Chapter 1
The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and faded hope. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sterile pallor across white walls and the thin cotton blanket draped over Asher's legs. He lay propped against two pillows, black hair matted against his forehead, strands sticking out at odd angles like broken quills. His lithe frame—once wiry from late-night runs and impromptu basketball games—was now swathed in overlapping layers of gauze and medical tape. Every shallow breath pulled at the bandages wrapping his ribs, reminding him that the body still remembered what the mind desperately wanted to erase.
On the small television mounted high on the opposite wall, a polished news anchor spoke in measured, practiced tones. Behind her, drone footage looped: a mound of shattered concrete and twisted rebar where Westbridge College's main lecture hall had stood only three days earlier. The headline ticker scrolled in urgent red: **"Tragic Structural Failure Claims 47 Lives—Decades of Neglect Blamed."**
Asher's lips curved into something too faint to be called a genuine smile, more a reflex than an expression of amusement.
"So this is how they cover it up," he murmured. His voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from screaming that still echoed in his skull.
The report was convincing, if you didn't know better. Experts in hard hats pointed at rusted support beams. Former students gave tearful interviews about "warning signs everyone ignored." A graph showed the building's age creeping toward seventy years, paint peeling, foundation settling. It was a tidy narrative: human error, bureaucratic laziness, entropy. No monsters. No blood-soaked corridors. No impossible things tearing through drywall like wet paper.
Asher knew better.
He had been on the third floor when the first tremor hit—not the low rumble of settling earth, but a deliberate, bone-deep vibration, as though something enormous had taken a single, thoughtful step. Then the screaming started. Not the chaotic panic of a crowd realizing the floor was giving way. These were sharper, more animal—screams cut off mid-breath, replaced by wet tearing sounds and the unmistakable crunch of bodies meeting something far stronger than concrete.
He remembered hiding behind an overturned desk in the back of the auditorium, heart slamming so hard it felt like it would crack a rib from the inside. The lights had flickered, died, come back in stuttering pulses. In those flashes he saw it: tall, impossibly tall, limbs too many and too long, skin like blackened oil that drank the light rather than reflected it. Its face—if it could be called a face—was mostly mouth, a lipless gash ringed with needle teeth that flexed independently, tasting the air. When it moved, the floor didn't crack under its weight; it simply gave, as though reality itself deferred.
Forty-seven dead, the news said.
Asher had counted at least sixty-two before he stopped counting.
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to shove the memory down, but it refused to sink. Instead it rose sharper: the copper-salt smell of blood, the wet slap of something heavy dragging across tile, the low, almost conversational gurgle it made when it found someone still breathing. He had pressed himself into the corner until plaster dust coated his tongue, until the thing finally turned away—sated, perhaps, or simply bored—and the building finished collapsing around him in a thunderous afterthought.
Miraculously, search teams pulled him out eighteen hours later, broken but alive. The doctors called it a miracle. Asher called it bad luck.
Because the creature wasn't dead.
He had felt it. Even as the paramedics strapped him to the gurney, even as sirens wailed and floodlights stabbed through the dust, he had sensed it watching from somewhere beneath the rubble. Patient. Waiting. Not gone—just… paused.
A shiver crawled up his spine, pulling fresh pain from his cracked ribs. He welcomed it. Pain was grounding. Pain meant he was still here, still human, still capable of feeling something other than the cold certainty that the world had teeth and it had tasted him.
Final year. He had been two months from graduation, thesis proposal already approved, an internship lined up at a mid-sized architectural firm. He had joked with friends about finally escaping the purgatory of student loans and cafeteria food. Now the campus was a crater, his classmates were statistics, and the only future he could clearly see was one where that thing found him again.
Life, he decided, had a vicious sense of humor.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling tiles. A confusing cocktail of emotions swirled in his chest, each one sharp enough to cut.
Fear first—bone-deep, primal terror that made his hands tremble under the blanket. Every time he closed his eyes he saw that mouth again, widening.
Excitement next, bright and sickening, like adrenaline injected straight into the vein. For the first time in twenty-two years he knew—really knew—that the world was larger and stranger than anyone admitted. Magic wasn't in fairy tales; it was in the dark, wearing someone else's skin.
Shame followed close behind. He had frozen. While others ran or fought or tried to help, he had hidden. Survived by cowardice. The thought burned worse than the road rash along his back.
Determination rose to meet it. If the creature was still out there, then someone had to stop it. Why not him? He had seen it. He had lived. That had to count for something.
Hatred came hot and clean, simpler than the rest. Pure loathing for the thing that had turned his ordinary life into a slaughterhouse. Hatred for whatever force had let it exist. Hatred for the people on television who smiled while they lied.
Spite layered on top, bitter and petty. If the world wanted to pretend none of this happened, fine. He would remember. He would make sure the truth clawed its way out eventually, even if he had to drag it into the light with his own broken hands.
And beneath it all, threading through every other feeling like a dark current, something colder than sorrow. Not grief, not mourning. Absence. The people who died had been acquaintances, classmates, faces he nodded to in hallways. He felt no tearing loss, no hollow ache for futures stolen. Just… nothing where sorrow should have been. Maybe shock had numbed it. Maybe he had always been colder than he realized. Or maybe—worst possibility—part of him had already accepted that death was simply what happened when you crossed paths with something that didn't belong in the daylight.
Despite the storm inside him, or perhaps because of it, Asher's mouth curved again. Not a grimace. Not a smirk. A genuine, calm, relaxed smile. The kind people gave when they had nothing left to lose and everything left to prove.
No joy fueled it. No hope warmed it. It was the smile of someone who had looked into an abyss and discovered the abyss had blinked first.
He reached for the remote on the bedside table, wincing as stitches pulled. The television flickered off, plunging the room into softer shadows.
Outside the window, the city lights glittered like scattered stars. Somewhere out there, in the dark between buildings, something ancient and hungry waited.
Asher exhaled slowly.
"Let it wait," he whispered to the empty room.
His smile didn't fade.