The world had ended quietly, in the way no one could have predicted. It wasn't the war, not the plagues or the firestorms. It was the silence that came first—an emptiness that crawled into every street, every home, every heartbeat. And then they came.
The dead.
I had been hiding in my apartment, a cramped space in the heart of the city, listening to the groans of the fallen as they prowled the streets below. Their bodies moved with grotesque precision now, no longer mindless. Eyes blank, but knowing. Watching. Waiting.
I pressed my back against the cold wall, the cheap wallpaper scraping against my shoulder, and tried to remember what it had felt like to sleep before the world went silent. My phone had long since died, its battery drained from frantic calls to friends I would never hear from again. The power was out, the lights gone, and the smell of decay had begun to seep in from the streets, curling under the door like smoke.
It was then that I felt it.
A whisper at the edge of my mind, soft, almost like a sigh. I froze.
"Alive…"
The voice was not in my ears. It was in my chest, in the marrow of my bones, and it sent a shiver down my spine. I tried to shake it off. I told myself it was hunger, exhaustion, the fever creeping through my body. But I couldn't move.
And then I saw it.
A figure in the shadows across the room. Not moving, not breathing, yet I could feel it watching me. Its eyes were hollow pits of darkness that shimmered with the faintest light, as if stars had been trapped in their sockets. I blinked—and it was closer. Closer than it should have been.
I stumbled back, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Who… who's there?" My voice was a rasp, cracked from disuse.
No answer. Just the heavy press of dread that filled the room. And then the whisper came again, closer now:
"Eat…"
I screamed. My body slammed into the wall, knocking a picture frame to the floor. It shattered, and I half-expected the thing in the shadows to lunge. But it didn't.
I blinked, and it was gone.
I fell to my knees, shaking. Sweat clung to my hair, my skin burning with fear. My breaths came shallow, fast. And then… the hunger.
It wasn't the kind of hunger that gnawed in your stomach. It was deeper, more primal. I felt it coil around my chest, slithering down my arms. And in that moment, I realized: I could see them.
Not the living, not exactly. The dead. Their souls hung above their bodies like smoke, gray and flickering, whispering with broken voices I couldn't understand. I recoiled, but the more I looked, the more I saw. Every corpse, every shadow, even the stray rats in the street—they had a pulse. Not of life… but of something else. Something waiting.
And I wanted it.
I wanted to reach out and touch it. The moment my fingers brushed the ghostly shimmer above the body of the first cadaver on the street, a shock ran through me. I saw… everything. Its life. Its fear. Its pain. And then, impossibly, I felt it drain into me.
A surge of strength, raw and intoxicating, filled my veins. My skin burned, my mind reeled, and for a moment I thought I could hear the heartbeat of the city itself, pulsing beneath the ruin. I felt alive in a way I had never known.
And then I saw the cost.
The whisper in my chest laughed, low and cruel. I looked down at my hands and recoiled—my skin seemed… thinner. My reflection in the broken glass of the picture frame looked hollow. My eyes… they were darker than before. Less human.
I had consumed a soul. And I had lost a piece of myself.
I didn't know if it was hunger, madness, or something else entirely. But I knew one thing: if I wanted to survive, I had to do it again. And again.
Hours—or maybe minutes, time had no meaning now—passed. The city was alive with screams and groans. I could see the dead moving, hunting, their shadows stretching into impossible shapes, clawing at the walls, the doors, the very air. And I realized: the rules had changed.
I could fight. I could survive. I could even—if I was careful—be stronger than them.
But the whisper in my mind reminded me of something I didn't want to hear:
Every soul you take steals a piece of what makes you human. How long before there's nothing left?
The first survivor I encountered in the street screamed as the dead clawed at her door. I felt the hunger rise in my chest, fierce and cruel. Her soul shimmered just above her body, fragile and pulsing. I reached out—and then stopped.
Could I save her? Or would I feed, as I had fed before?
Before I could decide, a shadow moved faster than I could track. Something larger than a human lunged at her. Its mouth opened wide, revealing rows of broken teeth, eyes burning with intelligence and hunger. I barely had time to react before it lunged at me, and instinct—something primal, not quite human—took over.
I pulled in a soul, faster than I ever had, and felt the strength course through me. The creature screamed, a sound that would haunt me forever, and crumpled into ash. But when I looked at my reflection in the puddle beside me, I didn't recognize myself.
I was stronger. Faster. But less. Less human.
And then I realized something worse: in the distance, more were coming. Dozens. Hundreds. Their whispers rising into a chorus of hunger and accusation. And above them all, the faint shimmer of souls—waiting. Watching. Hungry.
I had awoken something inside me, something that might save the world. Or destroy it.
And as the night pressed down, thick and suffocating, I knew one terrifying truth:
By dawn, no one could say if I would be the hero… or the demon.
I stepped forward.
And then the world went black.