Story 1097: Night of 1,000 Shadows

The black bell above the ruined citadel tolled once, and the world shuddered.

From the broken streets, the bone gardens, and the drowned crypts, they came—shadows, thousands of them, spilling across the corpse-littered city like a living tide.

Each silhouette was wrong, twisted—half-remembered faces of long-dead children, forgotten soldiers, eyeless priests, and beasts no tongue could name. Some were wisps that whispered curses; others were hulking forms with twisted limbs, hungry for flesh and memory alike.

It was the Night of 1,000 Shadows, the elders had warned, a prophecy older than the Ghoul King, older than even Dreadroot itself.

When the sky bled and the shadows rose, it would signal the beginning of the Final Convergence.

Trapped within the heart of the broken city, Mara Quinn, Iri Vance, and a handful of battered survivors prepared their final stand atop the skeletal remains of the old chapel.