Chapter 1: The First Fracture
The sky cracked open the night my mother died.
Not with lightning. Not with fire. Not with the screaming of the damned.
No one else saw it.
Just me.
A fracture in the stars, thin as a hairline crack in glass. Spreading. Crawling. Pulsing like something alive. It whispered as it widened, though no sound reached my ears.
And behind that fracture, something vast and wrong watched me.
---
The hospital smelled like antiseptic and death. The walls were yellow with age, the fluorescent lights buzzing like dying flies.
I sat beside my mother's bed, counting the seconds between each breath she took. I didn't cry. I'd spent years grieving before this moment, through every doctor's whisper, every chemo session that only delayed the inevitable.
I just waited.
Waited for the moment the world would decide to take her away.
Her fingers twitched. Cold. Fragile. Her eyes fluttered open, glassy and distant, as if she were already standing at the threshold of something I couldn't see.
"Ren…" Her voice was barely a breath.
I swallowed hard. "Yeah?"
Her fingers tightened weakly around mine. Her lips moved. I leaned in to hear her last words.
But she didn't speak.
She twitched.
Then she died.
Her entire body convulsed, limbs twisting unnaturally against the bed. Her mouth stretched wide—too wide—far too wide—a black void opening where her voice should be.
The machines around her shrieked. Her skin turned gray, cracking, splitting like dry earth beneath my hands.
Then, for a single second, I saw something staring at me from inside her hollowed-out face.
Something wearing her skin.
And then—
She was gone.
Just a body again.
Just another dead thing in a room full of them.
The machines flatlined. The nurses rushed in. Someone grabbed my shoulder. Someone screamed—maybe it was me.
But I couldn't hear them.
Because the fracture in the sky had spread.
---
That night, I walked the empty streets alone.
I should have gone home. I should have told someone what I saw.
But what was the point?
Nothing mattered.
The world had already ended.
I wandered until my legs ached, stopping beneath a broken streetlight. The air smelled like rain. My mother's last moments played over and over in my head, twisting, warping—that thing inside her, that moment her body had turned into something else—
And then, I felt it.
A gaze.
Not human.
Not anything that belonged in this world.
I turned my head—
And the crack in the sky was right above me.
It had stretched wide, revealing something behind it. A mass of shifting void, churning like a hole in the fabric of reality itself.
And it was reaching for me.
A hand—if it could be called that—slid through the fracture.
Long fingers. Too many joints. Skin that wriggled like it wasn't attached to muscle or bone.
I couldn't move.
The hand touched my forehead.
And then—
I fell.
---
I woke up in the dark.
Not normal darkness. Not the kind you close your eyes to. This was something else. A void with no up, no down. Nothing.
And then—
I heard the whispers.
Hundreds. Thousands. Voices that shouldn't exist, overlapping, screaming, pleading.
"Ren."
The voice wasn't theirs.
It was mine.
Something stepped forward from the void.
It was me.
A perfect mirror. My face, my body, my voice. But wrong. The smile on its lips stretched too far, its teeth too white, too sharp. Its eyes were pits of writhing black.
"Do you understand now?" it asked.
I shook my head. My throat was dry. My hands trembled. "What… what is this?"
The thing wearing my face grinned wider.
"You're dead, Ren."
The void cracked.
Light flooded in.
I gasped, slamming back into reality.
Cold pavement. The smell of blood and rain. My heartbeat pounding in my ears. I was outside. In the city. My body ached.
I tried to stand—
And then, I saw my reflection.
In a puddle.
And my eyes were black.
Not just black.
Moving.
Something stared back from inside them.
The presence hadn't left.
It had entered me.
And I wasn't human anymore.
---
[TO BE CONTINUED...]