All Chapters of His Dark Reign: Chapter 171
- Chapter 180
206 chapters
162. What bleeds towards the center
By morning, the city pretended nothing had happened.That was the lie that hurt the most.News outlets spoke of gas explosions, of unstable electrical grids, of mass hallucination triggered by stress and crowd panic. Officials reassured, analysts speculated, experts smiled with the practiced calm of people who did not believe what they had almost seen. Streets were reopened. Glass was swept away. The seam in the sky—so thin it could be mistaken for imagination—was gone.But the damage had not disappeared.It had redirected.Adam woke on a hospital bed he did not remember entering, staring at a ceiling that refused to stay still. The tiles subtly shifted when he focused too hard, lines bending, corners breathing. He blinked until the world snapped back into place.Barely.Machines hummed beside him, their rhythms slightly off, like they were listening to something else. He flexed his fingers. The skin along his forearm shimmered faintly before settling, as though reality had hesitated
163. The weight of staying
The city did not sleep that night.It tried—lights dimmed, doors locked, televisions murmured reassurances into living rooms—but the attempt felt ceremonial, like a ritual everyone knew would fail. Beneath the surface of things, motion persisted. Pressure shifted. The world adjusted itself around a new center of mass.Adam felt it even before he opened his eyes.He lay on his bed, fully clothed, staring at the faint glow leaking through his curtains. The house was quiet—too quiet. The old ticking clock in the hallway had stopped again, its hands frozen at a time that meant nothing. He had not touched it. He had not needed to.The pull was constant now. No longer sharp, no longer alarming—just present, like gravity. He could almost forget it if he didn’t breathe too deeply, if he didn’t think too hard about the way the air seemed to slope toward him, how sound bent slightly when he spoke.Adam sat up slowly. The floor creaked in a way that didn’t match the movement. The boards answered
164. The shape of what comes next
The staircase groaned as Adam descended.Not with the tired complaint of old wood under familiar weight, but with something deeper—like the house itself was resisting him, each step a reluctant concession. The air thickened with every movement downward, pressure stacking invisibly against his chest until breathing required effort. The pull inside him responded in kind, tightening, sharpening, as if it recognized proximity to something unfinished.The sound came again.A low vibration, almost a murmur, rising from the living room below. It was not speech, not quite, but it carried intent. Curiosity tinged with hunger. The kind that did not rush, because it had never needed to.Adam reached the bottom step and stopped.The lights were on.Every lamp in the living room glowed at full brightness, harsh and unblinking, yet shadows clung to the corners with unnatural density, refusing to retreat. They pooled beneath the furniture, stretched along the walls, warped where they overlapped. The
165. Where the center walks
They did not return to the house.The decision was made without ceremony, without discussion. Adam stepped out into the night air while the structure behind him creaked and settled into its wounds, and something in him let go of the place. The pull inside him loosened just a fraction, like a knot recognizing that it would not be tightened further.That alone told him everything.Places mattered now. Proximity mattered. What stayed near him was bent by him, whether he wished it or not.The street outside was half-lit, lamps flickering in uneven patterns. Neighbors stood in doorways and on porches, murmuring to one another, staring at the cracked windows and sagging walls of Adam’s house with the unsettled awe people reserved for disasters that had narrowly missed them. No one approached. No one asked questions.Instinct kept them back.Adam felt it—the way attention slid off him when he passed, how eyes tracked him and then quickly looked away, minds nudged subtly aside by Malrick’s in
166. The Weight of arrival
The thing that moved in the quarry shadows did not rush.That was the first mistake Adam recognized—and the most dangerous one.It observed.The darkness at the far end of the quarry thickened, not by spreading but by compressing, as if space itself were folding inward around a focal point. The air grew cold enough to sting Adam’s lungs. Gravel trembled beneath his boots, small stones hopping and skittering toward the pit’s center like filings drawn to a hidden current.Kaleb swore under his breath. “That’s not normal. Please tell me that’s not normal.”Lilith’s hand slid instinctively toward the blade strapped beneath her jacket. “It’s not attacking,” she said. “It’s… calibrating.”Adam felt it too. The pressure wasn’t hostile—not yet. It was inquisitive, testing the boundaries of his presence, mapping how reality curved around him now. Malrick stood slightly ahead of Adam, shoulders squared, his near-solid form humming faintly as if resonating with a frequency only the fractures cou
167. The shape of pressure
The city did not know it had survived something.That unsettled Adam more than the scout itself.Traffic resumed along distant roads. Power flickered once, then steadied. Phones buzzed back to life in pockets and handbags, their screens filled with messages that had no idea how close the world had come to folding inward like a bad thought. Even the quarry, scarred and fractured, began to settle, stone grinding softly as gravity reclaimed its confidence.Life continued.Adam stood at the edge of the pit and felt the lie of it press against his skin.“What you did back there,” Kaleb said, breaking the silence at last, “that wasn’t instinct. That was… control.”Adam didn’t turn. His eyes were unfocused, tracking patterns only he could see—residual stress lines in the air, faint distortions rippling like heat mirages where the scout’s presence had brushed reality.“It wasn’t control,” Adam said. “It was alignment.”Lilith watched him closely. “You’re splitting hairs.”“No,” Malrick said,
168. What notices back
Night settled unevenly after the pressure withdrew.It did not fall the way night usually did—soft, gradual, accompanied by the ordinary surrender of light. Instead, it arrived in pockets. Shadows pooled where they shouldn’t, clinging to corners of structures, deepening beneath broken stairwells and along the undersides of collapsed roofs. The sky above the industrial zone looked bruised, clouds stretched thin and slow, as though something immense had passed through them and left drag marks behind.Adam felt it immediately.Not the pressure this time.The attention.He leaned against the rusted column longer than necessary, steadying his breathing. The fractures were quiet—unnervingly so. They no longer buzzed or whispered at the edge of his awareness. It was as if they had gone still on purpose, holding themselves taut, waiting.Lilith didn’t rush him. She had learned the difference between recovery and recalibration. She stood a step away, eyes scanning the dark, one hand resting un
169. The shape of an answer
The night did not recover.That was the first thing Adam understood when the silence stretched too long and the air failed to settle back into anything resembling normalcy. The seam had closed, yes—but closure did not mean erasure. The sky still carried a faint discoloration, like a bruise under skin, barely visible unless one knew exactly where to look.Adam knew.He stood apart from Lilith and Kaleb now, a few deliberate steps of distance he hadn’t consciously taken. His body had moved before his mind finished deciding. The fractures inside him were not agitated, not loud—but they were alert, arranged in a configuration that felt uncomfortably like readiness.Lilith noticed the distance immediately.“Hey,” she said, sharper than before. “Don’t do that.”Adam didn’t turn at first. His gaze was fixed on the empty space where the seam had been. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m adjusting.”“That’s worse,” Kaleb muttered. He rubbed his arms, as if cold, though the night was warm. Too war
170. The World Learns to Flinch
Adam’s gaze drifted upward again.“No,” he said faintly. “We postponed.”Far away—far beyond sky or ground—something shifted its posture.The answer had been given.The reply was coming.---The city exhaled in fragments.Windows rattled, then settled. Alarms cut off one by one, as if embarrassed by their own panic. People clustered in tight knots at the edges of the street, staring at the repaired pavement with the wide-eyed disbelief reserved for things that should not be possible. Already, explanations were forming—gas leaks, sinkholes, electrical malfunctions—anything that fit inside a world that obeyed rules.Adam felt none of that comfort.Lilith half-dragged, half-carried him away from the epicenter, her arm locked around his waist, her shoulder braced against his chest. Every step felt like resistance, not from the ground but from Adam himself, as though some unseen current pulled at him from all directions at once.“Stay with me,” she murmured, not commanding, not pleading—an
171. Pressure without a shape
Morning arrived without permission.It did not feel earned, or clean, or real in the way mornings were supposed to feel. The light crept over the city like a hesitant intruder, pale and strained, catching on glass and concrete as if unsure those surfaces would still accept it. Shadows behaved strangely—stretching too long, clinging where they shouldn’t, peeling away from objects a heartbeat too late.The world had flinched the night before.Now it was waiting.Adam woke against the same brick wall, Lilith’s jacket folded beneath his head, her presence close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body even before he opened his eyes. For a brief, fragile second, there was the illusion of normalcy: the low murmur of distant traffic, the smell of damp concrete, the ache in his muscles that came from strain rather than metaphysics.Then the pressure returned.It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t even discomfort in the traditional sense. It was the awareness of weight without mass, of an expectat