The truce with Bubbles had brought a fragile peace, but it was shattered by a single, chilling discovery.
It was on a Tuesday morning, as Maya was fumbling for her keys, that she saw it. A faint, sickly-green symbol, no larger than her thumb, was seared into the wood of her apartment door, right next to the peephole. It looked like a stylized eye with a jagged tear running through it, and it seemed to pulse with a faint, internal light, like the glow of rotten wood.
Her first thought was vandalism. Some kid with a weird laser pointer. But the mark was burned into the wood, smooth and seamless. There was no charring, no smell. It was just… there.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She didn't call out a greeting as she usually did. She pushed the door open slowly, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Mal was already on the floor by the entrance, standing rigidly. He wasn't looking at her. His entire focus was on the mark, his golden eyes wide, his body so still he might have been carved from stone. The usual air of haughty impatience was gone, replaced by a silence so profound it was more terrifying than any of his grumbling.
"Mal?" she whispered, her voice barely audible.
He didn't respond for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached out a single claw and traced the air an inch from the symbol, as if afraid to touch it.
"Where did you find this?" His voice was flat, stripped of all its usual gravel and reverb. It was the sound of pure dread.
"On the door. Just now. What is it?"
He finally turned to look at her, and the fear in his eyes made her blood run cold. "It is a Hunter's Mark," he said. "A sigil of the Unseen. Morvana's personal assassins."
The name meant nothing to her, but the title 'Unseen' sent a shiver down her spine. "Are they like the goblins?"
A bitter, humorless sound escaped him. "The goblins were crude scouts, barely sentient. The Unseen are… something else. They are not creatures of flesh and blood. They are fragments of concentrated silence and hate. They do not walk; they flow. They do not break down doors; they phase through the spaces between atoms in the wood."
He turned back to the mark, his tail lashing once, a sharp, nervous twitch. "The mark is a tracker. It does not just tell them where we are. It tells them what we are. It has tasted my essence. And now… they are counting."
"Counting what?"
"Our heartbeats."
The simple, horrifying statement hung in the air. Maya leaned against the doorframe, feeling suddenly weak. The safe, quirky bubble of her life with a grumpy Dark Lord had been violently popped. This wasn't a game anymore.
"Why is this different?" she asked, her voice trembling. "You weren't this scared of the goblins."
"Because the goblins were an extermination squad. They were meant to kill a weakened foe." He gestured to the pulsing sigil. "This… this is a hunting party. They are not just here to kill me. They are here to collect me. To take my essence back to Morvana so she can use it to cement her power, or perhaps simply to torment for an eternity. They will not stop. They cannot be reasoned with. They are the reason entire worlds learned to fear the dark."
As he spoke, the overhead light in the hallway flickered. Once, twice, then died, plunging them into a deep grey twilight. It wasn't a power cut; the kitchen light was still on, casting a long, distorted shadow of Mal down the hall.
They both froze, listening.
There was no sound from the building's other apartments. No distant traffic. Nothing. It was as if they had been wrapped in a blanket of absolute silence.
Mal's form seemed to grow smaller. "They are close," he breathed. "The mark… it draws them. It weakens the barriers around this place. My power is still a flicker. I cannot fight them. Not yet."
The comfortable, familiar space of her apartment hallway suddenly felt like a trap. The walls seemed to press in, the shadows in the corners deepening, becoming solid and menacing. Every creak of the floorboards from the apartment above, which she usually ignored, now sounded like a footstep.
Maya looked from the terrifying, pulsing mark on her door to the small, frightened creature she had brought home from the rain. The Dark Lord was gone, replaced by a fugitive. And she was his only shield.
The light flickered back on. The mundane sounds of the city slowly filtered back in. But the cold dread remained, settled deep in their bones. The hunt had begun.