The alley was a gash of deeper shadow, lit by the arrhythmic pulse of failing lamps. Their light accused the damp brick and pooled filth, until a sound tore the silence—a man's cry choked into a wet crunch, then the gurgle of drowning. Three gaunt figures fell upon the fallen officer, a silent, frantic harvest. This is what hunger does. It consumes.
Leaning against a corroded dumpster, a young man watched. His crow-wing hair fell to his back, a strand veiling his one visible eye, the color of old blood. The other was bandaged. Clad in threadbare wear, he observed the feast with profound monotony, as one might watch paint crack on a wall already crumbling.
"A waste," he said, his voice a low, clear tenor in the gloom. "But effective. Note the angle of the third blow. That's how you ensure they don't get back up."
He explained it as if discussing the weather, which, in a way, he was. This was the climate he knew. A faint smile touched his lips as he looked at the rat.
"Keep this up, and I might not eat you."
He reached out, his movement languid, and scooped the rodent up. It squirmed in his grip, emitting frantic squeaks. His smile didn't waver.
"I'm joking." Then his expression flattened into seriousness, his eye locking onto the creature's beady black ones. "Let's get something straight. I sleep in alleys, not gutters. There's a difference. One's an address, the other's a state of mind. And my palate hasn't fallen that far yet. Even the shadows here have standards."
The smile returned, quick and bright. He positioned the rat carefully on the ground and released it. The animal shot away, a bolt of grey fear vanishing into a crack in the bricks. He gave a slight wave.
"Toodle-oo, Mr. Rat! Do continue to proliferate the streets with misery and disease."
As the scavengers continued their grim work, their wet noises the only sound, he sighed. He picked up an empty can beside him, hefted its insignificant weight, and threw it. It clattered against the wall just above them. The three figures startled, their heads snapping up, eyes wide with animal panic. In a scramble of limbs, they fled, leaving their grisly prize behind.
He pushed himself off the dumpster, the motion speaking of a deep-seated fatigue that was more mental than physical. He approached the corpse. It was a ruin now. Bite marks, missing parts, a dark slick painting the cobbles.... A still life of ultimate deprivation. He knelt, ignoring the stickiness, and began methodically searching the uniform pockets.
"Oh well," he murmured to the dead man. "Time to redistribute the wealth. The economy of the dead is very simple: everything goes to the living."
Coins, a few crumpled notes. Then, his fingers closed around a hard, familiar shape in the holster. He drew the service revolver out, and a small, genuine smile formed on his lips. The metal was cool and heavy, a promise of finality.
"Ah. There we go. The one useful decision you ever made was carrying this."
He tucked it into his waistband. As he stood, a movement caught his eye. Another homeless man, one he hadn't noticed, was frozen in a doorway, staring at him with pure, unadulterated horror.
Slowly, deliberately, the youth pulled a silver watch from the corpse's coat pocket. He polished its face on his ragged sleeve, the gesture absurdly fastidious, and then met the witness's gaze. His own face was deadpan.
"Relax. Just checking the time of death." He glanced at the watch. "He's running a bit… behind."
The homeless man took a shaky step back.
"What?" the youth continued, a faint smear of blood now on his fingers. "It's a community outreach program. I'm redistributing resources. He's been… convinced to donate."
He began to walk away, a casual whistle forming on his lips, the shape of the revolver a clear bulge in his pocket. The sound of retching echoed in the alley. He stopped, looked briefly at the vomit, then back at the corpse.
"See? Waste. He's not using his guts, and you're wasting yours." He shook his head, a teacher disappointed in his students. "I'm the only one here being efficient."
His single red eye fixed on the terrified man.
"You should probably leave. Look, I didn't kill him. But… if you stay here much longer, you'll soon be joining him."
He walked out of the alley, his gait unhurried. The city that received him was a tomb of utilitarian architecture, its concrete bones propped up under a perpetual, stagnant night.
The sun had died in legend millennia ago. Now, the only light came from the jealous glow of artificial lamps and blinking signs, casting hard pools on the street... A weak mimicry of the life they had replaced.
He moved through it, a silent figure between the shadows. What did he have left to lose? The question was as empty as the sky, a cold, dead moon forever choked by black clouds.
People on the sidewalks eyed his filthy attire with naked disdain, curling their lips and steering clear. He paid them no mind. His gaze lifted to the oppressive sky.
"As always… the moon," he mused to himself. "A constant, stagnant presence. Just like the night."
He couldn't fathom why that orb just hung there, and why not a single speck of true light remained in the world. The stories were clear. Millennia ago, the light failed. The sun was now just a memory described in decaying books.
"The sun… just a bright, burning star that once gave life to a world long gone," he murmured, the words falling flat, heavy with dust and memory. "I imagine it must've been beautiful. A lot more alive than this dead rock we're standing on."
He decided to put his ill-gotten gains to good use. In a small, grimy diner, he treated himself to a luxury: coffee with milk, and a croissant. To others, it was mundanity. To him, it was a fragment of a forgotten world of stability. The coffee was bitter, the croissant slightly stale. It was magnificent.
"So this is the taste of stability?" he whispered into the steam. "Not bad. Could be worse. It usually is."
He took another bite. A flake of pastry landed on his worn sweater. He looked at it, then brushed it aside without care.
"Huh. Fought its way free. Good for it."
After, he counted his remaining coins. Still a fair amount. He walked until he found a man writhing in a doorway, muscles twitching, eyes hollow with need. The addict saw him and immediately extended a trembling hand, a wordless plea for anything to soothe the void screaming inside him.
The youth pondered for a moment, head tilted. Then, he crouched down, brought his face level with the addict's, and poured all the stolen coins into his dirty palm. The man's eyes widened, swimming with disbelief.
A relaxed smile spread on the youth's face.
"Eh… why not? The world's already poisoned. Might as well pick your own flavor of venom. At least you have a choice."
He reached out and ruffled the man's greasy hair, the gesture almost paternal.
"Think of it as a loan. You pay it back by disappearing permanently. The interest is… non-negotiable."
He stood and walked away, his destination clear. The police precinct was a block of defiant light in the gloom. The moment he pushed through the doors, every uniformed officer and civilian inside turned. Their looks were a familiar tapestry of disdain, judgment, and immediate dismissal. Nothing new here.
He approached the front desk. An officer with a thick mustache arched a brow.
"Can I help you?"
The youth smiled, a pleasant, empty expression.
"Good afternoon, Officer. My name is LucianRavenshade, and I'm here to surrender myself to the authorities." He paused, letting the words hang. "For killing one of your own."
He then held up his hands, showing the dried, rust-brown stains. He pulled out the dead officer's wallet, flaked with blood, and read from it with academic detachment.
"I killed… 'ConnorDickinson.' Is that right?"
Silence crashed down. The civilians in the lobby fled, a sudden exodus of shuffling feet and gasps. Weapons were drawn in a chorus of clicks and rasps, leveled at him from across the room. Lucian looked… Satisfied.
And then, orders were barked.
"Stay still! Don't move! Get on the ground!"
Lucian's smile turned petulant.
"Oh, please, just shoot me, officers."
They insisted, voices tight with tension.
"Surrender! Now!"
Boredom, profound and utter, washed over his features. His plan required a more drastic gesture. In one smooth motion, he drew the policeman's revolver from his waistband. But he didn't point it at them. He pressed the cold barrel firmly against his own temple.
The confusion in the room was palpable, a thick, silent wave.
"Looks like I'm cashing in my ticket early," Lucian announced, his voice carrying easily in the stunned quiet. "Call it a… preemptive retirement."
With his free hand, he reached up and, in a single, deliberate motion, tore the bandage from his other eye. He revealed a pupil that was a milky, sightless opal, set in a sclera as black as the void between dead stars. He blinked both eyes—the blood-red and the void-black—calmly.
"Oh, well. I've been infected with this blessed disease for weeks now. The 'Mawed,' you call it? Normally, a person turns, ceases to be human, the moment symptoms show." He grinned, a wide, relaxed expression. "But look at me. I've been like this for three weeks. For some reason, my body fights the metamorphosis. I don't know how long it can hold. And I'm not a gambling man."
He looked at the ring of horrified faces.
"I came here to be shot by you. But look at you all. A bunch of cowards." He applied the faintest pressure to the trigger, watching their reactions, and smiled at their flinches. "Don't look so shocked. Y'all were going to put me down anyway. I'm just saving you the paperwork."
The sound of the gunshot was immense, a final, percussive period in the chapter of his life. It wasn't pain he felt, but a sudden, violent silence, as if the universe had finally hit the 'mute' button on the constant, wearying noise of existence. Then, nothing but an all-consuming, velvety black.
***
Lucian opened his eyes to a darkness so complete it felt solid. Then, a pinprick of light expanded, harsh and clinical, revealing a sterile white room that stretched into impossible shadows. At its far edge, two distant figures stood, silhouetted and indistinct. He blinked, feeling the grit of alley dust still under his eyelids, but no surprise surfaced.
'White walls, deafening silence, and an overwhelming sense of being judged. Did I die and get sent to the universe's most boring waiting room?' His mind was a sluggish, rusty engine turning over.
The air was cold, odorless, and dead. It was the opposite of the alley's pungent decay; this was a vacuum where smell went to expire. He scanned the visible patch of floor... Smooth, seamless, reflecting the light with a sickly gloss. His body felt heavy, not with the pleasant weight of a full stomach from the croissant, but with a leaden fatigue that seeped into his bones. The gunshot echo was gone, replaced by a silence so absolute it hummed in his ears.
A new figure resolved from the gloom, stepping into the light. A woman. Severe. A formal shirt, tie, tailored jacket, a knee-length black skirt. Her hair was dark, shot with strands of iron-grey, her eyes black behind glasses that caught the light like insect carapaces.
'Government. Has to be,' he thought, a spark of familiar disinterest cutting through the fog. Or something worse.
His gaze, dragging with effort, drifted down. To the strong line of her legs, the solid curve of her thighs. A slow, weary smile touched his lips. It was an automatic reflex, a worn cog in his machinery still spinning.
"Ma'am, did you fall from heaven? Because I'm seeing a beautiful angel before me."
Another figure materialized beside her, stepping forward as if to block his view. A man. Tall, impeccably dressed in a light brown shirt and formal trousers. Red hair perfectly styled, a sword at his hip. His hands rested casually in his pockets.
Lucian's smile dissolved back into a flat line of monotony. The fatigue pressed harder.
"Of course. The angel comes with a devil on a leash. My luck's so consistent it's almost poetic."
The man adjusted his hair
"We're happy to see you're awake," he said, his voice smooth, practiced.
Lucian loathed him instantly. The cleanliness, the order, the height. It was an affront.
"If you're going to torture me, make it quick. I don't want to hear your nonsense."
"Hey now," the man said, a flicker of irritation crossing his features. The woman remained an unmoving statue, observing. The man pulled a chair from the shadows with a scrape that was absurdly loud in the silent room and sat. "Let me get to the point, kid. Would you like to have superpowers?"
Lucian stared. The question was so profoundly stupid it almost cut through his mental fog. Almost.
"Superpowers," he repeated, the word tasting like ash. "Did the bullet scramble my brains, or are you just naturally this delusional?"
The man sighed, a patient, infuriating sound.
"First, do you know what a Mawed is?"
Lucian's expression flattened into one of pure, unadulterated disdain. It was a question on the level of 'does water exist?' Everyone knew. The Mawed were the fundamental terror of the world, the reason people huddled under flickering lights. The living proof that the darkness outside was hungry.
He didn't grace it with an answer. His silence was condemnation enough.
The man nodded, taking the cue.
"The disease, the 'Devouring,' isn't a common virus. It's a spiritual failure." His voice lowered, becoming clinical, dissecting. "The darkness of this era presses constantly on the mind. When someone loses their fundamental purpose, the thing that makes them cling to their own humanity, the pressure wins. The mind breaks, and the body… remodels itself in obedience. It becomes the monster you see in the ruins. The darkness consumes a person from the inside out. That's a Mawed."
He leaned forward, just a little bit.
"Resistance comes from that same foundation. Some people have a purpose, a memory, so deeply etched into their soul it acts as an immovable anchor. A blood oath. A loved one's face held not as a memory, but as a law. These few… they wage an internal war. The body may begin to change, the pain of the Devouring arrives, but that core of 'self' does not dissolve. They become something between worlds... Bestial in power, human in will. It is the rarest, loneliest resistance there is."
Lucian processed this through a thickening haze. The explanation felt distant, academic. His own internal war felt less like a noble stand and more like a drawn-out system failure. A slow leak in a sinking ship.
"So basically," Lucian said, his voice rougher now, the effort to speak palpable, "the only thing between you and becoming a monster that eats your neighbors… is having a good reason not to. Charming. And this relates to powers how?"
The woman spoke for the first time. Her voice was calm, serene, yet it carried the weight of years spent staring into the abyss. She didn't look at him, but past him, at something only she could see.
"Look at the grey haze out there," she said, though there was nothing to see but white and shadow. "Where the light seems to bend and sounds grow muffled? It is not pollution. It is a torn seam. A place where our world and another rub together until the fabric wears thin. A Twilight Veil."
'A what?' Lucian's mind fumbled with the term.
"A TwilightVeil," the man continued, as if reading his sluggish thoughts. "The Veil is a virus in reality. It infects a piece of space and begins to… Liquefy it. Physical rules fail. Light bends. Sound dies. Part of that collapse is a neurological effect: an energy field that suppresses consciousness. Like a narcotic gas."
As if summoned by the words, a new sensation began to bleed into Lucian's awareness. A deep, gravitational tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep. It was a pull, a seduction of the void. His muscles went slack against the chair he now realized he was sitting on. His thoughts began to stretch and blur at the edges. Distant voices whispered, not in his ears, but in the base of his skull—echoes from a deep well. They weren't loud, but they were profoundly wrong, like the discordant hum of a broken machine.
He fought to keep his one visible eye open. The red iris felt dry, gritty. A smirk, thin and defiant, pulled at his lips. It took tremendous effort.
"So… just don't fall asleep," he slurred.
"It is not sleep," the woman said sharply, her composure cracking for a microsecond. "It is a forced shutdown. Your brain is flooded by a signal not of this world. You go dark. It is inevitable within the infected zone. Once you are pulled into one, your only objective is survival!"
She moved with sudden, efficient speed, grabbing a carafe of water from nowhere and dashing it into his face.
The cold was a shock, a brief, sharp clarity. He sputtered, the water running in rivulets down his neck, soaking into his ragged sweater. It bought him a second. Just one.
"Quick!" the man barked, his calm veneer gone. "Between her and me! Choose one!"
Lucian's mind was collapsing into the static. Choice was a luxury he didn't have the energy for. His arm felt like it weighed a ton. He lifted a leaden hand, a single finger extending, and pointed vaguely at the man in brown.
The man's face broke into a satisfied smile. The woman released a short, frustrated sigh. Lucian didn't care. He was being drafted into some unknown dimension. It was probably a mirror of this one, or worse. What did it matter?
He managed a weak, wet chuckle, his gaze sliding past the frowning woman.
"Sorry, darling," he mumbled, the words tangling on his tongue. "But the red flags… are just more my color tonight."
The man approached. The smell of clean wool and faint ozone washed over Lucian, clashing violently with the alley's phantom stench still in his nose.
"Hey, kid, I'll be generous with you." He placed three objects on a small table that slid into view: a worn revolver, a thick leather-bound guidebook, and a sharp, utilitarian combat knife. "You can take one of these three into the Veil. To help on your… journey. Choose carefully."
Lucian's vision swam. The objects blurred. The gun promised violent finality. The knife, intimate efficiency. The book was just a block of shadow.
His hand moved without conscious instruction, bypassing the metal, fingers closing around the cool, worn leather of the book's spine. He dragged it toward his chest, holding it like a shield.
The man's eyebrows raised. A spark of genuine surprise lit his eyes.
"The book, huh? An intriguing choice. Most would pick the gun or the knife. Why the book?"
Lucian's eyes were closing. The pull was too strong. He fought to shape words, his voice a distant murmur.
"The knife requires I get close. The gun is loud… announces my position. The book… the book has been read by someone else. Has notes in the margins."
He was fading, the whispers rising to a chorus in the back of his skull. He forced a final sentence out, his lips curving into the ghost of that calculated, methodical smile.
"The notes… show where the last owner failed. What he feared. What he didn't understand. Knowing another man's mistakes… is a quieter weapon than a bullet. Besides…"
He clutched the book tighter to his threadbare sweater, a last anchor in the dissolving world.
"… If it all goes wrong… you can tear a page for a fuse. Or roll it up… and shove it down someone's throat. Versatility. Information is only useless… if you're stupid."
Darkness, warm and total, swallowed the light. The sterile room vanished. There was no chair, no figures, no book. There was only the fall, and the whispering, which was no longer distant, but all around him, pulling him down into the heart of a crumbling, silent scream.