Winter nights in Paris always carry a damp, moldy chill, as if the Seine were exhaling the sighs of the dead from its riverbed. I pulled up the collar of my military coat and stepped into a narrow alley in Montparnasse. It was midnight. The streetlights flickered weakly, their filaments trembling as though gnawed by shadows.
At first, I thought the encrypted call was a prank.But the moment I saw the photo sent to me—
I froze.
In the picture stood my father.
The man who had vanished twenty years ago in an underground French monastery.
What made my heart stop entirely was the object in his right hand: an ancient brass lamp.The heirloom of our family line.And in the photo—the lamp was lit.
I knew what that meant.A lit lamp meant something was closing in.Something dark enough that the lamp was fighting it back.
"Ethan Clair?" a voice called behind me.
I turned.A woman in a silver-gray scarf stood under the streetlight. Her face was divided by shadow like a Mondrian painting. Cold, sharp, and oddly familiar.
"You're Alicia Mora?" I asked.
She nodded and pulled a yellowed piece of vellum from her bag.
"The photo isn't the important part," she said. "This is."
On the parchment was a hand-drawn map of the old monastery. In the lower-right corner, crooked Latin letters spelled:
'Lux cadit. Tenebrae surgunt.'
Light has fallen.Darkness rises.
My heartbeat stalled.
Only a Lamplighter would write those words.
"Something has been awakened beneath the earth," Alicia said quietly. "And only the bloodline of your father can keep that lamp burning."
I opened my mouth to speak—
Clack… clack…
A strange sound came from deep within the alley, like chains being dragged across stone.
The wind died.
All the streetlights flickered once—
And went out.
The entire block of Paris dropped into a void of total darkness.
As soon as the darkness swallowed us, cold sweat broke across my back.A primal fear.A curse that came with my lineage.
In the suffocating blackness, I heard a low, rasping breath—as if an ancient, unseen face pressed itself against my ear.
"Where… is… the lamp…?"
Alicia gripped my arm hard."It's searching for the light! Run!"
I reacted on instinct.My combat knife came free from my boot, and my other hand found the object in my pack—
The Abyssal Lamp.My father's relic. Our family's curse.
The cold metal throbbed in my palm—as if it had a pulse.
A heartbeat later, a blue flame sprang to life from its wick.
When the ghostly flame flared bright, I finally saw what lurked deeper in the alley:
An old man
BlindSkin as gray as ashWearing a torn monk's robeHollow sockets where his eyes once were
He dragged iron chains behind him, and the corners of his mouth split toward his ears.
The instant the lamp's light touched him, he shrieked like he was burning:
"The light… must not… be lit!"
The ground beneath us swelled.
Something enormous—crawling, writhing—was pushing up from underground.
Alicia screamed, "It's the Blind Saint! The death-warden of the monastery!"
A wave of freezing wind surged toward us. I lifted the lamp with trembling hands.
"Ethan!" Alicia cried. "Don't let the flame die! No matter what!"
But I already understood something even more terrifying:
When this lamp lights,it means—
The darkness has begun to hunt me.