No one remembers how the school day begins.
It bleeds in like water through concrete—slow, inevitable, staining everything gray. The fluorescent lights hum their monotonous hymn while lockers groan open like the mouths of iron beasts, swallowing backpacks and secrets with equal indifference. The air carries that particular cocktail of adolescent desperation: burnt cafeteria grease, drugstore body spray, and the metallic tang of unfulfilled dreams.
Brooklane High wasn't hell. Hell would have been more honest. This was purgatory—beige walls, beige tiles, beige souls shuffling through beige days. A factory for manufacturing compliance, where individuality went to die a slow, bureaucratic death.
In this cathedral of mediocrity, Beatrice Langley stood at her locker like a zealot at prayer. Class vice president, debate captain, and high priestess of academic excellence, she whispered speech notes to herself while her fingers danced across her phone screen.
Three commandments were taped to her locker door:
Finish speech draftGet gift for Mr. HanleyAvoid Mark until he stops being weird
She'd already failed the third by second period.
"I'm telling you, something's off about that kid," Mark was saying, his voice carrying that particular brand of confidence that belonged to boys who'd never been told to lower it. He leaned against Devon's locker with practiced casualness, as if the hallway were his personal stage.
Devon barely looked up from his protein bar. "You said that about the janitor last month."
"Mr. Rod has three different mops, dude. One for each floor. That's not normal."
"That's called hygiene."
"It's called suspicious." Mark's eyes narrowed with the intensity of someone who'd watched too many conspiracy documentaries. "But I'm talking about that other kid. The quiet one. Always sits by the window in Mrs. Chell's class—you know, the one with the broken blind."
Devon paused mid-chew. "Which kid?"
"Black hair. Always wears the same clothes. Sits alone at lunch." Mark gestured vaguely. "What's his name again?"
A strange silence fell between them, as if the air itself had forgotten how to carry sound. Devon's brow furrowed with the expression of someone trying to recall a dream upon waking.
"Peter?" Devon offered uncertainly.
"No... Percy?"
"Pryce," Devon said suddenly, like the name had been pulled from somewhere deep and dusty in his memory. "Yeah, Pryce."
Mark nodded slowly. "Right. Pryce." He rolled the name around his mouth like it tasted foreign. "But here's the thing—does he ever actually talk?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
"I..." Devon stared at his protein bar as if it might contain the answer. "I don't even remember if he's in our class."
He was. Third row, always to the left. By the window where the light fell like a spotlight on an empty stage.
But the strange thing wasn't that he was there. The strange thing was that he was always there, and yet somehow, no one could quite remember seeing him arrive.
*
Lunch at Brooklane High was democracy's ugliest child—a cafeteria where hierarchies crystallized over plastic trays and social death sentences were delivered with chocolate milk. The popular kids held court at their designated tables while the misfits claimed their corners like wounded animals marking territory.
Teachers prowled between the tables with the weary resignation of zookeepers, pretending not to see the vape pens changing hands or the freshman crying by the broken vending machine.
In the far corner, where autumn sunlight leaked through a cracked window and made the dust motes dance like lazy ghosts, sat a figure that belonged to none of these tribes.
Pryce.
Alone, as always. No tray before him, no drink, no friends. Just a worn black notebook and a plastic pen that never seemed to run dry. He occupied space the way shadows do—present but incorporeal, existing in the peripheral vision of a world too busy to look directly.
Students flowed around him like water around a stone. A girl once tripped and spilled orange juice near his table; he didn't flinch, didn't move, didn't even glance up from his notebook. By the next period, she couldn't recall his face.
Teachers calling roll would pause at his name—"Pryce?"—hear a quiet response from the back, and then forget they'd ever wondered about the voice that answered.
Because Pryce didn't disrupt. Didn't shine. Didn't decay. He simply existed in that liminal space between memory and forgetting, watching the world with eyes that catalogued everything and judged nothing.
He watched Beatrice tuck the same curl behind her ear four times before opening her water bottle.
Watched Mark laugh too loudly at his own jokes, checking to see who was impressed.
Watched Mr. Kinley slip a flask from his jacket pocket and pretend it was hand sanitizer.
Watched a sophomore pick at her salad like it had personally offended her ancestors.
All the while, Pryce sat in perfect stillness. No hunger. No thirst. No need for the small rituals that defined human existence.
Because Pryce wasn't entirely anymore. Hadn't been for a very long time.
And today, like every day, he was hunting.
Not for prey—that was too crude, too simple. He was hunting for something far more precious: desperation. The kind that ate at souls from the inside, that whispered poison in the dark hours before dawn.
The kind that made people willing to trade anything—everything—for a single moment of relief.
His pen moved across the notebook page in elegant strokes:
Subjects: 247Potential candidates: 3Current kids with mild desperation: Insufficient
He paused, pen hovering over the paper like a scalpel over skin. His supernatural senses, honed by centuries of practice, detected the usual cacophony of teenage emotions: jealousy, lust, anger, fear.
But none of it had reached the crystalline purity of true desperation. Not yet.
But it would. It always did.
Pryce had learned patience in ways that would drive mortals mad. He could wait. Time meant nothing to a being who had watched empires rise and fall, who had walked through centuries like a man walks through rooms.
He would sit in this cafeteria, in this school, in this carefully constructed identity until someone broke badly enough to seek him out.
Because they always did, eventually.
The desperate always found their way to the Ancient Demon.
And when they did, Pryce would be ready to offer them exactly what they thought they wanted—and extract a price they'd never truly understand until it was far too late.
He closed the notebook with a soft snap and rose from his seat, moving through the cafeteria like mist through a graveyard. Students continued their conversations, teachers continued their patrols, and life continued its relentless forward march.
None of them noticed he'd been there at all.