2025-10-02 15:25:06By Monday morning, Westfield High had a new story.
Derek Hanley—the linebacker, the loudmouth, the guy who laughed the hardest whenever Adam was humiliated—was walking through the halls with a black eye, a bandage above his brow, and a stiffness in his movements that spoke of pain deeper than bruises. He didn’t swagger anymore. He didn’t shout. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact, flinching whenever someone brushed too close. And everyone noticed. “Yo, what happened to Derek?” “Looks like someone worked him over.” “Bet it was Sanchez. He probably got out of line at practice.” The rumors swirled in every corner—cafeteria, locker room, bathrooms. But Derek said nothing. When pressed, he muttered something about tripping on the stairs. Nobody believed him. The more he lied, the more the mystery grew. Adam watched it all from a calm distance, savoring the whispers. He hadn’t killed Derek—no, that would’ve been too blunt, too soon. But he had left a mark. And now that mark had bloomed into rumor, suspicion, and fear. It was exactly what Malick had promised: one stone, and the avalanche begins. --- At lunch, Adam strolled into the cafeteria. Heads turned. Whispers hushed. He felt it all—the attention, the unease—as if the air itself bent toward him. Derek sat with his teammates at their usual table, but quieter than ever. When Adam passed by, Derek’s eyes flicked up, wide and almost pleading, before darting back down to his tray. The sight thrilled Adam. It was better than an apology. It was submission. Sanchez noticed too. He leaned back in his chair, throwing an arm around his girlfriend, but his gaze never left Adam. When Adam caught the look, Sanchez smirked—sharp, dangerous. It wasn’t amusement. It was calculation. After a long moment, Sanchez lifted his soda and raised it in a mock toast across the room, eyes locked on Adam. Then he drank, never breaking the stare. Adam smiled back, slow and unbothered. The message was clear: I’m not afraid of you anymore. --- Later that day, in English class, the teacher asked for volunteers to read aloud. Normally, Adam would’ve kept his head down, praying not to be noticed. But this Adam raised his hand. His voice was smooth, steady, commanding as he read. The room grew still, students listening in a way they never had before. When he finished, a few kids even clapped. The teacher beamed. From the corner of his eye, Adam saw Lila watching him with something that looked a lot like interest. He saw Sanchez stiffen, annoyed by how easily Adam was slipping into the spotlight. And he saw Derek, sitting two rows back, shrinking into his seat, silent as a ghost. --- By the end of the week, the whispers had grown into a quiet certainty that something was happening at Westfield. Derek had fallen silent. Adam had risen. And Sanchez—the untouchable king—was no longer unchallenged. In the bathroom mirror, Adam studied his reflection. His face looked sharper every day, his eyes carrying that faint glimmer of crimson only he seemed to notice. Malick’s voice curled in his ear, velvet and venom. They see you now. They respect you. But respect is fleeting. Fear, though… fear lasts. Adam’s smile deepened. The second stone was ready.
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123. The answer from beneath
He reached the ragged line that separated their world from Adam’s. For a single second he could see Adam more clearly than he ever had when Adam was “Adam”: not the boy bullied and quiet; not the vessel for Malrick’s cunning; but a young man with a stubborn, furious core.“Adam!” Kaleb shouted. His voice carried oddly, doubled — in Lilith’s ear and then inside Adam’s head, magnified by the thin thread. The sound anchored.Adam’s fingers closed around Kaleb’s reaching hand like iron into iron.And when they met, the fracture bit.The entity flared in anger. Its tendrils whipped, carving away chunks of the psychic world. The raw hunger made walls bleed and memories detach from their frames like wet posters peeling off a wall. Faces the entity had summoned from the crowd of eyes swam forward and snarled. The world wanted to punish them for the contact.But the second voice — the one that had called Adam’s name — surged again.This new voice did not sound like a human voice. It sounded li
122. The answer from beneath 1
The entity expanded its attention like a tide. Its hunger spread through the liminal layer and the fracture both, a slow, irresistible gravity, and the air answered by tightening around every bone in the town. Shadows lengthened their teeth. The watching eyes in the sky blinked in unison, expectant.Then a second sound threaded into the pressure — quieter, lower, older than the world, and not a voice so much as a remembering. It did not shout; it unlatched memory. The sound was like ocean-floor stone grinding on stone, like the first language of the deep. It answered the entity not with challenge but with recognition.It said one name.“Adam.”The word rolled across the fracture as if carved into basalt. The ancient entity paused. Something like a ripple of irritation—then attention—moved through it. It hadn’t expected a reply that old, one originating from a place that remembered before doors. For the first time, the presence felt watched.In the psychic plane, where Adam hung betwee
121. The one who remembers the first door
It drifted awake slowly, as if rising from beneath the crust of a long-dead star.There was no light in the place it occupied. Light was something that belonged to worlds with boundaries, rules, and mercy. It had known those once—before the first door opened and the first scream was harvested. Before time learned to move. Before language had teeth.Now, awakening felt like sinking upward.The entity—older than form, older than choice—pressed its consciousness through the fractures it had been clawing at for centuries. And this time, something answered. A ripple. A pulse. An invitation.Adam.The boy’s name drifted through the ether like a tether made of bone-dust and human fear. Not because Adam called it—Adam had no idea what he touched. No, it was Malrick’s lineage, Malrick’s arrogance, Malrick’s hunger that created the wound in reality. A wound the entity could finally slip a finger through.It stretched.Reality stretched with it.And the entity remembered.A thousand worlds it ha
120. The breath between worlds
The world did not snap back into place after the collapse — it shuddered, twitching like something half-alive, half-dead.The liminal layer trembled, its gray horizon buckling in and out like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Buildings that had once been stable silhouettes flickered, stretching too tall, then compressing.Lilith felt the air thicken, not like fog but like breath — slow, labored, hot.“Something’s waking,” she murmured, her voice barely carrying through the static-laced air.Kaleb stood beside her, tense but steady. “Not Adam?”“No,” she whispered. “This is… older.”Cracks spread beneath their feet — not in the ground, but in the layer itself. Like glass that had been struck from the inside.Between the cracks, Lilith could hear something breathing. Long, wet inhales. Quivering exhales. A presence shifting in the dark below.Kaleb grabbed her arm as the ground pitched. “Hey—stay with me. Don’t fall into whatever that is.”She didn’t answer — she couldn’t.Because right then,
119. The moment the world flinched
The world didn’t shatter all at once.It flinched first.A tremor rolled through the cracked sky like something enormous had brushed its fingers across the fabric of reality. Every bird froze mid-flight. Every wolf lifted its head. Every human felt their spine tighten in a way that no instinct, no training, no ancestral memory had prepared them for.Because nothing in history had ever existed like the thing that was coming.Kaleb felt it first. His claws sunk into the wet earth as the psychic shockwave rippled through him. Lilith staggered beside him, hand gripping his forearm, her breath catching in her throat as the entire field around them vibrated like a drumhead struck by an invisible fist.And inside the collapsing psychic realm, Adam screamed.Not out of fear.Out of battle.Out of the effort it took to hold back the dark entity that was clawing its way through him toward the real world.The nightmare-arm that had burst through the sky thickened, veins pulsing, dripping black i
118. The vessel breaks
The beam of white, devouring light hit Adam like a celestial spear—silent, perfect, merciless. The fractured realm reacted as though stabbed through its core. The sky shattered in a ripple of cracks, each one emitting the sharp ring of broken crystal multiplied a thousandfold.Lilith screamed his name, fighting the pull of the collapsing ground as she threw her weight toward him. Kaleb lunged too, fingers brushing empty air before a shockwave hurled him backward, tumbling across a floor that kept re-forming beneath him in jagged, uncaring slabs.Adam didn’t fall.He hung suspended within the pillar of light, body rigid, head thrown back, mouth open in a soundless gasp. The glow carved through him, not burning, not wounding—claiming. As though the realm had marked him with a brand, and now the brand wanted its due.Lilith crawled forward, hair whipping around her face in the violent wind spiraling from the beam. Her eyes were wet, furious, refusing to accept this. “Adam! Look at me—loo
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