The sound of shattering glass was the last thing Marcus heard before the world went white. Not a peaceful white, but a searing, blinding flash that felt like a bolt of lightning had struck the center of the classroom.
When his vision finally cleared, Marcus was no longer in his seat. He was stumbling through the school's main exit, his lungs burning as if he'd swallowed hot coals. He didn't remember standing up.
He didn't remember the hallway. He didn't remember the screams that must have followed the darkness in Room 402. All he knew was the taste of copper in his mouth and the frantic, animal instinct to run.
He burst through the heavy oak doors and into the afternoon light. But the sun wasn't warm. It was a pale, sickly disc hanging in a sky the color of a tarnished silver coin.
"It was a panic attack," Marcus wheezed, leaning against a cold brick wall, his chest heaving. "Just a breakdown. Overworked. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep."
He looked at his hands. They were shaking so violently he had to shove them into his pockets. He waited for the sirens. He waited for the shouting students to pour out of the building behind him, crying for help, talking about the monster that used to be Mr. Halloway and the man in the leather coat.
But no one came.
The school sat in an eerie, unnatural silence. The windows reflected the grey sky like dead eyes. There was no blood. No shattered glass. Just the distant, muffled sound of a lawnmower from three blocks away.
"I'm going crazy," he whispered to the empty air. "I've finally snapped."
He walked home in a daze, his footsteps heavy and clumsy. Every shadow he passed seemed to linger a second too long. Every crow perched on a telephone wire seemed to turn its head in perfect unison to watch him pass. By the time he reached the white picket fence of his home in the suburbs of Ramla, his mind was a frayed knot of exhaustion and denial.
He needed normal. He needed the smell of his mother's cooking and the low hum of the evening news. He needed to be Marcus Miller again—the QA trainee, the student, the son. Not the "Prince" the voices spoke of.
"Marcus? Is that you, honey?"
The voice of his adoptive mother, Elena, drifted from the kitchen. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. It was solid. It was real.
"Yeah, Mom. It's me," he called back, his voice cracking.
He stepped into the dining room. The table was set. The scent of roasted chicken and rosemary filled the air.
His father, Michael, was already seated, unfolding a napkin with the methodical precision of a man who had spent thirty years as an accountant.
"You're late, son," Michael said, looking up with a gentle smile. "Finals go well?"
Marcus sat down, his muscles screaming for rest. "It was... intense. I think I need to lay off the energy drinks, Dad. I had a bit of a dizzy spell in the middle of the test."
"Hard work pays off, Marcus," Michael replied.
Then the distortion started.
As Michael continued to speak, his voice began to warp. It started as a subtle vibration, like a scratched vinyl record.
Within seconds, the words lost their shape. Michael's mouth was moving, his expression remained pleasant and fatherly, but the sound coming out was a discordant mess of high-pitched static and low-frequency growls.
"Bzzt—crrrk—the market is—skreeeee—expected to—vrrrrm—stable."
Marcus gripped his fork, his knuckles turning white. He looked at his mother. She was nodding in agreement, her lips moving in a silent rhythm of domestic chatter, but her voice was even worse—a wet, bubbling sound like air being blown through a straw into thick syrup.
"Mom? Dad?" Marcus's voice was a panicked whisper. "I can't... I can't understand you. What's happening?"
They didn't react. They kept eating, their forks clinking against the porcelain plates with a sound that felt like hammers hitting his skull.
Marcus looked away, desperate for something stable to focus on, but the room was changing.
The floral wallpaper—yellow roses that Elena had picked out three summers ago—began to darken. At first, he thought it was a trick of the fading light, but then he saw the moisture. Small, bead-like droplets began to form on the petals of the roses.
They weren't water. They were black.
The walls began to "weep." The droplets joined together, forming long, thick streaks of obsidian oil that trailed down toward the floorboards. The oil moved with a strange, purposeful intelligence, zig-zagging around the family photos hanging in the hallway as if it refused to touch them.
"It's not real," Marcus told himself, his breath coming in shallow gasps. "It's a visual hallucination. Sensory deprivation. My brain is misfiring."
He reached out a trembling hand. He had to know. If his hand passed through the oil, it was a dream. If it was dry, he was safe.
He touched the streak of black liquid running down the wall next to his chair.
The cold hit him first. It wasn't the cold of ice; it was a vacuum, a total absence of heat that seemed to suck the life straight out of his fingertips. His skin went numb instantly.
Then came the smell.
As his finger broke the surface of the oil, a stench erupted into the room—the cloying, heavy scent of an open grave that had been sealed for centuries. It was the smell of damp earth, stale air, and something ancient that had long ago forgotten what it was like to be alive.
Marcus pulled his hand back, gasping. His fingertip was stained a deep, bruised purple, and the black oil clung to his skin like a parasite, refusing to be shaken off.
"Marcus, dear, you've hardly touched your peas."
The static in his mother's voice cleared for a split second, long enough for the sentence to pierce through his terror. He looked at her. Elena was leaning toward him, her face filled with genuine, heartbreaking concern. She looked so normal—the soft wrinkles around her eyes, the grey hair tucked behind her ears.
She reached out her hand, her palm open and warm, intending to feel his forehead for a fever.
"You're burning up," she said, her voice warbling again into that wet, distorted static. "Let me see..."
Marcus sat frozen, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
As her hand drifted across the table, nearing his face, the light in the dining room died. Not all at once, but in a localized sphere around his mother.
The air behind her chair began to thicken. The black oil on the walls suddenly stopped flowing, freezing in place.
From the shadows of the hallway, something emerged.
It didn't walk; it simply was.
It was a figure of absolute darkness, a silhouette that seemed to be cut out of the fabric of the universe itself. It stood ten feet tall, its head brushing against the ceiling fan, though the fan didn't move as the entity passed through it.
It had no face—no eyes, no mouth, no features—only a smooth, void-like surface where a head should be.
Marcus tried to scream, but his jaw felt as though it had been welded shut.
The faceless shadow leaned over Elena. It moved with a slow, sickening grace, its body stretching like pulled taffy. Long, spindly arms—much too long for any human—unfolded from its sides. The fingers were like needles of charcoal, tapering into points that seemed to blur the air around them.
Elena continued to smile, her hand just inches from Marcus's cheek, completely unaware of the nightmare looming over her.
The shadow lowered its hand. Those long, obsidian fingers hovered just a hair's breadth above her throat, twitching with a rhythmic, predatory hunger.
Marcus looked into the void where the creature's face should be.
"The vessel is guarded," a voice boomed—not in the room, but inside Marcus's own skull, vibrating his teeth. "But the woman is meat. Shall we feast, little prince?"
The shadow's fingers began to close around his mother's neck.
Marcus's vision tunneled. The rosemary-scented air turned to ash. He felt the entity inside him—the one that had roared in the classroom—start to claw at the walls of his stomach, desperate to be let out.
"No," Marcus choked out, the word tearing at his throat.
His mother's hand finally touched his forehead. Her skin was warm, a terrifying contrast to the freezing void standing behind her.
"Oh, Marcus," she whispered through the static. "Your eyes... why are your eyes turning black?"
The shadow behind her tilted its faceless head, and its fingers touched her skin.