Lucien's body jerked in bed, lungs dragging in air as though he'd been drowning. The room around him was still, dim with the gray half-light before dawn, but in his head, her screams still echoed.
His mother's face had been pale with terror, her arms reaching for him as the voidspawn tore into her. The shapes were never fixed—sometimes claws, sometimes teeth, sometimes the jagged grin of something that laughed while it devoured her alive. The dream had never once changed in fifteen years. Neither had his reaction.
Lucien's white eyes opened, expression flat, and a long, weary sigh escaped his lips. He no longer woke in terror. Terror would have been a mercy. Terror meant something inside him still broke when he saw her die. Now, it was routine. A ritual. Night after night.
Nightmares no longer scared him. They only exhausted him.
He sat up slowly, brushing damp strands of his snow-white hair from his face. His eyes—colorless, blank—stared at the floorboards. To strangers, he looked blind. Pitying looks, cautious whispers, muttered questions of how he even survived in this world. But Lucien was far from blind.
If anything, he saw too clearly.
Threads of essence clung to every being he looked at—fine, shifting strands of light, color, and shadow that whispered of what they were. A human's glow, steady and warm. A voidwalker's flickering presence, darker, jagged, wrong. He saw it all as naturally as breathing.
The gift made him invaluable—if he chose to use it. But it also marked him. Every day of his life, Lucien was reminded that he wasn't like the others. He was something else. Something apart.
Something alien.
He dragged himself from bed, stretching his shoulders as his thoughts drifted back to the world outside his small apartment.
Fifteen years ago, a wound had split open in the sky and bled into the world. The scholars called it the Rift. The people had named it something simpler, something crueler: the Crack into the Void.
From it had come the horrors—creatures born of shadow and hunger. Spirits of malice, ghouls that walked on broken limbs, demons with too many mouths, onis whose laughter split bone, and worse things that slithered without names. They were called voidwalkers, for they had walked out of the void and never left.
Some—rare, strange, unpredictable—chose to help humans. The rest fed on them.
So humanity adapted. They built warning sirens, sealed bunkers beneath their cities, and trained men and women to fight back. Slayers, they were called—those who wielded old rites and half-remembered god-given techniques to capture, destroy, or twist the invaders into tools.
To most, it was survival. To Lucien, it was noise.
The monsters weren't what haunted him. He had seen his greatest horror at the age of ten, and it had followed him every night since. Everything else was just an echo.
The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, stirring warm air. His refrigerator buzzed quietly from the corner, the single faithful companion to his solitude. His room was simple, stripped bare of luxury: a bed with worn sheets, a wardrobe with a tall mirror, a tiny kitchen space with a heater, three battered pots, and a toaster that worked when it wanted to. A trash bin sat near the door like a forgotten sentinel.
Two doors divided his life—one leading to the cramped bathroom, the other to the outside world.
Normal. Mundane. Almost disappointingly ordinary, given the horrors scratching at the edges of existence.
But on the head of his bedframe rested one reminder that his life wasn't quite normal: a rusted sword. The blade was chipped, dulled, the kind of thing sold as decoration to tourists or abandoned in pawn shops. It had no shine, no edge. Yet Lucien never threw it away.
Sometimes, he swore it whispered.
A sudden siren cut through the quiet, shrill and piercing. The walls trembled faintly with the sound, a reminder drilled into every citizen's bones: danger was near.
Lucien didn't flinch. He simply tilted his head toward the speaker embedded in the corner of his ceiling as a woman's voice followed, tinny but urgent.
"Warning. Level-Three threat approaching District Seven. Estimated time of arrival: fifteen minutes. Civilians are advised to evacuate to the nearest bunker immediately."
" Repeat—Level-Three threat. Entity is identified as a human host possessed by an evil spirit, designation: the Clown."
The voice wavered as though she, too, didn't want to say the next part.
"The Clown is moving house to house. It is armed. It is killing indiscriminately. Fifteen minutes until arrival."
The siren wailed again, stretching on and on until it faded into the hum of the city.
Lucien sat back down on the bed. His pale eyes flicked once toward the mirror, then the rusted sword, then the refrigerator. The message was clear: get out, run, hide.
Instead, he exhaled through his nose, long and slow.
"Fifteen minutes," he muttered to himself. "Plenty of time."
He stood, stretching again as though the only threat he faced was boredom, and wandered toward the bathroom.
Lucien let the siren fade into silence before he finally pushed himself to his feet. His movements were unhurried, deliberate, as though the warning had been nothing more than a reminder to stretch. People outside were already scrambling toward bunkers, clutching children, dragging supplies, screaming for neighbors. Lucien heard them faintly through the walls.
He didn't move any faster.
The bathroom door creaked as he stepped inside. Steam rose minutes later, and when he emerged, his white hair clung damply to his temples. He wiped the mirror clean with the flat of his palm, staring at the pale reflection that gazed back—white eyes, colorless and depthless. They stared back at him without judgment, without feeling. He dressed methodically, pulling on a plain shirt and trousers, fastening each button as though the city outside wasn't on borrowed time.
His refrigerator hummed when he opened it, the faint chill brushing his skin. A single bottle of water sat inside. He plucked it out, setting it beside the stove. Eggs cracked in a pan, yolks hissing as they touched hot metal. The smell of scrambled eggs filled the apartment, almost homely in its simplicity. He toasted leftover bread, plated it, and carried the meal back to his bed as though he had all the time in the world.
The siren's echo still clung faintly in the air, but it could not compete with the scrape of his fork against the plate.
He set the fork down. Closed his eyes.
Both hands came together, fingers interlocked, head bowed in the gesture his mother had taught him. A prayer.
It was muscle memory now, hollow in its intent. He knew the gods didn't listen. They hadn't answered fifteen years ago, when he'd begged them to save her. They hadn't answered on any of the nights since.
Still, the habit clung like a scar. He prayed, not to gods, but to the memory of a woman torn from him. A small act of defiance against forgetting.
His lips moved silently. Then he opened his eyes and let his hands fall apart.
The fork scraped once more against the plate.
The floor lurched.
The entire apartment rattled violently as though something massive had slammed into the earth just outside. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, the mirror clattered against the wardrobe, and the refrigerator buzzed louder, shifting slightly out of place.
Lucien's fork hovered in the air. He frowned, not with fear, but with irritation.
"The Clown," he muttered.
Another crash—closer. The windows trembled in their frames. Somewhere down the street, glass shattered in a piercing chorus.
Lucien exhaled, shoulders sagging. His voice was quiet, almost bored.
"Someone else will take care of you."
He lifted a spoonful of scrambled eggs and brought it to his mouth.
The second quake hit harder. The bed jolted beneath him, rattling the frame until the rusted sword above his head clinked against the wall. His water bottle tipped, rolling across the floor.
Then came the sound.
Laughter.
Not the laughter of joy or relief, but the broken, jagged cackling of something wearing a man's skin. It echoed with too many throats at once, overlapping in sick harmony, like a crowd laughing together through one mouth. The sound grew louder, step by step, as if the thing was dragging its mirth toward him.
The siren outside cut abruptly, leaving the world in heavy silence.
Only the laughter remained.
Closer. Closer.
Lucien's spoon scraped once more against the plate as the first footstep fell just beyond his door.