Noah woke to quiet.
Not the heavy, oppressive quiet of the middle of the night, but the kind that belonged to early morning, thin, tentative, as if the world hadn't fully decided to begin yet. For a few seconds, he lay still, eyes closed, letting the sensation settle.
Something was different.
The tiredness behind his eyes was gone.
Not dulled. Not pushed aside. Gone.
The realization came slowly, like noticing the absence of a familiar ache after years of carrying it. Noah frowned, testing it the way you tested a sore muscle, half-expecting the pain to flare back up if you paid attention to it.
It didn't.
He opened his eyes.
The dorm room was washed in pale gray light, dawn leaking in through the narrow window. Evan's alarm hadn't gone off yet. His roommate slept on, tangled in sheets, one foot hanging off the bed. Everything looked exactly the same as it had every other morning.
Except for the desk.
The lantern was still there.
Its glow had dimmed, not extinguished—now softer, more subdued, like embers rather than flame. It didn't pulse or flicker. He half expected it to be a dream, some kind of lucid dream after not sleeping well for a long time.
Noah sat up slowly.
He thought he'd feel something after seeing it, but nothing came. There was just stillness, not exactly calm, but the stillness you feel when you just don't care enough to care. Just a quiet certainty that whatever he'd experienced the night before hadn't been a dream. He rubbed his eyes once, hard, then looked again.
Still there.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. The floor was cold, but it didn't bite the way it usually did. His body felt…light. Rested in a way he couldn't remember ever feeling before. Not the groggy relief of sleeping in too long, but something deeper. Structural. Like something had finally been set down.
He crossed the room and stood in front of the desk.
Up close, the lantern looked even older than he'd thought. The metal frame bore shallow scratches and dents, marks of use rather than neglect. The glass panels were thick, imperfect, faintly clouded as though they'd been exposed to heat and smoke countless times.
It didn't look decorative. However, it did look like it was lived through.
Noah reached out and touched it again.
Warm. Steady.
He wrapped his fingers around the handle and lifted it. The weight felt familiar now, like it had already been measured against him and found acceptable. The light inside shifted slightly, brightening just enough to push back the shadows at the edges of the room.
Evan stirred.
Noah froze.
His roommate rolled onto his back, muttered something unintelligible, and went still again. The lantern's glow hadn't woken him. Hadn't even seemed to register.
Slowly, carefully, Noah lowered the lantern back onto the desk.
"Okay," he whispered again, the word carrying a different weight this time, this time more curious than the other time.
He checked his phone. 6:14 a.m.
Six minutes before his alarm.
That unsettled him more than the lantern did.
Noah dressed quietly, movements precise, controlled. Hoodie. Jeans. Shoes. He hesitated only once, glancing back at the desk as he slung his backpack over his shoulder.
Leaving it felt wrong.
Not dangerous-wrong. Incomplete-wrong. Like walking out without your wallet or keys.
He picked the lantern up again.
The moment his fingers closed around the handle, the light brightened—not dramatically, just enough to acknowledge the contact. Noah held his breath, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did.
He exhaled and, after a brief pause, placed it back down on the nightstand.
Noah glanced at Evan one last time, who was still sleeping, then stepped out into the hallway.
The building was quiet, the hum of the lights overhead mixing with distant plumbing sounds.
The morning air was cool, carrying the scent of damp pavement and wet leaves. Clouds still hung low over campus, but the sky had begun to lighten at the edges. Noah started down the familiar path toward the library, his steps unhurried.
Something else was different.
People.
Or rather, their absence felt different.
The campus was always quiet at this hour, but now the emptiness carried weight. Not threatening. Just…expectant. Noah found himself scanning his surroundings without consciously deciding to, his eyes tracking movement that wasn't there. He felt eyes, or rather just something. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end.
He told himself he was imagining it.
At the library, the doors unlocked automatically as he approached. Inside, the lights flickered on in sequence, illuminating rows of shelves and long wooden tables. The night-shift supervisor glanced up as Noah passed, offering a tired smile.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning," Noah replied.
He clocked in and grabbed a cart.
The routine should have grounded him. It always had before. But today, something tugged at the edges of his awareness, a faint pressure like a storm building far beyond the horizon.
He tried to ignore it.
Half an hour into his shift, it became harder to.
The lights over one of the far aisles flickered, not the brief, harmless kind, but erratic, stuttering. Noah paused, book halfway to the shelf, watching as the illumination dimmed and flared again.
Then, just as abruptly, it stopped.
He frowned, slid the book into place, and moved on.
A few minutes later, a sharp clang echoed from deeper in the stacks.
Noah stiffened.
The sound wasn't loud, but it was wrong. Metal on metal, too deliberate to be an accident. He waited, listening.
Silence.
He told himself it was a dropped cart. A maintenance issue. Anything ordinary.
His breathing didn't return to normal, his heartbeat quickened to an almost deafening pace. The feeling… it returned, the hairs on his neck stood on end, a shiver, or rather a feeling, ran down his spine.
Another sound, closer this time.
A low scrape, like something being dragged across stone.
Noah swallowed.
"Hello?" he called, his voice echoing faintly between the shelves.
No answer.
He turned the corner into the next aisle.
The shelves were intact. The floor was empty.
At the far end of the aisle, near the emergency exit, the air itself seemed…off.
It wasn't visible, not exactly. More like a distortion, the way heat warped the air above the asphalt. The fluorescent lights overhead dimmed as they approached it, casting uneven shadows that twisted at strange angles.
Noah stopped.
Every instinct screamed at him to leave. To turn around and walk away, to find a supervisor, to call campus security.
He didn't.
He glanced around the bookshelf. Another chill ran down his spine; his body's alarms were going off. He didn't feel scared, but he did feel cornered.
The scrape sounded again, sharper now, closer, but this time from the opposite direction of the bookshelf.
Something moved within the warped air.
Noah's breath came shallow. His hands shook.
Another noise happened. This time, it was scraping, metal against metal; it sounded like metal was ripping, but the noise was more piercing.
Noah held his hands to his ears, covering them. Among the chaos, he tried to close the distance to see what the commotion was.
He fell back when he saw it. He couldn't explain it. It was beyond supernatural. It was simply wrong.
He saw a tear in the air… and something was clawing its way out. He could see its long, pale, gray fingers, tearing at space, trying to force its body through the rip.
That's when they appeared, he had thought he had seen them in a dream… they were around his age, holding things he had never seen before, weapons, things you would see in museums.
They moved faster than his eyes could follow. The hand of the "beast" was severed, and the rip in the air began to mend… and as sudden as they appeared, they were gone.
Noah scrambled to his feet. What the hell is going on.