The lock fought him. It always did. Three more tries and the door gave in.
Inside, the apartment smelled of dust and the faint, sweet residue of the candle he'd bought last week. A stupid purchase.
Lavender-scented, expensive for what it was, the wax already cracked down one side. He'd lit it exactly once, watched the flame gutter, and snuffed it out to save the rest.
He didn't know why he was saving it. Nothing to celebrate. No one coming over. Just him, the drafty windows, and the ledger work spread across his desk like a second skin.
The landlord's office was three blocks away.
Ember had walked past it every day for six months. His feet never stopped.
Ember sat. The chair groaned. Outside, the city hummed with evening traffic distant horns, the screech of subway brakes, the low thrum of thousands of lives he was not part of. He heard none of it. His attention was on the candle.
He picked it up and turned it over. The wick was still intact.
"Iam not going to light it," he told himself. "You never do."
He lit it.
The flame was small, unsteady. It threw long shadows across the walls. Ember watched it burn, feeling nothing at first. Then something not warmth, exactly. Recognition.
The candle felt like a mirror. The flame kept eating itself just to stay alive.
His sister used to love candles. Rain. She'd collect the stubs from charity shops, line them up on her windowsill, and light them one by one. She said it made the apartment feel less empty.
Her windowsill faced east. She said she liked to wake up with the light. He'd sealed the cracks in her frame himself, cheap caulk and borrowed tools. It still leaked.
Everything leaked.
That was before the clinic. Before the bills. Before she stopped asking him to visit.
Ember set the candle down. The flame flickered.
He could blow it out now. Save the wax. Be practical. That was what he did — survived, conserved, endured. The flame was a luxury. Luxuries cost more than money.
He didn't blow it out.
He turned to his ledger. Numbers. Deadlines. Payments due and payments missed. The candle burned beside him, and for twenty minutes, the apartment felt almost inhabited.
Then the flame trembled.
Not from wind. The windows were sealed. The door was closed. But the flame bent sideways, as if something had passed too close. Ember's hand stilled on the page.
He waited. The flame steadied.
The wax had softened in the afternoon heat.
His thumb sank in.
His breath caught. The floor was solid. The tile was whole. But his skin wasn't.
"Just a draft," he thought. "Old building. Settling."
The flame did not flutter.
It leaned. Not away from him toward something in the room that he could not see.
Ember felt the slow, crawling certainty of being watched.
He almost believed it.
Then the floor shifted beneath his feet.
Not violently. A subtle lurch, like the building had taken a breath. Ember stood slowly, his chair scraping against the floorboards. The candle flame burned upright now, unnaturally still. The shadows on the walls had stopped moving.
Something was wrong.
He should leave. Walk out the door, go to Khael's place. Khael's couch smelled of cat hair and stale beer. It was better than here. The safe choice. The smart choice.
Ember hesitated by the door.
Khael's name sat on his phone, unsent. If he went there, Khael would make tea. He always did. Wouldn't ask what was wrong. Wouldn't ask anything. Just make space.
Ember locked the screen. He couldn't afford to be someone's problem.His hand moved toward the candle.
"Don't touch it." Ember whispered.
He touched it.
The wax was warm, soft beneath his fingers. The flame leaned toward him. Not away. Not sideways. Toward. As if it had been waiting for his touch. As if it knew him.
The floor cracked.
A single tile, directly beneath the bed. A hairline fracture that spiderwebbed outward, spreading in silence. Ember watched it happen, frozen, his fingertips still pressed against the wax.
The crack widened. A sound emerged not grinding stone, not splitting wood. Water. Waves. The deep, rhythmic pulse of an ocean that had no business existing on the third floor of a city apartment.
Ember stepped back. His legs hit the bedframe. He could not look away from the darkness pooling beneath the cracked tile.
Something rose from it.
Not a figure. Not yet. Something stood there. A presence. Heavy. Pressing down on the air. The temperature dropped. "He could not breathe."
He wanted to run. His body refused.
The shape condensed. A hand first, long-fingered and slick, the color of a bruise that never healed. Then an arm, draped in rags that dripped brine onto the floor.
Then the face or the absence of one. Two jagged breaths where a nose should be. A mouth that stretched too wide, too thin, too knowing.
And the eyes. Yellow. Burning. Fixed on him.
It did not speak. It did not need to. It simply regarded him, as if he were a debt that had finally come due.
Ember's throat closed. He could not scream. He could not breathe. His hand was still on the candle, the wax cooling against his skin, and he thought, absurdly, "I should have blown it out."
The entity raised one finger.
Pain.
Not in his chest. Not in his head. His wrist. A line of fire carved itself into his skin, deep and deliberate the mark of a debt that had finally found him.
The last thing he saw, before the world folded inward, was the candle flame.
Still burning.
Still waiting.
Ember woke on the floor.
The apartment was silent. The tile was intact. The candle sat on his desk, unlit, the wick untouched.
"Just a dream," he thought. "Too little sleep. Too much coffee."
"Yeah. Too expensive." He whispered.
He sat up slowly. His wrist brushed against the floor.
Pain flared — sharp, electric, real.
Ember looked down.
A line of violet, fine as a hair, traced from his wrist to his knuckle. It pulsed faintly, like a vein that had risen to the surface.
He touched it. The pain receded.
And in the silence of his apartment, with the candle cold and the shadows still, Ember heard it:
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Footsteps. Heavy. Metallic. Dragging.
Coming down the hall. Toward his door.