The campus air carried a strange heaviness that night, thick like a storm cloud pressing against the earth, yet the skies above remained perfectly clear. Nathan walked the dimly lit path between the library and the east courtyard, his eyes scanning the shadows as though expecting them to move. For days, he had been following the trail of strange disturbances—the whispers, the flickering lights, the students waking with bruises they couldn’t explain. Tonight, he wasn’t just observing anymore. Something was waiting for him.The courtyard was empty. The fountain at the center gurgled softly, its water glowing faintly under the pale moonlight. Nathan stepped closer, boots crunching against gravel, but stopped abruptly. His breath caught.There, at the water’s edge, a figure crouched. At first glance, it looked human, a man bent forward with his hands dipped in the pool. But the longer Nathan stared, the more wrong the figure became. Its skin shimmered in places, like oil slick on water. I

The night pressed down on the city like a suffocating shroud. From the narrow alleyway where Nathan walked, the air smelled of rust and stagnant water, and the shadows leaned too close, as if hungry for him. He had grown used to the stares of the unseen, but tonight, they felt different—closer, sharper, as though something had shifted in the order of things. Nathan adjusted his coat collar and kept moving, his boots striking the damp stones in steady rhythm. His hands, however, betrayed the calm exterior. The faint tremor in his fingers had begun two nights ago. At first, he dismissed it as fatigue, a consequence of too little sleep and too much exposure to the corrupted sites. But when he removed his gloves earlier that evening, he saw the truth: thin black lines, like veins filled with ash, crawling up the inside of his wrist. He pulled the glove tighter now, hiding the mark as though the fabric could contain it. By the time he reached the abandoned chapel at the end of the alley

The first night after the corruption ended, the town should have felt lighter, but instead it carried an oppressive stillness. The streets of Camden were washed in pale moonlight, every shadow stretching longer than it should, bending at strange angles, as though the world itself hadn’t fully healed.Nathan had been walking the perimeter near the old church, marking his observations in a small leather-bound notebook. He wanted facts, something tangible, but what he found instead was silence—too much of it. Not the gentle quiet of a sleeping town, but a suffocating stillness that pressed on the chest, making it difficult to breathe. Even the wind refused to stir.The bell tower stood above him, black against the star-pricked sky. The bell itself hadn’t rung in decades, rusted to its chains. Yet tonight, Nathan swore he could hear the faintest hum—a resonance that buzzed in the marrow of his bones. It was not sound exactly, but vibration, a pulse that called to him, pulling him toward t

The library was silent, the kind of silence that didn’t feel empty but rather watched. Nathan sat at one of the oak tables, a single lamp casting its pale glow over ancient pages. The book before him smelled of mildew and forgotten dust. He hadn’t meant to find it—it had simply slid from a high shelf when his fingers brushed against the spines. Now it lay open, its ink bleeding with words that seemed to writhe if he looked too long.“The ones who feed on shame walk among us, faceless until the mirror drinks their truth…”The sentence made the air around him grow colder. His reflection in the darkened library window flickered—his head tilted though he hadn’t moved. Nathan’s jaw tightened. He closed the book sharply, and the sound echoed through the cavernous hall like a gunshot.He rose, intending to leave, but his feet faltered. The heavy silence pressed back at him, and somewhere deeper in the library, a chair scraped against stone. Someone else was here.“Nathan…”His name, whispere

The night wrapped the city in a suffocating silence, broken only by the pulse of unseen things that lingered between shadows. Nathan walked through the abandoned underpass where whispers had told him a “gathering” would occur. It was not the kind of gathering anyone sane would want to witness—but he had long stopped measuring sanity the way others did. His boots echoed against the cracked concrete, a sound swallowed too quickly, as if the air itself wanted to devour it. He smelled rust before he saw it—the iron tang of dried blood. Graffiti warped into patterns too deliberate to be random spread across the walls, glyphs that writhed when he glanced at them too long. A dozen figures stood ahead, cloaked and faceless. They had dragged someone—some student from the university—into the circle, binding her hands with rope that seemed more like veins than cord. Her sobs echoed softly, breaking against the cold night. Nathan remained hidden at first, his eyes narrowing. This was no ordinar