PROLOGUE
The Rule
—
Before.
Kristof was eight years old when the shadow spoke to him for the first time.
It waited at the far end of the hallway, where the dim light from the living room failed to reach. It was tall—too tall—its edges quivering as if the air around it were boiling. There was nothing human about its shape. It wasn't solid. It wasn't smoke. It was wrong.
He'd seen it before, always in passing, always when his parents were distracted. A flicker in his peripheral vision while he was brushing his teeth, or a darker patch in the corner of his room at night. But this time, it didn't fade when he looked at it directly. This time, it looked back.
And then, he heard it.
"You shouldn't be here."
The voice didn't come from its shape. It came from inside him, crawling across his thoughts like cold fingers.
Kristof pressed his back against the wall, gripping the plaster so hard his fingertips ached. The air in the hallway had gone sharp and cold, biting at his bare arms. Overhead, the bulb in the ceiling fixture gave a single, tired flicker.
The thing didn't move. Not physically. But Kristof felt it lean closer, as if the space between them was folding.
His chest tightened. He wanted to scream, but instinct screamed back: Don't give it sound. Don't give it anything.
So he ran.
Not toward the thing, but away—feet slapping against the floor, down the hall, past the living room, into his parents' bedroom where the heater was on and the smell of detergent lingered in the blankets.
"Someone's in the hallway," he blurted out. "It's not a person. It was looking at me."
His mother blinked in confusion. His father sighed, leaning over to switch off the lamp.
"You're too smart to believe in ghosts," his father said, almost annoyed. "You were dreaming. Go back to bed."
"I wasn't—" Kristof stopped. The words felt heavy in his throat.
He could argue. He could tell them how the thing wasn't just seen, but felt—how it carried a weight, a cold pressure in his chest, how its voice had slipped into his mind without crossing the space between them. But even at eight, Kristof understood the futility in trying. They weren't going to believe him. Worse, they might start looking at him differently.
So he only nodded. Went back to his room. Lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the pale light of dawn crept in.
He didn't cry.
He didn't sleep.
And the shadow remained, just behind the door.
Kristof never mentioned it again. Not to them. Not to anyone.
That was the night he learned the first rule.
—
Now.
Kristof Larsson was twenty nine years old. He didn't run from shadows anymore.
He knew the rules now.
Rule one: Don't react.
Rule two: Don't acknowledge.
Rule three: Don't give them shape.
The rules weren't superstition. They were survival.
His apartment was silent except for the radiator's constant hiss. Outside, the winter wind pushed dry snowflakes against the window in soft bursts. He sat at his desk, a single lamp casting a narrow pool of light across the surface. The rest of the room stayed in shadow.
In one of those shadows—by the far corner of the living room—something waited.
It had been there for three nights in a row. Not the same thing from when he was eight, but close enough to share its smell: cold metal, dust, and the faintest trace of rot. It didn't move. It didn't blink. It only watched.
Kristof didn't look at it. He didn't need to. The air where it stood was wrong enough to map in his mind.
His pen scratched over paper, long columns of numbers flowing in clean, sharp strokes. They curved, branched, and looped into intricate formations—equations folding in on themselves until they created a pattern only he could interpret.
Mathematics, to Kristof, wasn't just numbers. It was structure. It was a net. And the entities he saw—they hated nets. They were made of chaos, and chaos recoiled from being defined.
The bulb in the lamp buzzed once. The shadow in the corner shifted, barely perceptible.
Not yet, Kristof thought, finishing the last line of the formula. His hand stilled over the page, the faint heat of the ink cooling against his fingers.
He closed the notebook. Sat back. Listened.
The thing stayed.
—
It would have been another ordinary night—if such a word even applied to his life—if not for the break in the pattern.
Somewhere else in the city, something stirred. The shift was subtle, like the smallest ripple in a pond. But Kristof felt it all the same, threading its way into his awareness. It wasn't random. It wasn't them. It was… human.
A mind opening where it shouldn't. A door that had been closed, cracking just enough for the cold to slip in.
Someone was starting to see.
His gaze slid toward the window, to the cluster of lights marking the university district. A faint crease formed between his brows.
"Too soon," he murmured.
The thing in the corner moved for the first time. The air grew colder, heavier. And then, as if in mockery, it smiled.,