Marcus lunged backward, his chair clattering against the hardwood floor with a crack that echoed like a gunshot in the silent dining room. His mother, Elena, froze in place, her hand still hovering in the air where his forehead had been a second before.
She blinked, the look of motherly concern on her face melting into utter confusion.
The shadow—the faceless entity that had loomed over her—was gone.
"Marcus? What happened?" Elena's voice was clear again, stripped of the distorted static that had been clawing at his ears just moments ago. The black oil on the walls? Vanished. The yellow floral wallpaper was dry and mundane once more.
Marcus looked around frantically, his breath wheezing in his lungs. His adoptive father, Michael, lowered his fork and stared at him with the clinical gaze of someone examining a psychiatric patient.
"I'm... I'm fine," Marcus lied, his voice trembling with a fragility that fooled no one. "Just... a dizzy spell. I need to sleep. I'm sorry."
He didn't wait for a reply. He bolted up the stairs, burst into his room, and slammed the door shut, twisting the lock. He dragged the heavy mahogany nightstand across the floor, wedging it firmly against the doorframe. He wasn't afraid of Elena or Michael. He was terrified of what had been standing behind them.
"I'm not sleeping," he whispered into the darkness, his back pressed against the door. "If I sleep, the gate opens. I can't let him back in."
He flicked on every light in the room—the ceiling fan, the reading lamp, even his phone's flashlight. He flipped open his laptop and blasted aggressive metal music through his headphones, desperate to drown out the whispers that had begun to throb against the inner walls of his skull.
One hour passed. Then two.
The adrenaline began to evaporate, leaving behind a heavy, toxic exhaustion. His eyelids felt as though they had been weighted with tons of lead. Every time his eyes fluttered shut for a microsecond, he saw the black flames.
"Why do you fight, little one?" The voice in his head was softer now, almost caressing, like a serpent sliding over silk. "Sleep is my kingdom. Come home."
"Get out," Marcus hissed through gritted teeth. He pinched his arm until it bled, using the sharp sting of pain to stay anchored to reality.
But the human body is a fragile cage. Around 4:00 AM, as the lights in the room began to flicker from the electrical strain, Marcus's brain simply betrayed him. His head slumped back against the pillow, and the physical world dissolved like smoke in the wind.
He didn't wake up in his bed.
Marcus stood in the center of an infinite wasteland. Above him, the sky was a thick, bruised crimson—no sun, no stars, as if the universe itself were bleeding into a void. Beneath his feet was no earth, but black sand as dark as coal, fine and cold like the ash of the dead.
There was no wind, yet the sand moved. It flowed in small rivulets, coiling around Marcus's ankles like hungry worms.
"Where am I?" Marcus screamed, but his throat produced no sound. This place swallowed noise whole.
In the distance, something jutted out of the black dunes. It looked like a tree, but as he drew closer, his throat constricted with bile. It was a pillar made of intertwined human bones, and upon it sat a figure.
It wasn't human. It was woven from black flames that emitted no heat, only a bone-chilling cold. The entity didn't look at him—for it had no eyes—yet Marcus felt as though his soul were being scanned under a microscope of pure malice.
"THE BLOOD OF THE KING CALLS TO THE VOID," the voice didn't come from the figure, but from the sand itself. It was the sound of tectonic plates grinding together, so powerful that Marcus fell to his knees.
"Who are you? What do you want from me?" Marcus managed to force the words out this time, and they shattered through the silence like breaking glass.
The figure on the bone throne tilted its head slowly. A single black spark detached from its form and drifted toward Marcus. As it drew near, he saw flashes within the light: a baby crying while a war raged around him; a man with a crown of horns staring at the cosmos with utter contempt; and a beautiful woman with weeping eyes placing a pendant around a child's neck.
His mother. His real mother.
"YOU ARE THE VESSEL. YOU ARE THE CAGE. YOU ARE THE HEIR," the black sand roared.
"THE ENTITY WITHIN YOU IS NOT A GIFT, MARCUS. IT IS THE HUNGER THAT DEVOURED HELL. AND YOUR FATHER... HE HAS SENT HIS HUNTERS TO COLLECT THE SCRAPS."
Suddenly, the black sand beneath his feet began to sink. Hands made of skeleton and shadow erupted from the ground, seizing his ankles, his knees, his waist. They weren't trying to kill him—they were trying to pull him down into the deep.
"No! Let me go!"
Marcus fought, but the more he resisted, the stronger the grip became. One hand, larger than the rest and tipped with claws like obsidian razors, slashed toward his chest. He felt the extreme cold of the blades as they sank into his skin, tearing through the flesh.
"WAKE UP, LITTLE PRINCE," the voice whispered inside his head, this time with a tone of biting mockery.
"THE GAME HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN."
Marcus bolted upright in bed, gasping for air, his body convulsing as if he had been hit by a lightning strike.
His room was bathed in the grey, dismal light of morning. His laptop was dead, the battery drained. The silence was absolute, save for the mundane chirping of birds outside the window.
"It was a dream," he muttered, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. "Just a damn dream."
He tried to stand, but then he felt a sharp, concentrated sting in the center of his chest. He froze. His hand moved slowly to the buttons of his t-shirt, which was soaked in sweat.
He undid them one by one.
In the center of his chest, directly over his heart, three deep wounds were etched into his skin. These weren't shallow scratches—these were deep, bloody claw marks, as if a wild beast had tried to rip his heart out through his ribs. The blood was dark, almost black, and the flesh around the gashes was purple and ice-cold to the touch.
Buzz. Buzz.
Marcus jumped. His phone, lying on the desk, was vibrating.
He reached for it with trembling hands. A message appeared on the screen from an unknown number. It contained no digits, only strange symbols that seemed to warp and shift before his eyes like ancient, living runes.
He opened the text.
"I see you're finally waking up, Marcus. Pain is the best teacher. Don't bother looking in the mirror; it won't help. And in the name of all the gods who haven't died yet... whatever you do, do not look under the bed."
Marcus felt the blood turn to ice in his veins. At that exact moment, from the depth of the darkness beneath his bed frame, came a small sound.
Grrrrrrrrrr...
The sound of heavy, wet breathing, followed by the slow, rhythmic scritch of long claws dragging across the hardwood floor.