Rain hammered against him with a persistence that felt almost personal—cold needles pricking through fabric, sinking into bone, drenching him until every breath tasted of iron and city soot.
The cake blurred in his hands, its cheap frosting running in pastel rivers. He let it. Let the rain eat the colors, erase the shape. Let everything fade.
A sound slipped from his throat—something like a laugh, though hollowed-out and warped at the edges. The tune humming beneath it came from a place so distant it barely existed anymore, a childhood memory frayed thin as old thread.
He stepped lightly across puddles, boots kicking arcs of dirty water. Each splash fractured the reflections of streetlights—trembling gold lines shattering into a mosaic that almost looked alive. For a fleeting heartbeat, the city glittered, softened by rain until it seemed gentle.
But inside him, nothing stirred. Nothing answered.
Thirty minutes. Then it would all be over.
His eighteenth birthday. A day meant for candles. For voices singing. For hands clapping his shoulders. For warmth.
Instead, tonight was a boundary—drawn across the rain-slick pavement, fragile as chalk, final as a blade. Eighteen… the age when people looked to the future with sharp-eyed expectation.
He had no future to look toward.
He had decided he would step out of the world before it demanded anything else from him.
Thirty minutes until the ache stopped. Thirty minutes until the years of pressure broke and scattered.
The rain would keep falling. Neon lights would keep shimmering in puddles. Engines would keep growling, people laughing, windows glowing hearth-warm.
But for him, everything would stop.
Relief waited like a tide just beyond the horizon—cold, clean, absolute.
He walked, letting the rain drown him, blur him, soften him into just another shadow in the city's endless downpour. Letting the final moment grow closer with every step.
Yet the deeper the rain drummed, the more memory clawed its way back—sharp, jagged pieces slicing through the numbness.
Lucian Vale.
A name the world spoke in lowered voices, accompanied always by shivers or silence.
The cursed child.
Darkness clung to him—never seen outright, but felt. A pressure in the air, a wrongness coiled too tightly around his existence. Those who tormented him often died in ways that made newspapers grimly inventive: freak accidents, sudden collapses, inexplicable tragedies. Everyone pretended coincidence. Everyone avoided his eyes.
Sometimes late at night, shadows in his room swayed though no wind breathed. Sometimes they twitched. Sometimes they crawled up the wall like things seeking escape. And sometimes—
Sometimes they whispered.
A sibilant, hungry scrape just behind his ear.
"Kill them. Kill everyone. They hurt you, didn't they?"
"Let us help."
"Let them break… let them bleed…"
He never knew if the voice was inside him or outside. Didn't know which terrified him more.
Neighbors avoided the Vale house. Kids crossed the street to escape his shadow. Adults lowered their gaze, pretending they didn't feel a chill each time he passed.
Even his own parents—his blood—looked at him with a trembling mixture of love and dread, affection warped into guilt until it curdled into regret.
Fear had eaten at them until nothing was left.
In the end, they chose escape the only way they saw possible—leaving behind a silence so suffocating it felt like it had weight, like it pressed on his lungs, like it whispered his name.
Relatives blamed him. Grandparents stared with disgust sharp enough to bruise. Every door he knocked on slammed.
And so he was sent to an orphanage.
A new place. New people. Same curse.
Whispers clung to the halls like mold, spreading from mouth to mouth.
"The cursed one."
"His parents killed themselves because of him."
"Don't stand too close."
"He's bad luck… he's death."
"If you say his name, something follows you home."
They never said those things when he was near—never dared. Fear made them quiet. Fear made them careful.
He became the child whose name was swallowed instead of spoken. Whose existence was avoided. Whose touch was unthinkable.
Teachers monitored him with stiff shoulders. Strangers recoiled without knowing why. Even stray dogs gave him wide-eyed distance.
Loneliness stopped being an emotion; it hardened into a condition. A truth. As inevitable as the storms that rolled over the city. As constant as the vision that had haunted him since he was three.
A great tree—towering, ancient—its branches scraping a sky he couldn't quite see. Wild grasses brushing its roots. Flowers glowing softly, serene, untouched.
But beauty never lasted.
The grass withered into dust. The great tree rotted into shadow, its immense trunk collapsing inward as if devoured from the inside. Darkness always swallowed the vision whole.
A warning.
Or a promise.
He never knew.
The city blurred around him, rain turning heavier, harsher—almost as if trying to wash away the memories that refused to let him go.
Eventually, he reached the part of the city no map bothered naming. Crumbling houses, alleyways that stank of rust and rot. The streetlights flashed weakly, flickering like dying breaths.
He stopped only when the stench of rotting garbage and wet brick dragged him back into himself.
His home.
A narrow shack sagging between two others, its roof caving slightly inward, door swollen by rain until it barely hung on its hinges.
He pushed the door open. The creak echoed through the empty rooms—familiar, almost intimate, like a ghost exhaling in greeting.
The air inside wrapped around him thick and damp, smelling of mold and forgotten time.
He set the ruined cake on the scarred table. Its surface was pitted and stained, a battlefield of old memories and older neglect.
A lone bulb flickered overhead, throwing twitching shadows across the cramped room.
Lucian sat. The chair groaned, tired as the rest of the shack. His fingers traced the rough wood grain, grounding him, anchoring him to the last minutes of his life.
He waited.
Ticks from the clock crawled through the silence, each one dragging the seconds like they were reluctant.
His gaze drifted between the cake, the shadows shifting along the walls, and the weak glow of the clock.
Midnight approached—slow and inevitable.
Every breath, every heartbeat, tightened the knot inside him. Fear. Relief. A strange calm blooming cold in his chest.
Just a little longer.
A whisper slipped from him, soft as a dying ember.
"Happy birthday… Lucian."
The clock's second hand froze.
He didn't notice it at first.
But then the silence deepened—too deep.
The distant engines outside vanished. Voices cut off mid-murmur. Pipes stilled. Even the water dripping from the ceiling hung motionless in midair, a bead of silver suspended like a star that had forgotten how to fall.
The world stopped.
Soundless. Breathless. Still.
Lucian stood slowly. His heart pounded—too loud in a world that had gone silent.
He stepped outside.
Rain hovered in the air, each droplet a tiny glass bead caught between moments. A car's splash was frozen mid-arc, water suspended like wings of shattered crystal. People stood locked mid-step, umbrellas halted mid-sway, expressions arrested halfway through ordinary life.
They were statues. The entire city was a painting held under glass.
For the first time in his life… he was truly alone.
Not avoided. Not shunned. Not whispered about behind closed doors.
Alone.
He walked through the suspended rain. Droplets shimmered as he passed, refracting warped fragments of his reflection—eyes too dark, too empty, too old.
He reached a trembling bead of water, hovering inches from his face.
His hand rose.
The stillness pressed against his skin, heavy, expectant, as if the world were holding its breath.
Did I do this?
Is this… me?
The thought barely formed when his fingers brushed a suspended droplet of rain.
The moment he touched it, the world shifted.
Not suddenly, but like a ripple across reality.
The frozen street wavered. Colors bled. Sound warped. The air vibrated like a held breath released all at once.
The city dissolved around him.
And then he wasn't in the slum anymore.
He knew this place. He had seen it countless times in his visions.
A vast tree towered before him—its trunk as wide as a mountain, bark carved in ancient, spiraling patterns. Its branches reached so high they scraped a sky made of shifting light. The grasses around it glowed softly, brushing his ankles with gentle heat. Flowers pulsed with dim radiance, petals like pieces of moonlight.
Beautiful. Serene.
But something was wrong.
The air here trembled.
A pressure—familiar, dreadful—curled around his ribs.
His shadow stretched long across the luminous grass.
Too long.
It twitched.
A cold prickle crept down his spine. That same wrongness he'd lived with all his life… it trembled awake, as if the place itself called to it.
Something moved near the tree's base—just a flicker, like darkness folding in on itself.
Then a whisper brushed the back of Lucian's neck, colder than the frozen rain.
"You are not alone."
The world held its breath.
And Lucian—heart stuttering, lungs tight—knew something was watching him from the roots of the ancient tree.
Something that had been waiting for him.