The kitchen smelled of burnt sugar and iron.
Liam was nine, small enough that the table edge hit him at the ribs when he stood on tiptoe to watch his mother stir the pot. She was humming — soft, steady, the same tune she used when the rent notices piled up and the neighbors banged on the walls. Her hair was tied back with Zola's pink ribbon, fraying at the ends. She wore the apron with the hand-stitched daisies because store-bought ones cost too much.
She never finished the song.
The air cracked — not thunder, but glass under a boot. Sulfur and wet rot flooded in. The window above the sink exploded inward, shards suspended for a heartbeat before they rained.
Liam froze.
His mother dropped the wooden spoon. It clattered, rolled under the table. She turned toward the hallway, toward the front door that was no longer there.
A hole had torn open in the world.
Swirling black, rimmed with violet fire that didn't scorch the frame. Things poured through — tar-and-bone shapes, hooks for fingers, faces that flickered: screaming woman, eyeless dog, endless teeth. They moved like smoke. They moved like hunger.
"Liam," she said. Too calm. "Get Zola. Now."
He couldn't.
The tallest one — arms dragging on the floor, skin like cracked charcoal — reached for her. She grabbed the iron skillet, still hissing with oil, and swung. It connected with a wet crunch. Black ichor sprayed the wall like ink. Another lunged; she drove her heel into its chest, bone snapping.
But more came.
They swarmed. Hooks sank into her shoulders. She fought — nails tearing, teeth bared, skillet smashing skulls that burst like rotten fruit. They dragged her backward toward the vortex. Her heels gouged red lines across the linoleum.
"Liam!" Raw now. Desperate. "Take your sister and run!"
He bolted to the bedroom. Zola — three, tiny, clutching her rabbit — woke screaming as he scooped her up. He clamped a hand over her mouth. "Shh. Mama's coming."
Back in the kitchen, his mother was half inside the dark. She looked at him — eyes blazing with fury, fear, love — and shouted one last thing:
"Live."
The vortex took her.
The creatures turned toward him.
He ran — Zola's cries muffled against his shoulder, bare feet slapping tile. Behind him the apartment groaned as the hole widened, then slammed shut with a sound like breaking bone. Silence rushed in, heavy and wrong.
In the stairwell three floors down, gasping, he realized he still clutched the pink ribbon, torn from her hair in the chaos.
He kept it.
Nine years later it stays knotted around his pack strap — faded, frayed, a reminder.
His father — Elias Atta, Overseer of Recruitment for the Altef Central Guild — didn't come that night. When he finally appeared two days later, still in his crisp Guild coat, the silver insignia gleaming like a blade, he looked down at Liam like he was inspecting damaged merchandise.
"No spark," he said, voice flat, disgusted. "Not even a flicker. After everything…"
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
He didn't search for his wife. He didn't rage at the demons. He filed the report, claimed the widow's pension, and went back to training Retrievers who actually mattered.
He never once asked where Liam and Zola slept those first weeks. Never once offered a room in the Guild compound.
He just looked at his son and saw failure.
Liam learned the lesson young: the world — even the parts that were supposed to protect you — took what it wanted and left you to survive the scraps.
So he survived.
He hustled. He scavenged. He lied when he had to. He kept Zola fed, kept her drawings on the wall, kept her breathing through fevers and pain that no Guild healer would touch without coin upfront.
And every night, when the wind carried that faint sulfur stink only he seemed to notice, he remembered the ribbon.
He remembered the hole.
He remembered the creatures.
And he remembered the promise he carved into himself that night, nine years old, holding his screaming sister and a torn piece of pink cloth:
If Hell ever opened its mouth again, he would climb inside.
Not to beg.
Not to die.
To take back what it stole — and make the bastards who stood by and watched pay for it.