The room stank of mildew and stale tobacco. A single bulb swung above Nostradamus's head, flickering like it was fighting against suffocation. The light painted the cracked wallpaper in sickly yellow patches, made the roaches shine as they scuttled along the baseboards, and cast long shadows across the boy sitting on the edge of a sagging mattress.
He was fifteen, but his body looked younger, starved bones draped in skin too pale for the season. His hands, thin and veined, clutched the torn hem of his shirt, not because he cared about appearances, but because it gave him something to do with the endless tremor in his fingers.
Outside the window, the city breathed its usual poison. Sirens bled into the night, cars groaned against broken asphalt, and somewhere far off a woman screamed before her voice was cut short, swallowed by indifference. Life carried on.
Nostradamus sat in silence. His eyes , too dark to reflect the light, were fixed on the floorboards, but his mind was not in the room. It was peeling itself apart, turning inward, gnawing at the raw wires of memory.
The neighbors laughed downstairs. Beer bottles clinked. Someone shouted something about "lazy welfare rats." He didn't flinch; he'd heard worse. Those words had been carved into him long ago, pressed into his skin like hot iron until he no longer bled from them.
It wasn't anger that stirred in him now. Not fear either. It was something heavier, an emotion that didn't have a name in the world's vocabulary. Something fermented out of years of silence, neglect, and cold dinners eaten alone in the dark.
He leaned back on the mattress, felt the coils jab through the thin fabric, and stared up at the ceiling. The mold there resembled continents, strange maps of a world rotting above him. He traced them with his eyes, inventing borders, kingdoms, wars fought by shapes that meant nothing.
His thoughts wandered to the day's events, not because they were extraordinary, but because they were always the same, and that sameness was a prison.
The schoolyard had been noisy, as usual. Laughter from groups that would never welcome him. Whispers that weren't whispers at all, thrown loud enough to pierce. "Freak." "Weirdo." "Ugly." He'd learned to keep walking, to let the voices slide over him, but they didn't slide, they stuck like tar.
He had spoken to no one. Not even the teachers noticed when he sat through lessons without opening a notebook. They called his name during roll call, ticked the box, and forgot him again. He might as well have been a chair in the corner.
At lunch, he'd eaten bread that was already stale, chewing slowly as the others traded chips and candy bars. They never asked if he wanted any. They never asked him anything. And yet their eyes followed him with the same quiet malice predators save for the wounded.
When the final bell rang, he didn't rush home. He wandered. Past the graffiti-stained underpass, past the liquor store that smelled like piss, past the broken swing set where needles glittered like teeth in the grass. He kept walking until his legs ached, until his stomach gnawed at him.
Now, back in the room, he relived every step like punishment. His body still carried the weight of it. His mind pressed against the glass of reality like a trapped insect, desperate for some crack to escape through.
He sat up again, suddenly restless. His fingers clawed at the thin air. The walls seemed closer than they were. The bulb above him buzzed louder, as if mocking his heartbeat.
He whispered to himself. He didn't remember what the words were, maybe curses, maybe prayers, but his lips moved, and in the silence of that room, even his own voice sounded foreign.
Then he thought of the man downstairs. The one who laughed too loud, who shouted racial slurs in the hallway, who once shoved Nostradamus against the railing just for standing in the way. His face came to Nostradamus now, swollen and red, spittle flying from his mouth.
A picture unfolded in his mind. A grotesque one.
He imagined the man's throat cut open, the laughter turned to gurgling, the sound of it filling the stairwell. He imagined the neighbors pounding on their doors, hearing the noise but refusing to come out. He imagined the man crawling, leaving a smear of blood down the hallway until finally collapsing in the puddle of his own failure.
The thought didn't disturb him. It calmed him.
He breathed deeper. His shaking stilled.
It wasn't the violence that brought him peace, it was the order of it. The balance. A grotesque symmetry where cruelty returned to its source, where the laughter stopped, where the world was forced to look, even for a second.
And then the peace faded, replaced by hollowness. Because he knew he wouldn't do it. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. He was too small, too watched, too unimportant to carve the world into justice.
But the thought stayed. Nestled inside him like an egg. Waiting.
He pressed his palms against his face. His skin was clammy. His breath smelled of the instant noodles he had eaten three hours ago. He rubbed his eyes until he saw sparks of light.
"Why was I even born?" The question echoed in his skull, heavy, thick. No one had asked him if he wanted this life. No one had prepared him for its ugliness. And now he was trapped in it, a piece of machinery in a system that only produced waste.
He pulled his knees to his chest and rocked slightly, back and forth.
He thought of the children who laughed at him. Of the teachers who ignored him. Of the neighbors who spat insults. Of the government office that had lost his mother's paperwork and left them without food stamps for a month. Of the cop who told him once, "You'll end up in jail or dead, kid. Probably both."
Every memory stacked on the next, bricks in a wall built around him. No way out.
He wanted to scream. But he knew if he screamed, no one would come. Or worse , they would come and tell him to shut up.
The silence was louder than noise.
He lay back again, staring at the ceiling map, tracing the borders of mold. In his mind, wars continued. Armies of shadows marched. Kingdoms fell. Blood spilled.
And always, always, it ended the same way , with someone laughing, with someone winning, with him watching.
The night was thick with silence, the kind that pressed down like a weight. Streetlamps buzzed faintly, their pale halos cutting slices through the dark. Nostradamus Beaumont sat hunched in his room, knees to his chest, forehead against the cracked plaster wall. The ceiling leaked again. Each droplet splashed into a pot beside his mattress, the rhythm steady, like a heart still beating after being ripped from the chest.
The city breathed outside, engines groaning, sirens wailing, drunk men laughing too loud, a dog barking until its throat went raw. But in this room, in this rotting apartment, there was nothing except the boy and the gnawing inside him.
He was hungry. Not the kind of hunger food could quiet. This was deeper. Animal. Like something inside him was scratching to get out.
He thought of the word they used in whispers, Manifestation.
Some called it a curse. Some called it a gift. Some called it a disease.
The news anchors, their faces plastic and painted, called it the Plague of the New Age. They spoke with tight lips about the way children would wake one morning and find their skin sprouting cracks, or bones reshaping, or voices splitting into inhuman echoes. Some grew claws. Some lost their eyes and gained others in places no eye should be. Some became shadows, or smoke, or flesh twisted into things nightmares would hesitate to imagine.
The government called them biohazards. The Church called them the disgraced. The streets called them freaks.
Nostradamus called them kin.
Not because he liked them. Not because he pitied them. But because he knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that it was in him too. That something grotesque was waiting, patient, inside his marrow.
He pressed his cheek harder to the wall. The plaster was cool. He liked the coolness, the way it grounded him, kept him from shaking. His breath stank. His nails were bitten raw.
In his head, the voices started again.
"Pig."
"Swine."
"Monster."
At first, it was memory , kids at school, eyes sneering, voices dripping venom. But as minutes stretched, the voices became sharper, closer, no longer echoes of others but creations of his own. He had given them flesh in his imagination, and now they were alive.
He could see them when he closed his eyes. Faces. Not fully human. Too stretched, too wide, their mouths opening wider than mouths should. Pig snouts, cracked hooves, laughter that sounded like choking.
He gripped his head, digging his fingernails into his scalp until the skin tore. Blood smeared across his fingers. The voices didn't stop. They cheered.
And for a moment , just a flicker , Nostradamus smiled.
The world outside his window didn't care. Why would it? In this city, in this America, cruelty was air.
The television on the neighbor's wall, thin and humming, leaked sound through the plaster. Another report of protests. Another shooting. Another child gone missing in a district already abandoned by police.
On the corner, men shouted slurs at a woman walking alone. A bottle smashed. Laughter followed.
Down the street, in the convenience store with the flickering sign, an old man begged the clerk to accept expired coupons for bread. The clerk told him to go die.
Nostradamus watched all of it, every day, every hour. He didn't look away. He absorbed.
People hated each other. People fed on each other. But they hated those with Manifestations more than anything else. Those were open targets. The freaks. The cursed. The ones whose skin already betrayed them.
A man with scales instead of arms had been dragged behind a truck last week. Nostradamus saw the video on a stolen phone. The laughter of the men filming rang louder than the man's screams.
A child, only six, with horns budding from her forehead, was found in the river. No one claimed her body.
And the news anchors smiled with their plastic teeth and said it was unfortunate , but understandable. Society could not tolerate deformity.
Nostradamus breathed harder.
He hated them. He hated them all.
But deep down, he also hated himself.
Because he knew what he was becoming. Because he knew the word that would follow him to his grave: Swine.
It began small. His reflection no longer matched his memory. His teeth looked sharper. His pupils, wider. His skin sometimes shone with a greasy sheen, like sweat that never dried. And sometimes, late at night, he swore he could hear snorting when he exhaled.
Not his breath. Something else. Something pig-like.
He thought of Gon — though he'd never say the name out loud. He had read about him once, that boy who became a monster out of rage. That was fiction. This was not. Nostradamus didn't need rage to become a monster. He only needed himself.
Inside his mind, the transformation was already complete.
"Eat them," a voice whispered.
"Tear them."
"Show them what swine really means."
He shivered, but the shiver wasn't fear. It was delight. The thought of violence, of breaking the bones of the ones who laughed, of chewing through their screams, made him feel whole.
He knew this was wrong. He knew. But in a city that called him a freak before he had even transformed, in a society that spat on weakness, why should he care?
Monsters were hated anyway. So why not become one fully?
The historian's voice from the first chapter , that calm, detached voice of explanation , would have described this as inevitable.
"The boy was born into rot. Rot does not nurture. It consumes. And when it consumes long enough, the flesh left behind will twist. He is not alone. Every age produces its monsters. But this one, this Nostradamus Beaumont, was shaped so deliberately by neglect that it is hard to say whether he chose his fate, or if fate had already chosen for him."
But if you asked Nostradamus, he would tell you there was no fate. Only hunger.
The clock ticked. Each second louder.
His body itched. He scratched until his skin peeled, flakes of himself raining down on the mattress. He licked the blood off his fingers without realizing.
And in the distance, faint but rising, he heard a scream.
Not from his mind. From outside.
He stood. His legs wobbled, but carried him to the window. Down the street, under the jaundiced streetlamp, three men were surrounding someone. A shape small enough to be a teenager. Their laughter carried. So did the sobs.
Nostradamus didn't move at first. He only watched. His heart thudded.
The hunger grew.
His lips curled.
And then , for the first time in his life , he stepped outside.
Not as a boy. Not yet fully as a monster. But something between. Something worse.
The Swine had begun to walk.