The Beast World

Kiran did not sleep.

Not truly. Not in any way that gave peace. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her face—his own face—older, cracked by madness, staring through him like a ghost through a mirror.

"I failed," she had said.

The words rotted in his skull.

The shadow Beast coiled silently at the edge of his vision, always watching, always present. It never spoke. It didn't need to. Its hunger had become a second heartbeat, pulsing inside him with every breath he took. Whatever pact they'd made, it was permanent. It didn't just reside in him—it was him, now.

Outside the inn, the town began to stir. Kiran pushed himself from the straw mat that passed for a bed, bones aching, muscles sore in places he didn't know he had. He stared at his reflection in the cracked mirror again.

Still Kiran.

But changed.

His eyes were darker now. Less violet, more void. When he blinked, something blinked with him—deep in the pupils. A flicker of another consciousness.

Veridian.

He stepped outside the inn and took in the city in full for the first time.

It was smaller than he remembered from the novel. Cramped alleys twisted between timber buildings, most leaning under their own weight. Iron chimneys puffed black smoke into a slate-gray sky. People moved with purpose, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast.

This wasn't the gleaming city the protagonist Leon would one day save. This was Veridian before the story cared about it. Before the hero brought light.

Kiran felt the weight of that narrative absence like a sickness in the air.

And everywhere, Beasts.

They moved beside their human counterparts. Spirits of fur and fang, scale and claw. Some translucent, some solid. Some beautiful. Some wrong.

A boy passed with a floating eye stitched with runes bobbing over his shoulder.

A woman bartered fish while a centipede-like Beast wrapped around her neck like jewelry, flicking its tongue at passing men.

Another man screamed at a Beast made of shattered glass that mimicked his every gesture. No one paid them any mind.

This was normal here.

A world of Beast-bonded humanity.

Inside the inn's kitchen, the innkeeper stirred a bubbling pot of something that smelled like blood and spoiled herbs. He was a thickset man with gray in his beard and a Beast that hung from his shoulder like a rotting monkey, twitching with each heartbeat.

Kiran sat.

The man didn't look at him. "You ain't dead yet."

Kiran raised an eyebrow. "Should I be?"

"After what you touched in the woods, boy? Yeah."

He stirred the pot.

Kiran felt the weight of the Beast within him shift, restless.

"I know what I'm doing."

The innkeeper finally turned to face him, one eye milky with cataract. The other sharp. Too sharp.

"No one knows what they're doing when they touch that. Shadow-Beasts ain't natural. They don't come from soul. They come from elsewhere."

Kiran didn't reply.

The man chuckled. "You're either brave, stupid, or already dead inside. Maybe all three."

"I'm trying to survive."

"Wrong world for that."

They ate in silence. The stew tasted like rust and old secrets. Afterward, the man sat across from him and lit a pipe. Gray smoke curled upward, forming images of snarling Beasts that dissipated into the rafters.

"You remember much?" the innkeeper asked.

Kiran narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I mean your fall. Folks say you wandered the woods for a night, came back changed. Eyes wrong. Voice wrong. Like someone wearing a skin that didn't quite fit."

So people had noticed.

Kiran lied easily. "I was attacked. Something infected me."

The innkeeper nodded slowly, unconvinced. "You're not the first to try cheating fate. Never ends well."

"I'm not trying to cheat fate."

"What then?"

"I'm trying to kill it."

The Beast on the man's shoulder hissed. The innkeeper stood without another word and left.

Kiran wandered Veridian after that.

He traced the path Leon would take. Past the market, through the guard barracks, down into the underground temple. He remembered the layout from the novel—his knowledge of the plot was still intact.

He had to stay ahead of the narrative.

At the edge of the merchant district, he stopped at a shrine.

It was old. Cracked. The statue had once been a human-Beast fusion—an avatar of harmony. Now it was defaced, eyes gouged out, mouth painted black.

People passed it without pause.

He knelt.

"You used to mean something," he murmured. "Before the story forgot you."

A whisper. Cold.

You remember more than you should.

Kiran didn't turn.

The voice came from behind the statue.

Selena.

She stepped into view—tall, dressed in black leather now, cloak gone. Her Beast was invisible, but he could sense it: thick, suffocating, ancient.

"You're still alive," she said.

"I thought you were a hallucination."

"I am. And I'm not." She knelt beside him. "Do you know what this statue is?"

"A god. Or it was."

"It's what Beast-bonds used to be. Before the corruption. Before the contracts turned into slavery."

Kiran turned to face her. "You said the story I read—the ending—was false."

"It was manufactured."

"By who?"

"By the world itself. This place has a mind. A narrative consciousness. It shapes events. Edits truth."

He felt sick.

"Leon's happy ending?"

"Never happened. Or if it did, it was a dream stitched into the bones of this place to keep it sane."

Kiran stood. The shadow inside him growled.

"I want to see it," he said. "The real world. Not the version I read."

Selena smiled. It was not a kind smile.

"Then you'll have to go deeper. Beneath Veridian. To the husk."

The husk was legend.

A cavern below the city. A myth whispered by Beasts. The place where the original pacts were made—before language, before memory.

Selena led him to a locked gate behind the temple.

She whispered something in a tongue he couldn't comprehend. The lock rotted open.

They descended.

The air grew colder. The walls wept black. The steps were not carved—they were grown, as if the stone itself had sprouted like bone.

Kiran's Beast writhed inside him, warning, protesting.

At the bottom, they found a door. And a wall of symbols that pulsed with red light.

"What is this?" he asked.

Selena placed her hand on the wall.

"This is the edit point. Where the world's script is rewritten."

Kiran stepped forward.

"Can I change it?"

She turned.

"You already have."

Then the door exploded.

Screaming. Red. Flesh. A Beast—no, something worse—poured out. Not a creature. A cancer of memories. A malformed hybrid of dead pacts and broken spirits.

Selena screamed.

Kiran fell.

The last thing he saw before darkness took him was his own face again—this time carved into the wall.

With its eyes missing.