The first time Eren Kruger saw his father after death, the world stopped making sense.
The hospital smelled like bleach, sweat, and something sour that hid beneath the floor tiles. He was ten years old, too young to be allowed inside a morgue, but his mother had dragged him in anyway. She didn't hold his hand. She walked ahead, her thin black coat brushing against the walls, and her silence pressed down harder than any words.
The nurse led them through narrow halls until they reached a heavy metal door. It opened with a sigh, like the air itself didn't want them inside. The room was cold. Not winter cold, but a deeper cold, the kind that crawled into his teeth and made him clench his jaw.
There were drawers in the wall. Silver handles lined up in rows, like cabinets in a kitchen that nobody lived in anymore. The nurse slid one open.
And there he was.
Johann Kruger. Father. Or the shape of him.
Eren didn't flinch. Other children might have screamed or turned away, but Eren stared. His father's skin was pale gray, stretched too tight across bone. His lips looked sewn shut though they weren't. His eyes were closed, but Eren felt them watching him anyway.
He stepped closer, ignoring the nurse's hand. His breath fogged the air.
Something shifted.
He swore he saw it, a second figure inside the corpse. Not another body, but a skeleton of light. Thin white lines, like lightning caught in bone-shape, hidden beneath the flesh. It shimmered faintly, like it was alive.
Eren blinked hard, but it didn't go away. The corpse had two bodies: the dead shell, and this strange glowing frame inside. The light skeleton twitched its jaw, as if it wanted to speak, but couldn't.
A tremor ran through his arms. His stomach twisted, not in fear, but in fascination.
His mother made a choking sound. She pressed her hands together, lips moving silently in prayer.
"Do you see it?" Eren whispered, but she didn't hear him.
The glowing skeleton tilted its head at him.
The nurse coughed. "You shouldn't be here, boy."
But Eren barely noticed. Something in his head clicked open. He wanted to touch the light, to peel away the useless gray skin and see what it really was.
He felt it then, an idea so heavy it rooted inside him. There's more inside the body than blood and bone. There's something else. Something hidden.
The moment passed. He blinked again, and the skeleton faded. Just his father's corpse lay there now, silent and stiff.
The nurse pushed the drawer shut. The metal thudded. Eren's mother made the sign of the cross, her fingers trembling, and hurried out without looking back.
Eren followed, but his eyes stayed on the drawers. He wanted to open every one. To check. To see if all of them hid skeletons of light.
The funeral was worse.
They buried Johann in the churchyard, beneath a crooked tree. The priest spoke about mercy, about souls rising to heaven. Eren didn't believe it. Heaven sounded like a bad excuse. If there was a soul, he had seen it already, and it wasn't floating away, it was trapped inside the body, shimmering and silent.
The villagers whispered about his mother. Some said Johann had drunk himself to death. Others said it was sickness, or war wounds that never healed. None of them looked at Eren for long. He didn't cry. He didn't even blink when dirt hit the coffin lid.
His mother stood stiff, hands clasped so tight her knuckles bled white. She whispered prayers under her breath, faster and faster, like she thought God might answer if she just repeated herself enough.
Afterward, at home, she locked herself in her bedroom. For days, she barely came out. When she did, her hair was tangled, her eyes red, and she muttered things to no one. She forgot to cook. She forgot to wash.
Eren didn't mind. He liked the silence.
The house smelled of damp wood and mold, but it gave him space. He sat at the kitchen table, staring at the flies that landed on dirty plates. Their wings shimmered like glass, their bodies twitching.
One day, he trapped a fly in a glass jar. He watched it buzz and slam against the sides until it collapsed. Then he pulled the wings off with tweezers, one by one. It didn't scare him. It thrilled him. He wondered: If I could peel away a man's skin, would I find wings too?
He began collecting insects. Ants in matchboxes. Beetles pinned to cardboard. Flies in jars. He arranged them in rows like the morgue drawers. Sometimes, at night, he held a candle close and stared, waiting for one of them to glow from the inside.
His mother saw once. She slapped the jar out of his hands. The fly splattered against the wall.
"You're sick," she hissed. "Just like him."
But her eyes were hollow. She wasn't angry, just empty.
Eren didn't answer. He just picked up the broken jar and stared at the pieces of glass. They looked like fragments of bone.
School was no better.
The other boys called him ghost-face, because he rarely spoke. He didn't play football, didn't laugh, didn't fight back. When they pushed him, he just stared with cold eyes until they backed away, uneasy.
Teachers said he was bright but strange. He solved problems fast, but never showed his work. He drew diagrams in the margins of notebooks, shapes like insects, but twisted into patterns of stars and skeletons.
One teacher, a thin man with glasses, asked him once, "Eren, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
Eren answered without thinking. "I want to see inside everything."
The teacher laughed nervously. "You mean like a doctor?"
Eren didn't reply.
At night, dreams came.
He dreamed of the morgue drawers opening by themselves. Dozens of corpses slid out. Each had a light-skeleton inside, shimmering faintly. They all turned their heads toward him at once. Their jaws opened, but no sound came.
He walked between them, touching the cold skin, feeling the glow beneath. One skeleton leaned close. Its mouth opened wider, splitting its jaw.
A hiss escaped, like static.
He woke up sweating, heart pounding, but smiling.
Dreams weren't nightmares. They were invitations.
He started writing them down. Scribbles filled his notebooks. He didn't care if they made sense.
One night, he woke to find his mother standing at the foot of his bed. Her face was pale, eyes wide.
"You were laughing," she whispered.
He stared at her.
She leaned closer. "You're not my son."
Then she left the room, slamming the door.
He lay awake until morning, staring at the ceiling, wondering if she was right.
By the time he turned twelve, the insect collection filled half his room. Jars lined the shelves. Some dead, some still twitching. He drew symbols beneath each, not names but equations.
He had discovered something: the way an ant moved in spirals before dying looked like the orbit of planets. A fly's twitching legs resembled radio signals. Beetle shells reflected light like small black holes.
Patterns. Everything had patterns.
He just needed to go deeper.
At school, he cornered a frog during biology class and cut it open before the teacher arrived. He held the heart between tweezers, staring at the pulsing flesh. The other kids screamed. The teacher dragged him out, but he didn't resist. He kept staring at his bloody hands, fascinated.
That night, he dreamed again. His father's skeleton of light appeared, but this time it was larger, stretching beyond the room. Its bones cracked like thunder. It reached for him, but instead of fear, Eren stepped closer.
When he woke, he wasn't afraid. He was hungry.
One evening, his mother finally broke.
She stormed into his room, knocking over jars, smashing beetles under her shoes.
"You'll burn!" she screamed. "You'll drag us all to hell!"
Her hands shook as she pointed at him. "You've got the devil in you, Eren. I see it in your eyes."
He just watched. Silent. Cold.
When she collapsed on the floor, sobbing, he didn't comfort her. He only bent down, picked up a dead fly, and placed it gently on his palm.
"Not the devil," he whispered to himself. "Something else."
His mother rocked back and forth, muttering prayers.
Eren stared at the fly's broken body. In his mind, he saw the skeleton of light again, twitching, waiting.
And he smiled.
"KRUEGER"
By thirteen, Eren had learned something: silence was stronger than fists.
The boys at school still tried to push him, but they never got the reaction they wanted. One day, a boy twice his size shoved him into the mud, laughing with his friends. Eren got up slowly, his eyes cold, his face blank. He walked away without a word.
That night, he followed the boy home. He waited behind a hedge for hours, just watching the lights inside the house. He didn't move until the street grew dark and empty.
The boy had a rabbit hutch in the garden. Eren climbed the fence, cut the wire, and took one of the rabbits. He carried it to the woods, set it on the ground, and watched.
Its fur shone white under the moon. Its heart thudded fast in his hands.
He pulled out a pin from his pocket, sharp and long, the kind he used for beetles. With steady fingers, he pushed it through the rabbit's paw. The creature screamed, high-pitched and human-like.
Eren didn't flinch. He only leaned closer, listening.
When he let it go, it limped in circles, dragging its leg. Blood marked the dirt. It didn't run away. It just moved in endless spirals.
Eren smiled faintly. The same pattern as the ants. Circles, always circles.
By morning, the rabbit was dead. Eren left it hanging on the fence outside the boy's home. He never heard that boy laugh again.
His mother barely noticed him anymore. She lived in her prayers, her mutters, her cheap bottles of wine. She'd sit by the window for hours, staring at nothing, lips moving.
"Johann speaks to me," she whispered once when Eren passed. "He tells me you're wrong. You were born wrong."
Eren stopped. He tilted his head, curious. "What did he say?"
Her eyes flicked to him, wide and bloodshot. Then she looked away. "That you'll open doors best left shut."
She laughed then, a dry broken laugh.
Eren didn't laugh. He went to his room, wrote down her words, and underlined them three times. Open doors.
Books became his escape. Not schoolbooks, he devoured those too quickly, but books on physics, anatomy, dreams. He read about gravity, about black holes, about neurons firing in the brain. Each word was a thread, and he pulled at them until patterns showed.
One afternoon, while searching the dusty shelves of the town library, he met Dr. Edelmann.
The man was old, with thin white hair and glasses that slid down his nose. He wore a gray coat stained with ink. He watched Eren flipping through a book on particle physics.
"You understand any of that?" Edelmann asked.
Eren looked up, calm. "Yes."
The man chuckled. "You're lying."
"No." Eren pointed at a diagram of quantum fields. "It's like insects. They move the same way. Circles. Orbits. You just need to see it."
Edelmann studied him for a long moment, then smiled faintly. "What's your name, boy?"
"Eren Kruger."
Something in the way Edelmann nodded told Eren the man wasn't laughing at him. That made him stay.
Over the next weeks, Edelmann began lending him books, heavier ones, filled with symbols and strange words. He never explained them, but he asked Eren what he saw.
Eren always answered the same: "Patterns."
Once, Edelmann leaned forward, voice low. "And what do you think lies at the center of all these patterns?"
Eren thought. Then he said, "Something waiting to wake up."
Edelmann's eyes gleamed. "Interesting."
At school, his reputation shifted. Some boys still mocked him, but they kept their distance. Others avoided him entirely. He became a shadow, always present, rarely noticed, yet always unsettling.
One girl, Anna, tried to talk to him. She was curious, bright-eyed, too kind for her own good. She asked about his notebooks, the drawings of insects and skeletons of light.
"Do you believe in souls?" she asked once.
Eren stared at her for a long time before answering. "I've seen them."
She laughed softly, thinking it was a joke.
He didn't laugh.
The next week, Anna stopped talking to him. She told her friends his eyes scared her.
Dreams deepened.
He dreamed of glass cities floating in black space. He walked their empty streets, and every window reflected his face, but not quite. Some smiled when he didn't. Some wept. Some bled from the eyes.
He dreamed of black holes spinning like insects' wings, their edges humming with whispers. He leaned close, and the whispers said his name.
He dreamed of his father again, but the skeleton of light was bigger now, stretching across the sky. Its ribs were galaxies. Its skull was the moon.
When he woke, he felt heavy, like he had swallowed a star.
He began to write equations in his notebooks, not real ones, but shapes of numbers that twisted like beetles' legs. They looked meaningless, but when he stared long enough, he felt the same hunger as when he peeled wings.
At fifteen, everything changed.
One winter night, his mother collapsed in the kitchen. He found her on the floor, lips blue, bottle spilled beside her. She didn't move. He checked her pulse. Nothing.
For a long moment, he just watched.
Then he fetched a candle. He lit it and held it close to her body.
There.
The glow. The skeleton of light, faint but real, shimmered inside her chest. It twitched, as if trapped.
Eren leaned closer, eyes wide. "I see you."
The glow flickered weakly. Then it went out.
Her body was just a shell now. Empty.
Eren sat on the floor beside her all night, staring at the place where the light had been.
By morning, he was smiling.
Not out of joy. Out of certainty.
It wasn't madness. It wasn't grief. He had seen it again. Proof.
The skeletons of light were real. Souls, or something stranger. And they could die.
After the funeral, he didn't cry. People whispered again, called him cold, heartless. He didn't care. He had no use for their pity.
He moved into a small apartment, paid for by the state. He spent every waking hour reading, writing, studying. Edelmann visited sometimes, bringing more books, more questions.
One evening, Edelmann asked, "Eren, why do you chase these things? Most boys your age care about girls, money, comfort. But you? You look like you want to tear the world apart."
Eren looked at him calmly. "Because I want to know what's beneath it."
Edelmann chuckled softly. "And if you find it?"
"Then I'll decide what to do with it."
For the first time, Edelmann didn't smile. He just watched, eyes thoughtful, and said nothing.
By sixteen, Eren had begun small experiments. Frogs, mice, birds. He cut them open, searching for the light. Sometimes he thought he saw a shimmer. Sometimes not.
He grew frustrated. He needed better tools, better methods. He began sneaking into the school's laboratory at night, using their microscopes, their chemicals.
One night, he held a frog under the glass. As he stared, the image blurred. For a second, he thought he saw not blood vessels, but tiny threads of light winding through the flesh.
He blinked, and they were gone.
He clenched his fist. He needed more.
The cruelty in him sharpened.
One boy, a bully named Karl, shoved him in the corridor. This time, Eren didn't stay silent. He leaned close, eyes cold, and whispered:
"I know what's inside you."
Karl laughed, but the laughter cracked. He walked away quickly, glancing back.
A week later, Karl's dog was found dead in the woods. Its body was cut open, organs missing.
Nobody proved anything. But whispers spread.
Eren didn't care. He was past caring.
Dr. Edelmann remained his only real connection. One evening, the old man handed him a book thicker than a brick. "On Dreams and Consciousness," the title read.
Eren opened it eagerly. Edelmann watched him.
"You remind me of men I once knew," Edelmann said softly. "Men who thought the world was theirs to dissect. They reached too far. And they paid."
Eren didn't look up. "Then they were weak."
Edelmann's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
That night, Eren dreamed of the skeletons again.
But this time, one spoke.
Its jaw cracked open wider than a human's should, and a voice like static filled his head.
"Eren."
Just his name. Nothing more.
But when he woke, he knew something had changed.
They weren't just shapes of light.
They were waiting.
For him.
And in the silence of his room, with jars of insects glinting in candlelight, Eren Kruger began to smile.
Not a boy's smile.
A conqueror's.