In his eyes.. There it was—lurking deep within that boy's eyes.
But—what is "it?" I can feel something in that expanse of void, staring—at me. But—there's nothing there… I—don't understand.
"What—are you?..." The man asked, his voice trembling. The boy before him stared back with no response, his face—emotionless.
Behind the boy—ruins of his hometown, engulfed in flames of terror. His bright pale gold hair followed the cold breeze carrying the incense of inferno sent forth by the sky; encumbered by the dreadful reign of dark clouds.
Ethereal arms shone bright behind the boy as they encompassed him. The boy's glare remained steadfast—his eyes were dark—completely dark. The man stepped back, his hands quaking.
The right arm unwrapped itself, and started to come forth, beyond the boy. It pointed—pointed at the man. The boy's eyes widened suddenly as he abruptly stood up. The scorched cloak of white he was holding had cascaded below him as he trampled over it.
"I don't understand." "I—don't understand."
"I—don't—understand!" The man muttered in terror—his face warped into one of horror as he began to back away before exploding into a swift sprint.
"Help!" "Someone—help me!" He cried out—the tone of his voice sounded almost artificial. His arms flailing around like a puppet with tangled strings. His pace took an inconsistent form the longer he ran. Branches cracked beneath him as the trees wailed.
The boy walked toward him—his march fueled by an unknown purpose, yet failing to conceal its malevolency.
The man began to fade—his arms disappearing into a bright light of azure, followed by his torso, and head. The fog rose up, as to escape the boy, who despite the distance between them, landed directly upon the fading remnants of the conjured smog of light.
The fog had escaped.
He looked up. His eyes still widened. His white pupils glowed as they tracked something moving in the sky.
"My apostle…" A booming, yet calm voice manifested.
"You—have failed, it seems." The arms wrapped around the boy's neck, twisting it ever so slowly. One of the hands smothered his face. His eye visible through its grasp.
"Come forth… My dear apostle. Let us learn from this…"
A shallow breeze echoed amidst the crunch of footprints in the snow.
A question, if I may — is the world cruel because of the monsters that inhabit it? Or perhaps — do monsters exist because the world was always going to be cruel?
Panic had a frequency. Not a metaphor — something measurable, something that lived in the body before the mind caught up to it. Leith had come to understand this the way you understand cold — not through study, but through exposure so prolonged it had stopped registering as anything at all.
The main thoroughfare was not yet the worst of it. He had come from the eastern side streets — narrower, quieter, the buildings pressed close enough that the sky between them was just a thin grey strip — and the panic there had a different quality than the thoroughfare's. More interior. People moving through those streets weren't fleeing yet, they were deciding whether to flee, which was in some ways worse to watch. A woman standing in her doorway with both hands on the frame, looking at the street, then back into the dark of her house, then at the street again. A man sitting on a crate outside a shuttered shop with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, very still, in the specific stillness of someone who has run the calculation and found the result unbearable.
It was in one of those streets — before the thoroughfare swallowed him, before the crowd made everything anonymous — that the gap appeared between two buildings. Brief. Perhaps three seconds of sightline before the angle closed. A window of visibility cut through the press of stone and distance, and through it, partially visible, the front face of a house he knew.
He saw them at the same moment they saw him.
His mother was in the doorway, a dark cloak pulled close against the cold. His father just behind her shoulder. The distance between them was significant — twenty meters, perhaps more, the gap already beginning to close as he moved and the angle shifted. But the recognition was immediate and mutual, the specific quality of people who know each other too well for distance or crowd or deliberate absence to change what happens when their eyes find each other across a street.
His mother's hand came up from her side. Not a wave. Something smaller and less certain than that — the beginning of a gesture that hadn't decided yet what it was going to be.
Leith looked at her for the length of time the gap allowed.
Then he turned, and walked toward the thoroughfare, and the buildings closed behind him.
He did not look back. The crowd received him and the noise of it covered everything the silence had been holding. He moved through it with the same unhurried pace he brought to everything. The cold pressed against his face. The crowd moved around him without touching him and he let it.
Monsters — there is a version of the word that conjures something obvious. Teeth. Appetite. The kind of ugliness that announces itself so completely you have time to move. But the ones worth fearing have learned something that variety never did — that the cleanest damage is the kind that leaves no mark on the hand that dealt it.
Boots struck wet stone in desperate, irregular rhythms. Breath tore out in ragged clouds that dissolved before they could amount to anything. Somewhere behind him, something shattered — a dropped heirloom, left to the slush and the heels that followed without ceremony. Leith moved through the center of it — unhurried. A still current running against the river.
To his left, a man clutched a small rectangular device with both hands, his eyes locked on its needle. The needle dipped below a certain threshold. The color left the man's face in one clean motion — not gradually, all at once — and without a word, without even looking up, he released the heavy trunk he'd been dragging and vanished into the fog at a dead sprint. Lighter, for having let go of everything.
Further along, a cluster of people had pressed themselves against a wall-mounted glass tube. The faint blue luminescence within it pulsed — weakly, irregularly — with the rhythm of something running out of time. Their voices were stripped down to fragments before the wind could carry them anywhere. But their bodies said the rest. Shoulders drawn inward. Gazes fixed and unblinking. The posture of people watching a door close that they cannot reach.
The air felt hollowed out. Not thin — hollowed. As if something that had always lived in the bones of the place had simply decided to stop.
The crowd parted around Leith without looking at him. It was never a decision — that was the particular quality of it. No one saw him and chose to move. They simply moved, the way water finds its way around a stone without being asked to. Paths redirected mid-stride. Gazes slid past him like a hand across oil. Not a single shoulder brushed his. He was a still point inside a symphony of terror.
Then the rhythm broke. A girl — small, no older than six — caught her boot on a discarded wool coat and pitched forward directly into his path. Her hand caught his sleeve. She looked up at him, her face flushed pink from the cold, her eyes carrying none of the weight the rest of Edholm had spent years accumulating. A beat of stillness.
The mother appeared from the crowd — descending with the specific horror of someone who has just seen their child reach into a fire. She didn't shout. Didn't scold. Simply hooked her hands beneath the girl's arms and pulled her back with a force that lifted her feet clean off the ground — then turned and pressed back into the throng without a word, without a backward glance, moving with the urgency of someone putting distance between themselves and something they refuse to name.
Leith watched them disappear into the crowd. His expression remained what it always was. Not cold exactly — coldness implies the presence of something being withheld. This was an absence more complete than that. A face the eye moved across without finding purchase, that offered nothing to hold onto, that forced the people around it to conclude that whatever lived behind it was simply not available to them.
They leave. And the remarkable thing — the thing that takes the longest to understand — is that they sleep afterward. Soundly. Because removal is its own absolution, in a world that never checks whether you were close enough to help.
"You're standing in the middle of a stampede." Lior materialized from the crowd — wool coat zipped to the throat, expression carrying the particular brand of irritation that had long since made peace with itself. He didn't ask if Leith was alright. He simply planted himself there, a fixed point that had found the only other fixed point on the street.
"Eastern district's frequency markers went dark an hour ago," he said, nodding toward the nearest glass tube on the wall — its blue glow barely a pulse now. "Nobody's announced anything yet, but—"
"They don't need to," Leith replied.
Lior scanned the crowd, then the sky, then the crowd again — the habitual sweep of someone who had learned to read environments quickly and quietly. "Shrine's still clear. We move now, or we get swallowed here."
Leith looked at him for a moment — at the weight of his presence, the unstated nature of it. The loyalty that asked nothing in return and received approximately that. "The shrine," Leith said.
They moved together — a lopsided pair cutting against the current. Lior's eyes moved across the stampeding crowd around them. "Which one of these folks do you think would make the ugliest mutant?" he said, low enough that it didn't carry beyond the two of them.
"We're on the brink of evisceration and you're ranking people." Leith said it without looking at him. A small sound followed — brief, almost involuntary, the specific exhale of someone who hadn't planned to find anything funny and did anyway.
Lior smiled. He kept walking.
The crowd moved around them in its desperate, irregular current — boots on wet stone, breath tearing out in ragged clouds, the glass tubes on the walls barely pulsing. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The cold pressed at the edges of everything. Somewhere ahead the gate was bottlenecked and going nowhere, and neither of them was in a hurry to reach it yet.
"Are you still avoiding your parents?" Lior asked finally, without looking at him.
Leith didn't answer.
"You can't keep this up forever."
"Then what do you suppose I do?" Something tightened at the edge of his voice. "Show up to their house and announce to the world where the parents of the Print of Calamity are living?" Lior had no answer for that — not because he wouldn't give one, but because there wasn't one to give.
They pressed through the dense horde. A gap opened in the crowd ahead — bottlenecked at the main gate by a horse-led caravan that hadn't moved in some time. On a ledge adjacent to the gate a guard stood with his arms folded, looking down at the crush of people below him with the patient authority of someone who had decided that elevation was its own form of contribution.
"Hurry it up!" he called down. Not moving. Not helping. Just calling down, and finding it sufficient.
Below him the crowd absorbed the instruction the only way available to it — inward, against itself, redistributing the pressure because there was nowhere else for it to go. Nobody looked up. Nobody said anything back. The blade at his hip and the crowd's collective permission made that calculation automatic.
Nails were bitten down. Eyes darted. The particular anxiety of people who had been waiting long enough that patience had curdled into something uglier, turned now not outward where it might find a target capable of responding, but inward and sideways, at each other — small cruelties, sideways glances, the specific unkindness of people who are suffering and have found someone adjacent to suffer alongside rather than the source of the suffering itself.
Leith threw his hood up without a word and began to ease backward through the crowd.
"Hold it!" "Is that who I think it is?" "Hey — Print!" "You didn't seriously think we'd let you through, did you?"
"Damn it, Leith — run!" Lior's voice cut through the noise. Too late. A ring of armed guards had closed around Leith from every angle.
"The audacity," the lead guard said, marching forward while the others held position. His voice had the particular quality of someone who had been waiting for an audience and had finally found one large enough. "Trying to blend in with the rest of us. Looking for safety like you're helpless." He stepped closer. Behind him the crowd pressed inward — not to intervene, but to watch. To ratify. "Be honest with me, Print." The guard's voice dropped into something that wanted to sound authoritative. "You started this whole thing, didn't you."
It wasn't a question. It was a performance. And the crowd was not its audience — it was its author, the thing that had written this scene long before the guard stepped into it, that needed the scene to exist so the weight it had been carrying could find somewhere to land. The verdict had been decided before the evidence was requested. The evidence was never the point.
The crowd swelled with it — insults layering over each other, each one feeding the next. The glacial air made them louder, sharper. "Have you no shame? How dare you show your face here!" "That's the bastard who was near my house the day it burned!" "I saw him the day I lost my job—" "They took my sister in the Harren purge and not one of you said a damn—" The voice surfaced briefly — raw, directed somewhere other than Leith — before the crowd swallowed it whole, burying it under the noise directed at the available target. "Stupid hex — you must be the reason I can't—"
Splat. A snow-packed stone struck the lead guard square in the face. The crowd fell silent.
"Pathetic." Lior stood with his arm still outstretched, his chest heaving, eyes burning with a fury that had nowhere near finished with itself. "All of you — are so pathetic." He stepped forward. "Listen to yourselves. You're blaming one person for every unrelated misfortune in your lives. How low — how genuinely low — do you have to be to stand here and do this?"
"That's enough—" A guard raised his hand. Lior took another step forward.
"Has a single one of you ever actually seen him commit any of these things? Or is it just easier to point at someone everyone already hates?"
"I said that's enough!" The guard moved toward him.
"That's right." Leith's voice cut across everything — flat, unhurried. His gaze was on the ground. The crowd stilled. "I alone am the source of all your misfortunes." He looked up. "Every tragedy that has befallen you was my doing. I don't particularly care what you think of that. But right now — you are wasting my time." He let the silence sit for exactly long enough. "Move. Or I'll kill every last one of you."
Gasps tore through the crowd. The mob that had been moments from tearing him apart stood completely frozen — guards included. Blades still raised. Hands trembling. Lips that had been full of words now had none. Leith walked through them. Lior followed — irritation written plainly across his face.
They passed through the gate and into the outskirts beyond. The lights thinned. The noise fell away in layers. Behind them, the crowd that had been desperate to flee had stopped entirely. Not a single person attempted the gate after the Print had passed through it.
Every type. Every shape ugliness takes when it needs somewhere to live. And the remarkable thing — the thing the question at the beginning of all this was always pointing toward — is that you will not find a single one of them who believes they are the monster in their own story. Not one.
"What were you thinking?" Lior's voice was controlled in the way that things are controlled right before they aren't. "You could have gotten yourself killed. Don't do that — don't dig yourself deeper to pull me out. It's not something I can be okay with."
"I could say the same to you," Leith replied, his tone even. "Don't put yourself in front of something like that without thinking about what it costs you."
"You think I weighed the cost first?"
"That's the problem."
Lior stopped walking. He turned to look at Leith directly — concern underneath the frustration, the frustration just louder. "I'm not going to stand there and watch them go after you for something you didn't do. That's not something you get to talk me out of."
"You really believe I didn't do it."
"I know you didn't." Said plainly. No decoration.
They reached the stone steps of the shrine and stopped — looking out over Edholm below them. The crowd at the gate was still visible from here, a dark mass pressed against itself, going nowhere. The guard who had called down to them was still on his ledge. Still folding his arms. From this distance he was indistinguishable from the people he'd been directing — just another shape in the cold, going nowhere either.
"Could you blame them?" Leith said, after a moment. Lior waited. "They live burdensome lives. Lives too heavy to carry without somewhere to put the weight. So when someone comes along — someone the world has already decided is worth hating — they don't question it. They don't need certainty. They just need consensus." He let out a slow breath that fogged in the cold. "As long as everyone else hates that person, the math works itself out."
"That's not logic," Lior said, his voice tight. "That's not even close to logic."
"No," Leith agreed. "But it doesn't need to be. It just needs to function." He took the final step to the top of the shrine, looking down at Edholm below — his breath dissolving into the frost. "Your identity in this world is entirely consistent with how you are perceived. Without that — without someone to observe and define you — who you actually are becomes irrelevant. That is the ugly truth of it."
Lior was quiet for a moment. His hands found the railing — ice cold beneath his grip. "Then as long as I'm standing here," he said, "your identity isn't a curse."
Leith didn't reply. The silence carried something in it — small, and quickly buried, but there.
"And yet I'm supposed to be the odd one," Leith said, with a short exhale that wasn't quite anything.
Leith turned, and checked the leather-strapped watch on his wrist. The second hand moved. His eyes followed it — and went very still. Something left his face in that moment. Not visibly — more like a light behind glass going out. His mind traveled somewhere Lior couldn't follow.
But to understand the answer — you must first understand the world that produced it. And to understand the world — you must have lived inside it long enough for it to have left a mark.
"It's strange," Lior said, still looking out over the railing. "I can't feel any atheris from up here. Not even a trace." He paused. "Say — why did you bring us up here anyway?"
And so I walk the same paths as these monsters —
No answer. The snowflakes around them caught the light strangely — the sky above taking on a hue that hadn't been there a minute ago. Orange, bleeding in at the edges. Getting brighter.
Breathe the same frozen air, stare at the same lightless sky, and wait for the same dim threads of moonlight to find their way through the clouds.
And I find that I understand them. More than I would like. More than is comfortable.
"Leith?" CRACK. Lior turned — catching through his peripheral the briefest flash of violet. A zip of purple lightning, there and gone before he could be certain of it..
I realize the truth—
Before he could fully turn to confirm what he saw, the violet faded. What replaced it was vermillion. "Leith!"
"FWOOUUM–KRRAAAASH!"
We are all monsters...
The sky broke open. Flame tore through the fog in great heaving columns — the roar of it swallowing the screams below before they could fully form. Gusts of scorched wind bent the trees sideways. The heart of Edholm disappeared behind walls of amber and black smoke, as if the town had exhaled everything it had and gone quiet.
Leith's hair whipped violently in the thermal gale. His back was still to the town. His face was still expressionless — the particular stillness of someone for whom none of this is a surprise. "Leith — we have to go—" He was already gone. Already sprinting past Lior with his face rearranged into something that looked almost like worry — if you didn't know what his face looked like when it wasn't performing. "Damn it — where do you think you're going!?" Lior's voice dissolved into the noise behind him.
If we are all monsters, then we share a common author. And that author is this world.
Leith ran through it. The air was too thick — ash and heat compressing into something barely breathable — but he ran. Past smouldered bodies arranged by the blast into shapes that didn't make sense. Past rubble that collapsed in his peripheral vision and didn't slow him. The scent of burning flesh was specific in a way that nothing else is, and it pressed against his lungs with every stride. Children's voices tore through the roar — petrified, exhausted, looking for something that wasn't there anymore.
Then — cutting through all of it — KIIIIIEEEEHHH—! Leith veered left. A behemoth filled the alleyway beside him. Bones pushed through its skin at irregular angles. Its teeth were the length of his hand. It charged with its jaws already open — wide enough that the calculation it was making was very simple. A cutting whirr split the air. Thwunk. A javelin of metal spun through the alleyway and skewered the thing through the skull — pinning it to the ground where it twitched and went still beneath its own weight.
Leith turned. "Go!" Lior shouted, already retracting his arm — the other half of the split rod in his opposite hand. "Go — now!" Leith turned back and ran. Left — no, right — navigating through the ruins of what had been familiar streets, stepping over what he couldn't avoid, searching the smoke for landmarks. Until there it was — the corroded streetlight above the aged-brick roof, throwing its last sparks into the dark. The front door holding its hinges by sheer stubbornness.
He reached the handle. He had not been here in a long time. He had made sure of that. And now his hand was on it, and something had moved in him that had no interest in being reasoned with. He exhaled.
Crackle. His breath stopped mid-chest. Not terror. Not anger. Disbelief — pure and structural, the kind that dismantles the body before the mind has caught up. His eyes found his mother first — blade at her throat, her face beneath the blood almost unrecognizable. His father beyond her, discarded. The posture of something that had already been decided. And there — a red-eyed man, standing in the ruin of the room with the particular stillness of someone who has done something and found it unremarkable. His gaze moved to the door. To Leith. His teeth found each other and pressed — harder, harder — until the pressure became the only thing keeping the rest of him from coming apart entirely.
After all — how do you hold a monster accountable for being exactly what the world made it? Are we truly to blame for arriving at the destination we were always being led toward?
"I'LL — KILLLLL YOUUUUUU!" He charged. A fool by every definition — logic evacuated entirely, replaced by something older and less interested in outcomes. Grrrkkk… Chhhhh — Krkkkk. Crash. The walls gave before he reached them. The ceiling contributed. He hit the floor already half-buried, rubble pressing him into the scalding tiles with a patience the structure had no right to possess.
This world will shape you. Not if — when. No matter how long you hold your posture against it, the grinding is slow, and it is permanent.
He pulled at it. Piece by piece — debris off debris — his voice filling the space his body couldn't. "I'LL KILL YOU — I'LL KILL YOU—" His vision had split into two reds — the blood and the anger — and he could no longer tell which was obscuring more. "DO YOU HEAR ME — YOU SICK BASTARD — I'LL KILL YOU!"
He was repeating himself. He knew he was repeating himself. He couldn't stop.
His mother's skin caught the light in pulses — orange, flickering — and then went still in a way that skin does not recover from. Gkkk — Grk — Gwekkk.. Splatter.
"No atheris, sir. Neither of them."
His jaw twitched. Nothing else would move.
"Rid of the boy." The red-eyed man said it the way you say anything unimportant — head already turning away, attention already elsewhere.
And as long as we inhabit this world — we will be nothing but monsters. Not by choice. By inheritance. Decided the moment we arrived, before we had any say in the matter.
Consciousness left Leith's eyes. What replaced it was a flicker — weak, barely present — a thin thread of purple light running through the dark of his iris like a fault line. His limbs had stopped responding. The cold of the tiles had moved inside him. His jaw was the only thing still working, and it worked slowly, forcing the words out through the smoke and the weight of everything on top of him. "I'll — kill — you…"
And that is exactly why — this world — is so cruel.
The soldier raised his blade. A clean, practiced arc.
"Stop." The red-eyed man's voice. "Leave him."
He contradicted himself without inflection — as if the first order had simply been a draft and this was the revision. His gaze rested on the boy beneath the rubble for a moment that held no particular warmth or weight. Then he turned and walked. His shroud of jet black dragged behind him as he crossed the threshold of his own massacre and disappeared into the dark beyond. At his collar, barely visible through the smoke, a sigil pressed into dark metal — small, deliberate, the mark of something that had decided it was worth marking itself.
One thought followed him out.
That look in his eyes. Fear and anger — that I expected. But that wasn't all of it. What was he looking at — what was he actually looking at when he said those things?
END OF CHAPTER 1