The night deepened unnaturally fast, as if someone had pulled darkness over the sky like a heavy curtain. A strange, thin mist crawled over the ruined church grounds—slow, deliberate, alive.Lilith felt it before she saw anything.A tightening in her chest.A faint pressure behind her eyes.A whisper that was not sound but vibration.Kaleb moved closer to her, his jaw tense, sensing the shift.Adam scanned the area, uneasy, his hand drifting toward the hilt of the spectral blade Sanchez had left behind in the last encounter.The others—Mara, Jonah, Professor Ikenna, and the newly introduced exorcist-priest Father Damien—formed a loose circle as the air thickened. None of them spoke. None could.Something old was breathing.Something that remembered their names.Something that had followed Sanchez back from the alternate realm.---A jolt ran through the ground.Small, at first.Then a second, stronger.Then a third that nearly bent the church’s cracked pillars.Father Damien clutched

Night returned, but it felt different—heavier, denser, as though the world was thick with breathless anticipation. After the cafeteria incident, the school had been evacuated under the flimsiest excuse the administration could fabricate. A “power surge.” A “structural vibration.” Anything but the truth.Because the truth was feral.And it followed Adam home.The moment he stepped into his room, the air shifted. Shadows clung too closely to the corners, stretching with awareness, as though camouflaging a presence that refused to fully form.Malrick was silent—too silent.Adam locked the door behind him.He didn’t bother turning on the lights.His room hummed faintly, like walls pressing inward.He stood still until his pulse steadied, staring into the dark.“You’re going to say something,” he muttered. “So say it.”Nothing.But the presence in the room thickened, vibrating softly—as if the space itself breathed in.Then Malrick finally spoke.“He is stirring.”A chill sliced down Adam’

The gray world shuddered, an unnatural tremor running through its veins. Lilith, Kaleb, Briggs, and Mira stumbled as the ground beneath them shifted like water, sending ripples across the gray river they had been following. Every step echoed in impossible ways, each echo twisting and folding into itself, as though the liminal layer had begun to breathe.Lilith’s hands shot out, gripping a slick, rising wall of mist for balance. Her eyes, wide and violet-lit, scanned the horizon. In the distance, a dark pulse flickered — Adam. His form was trapped inside the river, flickering like a broken reflection. Something beyond human awareness pressed against him, pulling at the very edges of his consciousness.“He’s… he’s in trouble,” she whispered, her voice trembling, almost swallowed by the low hum that resonated through the layer.Kaleb’s jaw tightened. “We’ve seen him like this before. But this… this is different.” He clenched his fists, sensing the pull of an unseen force that even Malric

The morning sunlight should have been ordinary, a quiet glow spilling through the windows of Alder High. But nothing about that day was ordinary. The air itself hummed, vibrating in invisible currents that only a few could sense. Teachers and students walked the hallways with nervous hesitation, some noticing walls that shivered, shadows that moved without source, and the faint but persistent hum of a pulse underfoot.Lilith held Kaleb’s hand tightly as they entered the school, eyes scanning. The gray river, the fracture, the liminal layer—they weren’t just contained anymore. Pieces of it had bled into reality. Broken fragments of hallways, staircases folded upon themselves, and corridors stretched impossibly in impossible directions. The first wave of students screamed as reality wavered beneath their feet, lockers snapping and twisting.“Everyone, stay calm!” Lilith shouted, though her voice barely carried over the chaotic hum. She grabbed a trembling freshman, dragging him to what

The neighbor had never believed in omens. His life was ordinary: a small house perched on the edge of town, a garden that struggled against the stubborn soil, a clock that ticked like the heartbeat of his quiet existence. But that night, as he stepped onto his porch to fetch the mail, the world itself shivered under his feet.Above the church, the sky bled gray. Not the soft gray of dawn or a storm, but a deep, viscous gray that seemed alive, curling and folding in impossible directions. It pulsed slowly, deliberately, as if taking its first breath into the human world. The streetlights flickered and warped, their light stretching like tendrils reaching toward him, and he staggered backward, heart hammering.A wind rose, unnatural and cold, swirling through the empty street, carrying with it whispers he could almost understand. They weren’t words exactly — not yet. But they carried meaning: threat, promise, hunger. He pressed his hands over his ears and stumbled, nearly falling into t