Resurrection

The chamber was swallowed by darkness.

A thick, living kind of dark—the kind that slithered into the bones and wrapped itself around the heart like a coiling vice. It was absolute. The torches had not merely been extinguished; their fire had been *devoured*, snuffed out as if the very air itself had turned against them.

The silence was the worst part.

Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of something waiting.

Alberto did not move. He did not flinch. His breath was steady, controlled, even as he felt the shift in the room—the slow, dreadful way the presence thickened, congealing in the air like clotted blood.

And then—

A whisper.

Not a voice. Not words. Just a shape of sound, curling through the dark like fingers trailing along the nape of the neck. A hiss, a sigh, a thing that slithered between the gathered men, filling their lungs with something rank and wrong.