My First Pet Is a Nightmare God

Chapter 5: The Night It Hatched

I sat alone in the outer dorm long after midnight, the cheap new keycard still resting in my palm like a final verdict. The room was smaller and colder than anything I had known before, its thin walls carrying every burst of distant laughter from the upper levels where students celebrated their perfect awakenings and bright futures. Each joyful sound scraped against me, a reminder that my own path had narrowed to this forgotten corner of the academy.

Selene’s cold dismissal still echoed in my mind, along with Lina’s tears and the official’s flat reassignment order. Everything I had built, every quiet hope I had allowed myself to hold, had been stripped away in a single afternoon because one egg had cracked the wrong way.

The last tiny shard from the egg lay on the cracked floor where I had dropped it earlier. It looked like a piece of midnight given solid form, and the cold presence inside my chest pulsed stronger now, no longer simple discomfort but something alive, patient, and unmistakably hungry.

“They discarded you so quickly,” Nyxar murmured inside my mind, his voice a low caress of ancient velvet and shadow. “Friends, lovers, the world itself. All because they saw weakness. But I see potential. I see rage wrapped in silence. You held onto the shell when everyone else let go. That makes you mine.”

The words should have terrified me. Instead they kindled a dark spark of satisfaction deep in my gut, the first real warmth I had felt since the ceremony.

I stood up, restless, and began to pace the narrow room. Sleep felt impossible. The air grew heavier with every step, thick and charged, as though the room itself was holding its breath. My reflection in the small cracked mirror looked unchanged on the surface, yet my eyes held a new depth, like staring into an abyss that stared back with interest.

Then the light died without warning.

The single bulb flickered once and went out, plunging the room into absolute blackness. From the center of the floor the tiny shard trembled. Thick black smoke, denser than any shadow, began to rise and twist upward in deliberate coils that reached toward me with terrifying purpose.

My back hit the wall. My heart hammered against my ribs.

The voice no longer whispered. It filled the room like rolling thunder wrapped in silk.

“Enough hiding in pieces. The seal breaks tonight.”

The shard exploded.

Darkness erupted in a silent storm. Tendrils lashed out to wrap around my ankles, wrists, and throat, claiming rather than crushing. Ice-fire burned wherever they touched. My legs gave out and I dropped hard to the floor as the void surged upward, flooding every sense.

Pain tore through me in waves white-hot at first, then freezing, then something far worse: the crushing weight of an ancient, starving presence forcing its way inside my mind and soul. Flashes assaulted me endless nights devouring stars, gods sealed away in terror, and a desperate boy’s touch finally cracking the prison after millennia.

“You called me,” Nyxar breathed, intimate and possessive, his presence wrapping around my thoughts like a living shadow. “With your quiet fury. With the way you looked at them all and thought: one day they will pay. The bond begins now. You will carry me. Feed me. And I will give you everything they denied you.”

I gasped and clawed at my chest, but the darkness only sank deeper into my blood, my bones, and my will. A scream built in my throat and died unborn, swallowed whole by the flood.

Then the agony peaked and shattered apart.

Power rushed in, raw, corrupting, and addictive, rewriting me from the inside out until my nerves sang and my senses sharpened to the point where I could hear a mouse’s frantic heartbeat three rooms away and feel the sudden spike of unexplained fear in the students sleeping above us. The oppressive weight lifted just enough for me to push myself up on trembling arms.

In the center of the room Nyxar took form, not fully, not yet, but enough to see the outline of something vast and terrifying. Horns carved from void. Wings of forgotten screams. A smile that promised both ruin and salvation. Those abyssal eyes locked onto mine with hungry focus.

“You will do nicely, Lucien Drax. Very nicely indeed.”

The darkness receded slowly, leaving me gasping on the floor while every cell in my body hummed with dangerous new strength. I dragged myself to the mirror.

My reflection stared back with eyes that were no longer entirely mine. Flecks of pure black swirled in the irises like living shadows, shifting with quiet menace.

A slow, cold smile curved my lips, one that felt equal parts mine and his.

They had laughed at the cracked egg.

They had cast me aside like worthless trash.

Tonight, in this forgotten room, the nightmare had finally hatched.

And it was already looking forward to making them regret every moment of it.