They say the night the moon died, the city kept breathing until it remembered how to panic.
Kael Vorrin was under a bus when it happened — knees slick with oil, face streaked with the glow of a failing streetlamp. He worked nights at the depot, fixing tired engines that coughed and spat like old men. The city at two in the morning belonged to mechanics and ghosts. He liked it that way.
The lamp above him snapped, once, twice, and went black as if someone had shut the world's eye.
For a moment the night simply waited. The air was a thin sheet. The only sound was the distant hiss of the harbor and the drip of water from the bus's rusted underside.
Then the sky answered.
It wasn't a sound you could name. It rose from the east like something rolling over in its sleep — not wind, not thunder, but a pressure that folded the hairs on his arms inward. People who had been shouting at each other over crates suddenly stopped, mid-word, their voices swallowed as if some invisible hand pinched the street's throat.
Kael crawled out from under the bus because he was built to move when the world asked. The depot smelled of grease and rain. A few men groped for their coats. One of them laughed, sharp, too loud, as if to prove the city still had a sense of humor.
Above the clouds there should have been a pale coin, patient and distant. Instead there was nothing. A flat, indifferent black that felt like a lid.
"Is that… an eclipse?" somebody asked.
Kael felt the word like a pebble hitting water, and the ripple that followed did not wash back. People looked at the sky the way animals look at a sudden hole in the ground.
The first thing to change was light. The shopfronts with their fake neon kept blinking on — lights that lied. They threw faces into relief and then slid them away. Shadows lengthened as if reaching for something they could not touch.
Then the shadows moved.
Not all at once. Not like a single thing waking. They lifted like hands and slid along walls. A child's shadow hopped off the pavement and darted toward a puddle. The puddle swallowed it like a mouth.
Someone screamed without meaning to. The laugh Kael had heard earlier fractured into a dozen small sounds and scattered.
He ran because running is what you do when gravity reshuffles its rules. He ran past the bakery where Marnie left a stool out for the night, past the tram that had stopped mid-arc like a toy whose spring had been cut. People streamed into the street, faces upturned, hands painting shapes in the dark air.
The voices began to change. They split into layers — a man shouting at a driver, and under that, a whisper repeating the same sentence a half-second later. The repeat was smoother, polite, as if memory itself were imitating speech.
At the intersection two blocks away, movement coalesced into something more than a trick of light. It started as a cluster of darker shapes near the café — umbrellas, coats, something blocking the pavement. Kael slowed. The city felt like a mouth, and he had stepped into its throat.
A woman crouched on the curb, clutching a stroller. She mouthed nothing, staring at the empty sky. Near her, a dog barked until the bark came back wrong — the echo barked behind, then the real dog went still and walked away without looking back.
From that cluster something unfolded: shadow-animals, low and wet with hunger. They were wrong in the way things are wrong when a rule gets broken. Limbs extended too long, joints bending the wrong way. They did not make a sound, but the air around them smelled of old leaves and iron.
Kael didn't think. Muscles did.
A shadow lunged at the woman with the stroller. It reached as darkness, a hand that gathered the light into its palm. The stroller jerking, the baby's blanket fluttered like one of the doomed banners he'd seen in nightmares.
Kael dove. He should have been thinking of stopping the thing. He should have been thinking of rescue ropes and light and how to unmake a thing that wasn't meant to be. Instead his fingers closed around cold metal and he shoved the stroller away. The shadow's hand met the bumper of the bus and frayed like cloth.
When his fingers left the metal, a burning pain tracked up his arm. He tasted rust and salt. A smear of blackness clung to his skin, like oil, like a bruise. The shadow hunched, surprised, as if it had expected softer prey.
That's when something touched the back of his neck.
Not fingers. Not wind. A pressure that tasted like a closed room, something ancient and quiet pressing behind his ribs. It was not pain at first. It was recognition, a small, hungry acknowledgement. The mark at the base of his skull — a faint scar he'd had since a kid fall — warmed.
A voice. Not in his ears. In the space behind his thought.
—Wake.
He had no name for it. He had no language because language would betray what slipped instead into the hollow of his mind. The presence was comfortable as a coat, dark as a pocket where you kept things you had no use for.
Wake, it said again. Wake.
Kael tried to pull away, to shrug off a feeling. He found himself answering aloud.
"What are you?" he said, and his own voice surprised him with steadiness.
—Name me, it returned.
He flinched. Names are anchors. They are the thing you use to hold a creature to a place. He had only the little words of the street, the sputter of jokes and grease, the names of buses and bolts.
The contact slid, patient and cold. You are empty, it said, and that emptiness smelled like a wound. Fill me.
Kael could have screamed. The street had time for that. Instead he found his mouth forming an ugly sound, half prayer, half command.
"Don't touch them," he heard himself say to no one in particular, and the sound landed with a weight he hadn't expected.
The presence hummed, pleased. It liked the string of refusal. It liked the idea of being held back. Too many things that wake want to eat. This one, whatever it was, preferred to be invited.
"Name," it said again.
Kael thought of a name and nearly gagged on it. The word that fit was not poetic. It was a patchwork. It was what he felt when the moon was full and his pockets were empty. It was cold, a smell of ash and the hollow places between people: Ashveil.
When he spoke it, the city inhaled.
Something peeled off the back of his neck and crawled like a shadow-snake along his spine, cool and oddly soothing. It pressed at his shoulder blades and unfurled there — not like a cloak, but like the first fold of a wing. For an instant he felt a connection to the thing he could not see: a line of thought that answered to him, that listened when he thought and nudged when he did not.
The shadow-creatures in the street paused. They cocked their heads, not sure how to act in the presence of the new rule. The woman with the stroller blinked as if waking from anesthesia. Her baby breathed and fussed. The world tilted back toward ordinary because someone had named the quiet.
Kael laughed, a short, hysteric sound that tasted like a bruise. He'd wanted nothing more than to keep his hands clean. He'd wanted nights of grease and a radio and pay enough to sleep through the storm. Now there was a thing living at the root of him that expected answers.
"Stay," he said to the presence, almost gentle. "Help me."
—We remember, it said, and the voice was not kind and not cruel. We do not forget.
The shadow at his back tightened, a cool pressure that made his limbs move better. He felt lighter, as if something that had been sitting in his chest had been lifted and handed back as purpose.
They moved together then, as if new and old had learned an awkward waltz. The shadow-sense slid along the alley like a hand reading braille, and Kael felt it map each footstep: where danger was hollow, where panic was thick, where somebody still possessed enough stubbornness to scream.
He learned fast. The shadow showed him how to listen for the things that had been wrong. He learned to send a flicker of light — not real light but a command pressed into the dark — and watched it scatter the nearest shadow-creature like dust. The creatures hissed, retreated into the seams of buildings, uncertain.
Not all could be saved. A man across the square convulsed and went still, his mouth open in a silent plea. The shadow at Kael's back hummed, and for a flicker he saw the man's face not as a man but as a ledger of small regrets. The voice said, We can keep some things. Choose.
Kael did not know how to choose. He chose the woman and the baby because the baby's fingers curled around blank air like a promise.
He chose to walk. With each step the hollow inside him filled a little — not with answers but with noise. The city was loud now in a way that mattered. It was full of things that wanted to be named. Ashveil listened, and his own thoughts no longer felt like his alone.
Far down the avenue, a siren began to wail. Someone had found a radio. Someone else had found a gun. The night was unraveling into a thousand small wars.
Kael kept moving, the shadow-breath warm at the nape of his neck. He should have been terrified of what that warmth meant. Instead, he felt oddly steady — a mechanic's calm, a man used to solving problems with spanners and patience.
We remember, Ashveil had said. We do not forget.
He repeated the phrase silently, tasting it. Memory would be dangerous now. Memory would be everything.
He did not know whether he had done the world a favor or a cruelty. He only knew that the moon was out and the city was no longer safe. He knew that something had woken inside him that would not settle back into sleep simply because the lamp came on.
Ahead, the depot's lights went out one by one in the row of workshops like a ribbon being cut. Beyond them, the harbor boiled with movement. Figures crossed the water in small stolen boats. Fires bloomed like small suns in the distance.
Kael tightened the collar of his jacket and pulled Sera's blank page from his pocket because he did not know what else to hold.
He set his jaw. If the night remembered, he would make it remember something else.
He would find out why the moon slept.
He would find out what Ashveil wanted.
He started to run.