My life began with an ending.
My mother never held me. My father… had chosen not to stay. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to die.
Yet I walked. I breathed. I survived.
I wasn't completely alone. There were faces I had known since I was small. Niran always laughed too loudly, throwing his head back and making the world feel lighter—even when shadows clung to him. Preecha barely spoke, but when he did, the words cut through the air like knives. And Dao… she watched me quietly, her gaze weighing every step I took, as if she could see the cracks beneath my skin.
We walked home together most days. Their voices mingled with the afternoon heat, like faint music I could almost hear. I drifted behind them, separate yet tethered by invisible threads.
The air smelled of hot asphalt and distant rain. We passed the usual shops, the corners where stray cats lingered, the shadows of the city stretching long and thin. Their chatter drifted around me—fragments of laughter and complaints—and I felt both comforted and alienated at the same time.
Niran pointed at a stray dog weaving through the crowd. Preecha mimicked its movements, and I allowed myself a faint smile. Dao whispered something softly, and the others paused to listen. It was a rhythm I had followed for years, a small comfort I did not deserve.
And yet, a heaviness lingered beneath the laughter. Something waited—unseen, just beyond the corner of my eye.
We turned the corner by the old fruit market. The sun bled gold across the rooftops. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of it—a shadow slipping between the crates, too fast, too quiet. I blinked, and it was gone.
A horn blared. Screeching brakes. A flash of metal.
And everything went black.
***
The crash didn't kill me.
It left me trapped instead.
Days passed. Weeks. My body remained in a hospital bed, machines hissing and beeping, while my mind drifted somewhere far deeper. I had fallen into a coma, lost in a silence that felt endless.
And in that silence—voices reached me.
Niran's. Preecha's. Dao's. Shaking, desperate, raw.
"Please… just let him live…"
"I'll give you my laughter, my joy—take it all, if only he can open his eyes again…"
"…take the silence I keep, the loneliness I bury—let it weigh on me alone…"
"…I'll surrender my hope, my heart, whatever remains of me… just don't take him too…"
They poured themselves out, not in blood, but in sorrow. Not in flesh, but in emptiness. Their grief, their despair, their loneliness—they offered it all, blindly, into the dark.
And someone listened.
An entity, straight from hell.
***
Chains slithered through the void, coiling tight, rattling like serpents. They wrapped my chest, my wrists, my throat, pinning me as if to remind me I still had a body.
A presence stirred. Immense. Silent. Terrifying in its poise.
"Delicious," a voice said, low and rich, amused. "They bring their sadness willingly. They bring their loneliness as an offering."
The figure stepped forward. Human-shaped, but too flawless, too sharp. Chains trailed behind it like whispers of a thousand broken prayers. Its eyes glowed faintly, cold and endless.
"I am the God of death and loneliness, the Beetle of Death," it declared, savoring each syllable. "My name is Keph…"
My breath seized, every nerve in my body screaming.
"…riel."
The chains pulsed with faint blue light, snaking closer.
"You live because of them. Their grief sustains you. Their despair binds you. Their loneliness anchors you. And now—you belong to me. Only you can see me."
Shadows writhed at the edges of my vision—shapes of hunger, red and blue, their whispers like glass grinding beneath my skull.
"This is the truth of your world," Kephriel said. "You are alive, and yet… cursed. Keeping you alive was easy... I simply required a soul in exchange. They were so very... generous."
I tried to scream, but my mouth filled with silence. The darkness breathed with me, pressing in, until the fragile memory of my old life seemed to crumble and vanish.
"Can you feel them yet?" Kephriel's voice was a taunt in the void. "The whispers at the edge of your sight? The new ache that is not your own?"
***
A voice tore through the black.
"Rafael Ismael Sakda."
My eyes opened. The ceiling of a hospital room came into view, washed pale by daylight. The chains were gone, but the weight of them lingered in my bones.
A doctor stood beside the bed, clipboard in hand, his voice calm but final.
"The treatments we administered have kept you alive… but the costs exceed what your family can afford."
I blinked slowly, my lips dry, my throat hollow.
"I'm sorry," the doctor continued, his tone polite, almost rehearsed. "We have no choice but to discharge you. Without payment, we cannot continue care."
The words fell like stones into silence.
The antiseptic smell stung my lungs. My friends were nowhere to be seen.
And for the first time since waking, I realized—
I had nothing.