2025-12-17 00:05:25
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147. What holds the door
The fracture did not stabilize.It hesitated.That hesitation was worse.Adam stood at the center of the gray, Malrick’s presence fused to him like a second nervous system—every thought echoing twice, every sensation sharpened and deepened. The pain had not vanished. It had become useful, a burning clarity that cut through fear and doubt alike.The Entity loomed, vast and unfinished, its shape stuttering as the fracture struggled to reconcile incompatible truths. Where it had pressed forward with inevitability before, now it circled—not physically, but conceptually—testing boundaries, probing the limits of this new configuration.Adam felt its attention like cold fingers rifling through the margins of his mind.You have altered the equation, it pressed, curiosity edging into irritation. This vessel was not meant to resist integration.Adam swallowed, blood still trickling from his nose, voice hoarse but steady. “I’m not your solution.”Everything becomes a solution eventually.Malrick
146. The door learns it's name
The moment Malrick stepped fully into shape, the fracture howled.Not a sound—no air existed there to carry it—but a tearing of structure so violent it felt like the concept of space itself was being peeled apart. The gray world buckled, its unfinished surfaces cracking like drying clay under a sudden flood.Adam stood at the center of it, barely upright.Malrick loomed before him now, no longer an abstract weight or whispering presence but something closer to form—tall, skeletal in silhouette, edges blurring and sharpening in cycles, as if reality couldn’t quite agree on how much of Malrick it was allowed to acknowledge. Its eyes were not eyes at all, but hollows that bent the gray inward, swallowing light, swallowing meaning.And opposite them—The Entity moved.It did not advance like a creature.It expanded.The darkness thickened, swelling outward, and within it, something vast rearranged itself, as though learning how to fit inside the fracture. Shapes emerged that were never me
145. When the handle turns
The fall did not end.Adam had expected impact—pain, collision, some definitive moment where descent surrendered to consequence. Instead, the sensation thinned, stretched, became something less physical and more conceptual, as if gravity itself were reconsidering its obligations.He drifted.The gray around him was not empty. It was unfinished. Shapes suggested themselves and then retreated, half-ideas aborting mid-creation. The horizon folded in on itself, repeating like a thought trapped in a loop. Sound existed only when it wanted to, arriving late, leaving early.Adam’s body felt distant, like an echo of something he used to inhabit.Malrick remained with him, but no longer merely within. The presence hovered closer to coherence now, its outline sharpening in fits and starts, as though the fracture were giving it permission to exist more honestly.“This is the liminal layer,” Adam said, his voice carrying oddly, multiplied and softened at once. “But deeper.”This is beneath the dr
144. The shape of what waits
The night did not arrive naturally.It settled.Streetlights flickered on one by one, but their glow felt thin, diluted, as if the darkness between them had thickened into something that swallowed light rather than merely lacking it. People still walked the sidewalks, cars still passed, televisions still murmured behind curtained windows—but the town had slipped a fraction out of alignment with itself.Adam felt that fraction like a fracture line running through his bones.He sat on the edge of his bed, knuckles wrapped in gauze, staring at the cracked mirror across the room. The break spider-webbed outward from where his fist had struck, distorting his reflection into multiple versions of the same face. In one shard, his eyes looked hollow. In another, sharp and predatory. In a third, briefly—terrifyingly—inhuman.He tore his gaze away.The hum beneath the ground had not stopped. It pulsed now, slow and rhythmic, like a colossal heart beating far below the town.Malrick remained coil
143. What listens beneath the skin
The moment Adam crossed the school gates, the pressure intensified.It wasn’t dramatic. There was no sudden wind, no thunder cracking open the sky. It was subtler than that—more insidious. Like walking deeper into water without realizing how far the ground had dropped away beneath his feet.He stopped at the sidewalk, backpack slung over one shoulder, eyes fixed on nothing. Cars passed. People laughed too loudly nearby. The world kept moving, ignorant of the fact that something ancient had shifted its attention fully onto him.Malrick stirred.Not with words.With weight.It settled into Adam’s chest, not like possession, not like control—but like a second gravity layered beneath his own. His breath hitched for a fraction of a second before he mastered it. He had learned, painfully, how to hide these things. How to let the storm rage inward while his face remained calm.Lilith paused a few steps behind him.“You’re not okay,” she said.Adam didn’t turn. “I never am.”“That’s not what
142. The weight that follows
Adam didn’t sleep.He lay on his bed fully clothed, staring at the faint crack in the ceiling that ran like a hairline fracture through plaster. Every time his eyes drifted shut, the pressure returned—not as pain, not even as fear—but as awareness. As if something behind his eyes was watching him watch the dark.The room smelled wrong. Familiar, but slightly diluted, like a copy of itself. Even the ticking clock on his nightstand hesitated between seconds, its rhythm uneven, uncertain.He rolled onto his side and pressed his palm against his chest. His heartbeat felt louder than it should have been. Deeper. As though it was echoing through a larger space than his body.Malrick did not speak.That alone was alarming.Adam had grown used to the presence—resented it, fought it, but relied on its sharpness. The silence now felt intentional. Calculated. Like a predator going still so its prey would forget it was there.Across town, Lilith stood at her bedroom window, curtains half-drawn, w
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