Nothingness.Not darkness—darkness still had shape.This was absence. A silence so complete it felt like pressure.Adam didn’t know if he was floating or falling.He didn’t know if he had a body.Time stretched thin, like a thread pulled near tearing.Then—A sound.Soft. Wet. Familiar.Breathing.Not his.The Entity.Adam’s awareness snapped back like a rubber band, and suddenly he felt his limbs again—heavy, frozen, as though trapped in tar. A faint glow flickered far below him, a pulse of pale white like a heartbeat.His heartbeat.The void wasn’t empty. It was a mouth.And he was halfway into the throat.Adam kicked upward—panic breaking through the numbness—but the void dragged back with equal force, a cold suction wrapping around his waist, pulling him deeper.A voice murmured through the dark:“You were made for this.”Malrick.Except this time his voice wasn’t using a host. It came from everywhere, vibrating inside Adam’s bones.“You cannot cling to what you were,” Malrick whi

Adam’s scream didn’t echo.It reverberated—a shaking, bone-deep distortion that rippled through the clearing like a shockwave. Leaves lifted from the ground, hovering mid-air for a breathless second before spiraling upward in a vortex around him. The entities drank in the sound, their shadows tightening, vibrating, twitching with grotesque anticipation.Lilith’s stomach dropped.She knew that scream.She had heard a shadow of it inside the fracture, whispering against the edges of Adam’s failing mind.But this—This was the full version.Kaleb clamped his hands over his ears, tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes. “Make it stop—Lilith—please—make him stop—”But she couldn’t move.Because the look on Adam’s face wasn’t the look of someone being harmed.It was the look of someone being claimed.His body shook, suspended between the two entities—one shadow thin and needle-sharp, the other heavy, round, monstrous. They weren’t attacking him.They were revering him.The first entity

The world did not end all at once.It fractured.Sound went first. Not silence—worse. Noise folded inward, as if every scream, every rustle of leaves, every breath the forest had ever taken was being swallowed by something deep beneath reality. The air thickened, pressing against Lilith’s skin until every movement felt like pushing through water.Adam stood at the center of it.Not looming. Not towering.Anchored.The ground beneath his feet darkened into something glassy and veined, like cooled magma threaded with faint silver light. Shadows bled outward from him in slow, deliberate pulses, crawling across the earth as if tasting it. Wherever they touched, the forest reacted—trees leaned away, bark splitting with quiet pops, roots squirming beneath the soil.Kaleb’s heart hammered so violently he thought it might tear free. He backed away in small, panicked steps, his heel catching on a stone. He barely noticed the pain as he fell again. His eyes never left Adam.“Lilith,” he whisper

Dawn arrived wrong.The sun crept over the horizon like it was unsure it was welcome, its light pale and thin, filtered through clouds that hadn’t finished deciding what shape they wanted to be. The forest around the clearing looked the same at first glance—trees standing, grass still bent where it had been flattened—but everything felt subtly displaced, like a photograph nudged out of alignment.Lilith noticed it when she tried to stand.Her foot sank a fraction too deep into the soil, as though the ground hesitated before supporting her weight. She stumbled, catching herself on a tree whose bark felt unnervingly smooth beneath her palm.“Kaleb,” she said quietly.He was already staring at his hands.They shook as if he’d been standing in cold rain for hours. He flexed his fingers, watching them lag a half-second behind his intention. “I don’t feel right,” he murmured. “It’s like… like my body’s still somewhere else.”Lilith followed his gaze back to the center of the clearing.Adam

The smile did not belong to a face.Adam felt it before he understood it—a pressure behind his eyes, a subtle curl in the wrong places of reality, like the world itself had learned a new expression and was trying it out on him. The shadows at his feet tightened, no longer merely reactive but alert, drawn taut as if listening.Lilith sensed the shift instantly. Her hand tightened around Adam’s sleeve. “It’s still here,” she said. Not a question.Adam nodded once. “Closer.”The sirens grew louder, bleeding through the woods in uneven waves. Flashing lights flickered between tree trunks, red and blue slicing through the gray haze that clung stubbornly to the air. The man on the ground groaned softly, stirring, his breathing shallow but steady.Kaleb wiped his shaking hands against his jeans. “We can’t be standing here when they arrive,” he said. “They’re going to ask questions. And I don’t think ‘reality malfunction’ is going to sound convincing.”Lilith glanced back at the man, then at