Chapter 1
The night was cold, the kind that made the bones ache.
Eren Vale sat on the broken steps of a tenement building, his knees drawn close to his chest, watching the thin smoke curl up from a trash can fire across the street.
The flames hissed and spat as the last scraps of cardboard burned away.
It was a dead neighborhood—brick walls smeared with graffiti, windows boarded, doors chained shut.
A part of the city people forgot existed. That suited Eren just fine. Forgotten places were safer.
His stomach growled again, but he ignored it. Hunger was an old friend. He'd been living with it since he could remember.
He looked down at his hands, rough and calloused from odd jobs and street fights.
He was eighteen now, but the years had weighed on him heavier than his age should have allowed. No parents, no guardians, no one who would care if he didn't wake up tomorrow.
And still, there was a flicker in his chest. That stubborn thing called hope.
Maybe tomorrow would be better.
The thought made him laugh bitterly. Better never came.
Tonight, the streets were too quiet. Even in this broken part of the city, there were usually sounds—the clatter of bottles, a distant siren, maybe the barking of strays. But now? Nothing. Not even the wind. The air hung heavy, suffocating.
Eren shifted uncomfortably. He wasn't the type to spook easily, but something about this silence pressed against his skull.
His instincts screamed at him, the same instincts that kept him alive when he ran with gangs for a while, the same ones that told him when to duck before a blade swung.
Then it happened.
The light above the street buzzed, then flickered once. Twice. Then it died.
Eren frowned and pushed himself to his feet. "Figures," he muttered. "Even the damn streetlight's given up."
But when he turned to go back inside the building, he froze.
His shadow on the wall didn't move with him.
It twisted, stretched, bent in ways that didn't match his body. His breath hitched, a sharp sting of panic cutting through him.
Not real. Just tired. Lack of food. Hallucination.
That's what he told himself, but the words felt empty.
The shadows around him began to ripple.
They spread across the walls, across the pavement, across the sky itself. The stars blinked out, one by one, swallowed by a curtain of black.
Then the world shattered.
The air turned to glass and broke apart with a soundless crash.
Eren staggered backward, but there was no ground beneath his feet. He fell—weightless, endless—until he slammed onto something solid. Sand.
He coughed and scrambled to his knees. The ground was black, stretching infinitely in every direction.
Above him hung a fractured sky, shards of light bleeding crimson into the void.
"What the hell…" His voice came out hoarse.
A whisper slithered through the air, soft but everywhere at once.
Welcome, dreamer.
Eren spun around. No one. Just emptiness.
Then the sand shifted. Shapes rose from it—tall, distorted, human but not human. Their bodies were stretched thin, their faces hollow where eyes should have been. They dragged long claws behind them as they moved.
Eren's chest tightened. His breath grew ragged. He had been in fights before, had knives pulled on him, had run from men with guns. But this… this was different. This was primal terror, an instinctive fear of things that didn't belong.
"No, no, no," he whispered. His hands trembled. He had no weapon, no escape. Just him, barefoot in this endless nightmare.
One of the shadows tilted its head. Then it lunged.
Eren fell backward with a yell. His palm hit the sand—and something burned. He gasped, jerking his hand back, but a shard of glass had appeared there, glowing faintly with a pale light.
It pulsed like a heartbeat. His heartbeat.
He didn't have time to think. The shadow was already upon him.
With a desperate cry, Eren swung the shard. The edge sliced through the creature's chest, and for a moment, it felt like cutting smoke. Then resistance. Then—pain. The shadow screeched soundlessly as it dissolved into ash.
Eren's lungs burned as he sucked in air. His whole body shook. But before he could drop the shard, a spark of light from the creature sank into him, burning straight into his chest.
He screamed.
The world tilted. Heat surged through his veins, searing every nerve. His vision swam with white spots, his heart hammered like it would explode.
And then… clarity.
He staggered to his feet, clutching his chest. The pain faded, replaced by something else. Strength. Energy. A sense of… solidity, like the world itself had become sharper.
The shard in his hand glowed brighter.
Another shadow lunged at him. This time, Eren didn't stumble. He turned, swung, cut. The creature fell apart in seconds. Another fragment of light sank into him. This time it hurt less, but it left him trembling.
He stood there, chest heaving, staring at the ashes that drifted away like smoke in the windless air.
"What… what the hell is this place?" he whispered.
The whispering voice returned.
The Eclipse has chosen you.
Eren whipped his head around, but again, there was nothing. Only the shifting sand, the endless black, and the broken sky.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the world cracked apart.
The sand fell away, the sky shattered, and Eren was falling again.
He jolted awake with a gasp.
The broken steps of the tenement dug into his back. The streetlight buzzed faintly above, still flickering. The fire across the street had burned out.
For a second, he thought he had dreamed it all. Some hunger-born hallucination.
But then he opened his hand.
The shard was still there, glowing faintly in the dark.
Eren's mouth went dry. His pulse thundered in his ears.
This wasn't a dream.
Reality would never be the same again.
T O. B E. C O N T I N U E D....
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