"Some shadows… don't need light to prove they exist."
⸻
The air was thick with the scent of rain, though the sky hadn't wept for days.
Luin sat at the edge of the rooftop, watching the smoke rise from the distant chimneys.
From up here, the city seemed to breathe slowly, tired, groaning beneath the weight of something unseen.
Sounds in the distance. Wooden carts dragged by horses. Children shouting.
A vendor repeating the same call he'd made every morning.
But Luin heard none of it.
Something inside him had begun to stir.
The Seal… was no longer silent.
⸻
"Sometimes I feel like my skin… isn't mine."
He said it softly.
No one replied.
Yet a calm voice rose behind him, as if it already knew what he was thinking:
"Does it have to be yours… all the time?"
Luin turned sharply.
A man stood at the rooftop door. Simple clothes, dull brown hair, a face so ordinary the eye could almost forget it.
But he stood with a confidence that didn't belong to the ordinary.
He smiled gently.
"My name is Willem."
⸻
Luin didn't move. Didn't answer.
But he didn't feel afraid either.
Strangely… the man's presence calmed something within him.
Willem sat a few steps away.
"I've been watching you. Or rather… I noticed you when the Church did."
Luin frowned.
"You're one of them?"
Willem chuckled lightly.
"If I were, we wouldn't be talking. You'd just… vanish. Like the others."
⸻
A pause.
"Then why watch me?"
"Because I saw your face… and in it, I saw someone I once knew."
"Dead?"
"Killed. By men in white."
⸻
Something in Luin's chest shifted.
Not pity — something deeper. An echo.
⸻
"I don't understand what's happening to me."
"You won't, not while you keep running from it."
"What do you mean?"
Willem pointed to Luin's chest.
"The Seal isn't born from power. It's born from pain that decided to fight back.
If you don't understand your pain… it'll use you before you ever use it."
⸻
Luin stayed silent. Then quietly asked:
"What do you want from me?"
"Nothing. Just to give you a choice — learn what's inside you… or let it consume you."
⸻
Before Luin could respond, a faint creak echoed from behind the wall.
Someone was listening.
He turned, but found no one.
When he looked back, Willem was gone.
Only a small note remained where he sat.
"When you open a door… make sure you know who's waiting behind it."
⸻
That night was cold — not from the air, but from something deeper.
The wind blew, but moved nothing.
The light flickered, but showed no path.
And the silence… felt wrong.
⸻
Luin sat by a wall in a narrow alley behind the fish market, staring at his fingers.
Had they grown longer? Changed?
A simple question — yet it haunted him for days.
He didn't have time to think longer, because the voice came again — from nowhere and everywhere at once:
"Luin… are you ready now?"
He looked up quickly. No one.
"You've taken too long…"
He rose slowly, trembling.
The voice wasn't like his usual hallucinations, nor the whispers that followed the first Seal.
It was different. Softer. Sad.
And far too close.
⸻
He walked — not knowing why.
Step by step, the alleys narrowed, as if the city itself was folding inward to swallow him.
Until he reached a crooked wooden door that hadn't been there before.
He didn't think. Didn't hesitate.
He opened it.
⸻
The room was unlike anything in the district.
Rotting floorboards. The scent of burnt wax.
And a massive mirror hanging from the ceiling by black ropes.
In front of it stood a boy, identical to him.
But it wasn't him.
The boy wore a patched gray shirt, his eyes fixed on the mirror as if it might devour him.
Without turning, he spoke:
"I thought they'd save me."
"I thought he would help me."
"But he sold me, just like the one before him."
Luin froze. The mirror showed two reflections, his present self, and a younger, terrified version of him, bound and shaking.
Then came the whisper, distorted, yet familiar.
The Surgeon's voice.
Not speaking to him, but repeating something said long ago — words buried deep.
"I told him: never trust anyone."
"I told him: love is a slow poison."
"But he didn't listen. He wanted to believe."
"And the result?"
"Was you."
Luin's breath caught.
Who was "he"? A friend? Himself?
He didn't know.
But the last words cut like knives:
"The result was you."
As if his very existence was born from betrayal.
⸻
He stepped back.
The air thickened.
The walls seemed to breathe.
The boy turned to him, same face, hollow eyes.
"You'll be sold again, Luin."
"Unless you kill first."
Pain exploded in his chest.
Like nails driven into his heart.
He couldn't breathe.
And a voice, warped, internal, whispered:
"The Seal… hears."
⸻
The lights went out.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the alley.
The ground damp beneath him, as if all the city's moisture had gathered there.
No door. No boy. No mirror.
Only a shadow kneeling, gasping, as if choking on truth.
⸻
Elsewhere, atop an abandoned church,
a man in white robes stood, his face hidden behind a mask half gold, half bone.
He wrote in a black notebook, murmuring:
"The second Seal… begins to twist."
Then turned toward the city,
where darkness revealed less than it hid.
"Watch him only at night. No one interferes until he remembers… who betrayed whom."
⸻
The next day, no sounds.
No tavern noise. No footsteps. Not even the window's usual groan in the wind.
Only Luin's breathing, slow, uneven, as if his ribs were learning to breathe again.
Sitting on the floor, in the dim corner of his room.
Eyes unfocused. Hands clasped around his knees.
⸻
"The light feels distant… like someone closed the sky."
He whispered, or maybe only thought it.
He wasn't sure if his voice still belonged to him.
Then came the echo, his own voice, answering from the dark:
"Why are you afraid?"
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are. All this… over an old bruise."
"A bruise?"
Luin laughed, a broken laugh.
"Something was taken from me… something I can't even name."
A faint gray thread slid across his eye.
Maybe a candle's dying shadow, or something inside him burning away.
"It all began with the voice..."
"The voice beneath the skin. It said I opened the Seal. That I'm one of them… the cursed? the chosen? the lost?"
No answer.
"Why won't anyone answer?"
"Because you're more than one person now."
"Luin… isn't Luin anymore."
He clenched his clothes. Trembled.
Not from cold, from something rising inside, slow and rotten.
"Where did it start?"
"With the child? The blood? No… long before that."
He remembered the vision.
The weak, naïve face he once had.
The betrayal that followed.
"I told him not to trust anyone..."
"But he did. And the price… was me."
He shut his eyes tight.
Behind the darkness, the symbol burned again, the circle on his skin pulsing, then vanished.
But its echo remained.
In his chest. His eyes. His heart.
"It's not a Seal… it's a mouth. A mouth swallowing me from the inside."
⸻
Then came the questions, sharp and cold:
"Do I want to know who I was?"
"Do I want to return?"
"Or do I fear… that who I was was too weak to survive?"
He opened his eyes.
Nothing in the room had changed.
Yet everything had.
The shadows felt heavier.
The Seal was watching.
"What I hate isn't ignorance… it's doubt."
"Ignorance leaves me lost… but doubt binds me while I believe I'm free."
⸻
He raised his head.
No more sleep.
No more running.
No more screaming.
Only one desire remained:
To know.
Even if the cost was his pride, his memory… or his life.
⸻
"Fear is no longer my enemy…"
"It's the only proof that I'm still human."
⸻
In a dark chamber behind the Church's white walls… the mirror watched.
Two figures in gray robes with silver edges and blank white masks stood before it.
"He's begun talking to himself," one whispered.
"The Seal is whispering back," the other replied.
A third man stepped from the shadows, hands behind his back.
His voice firm, deliberate:
"The Spirit Division is ready. If the change continues… we take him tonight."
Silence.
"And Willem?" one asked.
The third man didn't move.
"Luin doesn't know… that his friend is the one he should fear most."
The mirror went dark.
⸻
End of Chapter Eight.