“Do you want me to answer it?” He asked me, but my focus was just on the phone, my fingers twitching.
I didn’t want to move, but my hand moved anyway.
Shadow smiled. His teeth gleamed too white, too wide, and he answered the phone,“Hello?”
Static crackled, the same ringing in my ears that hadn’t stopped ever since I was twelve. Then—“Dorian…”
The voice.
Ian.
My chest ripped open. My breath broke apart. The walls leaned in on me. My ribs folded in. My skin crawled with something alive beneath it.
The scream came before I could stop it. It clawed out of my throat, and it broke free from all these years of radio silence I kept inside me. And the door burst open. Hands grabbed me. Cold metal pressed into my arm. I barely felt the needle slide under my skin. My body softened, limbs too heavy to move, but the scream stayed alive inside me even after my mouth closed.
Through the blur, I saw Shadow lean in, so close his breath brushed my ear.“That’s better.”
And then the dark swallowed me whole. I couldn’t move; my body was numb. I could only lift my finger just enough to point towards the wall. I could see the paint peeling, and the wall started to bleed.
“Hello?”I could hear the voices, just before one last scream.
I woke in the dead of night; it was 3:18 a.m. It was always 3:18 a.m.
Shadow hovered above me. He had slipped through the cracks between my dreams and memories. My eyes rolled back into my skull, hijacked by his possession. He was inside my mind, hungry.
He was always hungry for blood.
He saw into the broken reel of my memory. He tasted my tears as they slid down my face while I held Ian’s shattered body. He watched my trembling hands, slick with blood, fumbling togather the fragments of his skull, desperate to fit them back together, as if stitching bone could summon life.
I shook as my hands searched for bones like puzzle pieces, my mind splintering with each heartbeat. Somewhere inside, I whispered.
“Maybe I can fix him. Maybe I can still fix him.”
But it was the stench of blood, warm, metallic, that clawed into my senses. The taste of it coated my tongue as I wiped my tears with stained hands. That taste never left me. It’s still there. Even now.
How do you come back from that?
How do you survive losing a piece of your own soul?
I lost my brother that night. And something inside me rotted with him. I was only twelve.Twelve.Do you understand what that does to a child? What it creates?
I am living proof. Proof that darkness is real. It can crawl inside your brain and build its nest, sinking its teeth in so deep you no longer remember where it ends and you begin.
We all carry our own shade of dark. Some live with pale shadows. Mine... mine was pitch black. Thick, endless, consuming. But isn’t that what we all think? That our suffering is the worst? That if we wear the smile well enough, no one will see what’s decaying beneath. People see it and believe you’re fine. But inside, something is dying. Every single fucking day.
Be careful with people like that. They should have been careful withme.
Because when a mind fractures that deeply, when something festers long enough inside, what’s left is not human. Not really.
And when life becomes hell, we learn to build heaven from flame and ash. We’ll burn the world if that’s what it takes to survive.
My eyes rolled back, and there he was. Floating above me.
Shadow.
His eyes were black, like open graves staring down at me. A grin twisted across his blurred face, features smeared and shifting, as if the air itself refused to hold his shape. And yet, I knew him. Somehow, I always knew him. A ghost wearing the face of someone I used to know, someone I used to see.
The moment I closed my eyes, he disappeared, but then Ian came.
