The first thing Shlok noticed was the silence.
His playlist of 90s rock had just cut out mid-guitar solo, a jarring absence that made him pull an earbud out. He was about to curse his phone's battery when he realized the noise of the subway car—the rumble of the wheels, the murmur of the crowd, the automated voice announcing the next station—had vanished too.
It wasn't the ordinary kind of silence, not the peaceful absence of sound that one might find in a library or at dawn before the city stirred. No — this was hollow. A suffocating stillness that pressed against his skin, as though the air itself had forgotten how to move.
He blinked. The crowded subway station was gone.
The tiled walls, the fluorescent lights, the weary commuters staring into their phones—all of it had dissolved. The woman standing next to him, the one with the bright red scarf, faded like a ghost in old film, her form becoming a transparent wisp before the mist consumed her entirely. The world around him was wrapped in a suffocating veil of gray, and the faint, skeletal outlines of collapsed buildings loomed where the subway platforms had been. The floor beneath his feet had turned into cracked stone, streaked with black veins that pulsed faintly like the arteries of some colossal, sleeping beast.
"The… Shroud," he whispered, though the word didn't feel like his own. It crawled up from some deep, primal instinct he didn't remember having.
A sharp gasp echoed nearby. Shlok spun around. Huddled against the base of a crumbling pillar was a young woman, clutching a textbook to her chest like a shield. Her eyes, wide and terrified, darted around the oppressive gray before locking onto his.
"What's happening?" she asked, her voice a trembling whisper that the silence seemed to mock. "Where is everyone?"
Before Shlok could answer, a low groan shuddered through the mist. It was a sound like rusted chains dragging across broken glass, a noise that vibrated in his bones. Shlok froze. His breath quickened, and with it came a strange heat in his chest—sharp, biting, alive. His heart hammered, and for the first time, he realized he could see his own fear. Wisps of shadow, dark and coiling, leaked from his skin like smoke.
Dread.
The woman stared, her terror shifting to disbelief. "What… what is that? Coming off of you?"
He stumbled backward, trying to smother it, to push the shadows back into himself, but the mist seemed to drink them eagerly. His fear wasn't hidden here. It was bait.
From the gray, a figure emerged.
At first glance, it was human, but wrong in every way. Its body was thin to the point of breaking, skin stretched so tight over bone that every joint looked dislocated. Its face—gods, its face—was blurred, as though someone had taken a portrait and smeared the features with their thumb. The only detail clear enough to burn into memory were the teeth: too many, too sharp, chattering in a grotesque grin.
"A Whisper," the strange, instinctual part of his brain supplied, though Shlok did not yet know the name.
The thing tilted its head, a sickening crackle echoing in the stillness. The shadows around Shlok surged toward it, drawn like iron filings to a magnet. His dread fed it. The creature's grin widened.
"Get back!" Shlok yelled at the woman, his voice cracking.
Panic clawed at his mind. Run. Hide. Scream. But some deeper instinct, some savage animal part of him, hissed another truth: If you turn your back, you die.
"Don't show it you're afraid!" the woman shouted, her own fear warring with a strange, analytical focus. "It's getting stronger! It's eating… whatever that stuff is!"
She was right. The Whisper shivered in ecstasy and lunged. Its limbs bent wrong, snapping like whips as it closed the distance with unnatural speed. Shlok threw his arm up on pure instinct—a pathetic, useless gesture to ward off the inevitable.
And the shadows exploded.
A jagged blade of black glass erupted from his palm, humming with a palpable hunger. It wasn't just in his hand; it was his hand, his fear condensed into something sharp enough to kill. The Whisper, too fast to stop, collided with it. There was a wet, tearing sound as the obsidian blade impaled it through the chest.
Its blurred face twisted into a rictus of shock, and it shrieked—a sound that shattered the silence like breaking ice.
Shlok staggered back, the weapon trembling in his grip. It felt cold and horribly alive. The creature twitched once, then dissolved into a swirling cloud of ash and smoke. What remained drifted downward, congealing into a single, sharp-edged shard of obsidian that pulsed with a faint inner light before falling to the stone floor with a soft clink.
He stared at it, chest heaving, sweat soaking his shirt. The black glass blade retracted into his palm, leaving no mark, only a phantom chill. He knelt and picked up the shard. It was warm to the touch.
A Fragment of Dread.
The silence returned, heavier than before. The woman slowly approached, her footsteps hesitant. "You… you just… it's gone."
Shlok looked from the shard in his hand to her. "I think I killed it." The words sounded absurd.
"You made that," she said, her voice filled with a terrified awe as she pointed at his empty hand. "With the… the shadows. With your fear." She took a shaky breath. "I'm Ananya, by the way."
"Shlok." He swallowed hard, trying to steady his nerves. The shard felt like a lead weight in his palm. "You saw that? I wasn't… I'm not crazy?"
"If you are, we both are," she replied, pulling her jacket tighter. "You said a word when we first got here. 'Shroud.' Do you know what this place is?"
"No," he admitted, his gaze sweeping over the endless gray. "The word just… came to me. Like a forgotten memory." He could feel it now, a low thrumming at the edge of his senses. "There are more of them out there. Those… Whispers. Their hunger is palpable, even through the veil."
Ananya looked out into the mist, then back at him and the fragment he held. "That thing ignored me completely. It came right for you."
"Because of this," Shlok said, watching a final, faint wisp of shadow curl from his fingertips and dissipate. "It could smell my dread."
A grim understanding passed between them, two strangers bound together by an impossible reality. The Shroud was real. It had found them.
Ananya let out a dry, humorless laugh. "So what's the plan, Fear-Slinger? We can't just stand here."
Shlok closed his fist around the shard, its strange warmth a small anchor in the terrifying emptiness. He looked into the impenetrable mist, where other things stirred.
"She's right," he said, more to himself than to her, his voice harder than he'd ever heard it. "If we want to live… we have to learn how to feed it before it devours us whole."