Chapter 1: The City That Devours

The ruins of Noxport lean under the weight of time, twisted and hollow, as though the city itself is too exhausted to remain standing. Buildings sag like melted wax, their edges blurred by the creeping rot that has taken root in their bones. The once-proud streets, paved by careful hands long forgotten, are fractured now, jagged veins of stone winding through an earth that no longer belongs to the living.

Aldia walks these streets like a trespasser in a place that remembers its ghosts.

Her boots press into the damp cobblestones, and for a fleeting moment, they seem to sink beneath her weight, shifting and adjusting, as if the city resents her presence.

The air is thick with moisture from recent rain, but beneath the scent of wet stone and rotting wood, something else lingers—something sweet, cloying, too rich to belong here. A scent like old perfume left in a sealed room, waiting for someone who will never return.

The silence is heavy, stretched too thin, as though the city is holding its breath.

She moves carefully, her steps measured, her dagger a steady weight at her hip. Not because she is afraid. Fear is for those with something left to lose.

Her fingers tighten around the hilt as she passes a shattered storefront. The broken glass catches the moonlight in jagged slivers, reflecting something that does not belong.

She stops.

The reflection lingers a second too long. She turns swiftly, but there is nothing.

Only her own shadow, cast long against the damp stone.

Still, the weight of unseen eyes remains, watching from the spaces between things, from the corners where the light cannot quite reach.

She exhales as she calls for Nyxie. "Nyxie! where are you?' No answer, and she understood where it could be.

The air shifts.

Not with wind; wind carries motion, change, the shifting of the world. This is something else. Something colder, something that coils through the empty streets with intent.

A whisper.

It does not belong to the city.

It does not belong to the dead.

It does not belong.

The voice does not break the silence so much as it bleeds into it, curling around the edges of her hearing, slipping against her skin like breath from lips she cannot see.

"Aldia, come closer." a voice whispered, sending a shiver down her spine, sharp and immediate, but she does not stop.

She does not look back.

To acknowledge it would be to invite it closer.

Her breath hitches for only a fraction of a second, then steadies. A learned instinct. A survivor's discipline.

The dagger remains sheathed at her side. A weapon drawn too soon is a mistake. A weapon drawn too late is a death sentence.

She walks.

The silence presses in tighter, thick and suffocating, stretching the space between her steps as if time itself has begun to slow.

The shadows seem thicker now, stretching unnaturally long, bending against the angles of the world like something unseen is pulling them forward.

Aldia's pulse hums beneath her skin, steady, even. She knows better than to let the city hear her fear.

Somewhere in the distance, water drips, a slow, deliberate sound.

She listens.

One drip. Two. Then silence.

Something is different.

She stops, her foot hovering just above the next step.

The sound has changed.

Not water, but a sound she has not heard before.

And then it shows itself.

The mist comes first.

It rolls in thick and golden, curling between the broken buildings, seeping through cracks in the stone like liquid shadow. It does not belong to the sea. It is too heavy, too unnatural, the color of aged parchment stained with something darker.

It does not drift. It spreads.

Aldia stays still.

Stillness is survival.

At first, it is only mist. A shifting veil, writhing at the edges of the street. Then, something within it stirs.

The fog begins to take shape. At first, it is nothing. Then limbs.

Elongated fingers, curling like roots searching for soil. A torso, a head—wrong. It is not stepping forward, not emerging from the mist. It is assembling itself within it, piece by piece, like something crawling out of an unfinished dream.

Aldia does not draw her dagger.

Not yet.

It moves.

The figure tilts its head, a slow, jerky motion, as though controlled by invisible strings, pulled by a hand that does not understand the mechanics of a body.

Its face, or what should have been a face, is nothing.

Not hollow, not missing, but shifting. Ink dissolving in water. A suggestion of features, there and not there.

Then—

It smiles.

Not a human smile. Not kind.

A wound, ear to ear, stretching impossibly wide, a slash through flesh that is not flesh. Something black and wet glistens at its edges, dripping down in slow, sluggish drops.

The thing does not lunge, does not step forward. It only watches.

Then, It speaks.

The sound does not emerge from its mouth. It slides through the air, seeps into her skull like a whisper buried in the bones of her mind.

And it is her own voice.

"Why do you keep running?" The voice is distorted and hollow.

A cold prickle blooms at the base of her spine, but she does not let it show.

Her fingers twitch, just barely.

Not with fear.

Not yet.

The thing waits.

The mist coils at its feet, shifting around it like something alive, something eager.

Kaelen exhales, steady.

"Because something is always chasing," Aldia says softly. Being in Noxport, its never safe, never you alone. Something is always creeping, stalking from the corners and from the cracks of this broken city.

The wound of the creature's mouth stretches wider.

All of a sudden, the city crumbles.

It is not an earthquake, not the shifting of stone surrendering to time. It is deeper than that. The ground beneath Aldia's boots pulses, slow, rhythmic, deliberate. Not a vibration, not the murmur of an old ruin settling, but a heartbeat.

Beneath the cobblestones, something is alive.

Aldia steps backwards, confused. 

And then she sees, behind the creature, the street ahead narrows, hemmed in by the carcasses of buildings that lean towards each other like drunken men whispering their last confessions. Their walls are pockmarked with rot, windows nothing more than gaping sockets where the city's eyes used to be.

At the very end, where the road crumbles into dust, she sees it.

A wound.

A tear in the air, jagged and raw, pulsing with an unnatural breath.

It is small now, no wider than a doorway, its edges flickering like silk caught in an unseen wind, unraveling thread by thread.

Aldia exhales, slow and measured. She has seen rifts before.

They do not whisper.

They do not hunger.

This one does.

The figure watches in amusement, a last smirk. The mist around the figure shudders, uncertain. Then, suddenly, it collapses. The figure melts, unraveling, spilling into the cobblestones like wax abandoned to flame.

No scream. No sound. Just dissolution.

She steps closer to the anomaly, passing through where the figure stood a second ago.

The rift does not glow, does not beckon with light or darkness. It is neither. It is absence.

Inside, there is no shadow. No void. No depth. It is simply—not.

A gust spills from its center, curling around her, dragging its fingers against her skin like something unseen memorizing her shape.

It is cold, but not in a way that belongs to any season. It is the cold of forgotten rooms, of breath held too long, of places that should never be touched.

She feels the moment it happens. Reality shifts.The scent of rust and rot is erased in an instant.

Gone is the damp weight of a city long past its death. Gone is the broken stone beneath her feet.

Gone is Noxport.

And in its place there is something else.