The bathroom was no longer a sanctuary of tile and porcelain; it had become a kill-box. As the first of the Hounds—a creature that looked like a starved wolf woven from jagged wire and oily smoke—shattered the remaining window frame, the Mentor moved.
"Out! Now!" the man in the leather coat roared. He didn't look back to see if Marcus was following. He didn't have to. The shockwave of the Mentor's first strike, a silver arc of starlight that cleaved the Hound's head from its shoulders, was enough to send Marcus scrambling toward the door.
Marcus didn't stop to look at the pool of black sludge eating through his mother's expensive linoleum. He didn't stop to wonder why his "parents" hadn't come running at the sound of a window imploding and a man screaming commands. He burst through the bathroom door, his bare feet slapping against the hallway carpet, his chest burning with that strange, violet heat.
"Mom? Dad?" he croaked, but the names felt like ash in his mouth.
He reached the top of the stairs and looked down into the foyer. The front door was wide open, swinging gently on its hinges. The evening light spilling into the house wasn't the warm, golden hue of a Mediterranean sunset. It was the color of a fresh bruise—a sickly, deep purple-veined with streaks of gangrenous green.
The world outside looked like a photograph that had been left in the rain, the colors bleeding and running together until the trees looked like twisted limbs and the houses like rotting teeth.
Marcus took the stairs three at a time, nearly tripping over his own feet. He reached the bottom and lunged for the front door, his only thought to get to the street, to find a person—a real person—who could tell him this was all a nightmare.
He hit the sidewalk and stopped, his breath coming in ragged, freezing gasps.
The street was empty. Not just quiet, but empty. The cars were still parked in the driveways, but they looked like rusted husks that had been sitting for decades. The lawns were grey and brittle. And the sun... the sun was a jagged hole in the sky, weeping a dark radiance that offered no warmth.
"They are here," the voice inside him purred. It sounded excited now. It sounded like a child on Christmas morning. "The little crawlers. Can you feel them, Marcus? They can taste your fear. It's like honey to them."
"Shut up," Marcus whimpered, clutching his head. "Just shut up."
He began to run. He didn't have a destination; he just knew he couldn't stay in front of the house. As he moved, the first streetlight at the corner of his block began to flicker.
Buzz. Snap. Pop.
The bulb exploded, raining shards of glass onto the pavement. Marcus didn't look back. He kept running, his lungs feeling as though they were being lined with crushed glass.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
One by one, the streetlights followed him. It was a rhythmic execution of light, a wave of darkness that trailed exactly ten feet behind his heels. Every time a light died, the purple sky seemed to lean closer, pressing down on him, trying to squeeze the air from his chest.
He turned the corner onto the main road, hoping to see the usual traffic of Ramla—delivery trucks, commuters, teenagers on scooters.
Nothing. Only the bruised sky and the dying lights.
Then, he heard the sound. It wasn't a growl or a footstep. It was a glitch.
A sound like a corrupted digital file, a scratching static that tore through the silence. Marcus skidded to a halt, his sneakers screeching against the asphalt.
Ten yards ahead, the shadows cast by a row of overgrown hedges began to twitch. They didn't move with the wind. They moved against it. Three shapes detached themselves from the darkness.
They were "Shadow Crawlers." At first glance, they looked vaguely human, but their proportions were all wrong. Their arms were as long as their entire bodies, ending in fingers that had too many knuckles. They didn't have skin; they looked like they were made of television static and black ink.
One of them tilted its head, and for a second, its form flickered—it disappeared for a heartbeat, reappearing three feet closer, its body trailing "after-images" of itself.
Scrrrritch-vrrrrm.
The static sound increased. They were glitching in and out of reality, moving toward him in jagged, unnatural bursts of speed.
"Stay back!" Marcus yelled, holding out his hands as if that would stop them.
The first Crawler lunged. It didn't run; it simply ceased to exist in one spot and materialized in the air in front of Marcus, its clawed hand reaching for his eyes.
Marcus reacted before he could think. He threw himself to the side, rolling across the rough asphalt. The Crawler's claws missed his face by an inch, striking the pavement with a sound like a hammer hitting a nail. The asphalt didn't just crack; it withered, turning to grey dust where the creature touched it.
Marcus scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against his ribs. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. He turned and ran in the opposite direction, but the Crawlers were faster. They glitched through the air, appearing on the roofs of cars, on the sides of houses, always circling him, always closing the gap.
"Borrow it," the Entity whispered, its voice now a low, vibrating roar that made Marcus's teeth ache. "You are dying, little bird. Borrow my shadow. Let me break them for you."
"No!" Marcus screamed. "I won't let you in!"
He saw an opening—a narrow alleyway squeezed between a shuttered grocery store and an old apartment building. It was dark, but it was narrow. If he could get in there, maybe they couldn't swarm him.
He dived into the alley, his shoulders brushing against the damp, brick walls.
The smell of rot and ozone followed him, growing stronger with every step. He ran deeper into the darkness, his hands searching for a back door, a fire escape, anything.
But the alley didn't go through.
Ten yards in, Marcus slammed into a solid brick wall. A dead end.
He spun around, his back pressed against the cold, rough bricks. The three Shadow Crawlers were standing at the entrance of the alley. They weren't rushing in. They were standing perfectly still, their forms flickering like dying candles.
Then, they began to laugh. It wasn't a human laugh; it was the sound of a thousand radio stations playing at once, a cacophony of distorted voices and static.
"Come on then!" Marcus yelled, his voice breaking into a sob of pure terror. "Do it! Kill me!"
"They won't kill you," the Entity whispered, and Marcus could almost feel a cold, phantom smile spreading across his own face. "They are the harvesters. They will take your limbs, then your eyes, then your tongue. They will leave just enough of you to be delivered to the King."
The Crawlers moved forward, their movements no longer jagged but smooth and predatory.
Marcus looked down at the ground, hoping to find a rock, a piece of wood, anything to use as a weapon. But the ground was gone.
The shadows beneath his feet—the dark, elongated shape cast by his own body in the bruised light—were moving.
The shadow didn't lie flat on the pavement. It began to liquefy. The blackness rose up from the ground like boiling oil, thick and viscous. Marcus tried to step away, but his feet were stuck. The shadow had become a trap, a pool of living tar that held him fast.
"What is this?" he gasped, pulling at his legs.
The liquid shadow began to grow. It rose up the walls of the alley, forming thick, pulsating bars of obsidian. Within seconds, the dead end had been transformed. The mouth of the alley was being sealed by a cage of solidified darkness.
Marcus reached out to touch the bars, but as his hand neared them, they hummed with a violent, repulsive energy. They weren't just bars; they were ribs. He was standing inside the skeletal structure of something massive, something that was manifesting through the very ground he stood on.
The three Shadow Crawlers stopped at the edge of the cage. They looked at the rising shadows with something that resembled reverence—or perhaps, utter terror.
From the liquid shadow at Marcus's feet, a shape began to rise. It wasn't a monster. It was a person.
Or at least, it had the shape of one.
The figure was made of the same obsidian oil that had wept from his dining room walls. It had no clothes, no hair, no face—only a smooth, blank surface of reflecting blackness. It rose until it was a head taller than Marcus, its presence so heavy that Marcus felt the air being squeezed out of his lungs.
The figure reached out a hand. It didn't have fingers; the hand simply melted into five long, tapered points.
"The King's blood is too precious for these scavengers," the voice of the Entity roared, but this time, the voice came from the figure in front of him. "I am the Shadow of what you will become, Marcus. Do not fear the cage. The cage is the only thing keeping the world from you."
The figure's hand touched Marcus's chest, directly over the three claw marks.
The violet heat exploded into a blinding, white-hot agony. Marcus's back arched, his head hitting the brick wall with a dull thud. He felt his vision begin to fracture. He saw the Shadow Crawlers being pulled into the black bars of the cage, their forms screaming in digital static as they were absorbed, their essence being fed into the shadow-figure standing before him.
"Now," the figure whispered, its blank face inches from Marcus's. "Let us show them why the Abyss is afraid of the dark."
The liquid shadow began to crawl up Marcus's neck, over his chin, toward his mouth. He tried to scream, but the shadow flowed into his throat, cold and thick.
Just as the darkness swallowed his vision, he heard the sound of the Mentor's silver blade striking the outside of the cage—a distant, metallic ring that felt a thousand miles away.
"Marcus! Hold on to the light!" the Mentor's voice echoed, faint and desperate.
But the light was gone. There was only the bruise-colored sky, the cage of ribs, and the crushing, absolute weight of the inheritance.
Marcus's eyes snapped open one last time before the blackout.
They weren't gold anymore. They were two pits of endless, starless night.