Darkness clung to the city like damp fog, thick and suffocating. At first, no one noticed when the rules began to change. A missing neighbor here, a phone call that ended in silence there—just enough to make people uneasy, not enough to make them panic. But by the time the truth surfaced, it was already too late.
They called it revival. The dead no longer stayed dead, and the old tales—ghosts, spirits, monsters whispered about in childhood—were no longer stories. They were laws now. And laws demanded obedience.
The first law was simple: When the knock comes at midnight, do not open the door.
Break it, and you vanish. No screams, no blood, just gone—swallowed whole by something that should not exist.
Ethan Walker never asked to be part of this. He was a student, drifting through ordinary classes, cheap beer, and the dull promise of a future he wasn't sure he wanted. But the night someone knocked on his dorm room door, the night he kept his hand frozen on the handle while the wood shuddered beneath his grip—that was the night his old life ended.
The rules spread quickly. Don't answer unknown phone calls after 3 a.m. Don't step onto the seventh bus route when it's empty. Don't look into a mirror for too long, or something will look back. Each law came at the cost of lives, carved into the world with blood and silence.
But surviving wasn't enough. The dead were growing stronger, hungrier. And sometimes, to fight a ghost, you had to borrow the power of another ghost. That was how Ethan found himself standing on the razor's edge between man and monster, his own reflection flickering like something already half gone.
This isn't the story of heroes. Heroes can't survive here.
This is the story of rules, of terror, of the last revival.