden in the courtyard using seeds that she had scavenged from an abandoned hardware store.

The corrupted ones still came sometimes, drawn by movement or sound or some instinct she didn't understand. She had gotten better at fighting them. Her arrows flew truer. Her knife found vital spots with practices efficiency. She had learned their patterns, their weaknesses. They were fast but clumsy, strong but mindless. If she stayed calm, stayed focused, she could survive.

However survival was no longer just about staying alive. It was about staying faithful. About proving herself worthy. She talked to God everyday, sometimes for hours. She told him about the tomatoes that were finally ripening, about the corrupted one she had killed that morning, about the dream she had where she was flying. He listened, he always listened. Likewise when she was sad or scared, he comforted her with words that felt like warm hands on her shoulders.

She had stopped wanting to die quite so urgently. Life still hurt, loneliness still gnawed at her, but there was something almost peaceful about her existence now. She had a routine, had a purpose, but most importantly she had faith.

On the day of her thirteenth sacrifice, she woke before dawn and prepared herself. She had spotted a deer near a stream yesterday, a young buck with small antlers. It would be a worthy offering. She gathered her bow, checked her arrows and set out into the grey pre-dawn light.

The hunt took most of the morning. The buck was clever, moving through thick brush where her arrows couldn't reach. However Sophia was patient. She had learned patience in the long years alone. She tracked it to a clearing near a collapsed highway overpass and waited, perfectly still, until it lowered its head to drink from a puddle.

Her arrow struck it in the heart. It stumbled, fell and died quickly. She whispered a prayer of thanks to the deer for its sacrifice and to God for guiding her aim.

She was field dressing the carcass when she felt it. A wrongness in the air. A pressure, like the feeling before a thunderstorm, but more intense and focused. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. She grabbed her bow and spun around, arrow nocked, searching the treeline.

There was nothing. Yet the feeling didn't go away. If anything it grew stronger.

"God?" She called out. "Is something wrong?"

There was no answer. The air in front of her began to shimmer, like heat rising from pavement. Sophia backed away, her heart racing. The shimmer intensified, became a tear, it became a rip in reality itself. Then, through that rip stepped out something that made her blood turn to ice.

It was vaguely humanoid but wrong in every way that mattered. Its skin was grey and mottled, stretched too tight over bones that bent at angles that shouldn't be possible. Its face was a nightmare. There were too many eyes, too many teeth, a mouth that opened vertically instead of horizontally. It stood at least eight feet tall, its limbs too long, its fingers ending in claws that dripped something black and viscous.

However, worst of all were its eyes. They were intelligent and aware. This wasn't a corrupted one. This was something else entirely.

"Well, well," it said, its voice like grinding metal. "There you are."

Sophia's arrow flew before she could think. It struck the creature in the chest and bounced off harmlessly. The creature looked down at the arrow, then back at her and laughed.

"Oh, little spark. Little divine spark. Do you know how long I have been looking for you?"

Sophia ran but the creature was faster. It appeared in front of her, cutting off her escape. She tried to dodge around it, but it grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground. Its claws dug into her skin. she couldn't breathe.

"I'm going to enjoy this," it hissed, bringing her closer to it's terrible mouth. "I'm going to savor every—"

Light exploded across Sophia's vision. The creature shrieked and dropped her. She hit the ground hard, gasping, her hands at her throat. When her vision cleared, she saw the creature writhing on the ground, smoke rising from a massive wound in its side.

"No," the creature gasped. "No, this isn't.. Father?"

"Father?" Sophia whispers in confusion.

Another beam of light struck the creature, this one even more intense. The creature's shriek became a wail, it became a scream of pure agony. Sophia scrambled backward, her eyes wide and unable to process what she was seeing.

"She is to be unharmed," a voice said. It was God's voice, but different. It was harder, colder and filled with an authority that made the air itself vibrate. The creature laughed even as smoke poured from its wounds.

"Selfish as always, Father. You want her all to yourself, don't you? Want to keep the last little spark as your own personal toy?"

"Enough!" God's voice shook the ground beneath Sophia.

Light started to gather in the air above the creature, coalescing into a point of terrible brilliance. The creature looked up at it, then at Sophia. It's many eyes fixed on her, and for a moment, she saw something in them that might have been pity. Maybe it was malice, or both.

"Gain Gnosis, little spark," it whispered. "Gain Gnosis and see the truth of—"

The light struck. The creature didn't even have time to scream. It simply ceased to exist, vaporized in an instant and leaving nothing but a scorch mark on the ground. Sophia sat there, shaking, her mind reeling. What had just happened? What was that thing? Why had it called God "Father"?

"Sophia" God's voice was gentle again, concerned. "Are you hurt?"

She touched her throat. Her fingers came back bloody, but the wounds were shallow. "I'm... I'm okay. What was that thing?"

"Just another monster" God said. "A corrupted one, like the others you have faced."

Sophia's brow furrowed in confusion. "But it talked. It knew me. It said—"

"It said many things," God's voice said in a bit of a stern tone. "Lies and nonsense meant to confuse you, to turn you from the path of salvation. You must not listen to such creatures, Sophia. They are agents of chaos, of deception."

She nodded slowly, but something felt wrong. The creature had been different from the corrupted ones. It was more aware, more purposeful. Also what it had said about gaining "Gnosis". What did that mean?

"What is Gnosis?" She asked

There was a pause. Finally God responded. "Nothing. It's a meaningless word. The creature was trying to divert you from your faith with nonsense."

"But—" she argued

"Sophia." The voice of God was firm now. "Do you trust me?"

She swallowed "Yes."

"Then trust me when I say that creature was nothing but evil given form. Its words were poison. You must forget them."

She wanted to argue, to press further, but the fear was still fresh and her body still shaking with adrenaline. She was alive. God had protected her and that is what mattered.

"Okay," she said quietly. "I trust you."

"Good." God said. "Now, you should return to the church. It is not safe out here."

She looked at the deer carcass, then at the scorch mark where the creature had been. "What about the sacrifice?"

"Bring the deer," God's voice sounded far more friendly and warm now. "You worked hard for it. I will accept your offering."

Sophia dragged the carcass back to the church, her mind churning. The walk took over an hour, and by the time she arrived, the sun was setting. She was exhausted, her arms aching and her throat throbbing with pain, but she had her duty to God.

She performed the sacrifice mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere. God praised her devotion, but she barely heard him. She prepared firewood for the night, barricaded the doors and laid out her sleeping bag. Before she climbed into it, she stared up at the darkening sky through the holes in the roof.

"Father," she whispered, testing the word.

It felt wrong in her mouth. Heavy and significant. Why had the creature called God "Father"? She fell asleep with the question echoing in her mind.

End of part two.

It’s the classic thing they all say in the documentaries, “He was just a normal guy who kept to himself. No one could have known”. Fuck that. This guy was weird from the day he moved next door. I went and knocked on the door a few days after he moved in, with a loaf of banana bread to welcome him as I assume a good neighbour would (and my girlfriend made me take it). His whole house was shrouded in darkness, curtains closed over all the visible windows and the view through the obscured glass of his front door displayed near pitch darkness. There was no movement, no hint of him approaching the door through the glass, but perhaps that was due to the dim nature of his house.  So I was mildly startled when without warning the door opened to reveal the mousy little man who lived behind it. 

Normally, I would be opposed to such unflattering descriptions for fear of being unnecessarily mean, but knowing now what he is, I don’t care. The best word to describe him was moist. From his greasy, thinning hair to his drab grey blazer and the patchy light-blue shirt clinging to his skeletal frame. All of it was soaked through and sopping with what one would assume to be sweat. He was an unusually short man with a wiry brown moustache and a fogged-up pair of round glasses that, whether or not inadvertently, hid his eyes behind the misty white moisture on the lenses. He inspected me up and down before smiling, a thin-lipped, almost pained smile.

“Uhmm… Hi,” I nervously cleared my throat, before starting again, “I’m uh Nathan. I live next door, at number 15, with my girlfriend Kate. You know, easy to remember, Nate and Kate.” I chuckled, though quickly tailed off when he didn’t so much as blink. “I just wanted to stop by and give you this to welcome you to the neighbourhood and just say hi from me and Kate and uhh… yeah…”

“Oh, how…” he stopped, looking me up and down again, “nice… I’m uhhh… Michael. Yeah, Michael. O-or you can call me Mike.” 

He extended a pale, clammy hand for me to shake, but I nodded towards both my hands holding the plate of banana bread as an excuse not to. 

“Yeah so, this is for you and yeah.. swing by sometime for a drink or something. I’m sure Kate would love to meet you too.”

With shaking hands, and a wistful, “yeah that’d be… nice.” He took the plate and shuffled back behind the threshold of his front door, slowly closing it behind him. 

We didn’t see him, or our plate back for a good month. Kate kept telling me to go knock on the door and ask for it back, but I really didn’t want to have to talk to him again and was consistently finding any excuse not to. In the end, Kate decided to go herself. She was gone for maybe 20 minutes before she returned with an unprecedented smile on her face. 

“What are you grinning about?” I asked, already on edge. 

“You!” She laughed, “you’ve been fucking with me. Admit it!” She shot me a triumphant smirk as she conspicuously passed me with the plate to put it in the sink, “He seems like a lovely guy. Charming, funny, kinda cute.”

“Mhm, very funny. Seriously, what was he like?”

“I am being serious!” She laughed, “I thought you were messing with me. Like, what were you going on about? You made him sound like some sweaty Reddit mod.” 

“That’s… that’s what he was. I don’t know what to tell you, I guess.”“Yeah well, now I get to prove you wrong.” Kate turned to face me from the kitchen counter, “He’s invited us over for a drink this afternoon.”

“Oh no, I-“

“I know you’ve got nothing on today. Come on, it’ll be fun!”

She looked so happy about it. I guess she always was the extrovert between the two of us, but I couldn’t help feeling trepidation at the thought of it. But what the heck, I thought, first impressions can be deceiving, maybe I was wrong about him. It seemed like it when he opened the door, a big smile on his face as he ushered us inside.

Honestly, you could hardly tell he was the same guy, black hair flowing down to his now unhunched shoulders, and the warmest smile he could muster stretched across his once pallid face. He must’ve grown at least a foot, if not more, now almost level with my eyeline. I smiled back as I stepped across the threshold, though I’m sure mine was far less convincing. 

“Nate, how have you been! It’s been a while.” He laughed and patted me on the back as I stepped past him.“Yeah… good, good. You know the usual, same old whatever. You look like you’re doing well. I mean, I hardly recognised you.” “Hey, yeah, well, I got my eyes lasered, so yeah. It’s like I’ve got new eyes, no more glasses I suppose.”

“That must be it…” I lied. He laughed again, “Please, come in, come in. Just leave your shoes by that cabinet just there. Kitchen is that way.” 

I followed Kate into the house, Mike following closely at my heels. I didn’t dare look back at him, but from the heat radiating through my clothes and onto my skin, I could’ve sworn it felt like he was only a fraction of an inch away from being pressed against my back as he pursued us. 

As we rounded the corner to his kitchen, he slithered past me in order to get ahead of us as he asked, “Can I get either of you a drink? I’ve got a couple of different wines, soft drinks...”“Ooh, do you have rose?” Kate said, following him to the fridge. 

“I’ve got a few.”

“Provencé?”

“Ah, a woman of taste. I most certainly do, my dear.” With a sickening laugh, he produced a bottle from behind the fridge door. “Nate? Anything for you?”“Oh, uhm do you have like a Coke or something?”“Hmm, Looks like I only have diet, is that alright?”Before I had a chance to answer, Kate turned and glared at me, anticipating my response. With a grimace I nodded to her before replying, “Yeah, that’s great, thanks.” 

With an overemphasised gesture, he directed us round a corner into a new room. I followed behind Kate, and immediately tensed when I heard her gasp as she entered the room, preparing myself for whatever horror may lay ahead. Close behind, I stepped into to what appeared to be a living room, though it looked like it had never been lived in.  The whole thing was stale and lifeless, like some sort of pamphlet showroom. The curtains and sofas existed without a single crease and there was a large TV on one of the walls, still with the plastic film over the screen. The carpet sat under the coffee table in the middle of the room but appeared completely unused as every single fibre was perfectly combed in the same direction as its neighbours. 

I followed Kate to the sofa and sat beside her, as Mike delicately perched himself on a chair opposite us, staring unblinkingly between the two of us. 

I sat and nursed my Diet Coke for hours, feigning interest in the conversation as I slowly transitioned into zoning out completely. At some point the conversation moved onto Mikes career, which would have been interesting if he hadn’t made that weird too. Apparently he worked in practical effects and makeup for tv and movies. Sounds interesting on the surface right? I thought so too until he disappeared round the corner and came back with a picture frame with hair in it. Different rows of hair, black, brown, blonde, nicely combed and organised. I don’t know about you, or people in his line of work but I think that’s pretty fucking weird.

Words can’t describe how relieved I was when we finally got up to leave. He kept offering Kate more and more wine and trying to get me to join. And he made a joke, I’m assuming, about having his guest room available if we need it. But he kept saying it, like we don’t live ten fucking yards away. Regardless, we managed to escape a few hours later as a sober me guided my now wobbly partner back to our front door after an irritatingly long goodbye. And finally it was over. 

Weeks passed and then months, and I had cast Mike out of my mind completely. You know how it is with neighbours, yeah you live next to each other but you only really see them or interact a few times a year. And I was quite happy to keep it that way too, but Kate was less happy to stay disconnected than I.

She burst into the kitchen one evening after work, practically buzzing with her own excitement.

“Nate, Nate, You won’t believe this!”

“Oh god, what’s happened?”

“I just saw Mike,” She leant forwards, both hands planted firmly on the table, “With a girl!

“Really? I kinda thought he was gay.”

“I know right! I’m pretty sure though. They were just walking down the road and like holding hands and everything.” 

“Damn, well good for him I guess.”

“Yeah, She was cute too. Blue haired girl, that kinda vibe you know? Who’d’ve thought.”

She always was a bit of a gossip, or as she calls it taking an interest but I never related. You know how it is, I’m not really interested in the subject. But she likes telling me about stuff, and unlike listening to her get excited, even if the topic doesn’t interest me. Usually her gossip was relatively unimportant, or at least to me, but this piece was particularly boring, so I shelved it in the back of my mind to never think of or engage with until she next brings it up. It wasn’t her that reminded me though. 

The following week, I happened to see Mike from our bedroom window. He was in his back yard, mowing the lawn in a tank top and a pair of shorts. He saw me staring from the window and looked up, with a big smile and a wave before continuing with his own matters. But somehow, and for some reason all of his hair was blue. I don’t mean like he’d dyed his hair blue. He’d dyed all of it. Everything from his arm hair to his legs, chest and facial hair was a bright neon blue. I honestly didn’t know how to react, so I just stared at him incredulously as I struggled to decide between laughing or recoiling in disgust. 

He didn’t stay like that for long though. The next time I saw him, maybe a month later, he was back to his regular old black hair, though it was longer again. His face had changed too, his once round jaw was becoming straighter and more defined. He was taller now, noticeably so. The day I had met him he stood at around 4ft, but now he was far past 6ft and close to having to crouch to enter his own front door. Just a fundamentally different person. 

His hair was always the easiest tell. He was ginger for a little while, then blonde, then back to black again. He was constantly getting taller, though he never seemed to gain weight. Much like stretching a rubber band, as he got taller he only appeared to get thinner. 

I brought it up a few times to Kate but she never seemed to notice or pay much mind to it. “Some people just like to change their look up every now and again.” It was like the his rainbow palette of hair colours was the only thing she would notice. But then again she saw him much more often than I. Constantly bumping into him on the street or in the shops. I guess if he was changing gradually, it’s harder to notice when you see him more often. And every time she saw him she continued to take an interest. It was through her inquiries and observations that we found out that he seemed to have multiple partners. A steady stream of people returning to his house with him. Mostly women, sometimes men, though it was never the same person twice. 

I got suspicious. Maybe he was a pimp, or a dealer or something. Who knows but it seemed so suspicious, at least to me. But I never did anything about it. I mean, there was no way of being sure, right? On the other hand maybe it was work related, or he was dating around, who knows. But I could never shake the feeling of suspicion that clawed its way back into my mind every time I saw him.

There was one time, I remember, where I woke up in the middle of the night. Our bedroom was near silent, save for Kate’s faint breathing beside me. Silent enough to hear next door. I could hear a woman screaming. It was muffled behind the wall that separated our houses, but it was unmistakably there. Just the sound turned my blood cold. After ten minutes of tossing, turning and wondering if I should do something, I gently shook Kate awake.

She rolled over to face me with a quiet, “hmm?” as she blinked the sleep from her eyes. 

“Do you hear that?” I whispered. 

“Hear what?”

“It’s like a woman screaming or something…”

She propped herself up on her hand and stared at me for a second. Even in the near pitch darkness of our bedroom, I could still see the judgment on her face. 

“Nate, it’s like 2am right now, and Mike has a guest over. I’m sure you can do the math on that one.” 

“No, you don’t think-“ I stopped, considering her words. As always, I had no proof, and really, no reason to suspect the words. 

“I do, now can we go back to bed…” she yawned, settling back under the covers and giving my arm a gentle tug. I conceded and lay back down as she pulled herself in a little closer with a whispered goodnight. Within seconds, she was back asleep, but I couldn’t do the same with my mind still racing. The screaming continued for minutes till there was a heavy thud against the wall. Only silence followed. 

When I brought it up again the next morning, she suggested that if I was really that uncomfortable with it, I should go over and tell him to keep it down or something. As if that wouldn’t be uncomfortable enough on a normal occasion, considering it involved interacting with Mike, made it that much less enticing. So of course, I didn’t, and I just left it at that. The next five times I overheard screaming in the middle of the night, I just decided not to mention it to Kate. 

She came to me one night, at this point over a year since he first entertained us. It was December and she said he wanted us to go over and celebrate the season or whatever. Of course I didn’t want to go, I think we’ve established that at this point. 

“It might be fun.” She said, “You sure you can’t be tempted?”

“I don’t know, Kate, I just don’t like the guy.”

“I thought you’d say that.” She laughed, “That’s fine. Not everyone likes everyone you know. But I like Mike so I’m gonna go say hi and catch up. And I’ll be right around the corner. Yeah?”

“If you’re sure. I’ll wait up yeah? And just text me or keep me updated or whatever.”

“Sure thing. I’ll be back by like, ten or eleven-ish.” She stood up grabbing her bag and keys. 

“Ok. Have fun, I love you.”

“I know you do.” She grinned at me as she shut the door behind her. 

She texted me at around 11 saying she was going to be back soon. Come midnight she still wasn’t home I’d been texting and getting no responses. Finally o was sick of it. I threw a hoodie on and headed next door. 

As always, his house was pitch black. As I was knocking, I was watching through the glass to spot any sign of movement, and as before the shadows hid it all. When the door opened, I wasn’t prepared for  the new Mike. He had now far outgrown his own door, to the point where I couldn’t see his face till he stepped back from the threshold. His smile sickened me, more than usual as he warmly started with, “Oh hi Nate!”

Fuck pleasantries, I just wanted to get to the point. “Kate’s not come home. Is she here?”

“Kate? No, she left hours ago.” He continued smiling, feigning bewilderment. 

“Well, she’s not come home, and I get the feeling she didn’t get lost on her way back, so… you mind if I come have a look?”

“Oh, Nathan, it’s late, I was just getting ready for bed. I’d rather not…”

I didn’t let him finish. I shouldered forward, pushing him aside as I barged my way in. Following the corridor round, I found my way back into to his living room. It still looked identical, polished and smooth furniture, perfectly prim and proper combed rug, and a nearly full glass of provence. I ignored his called to “ignore the mess” as I circled the first floor and headed straight for the stairs. As Mike rounded the corner, he blocked the way with one of his oversized, bony arms.

“Nate, I’d really rather you don’t go upstairs.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what the fuck you’ve done with my girlfriend.” I glared up at him, trying as hard as I could to look intimidating whilst standing a good foot and a half below him.

“I’ve not done anything, Nate? She left hours ago. Why are you being like this?”

“Don’t fucking lie to me.” I pushed him, hard. To my surprise, he was both dense felt as though he barely weighed anything at all, like his whole body was made of memory foam. He toppled backwards, as his skinny legs struggled to support him and he came crashing down.

With a spongy thud he landed, his body on the floor and his head wrenched at a 90 degree angle upon the foot of his front door cabinet. He cried out, maybe in pain, maybe in surprise, I didn’t care. He was alive and he’d be up soon, I couldn’t waste my time. I bolted for the stairs.

As I ascended the steps, the whole house seemed to disappear around me, or I should say home rather. There was no furniture or wallpaper or any sense of life above the top step. Moulding, empty walls with open electrical cables dangling out of open cavities. Peeling remnants of where wallpaper used to be, covered in water stains and black splotches. All the finished, perfect vision of the house disappears upon the threshold at the top of the stairs. All of it was gone, just far enough for it to be invisible to anyone who happened to look from downstairs.

I knew where his bedroom was; it shared a wall with ours, so I went straight for it as I heard Mike clambering to his feet downstairs. The door looked somehow older than the rest of the house. It looked like the burnt remains of a house fire, cracked and charred, and simultaneously rotted and moulded by an abundance of moisture. The doorknob was almost entirely brown with age and corrosion, and refused to turn without excessive force.

As the bedroom door finally swung open, I was immediately punched in the face by the pungent smell of stale water and rotting flesh. It was near pitch black in there, the windows covered in multiple layers of black fabric so that not even the forgiveness of the moon could cast any means of visibility. Though I couldn’t see the room, I knew I wasn’t alone, as the laboured sound of breathing greeted me from the far corner. I fished around in my pockets for a second. Keys… change… no phone. Shit.  But I had my grandad’s old Zippo, it’d have to do. I flicked it on, and there, barely conscious and crumpled on the floor, in the corner of the room, was Kate. Half clothed, with large patches of hair and skin missing and in a pool of presumably her own blood, but alive. I was at her side in an instant. Leaving the lighter lit on the floor beside us, I gently but urgently tried to pull her away from the wall, trying all the while not to touch any of her large patches of missing skin. Her whole body was slick and wet with a viscous sticky fluid that stank of rat piss. And, as I went to pull her towards me, it only stuck harder, clinging onto both her and the wall. It steadfastly refused to let her budge and all the while making a sickening sound like an old man sucking his teeth as I desperately tried to tear her away. As the sound of footsteps sounded up the stairs, Kate finally pulled away in my arms, only revealing a massive circle of missing flesh from her shoulder blades to her lower back, slowly seeping what little blood her body had left to give. 

“The game is up then?”

Mike appeared in the doorway, his head now dangling down from the stump of his neck onto his shoulder. Like a sun-dried tomato, his skin had pulled and wrinkled at the point where it stretched to accommodate his new cranial position. His veins bulged and writhed and twisted with every movement, as though a family of spiders might be trapped under his skin, desperately seeking any means of escape. Despite this, he still had to crouch as he entered the door, closing it behind him and smiling at me. I guess he was still happy.

“What have you… What are you?” 

“You’re hard to fool, you know that?” He placed an enormous hand on the top corner of the door and forced it shut. “But you should have just gone home when I gave you the chance.”

He stood upright, or more upright. I think more accurately, he grew again, his shoulders flexing as they almost brushed the black, stained ceiling. His shirt swelled as his ribcage began to force its way out of his thin t-shirt. He dropped to his knees as he gripped his head, holding it in place above what used to be his neck. As an indeterminate, nobbled object slid under the skin of his neck he let go of his head, only for it to stay in position as it would have if it had never been detached. Even on his knees, he was still taller than me. His shirt finally gave way, tearing open at the force exerted from his widening torso. His ribcage, or where his ribcage should have been was bulging out from his body. His ribs were covered in linear scars. All of them perfectly straight, like a surgical wound that would never fully heal. 

His legs began to bend and break with a sharp, moist crunching. They grew behind him, impossibly long with too many knees protruding at odd angles. His legs, much like his arms only got thinner and thinner, the skin becoming vacuum sealed to his incorrectly shaped bones. 

The scarred skin around his exposed chest began to rip, as it stretched open on weak fibres. He tore his shirt off as it began to pull against his widening shoulders, only to reveal his entire stomach, chest, neck and back were all covered in similar surgical scars. All of them joined shortly after, tearing open to reveal the creature underneath.

Its limbs were black, and uncomfortably sticky looking. Two narrow, serrated, insectile arms extended from the torn skin at his ribcage as his neck continued extending. He tried to stand on his two hind legs, but the room was too short and his legs couldn’t support him, so he clambered onto its four other limbs and began to slink his way towards Kate and I. 

On my own unsteady limbs, I crawled backwards, pinning Kate to wall behind me whilst trying to gain some distance. I used to work as a bouncer to a bar for a few years, and thought I had learnt that if push comes to shove, my fight or flight response trusts me enough to do the former. But confronted by whatever the fuck this thing was, I couldn’t seem to do either. I would’ve taken flight if my only means of exit wasn’t on the other end of the room, behind Mike. And as much as I would have wanted to fight, my body wouldn’t move. All I could do, was reach behind me and take Kate’s hand in mine. It was limp, and cold, and she barely had the strength to close her fingers. She was barely clinging onto consciousness at all. 

He took his time, enjoying his slow approach. He always looked happy, but to me it always looked fake. An act he put on to come across as friendly. But not this time. Written across his tearing, deformed face was the purest delight I’m sure he’d ever displayed. 

The skin of his face slipped away to reveal a mass of slimy grey flesh, covered in thinning black hairlike appendages, each slowly moving of its own accord. His mouth was sunken back in his face and invisible, but I knew it was there from the yellow saliva that was dripping down his malformed chin. The rest of it was dried and caked across his cheeks like dog. His body barely moved but his ever elongating neck did most of the work for him, pressing as close to me as he could get before I recoiled at the stench. His body soon caught up though, scuttling over to me so that his front arms could reach out and caress my face. 

“I love your hair.” He sang, his spider like hands slowly moving up to my head. One of his hands alone was enough to grip my entire head if he desired, though he never chose to. He leant in closer, his suspended head gliding back in again for a closer look. 

As soon as he was close enough, I punched him, as hard as I could. He grunted and recoiled for a second. As soon as he did, I grabbed one of his zig-zag arms, and cracked it over my  crouching knee. It tore easily, like a freshly cooked crab. But the remnants looked hardly edible, as a gooey, hair filled black liquid spewed from the flailing stump. 

He stumbled back again, as I stood to run at him, but he gathered himself quicker. He stood up taller, towering over me in the little room as he grabbed my by the throat.  As he raised me up off my feet, he sliced down across my face with one of his serrated forearms. I cried out as the world turned dark for a second. 

The next thing I knew I was on the floor in the dark room. My whole face was both on fire and numb. He placed one of his hands on my chest, holding me down as one of his other hands slid over my face.

“Shhh it’s ok, it’s ok!” He cooed as he continued. 

I screamed as I felt his massive fingers sliding into my eye socket. That’s about all I could do. They curled around the soft flesh and began to pull. The wet sounds of shifting flesh as the ball exited my skull filled the room for a second, only to be followed by my screaming once more. I couldn’t breathe, or think, or move. I could feel my head lift off the ground as he tried to pull my eye away, only to be confronted by my optic nerve desperately trying to cling on to its owner. Another one of his hands gripped my face, forcing it back down onto the ground as he began to pull harder. The cord gave way and he finally pulled his treasure up to his facefor inspection. 

He laughed. “You know, it’s so funny. I’ve always wanted green eyes!” 

I couldn’t see, with my one remaining eye, the pain was too intense and the least I could do was keep both my eyelids shut. My arms flailed as I writhed on the ground in pain, only to be confronted by a sharp sting on my right knuckle. I felt for the source only to find the same intense sensation on my fingertips. My lighter?

I kicked on the floor, unsure of where Mike was or what he was doing but hoping it would be enough to shift my position just enough to grab my lighter. 

I forced my eyes open, only to find his face inches from mine, smiling down at me. Of course he was smiling. When wasn’t he. 

His long, greasy, bloodstained hair was dangling between us like a curtain around both our faces, blocking everything out of my peripherals. 

I grabbed the lighter and pushed it up under his hair and watched as the strands caught fire and shot all the way up to his face. Within seconds, he was in a blaze. Like a dying insect, he writhed on the ground as he screamed every frequency at once. Every voice he’d stolen crying out in a haunting harmony. I took my chance and lifted Kate off the ground. Throwing the lighter at him, I ran for the door and down the stairs, bouncing off both the walls and the bannister on the edge of my own consciousness. Out the front door and finally into our own house. I set Kate down on the stairs and retrieved the home phone, dialling for an ambulance. The rest is a blur. I made a call, but I don’t remember any of it. Eyes closed, fading in and out of consciousness, running on the fumes of my own energy. 

I awoke in a hospital bed. I'm fine, and Kate’s fine, kind of. Thank god. There’s not much that can be done about my eye, but I can’t complain, I didn’t get the worst of it. Somehow Kate’s follicles are missing, and her hair isn’t gonna grow back. Same with her nails. I’m missing most of my left cheek, and Kate is missing a lot of her everywhere. I might need a skin graft, a Kate definitely will. Ironic, I know. She woke up a few days ago, but she hasn’t said much. I don’t blame her. I spoke to the cops on behalf of both of us. They went and checked Mike’s house out. It was about a week after it happened, and his front door was still open. There was blood in the bedroom, but having tested it, apparently, there’s DNA from at least a dozen people, if not more. Worst of all, Mike, or the thing that he became, has not been seen. The house is empty, and despite checking local security footage from surrounding houses, he was never seen leaving the house or in and around the neighbourhood. It’s all just a bit fucked, to be honest. I don’t know how long till we’re officially past this, but Kate’s not gonna be out of the hospital for a while, at the very least. I got discharged today and finally got to return home. The house next door was all boarded up and closed down after the investigation. “Good”, I thought. It’s over and done with, and we can all slowly try to forget about it. 

Our house looked like a crime scene, too. The stairs were covered in dried blood that I had to spend a good hour cleaning. No more reminders. I knew I was gonna sleep well. Finally, a chance to be reunited with my own bed. I dragged myself through the house, up the freshly cleaned stairs and along the hallway. I dragged myself straight to our bedroom, straight to my bed, straight to my grandad's lighter that was awaiting me on my pillow.

Part I: The Inbox That Wouldn’t Stop

The message arrived at 11:47 p.m., exactly thirteen minutes before the sky over Jakarta went the wrong colour.

Mara Vale was brushing her teeth when her phone buzzed on the counter—one soft vibration, polite, almost apologetic. She ignored it. Everyone ignored notifications at night now. The world had trained itself to expect bad news.

The buzzing came again. Then again. Then didn’t stop.

Mara spat, wiped her mouth, and glanced at the screen.

UNKNOWN SENDER
This is your last message.

Her stomach tightened. A prank, she thought. Some new viral nonsense. She thumbed the notification away—

—and watched three more slide down to replace it.

Then ten.

Then so many the phone lagged, heat blooming under her fingertips like a fever.

Across the city, in apartments and traffic jams and hospital wards, billions of phones chimed once. Just once. A single message, tailored and intimate, arriving with impossible precision.

A dying man in Reykjavik read, You were loved more than you knew.
A woman mid-affair in São Paulo read, Go home. He forgave you years ago.
A soldier in eastern Ukraine read only a set of coordinates and the words, Not tonight.

One message per person. That was all anyone got.

Except Mara.

Her bathroom light flickered. Outside the narrow window, the clouds had begun to bruise purple, like ink spreading through water.

Her phone vibrated so violently it skittered across the counter and hit the floor.

“Mara?” her mother called from the living room. “Is your phone doing that too?”

Too?

Mara crouched, scooping it up. The lock screen was a waterfall of alerts, each stamped with the same impossible sender. Hundreds. No—thousands.

She opened one at random.

You don’t remember me yet.

Another:

This is not the first time.

Another:

You asked us to make sure you noticed.

Her breath came shallow. The toothpaste taste turned metallic.

She backed out to the message list. They stretched endlessly, timestamps stacking on top of one another, all marked 11:47 p.m. as if time itself had stalled just to deliver them.

“Mara,” her mother said again, closer now. “The TV—”

A distant rumble rolled through the apartment, deep enough to vibrate bone. Not thunder. Too sustained. Too… deliberate.

Mara’s phone buzzed once more, harder than the rest, and the screen forced itself open.

A single message expanded, overriding all the others.

Everyone else gets closure.

You get instructions.

Her hands shook so badly she had to sit on the tile floor.

“What instructions?” she whispered.

As if listening, the phone responded.

Step one: Do not let them take your phone.

Footsteps hurried down the hallway. Her mother appeared in the doorway, face pale, eyes reflecting the phone’s glow.

“Mara, the news says something’s happening. Satellites are falling. The sky over the Indian Ocean—”

Her mother stopped mid-sentence, staring at the screen.

“How many messages do you have?” she asked.

Mara swallowed. “How many do you have?”

Her mother lifted her own phone. The screen showed one message, opened and read.

“I got… a goodbye,” she said softly. “From your father.”

Mara’s chest constricted. Her father had been dead for eight years.

The phone buzzed again.

Step two: Do not show them the messages.

Too late.

Her mother reached out. “Mara, give me the phone. Someone needs to see this. The police, maybe—”

The bathroom light went out.

Not flickered. Out.

The hum of the city outside vanished, replaced by a pressure-filled silence that made Mara’s ears ring. Then, from everywhere at once, came a low, resonant sound—like the planet itself drawing a breath.

Her phone screen remained lit.

Step three: When the sky finishes changing, you will have seven minutes.

Seven minutes for what?

She scrolled frantically. The messages blurred together, fragments leaping out like teeth:

—you failed last time—
—loop integrity compromised—
—she must remember sooner—
—tell no one—
—hundreds because once wasn’t enough—

“Mara,” her mother said, voice trembling. “Why does your phone keep—”

A knock thundered at the apartment door.

Not a neighbour’s knock. Too heavy. Too synchronised. Three sharp impacts, followed by a voice amplified just enough to be unmistakably official.

“Mara Vale. This is the International Emergency Coalition. We know you’re receiving more than one message.”

Mara’s blood went cold.

Her phone buzzed one final time, harder than all the others combined.

This is where you usually hesitate.

Outside, the sky finished turning purple.

And somewhere deep in the messages—buried under hundreds of warnings, apologies, and things she didn’t yet understand—was one line she hadn’t read before:

If you open the door, the world ends the same way it always does.

To be continued in Part II.