The city screamed like a wound.
Fire licked the sky in ragged tongues. Roof tiles fell like angry teeth. Somewhere ahead a bell cracked and kept on ringing, its tone warped by smoke and mana interference until it sounded less like a warning and more like a dirge. People ran in ragged lines, elbows and handbags and straw hats colliding; a child's cry cut through the chaos and kept repeating until it was just noise under noise. Lantern light warred with the unnatural green of ruptured mana; spells flared and died like moths caught in a current.
I moved through it like a shadow that didn't belong — which was apt, because I'd always been the quiet kind of person. Scout gear hugged my ribs; a thin cloak, patchwork leather, a battered mask slung at my hip. The pack on my back squeaked with the slips and stitches of a life you keep in case there's time to come back for it. There was no time now.
"Left flank, civilian cluster!" someone shouted. A line of hunters cut across the street, heavy boots throwing up sparks from cracked pavement; a relic-mage on their flank kept recalibrating a barrier, breath short and hands red with sweating gloves. The guild had come quick — the banners were bright even in the haze — but speed didn't equal salvation. Not today.
Rifts had opened in the sewers first, like mouths tearing up the underside of the city. Then the stone cracked, and from the cracks came crawling things that should have been terms written in children's nightmares: slick-mawed, armoured with hard keratin, eyes like lamp-glass. They smelled of copper and rot and something older, a cold itch under skin. The first ones poured out and the guards took them like waves breaking on cliffs. The rest spilled past the barricades. Panic is an honest thing; it forgives nothing.
I moved to the left. A woman huddled against a stall, shawl over her head, face pressed to her knees. Her daughter — seven, maybe eight — clung to her arm, tiny fingers white-knuckled. I put my hand on the woman's shoulder and she jolted against me, as if she'd forgotten the world had more than one pulse. I told her—short, useful—where to go, which alley had less smoke, where a team was forming to move civilians out. She nodded. She tried to stand. Her daughter's foot slipped. I reached, and the world narrowed to that.
That was when the first thing grabbed at the street: a leg of shadow, scaled and wrong, and everything after that happened sideways.
A relic-mage's barrier snapped like glass. I tasted metal. A sound like a bell in my teeth and then nothing; the child's scream pulled like a thread and I chased it. Hunters that had been minutes ago a line of iron were tossed like rag dolls. A rider screamed and was swallowed mid-word. A building's wall fell away and the light behind it was not light at all — it was the raw blue of a rift, and it spilled monsters into the lane like water through a broken dam.
I pushed. I shouted. I pulled the mother and the child and three others and we ran. Someone behind me barked orders that meant nothing because the orders themselves were being chewed up by the outbreak. The guild's flagship barrier shimmered on the ridge; I saw figures moving there, cloaked silhouettes with authority in the way their shoulders held. Their voices were bright, clipped, and unbearably calm compared to the street.
"Move the teams! Evacuate the storehouses! Seal the south quadrant!"
Their faces were lit by a map glow. They looked away from the street and toward the rear gates — toward the lines of wagons and men with hands on ropes. They were calculating. They were not the people on the ground.
We ran for a side-lane and the world tilted. The stone collapsed; a band of monsters had chewed through the support; a building's beam fell and pinned a woman under splintered oak. Rifts kept spitting; every new eruption made the air taste worse. My heart banged like a drum. I dropped my pack to lever the beam, a useless hinge and sweat and swear-words, and a hand — not mine but the child's — found my sleeve and dug in like prayer.
We should have moved faster. We should have been stronger. But strength counts for little when the walls behind you are falling and there is nowhere to put your back.
Then a line of order came from the ridge: a sound sharp enough to cut the noise. "Pull back! Now!" The voice belonged to a man I recognized — Guild Captain Riven, pale and composed. He turned slightly, toward the east gate, toward the wagons. His hand signalled the mages to reinforce the barrier there.
I glanced up. The light on his face was steady, like someone watching a performance. He did not look at us.
I shouted at him. "Captain!—" My voice was rough with smoke. The child's fingers had gone slack in mine. The beam would not budge. Behind me a shriek, and a thing filled the lane: long, jointed, its head a crown of teeth; it smelled like the city's oldest rot. Hunters fell in a scent of torn leather. My shoulder froze; they had my friend Brennar there and he went down, eyes wide as if surprised to be there at all. The world was too fast.
Someone unhooked a pulley somewhere. A mage on the ridge adjusted his matrix with a flourish. The wagons began to pull away, ropes biting into hands. The barrier at the east gate flared brighter and the people behind it — guild officers, cartmasters, merchants with thick ledgers — took one final look at the street. No one on the ridge moved to help. They didn't have to. The decision was made: they would live. The others would not.
I saw it then. Not a plot laid like a trap; that would at least feel like something. No, this was careful calculus. A map that tolerated some sorry squares being deleted. The leader's mouth twitched like someone tasting wine that wasn't to their liking.
"Seal the passageways," one of them ordered softly. "Channel the overflow to Sector D." The relief that passed over several faces was a quiet thing, like a sigh at a meal done.
The beam pinning the woman cracked. She screamed as the monsters surged. The child's small face went bright with terror. Hands slipped from whatever grip they'd had and fingers flailed for purchase on air. I tried again — and a thing hit me in the ribs. It moved like a living vice. Furrows of white-hot pain spread from shoulder to hip. The world took on a new weight.
Someone grabbed the child's dress and pulled. The child's hand came loose from mine in a single, clean motion, and I watched it go because there was nothing else to do. The guild officers on the ridge watched us lose our hands, one by one, as if they were watching a bad harvest and needed to move on.
Blood was warm on my palm. The woman under the beam screamed and stopped. No one had time to be vaguely moral. There was only the mechanical, grinding logic of survival.
I remembered then an oath I'd signed blindly when I was young and hungry and eager for the guild's light: to protect civilians. It was ink and ritual, a band of cloth and a name on a register. The oath tasted like ash now. Someone had folded it away when the ledger needed cleaning.
I clambered and pulled and dragged and finally pushed the beam enough to free the woman. She coughed, sputtered, and for a sliver of time looked at me with eyes that asked a question I had no answer to. Then a shadow lunged and the street became teeth. My ribs exploded inward with a final, absurd clarity. The child hit the ground beside me. The muffled roar filled my ears, and the last thing I saw through the smoke was the ridge — bright, distant — and the faces that chose the wagons.
There was pain, everywhere; the taste of iron in my mouth. Then there was a peculiar, quiet cooling — as if the city had been turned down by degrees. Voices got distant, like a chorus behind a thick curtain. I thought I might vomit. I tasted the child's hair. I wanted to scream but my throat was cotton-muzzled.
And then I was not thinking at all.
Darkness folded. It was not the blank I'd always imagined; it was textured, layered like bellows. I fell and fell and did not know what hit me. Time unspooled. A smear of something — a bright, flashing matrix—pulled like a thread. There was an absence where a face should be. The last impression before it shut was of Captain Riven's calm, of the wagons pulling away, of a ledger closing.
Then the world ended.
If death is a door, no one told me what the lock looked like. I only knew I had crossed some line where my name, my pack, the taste of smoke, and the child's frantic fingers all unmade themselves into a single thin filament of memory.
Silence. Not even the echo of the bell.
When sound returned, it came wrong. Like a badly tuned lyre, the notes twice removed from what made them. I opened eyes that were not eyes and saw the world through gaps of shadow. The first thought — if you can call it that — was small and simple: cold. The next was hunger. Not human hunger. Something deep and ancient and simple as a stone's need to be heavier.
My body was a smear of dark. I tried to move and became a ripple. There were no joints, only a sense of drift. I tasted air that was not air: an ambient hum of mana, metallic threads and the faint sweetness of raw essence. Light hurt, like acid. Shade invited. I folded into it.
The labyrinth around me was the underside of a ruined temple — roots strangled stone, and the ceiling had been scorched by a fire some other creature had left behind. Mana ran along the cracks in the floor like little silver rivers, and somewhere distant a creature sang — a low, resonant note that made the stones murmur. I was small compared to the vault above, almost invisible, and that invisibility tasted like safety. For the first time since the street imploded, there was no baring of teeth.
Instinct arrived as a pressure. Something moved in the dark — a small thing, breath shallow, a beetle the size of a coin. It was clumsy and bright with life. My shadow moved on its own, wrapping, tightening, tasting the beetle's heat the way a lamp notices moths. The beetle did not suspect. It did not scream when I—what? Breathed? Touched?—closed.
Warmth flowed up my dark, and with it comprehension in shards: feeding is not only force. It was a translation. A touch, and the beetle's pattern of being unmade and folded into me. A sliver of memory unfurled inside my dark: the beetle's last moments, the way it skated across a fallen leaf, the tiny pulse in its heart. I took it, and the world sharpened.
Images came too, but not mine: a flash of hunters with ropes, the flick-snap of a barrier, a ledger closed, a man's face dimpling with something that was not grief. The taste of smoke. The image skipped, like a faulty crystal. Between these shards a voice dawned — not spoken, but a cold, efficient print across the inside of my dark.
[Devour Protocol — Initialized.]
I did not know what 'protocol' meant, but the label felt accurate. The hunger was no longer blind — it had a name, and names are maps.
[Species: Shadow Wisp.]
My name — the syllable I had worn like an old coat, Zairen Crow — sat like a pale echo behind the new labels. It stayed; it did not fit but it did not leave.
[Predation Level: 1.]
Predation. The word had teeth. My dark pulsed with a little more confidence. Somewhere, faintly, a tiny bell rang — not a city bell but a system chime, clean and devoid of mercy. It marked me, a stitch in the fabric.
I listened. The labyrinth hummed. Above, a current of mana ran like a vein. I tasted it and felt the faintest grow of power, like a plant's first greedy reach for light. The beetle's pattern had left behind a tiny map — a clear line toward the sound of other creatures, warmer flesh, denser life. The map made my dark ache.
A thought, new and thin as a spider-line, weaved through the shadow: survive. Evolve. Consume.
It was not a plan yet. It was the first cold breath of something that might, in time, be called intent.
I drifted toward the seam of light in the far wall where old water had etched a crack. The brightness there was tiny, endured through centuries of ruin. It made the edges of my being sting. But every step away from it deepened the dark's comfort. I moved because the dark suggested it and because the small bell in my core told me there would be more to take.
And then, in the hush between breaths, the words appeared again, clear as a carved rune in the back of my mind.
[Devour Protocol — Activated]
[Species: Shadow Wisp]
[Predation Level: 1]
The system spoke with the same dispassionate clarity as the guild captain had ordered his wagons away. There was no mockery. There was only a record. I let the sound settle as the dark pooled around me, and for the first time since the city screamed I smiled — not with lips, but with the slow, cold tightening that must pass for a wisp's satisfaction.
They thought they could throw away a man. I would learn to take them back.