Nocthar lay there with the remnants of life dissipating from his eyes.
The sky above was gray, same as every day he'd ever known. Concrete dust settled on his cheeks like dirty snow. He couldn't feel his legs anymore.
Couldn't feel the power, all five thousand souls, the terror he'd consumed, godlike strength he'd stolen, were now leaking out of the hole in his chest.
This is how it ends, he thought. Not feared nor worshipped. Just... empty.
And then the memories came.
Before the pollution,
John Hale — that had been his name. Not Nocthar. John. A man who weighed sixty-two kilograms, soaking wet, with wrists like twigs and a posture that made him seem smaller than he was.
He saw the cubicle and flickering fluorescent light. The spreadsheet on his monitor, columns of numbers blurring together until his eyes burned.
"John." The voice still made him flinch, even in memory.
Mr. Hendricks, his supervisor, standing over him with coffee breath and a smile that showed too many teeth. "I need the Parkson report by morning. And the quarterly reviews. And while you're at it, Chen's team left their filing, you can handle that too, can't you?"
"Sir, I already have—"
"Are you saying no?" Hendricks cut him off, leaning in close.
"Because we both know what happens to people who say no in this company. Your wife doesn't work, does she?
How's that mortgage, John? Three months behind, if I recall?"
John said nothing, like he always did.
He took the folders. Stayed until 11 PM. The cleaning staff ignored him, vacuuming around his chair like he was furniture.
The others were worse. They didn't even need leverage, they just enjoyed it.
Jamison "accidentally" spilling coffee on his keyboard.
Patel "forgetting" to CC him on critical emails so he'd take the blame for missed deadlines.
The birthday card they'd circulated last year, signed by everyone, with a drawing of him as a human doormat.
We can wipe our feet on John! someone had written, and everyone laughed.
He'd smiled too, because that's what you did. You smiled, took it, and you hoped that if you were small, quiet, and invisible enough, they'd eventually forget to hurt you.
At home.
The apartment smelled of stale air and her perfume, too much of it. Aggressively floral, like she was trying to mask something rotten.
"You're late." Deborah didn't look up from her phone. She was on the couch, the one he'd paid for, wearing the robe he'd bought her, in the home his salary maintained.
"Overtime. Hendricks needed—"
"I don't care what Hendricks needed." She finally looked at him, and her eyes were the same color they'd been when she was beautiful to him, green, like new leaves. But now they just looked hard, filled with malicious intent and viciousness.
"The sink's been leaking for three days. Three days, John. Are you incompetent, or just lazy?"
"I'll call the plumber tomorrow—"
"With what money?" She laughed, and it wasn't a kind sound. "You barely keep us fed. My mother was right about you. Worthless. "
He'd learned not to argue, and that "I'm sorry" was the only phrase that sometimes, sometimes — delayed what came next.
But that night, he was too tired. Too hollow. He'd stood there with his folder of extra work, his back screaming from twelve hours in a chair not meant for human spines, and he'd said, very quietly:
"I do everything. Everything. And you—"
The remote control hit his temple. Then her hand, next came the ceramic mug, crashing onto his face, which broke and opened a gash above his eyebrow that he'd hidden with a bandage and an excuse about "slipping in the shower."
She was bigger than him. Stronger. Had been since the first year of marriage, when stress had eaten away the little muscle he'd had, while she'd gained weight that somehow translated to force when her palm struck his face.
He'd lain on the kitchen floor that night, bleeding slightly, listening to her call her mother to complain about how useless and pathetic he was, how she wished she'd married literally anyone else.
He'd wanted to die.
He'd stood at the bathroom mirror the next morning, looking at the bruise blooming on his cheekbone, and cut on his forehead, with the eyes of a man who had been systematically erased from his own life.
I wish, he'd thought, staring at his reflection. I wish the world feared and respected me. I wish they knew what it was like to be small, to be nothing, to be....
He'd gripped the sink, tears streaming, hating himself for crying, hating himself for being weak, for being this timid and pitiful.
The wish crystallized into something violent.
A prayer screamed into the void of his existence.
I wish they would ALL fear me. EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM.
He'd never felt such concentrated hate. Such pure, undiluted need. It burned through him like acid, consuming the last fragments of John Hale, leaving behind something raw, hungry and desperate.
And the world answered.
The Pollution.
They called it the Inkforce Incident afterward. But in that moment, there was no name, only horror.
The sky tore open.
Not metaphorically nor poetically, but the actual fabric of the atmosphere above the city split, and something poured through. Not light nor darkness, but something inbetween. A viscous, liquid presence that moved like ink through water, spreading, consuming and corrupting.
John was still at the mirror when it hit his building.
The window exploded inward. The Inkforce didn't just enter, it invaded. Pouring down his throat, into his lungs, through his pores, rewriting him at the cellular level. He felt his bones dissolve, muscles liquefy, organs rearrange into configurations that shouldn't exist.
The pain was conceptual.
He screamed. Screamed until his vocal cords shredded, and it became a wet gurgle, until he was no longer sure he had a mouth to scream with. His body was being unmade, piece by piece, cell by cell, his very existence being rewritten by the Inkforce's alien will.
Around him, he heard others. Hundreds. Thousands. Their screams harmonized into a symphony of annihilation. Some were closer, Deborah, pounding on the bathroom door, demanding to know what was happening. Her screams joined the chorus. Then stopped abruptly, replaced by something wrong, wet and hungry.
The Inkforce was transforming them. Those without the mental fortitude, or perhaps those without the specific emotional resonance became abominations. Flesh that moved without bones. Mouths that opened in places mouths shouldn't be. Things that had been human but were now only screaming.
John should have died.
Should have joined them and dissolved into the collective nightmare the city was becoming.
But he'd made a wish .
As his body broke down, and his DNA unraveled, his consciousness teetered on the edge of oblivion, that wish — I wish they would all fear me, burned like a star in the center of his dissolving mind. The Inkforce tasted and fed on it.
It found in him a vessel perfectly shaped for a specific kind of power.
The transformation twisted, where others became mindless abominations, John became something else. The Inkforce didn't just mutate him, it granted him something else. Took his desperate, broken prayer and made it manifest.
He felt their fear before he understood what he was feeling.
The survivors hiding in closets, under desks, behind barricades. Their terror radiated from them like heat from a furnace, and John — Nocthar the devourer of fear, The one beloved by dread herself. The name come to him unbiddenly, a title rather than an identity, drank it in.
The first taste nearly killed him with ecstasy.
It was power. Real power, and not the pathetic illusion of authority Hendricks wielded nor the brute force Deborah used. This was transcendent strength. The actual emotional energy of human terror, converted into physical might, speed, and sharpened senses that could hear a heartbeat from three rooms away, into vision that could see the glow of fear radiating from a body like an aura.