The First Fragments...

I. The First Prayer

It happens deep into the night, in the heavy dark that feels too thick to breathe through. A darkness that tastes of copper and dust, ancient and patient. His body betrays him first—stiff, useless, as if his bones have turned to iron and his lungs are filling with sand.

He tries to move. He cannot. He tries to scream. His mouth stays closed, locked by some unseen hand.

And then he sees it.

Someone at the foot of his bed. No, not someone—*something*, though that word is too small for the wrongness standing there. A figure that eats the light around it, bending the edges of his sight. It crawls inside his head with too many limbs, too many eyes, too much hunger. Its presence scrapes against his mind like splintered bone dragged over wet stone. It watches him with a stare so wide and hollow it feels like falling into a grave that has always been waiting for him.

The air smells like rust, wet earth, and the sharp bite of decay. His stomach churns violently. His pulse hammers in his throat, in his ears, but it’s useless; he can’t run. Can’t hide. He has prayed before, whispered to the God that they teach you about in church. But faith abandoned him long ago. The God he once knelt for feels like a dead thing, distant and cold. Useless, and uninterested in doing anything to come to his aid.

So he whispers, desperate and raw, to whoever might be listening.

“Please… someone. Anyone.”

And She answers.

A hush falls over the room—not silence, but a waiting, breathless stillness. Like the moment before the ocean swallows you whole. Something cool brushes against his temple, like fingers carved from shadow and smoke, and yet tender. The weight pressing on his chest eases, just slightly. His ribs creak as he drags in a breath, ragged and shallow.

"Mine," She says, though it’s not words but a pulse that ripples through his blood, through the marrow of him. The creature at the foot of his bed shudders violently, as if it hears Her too—as if it *knows*.

And then it fades. Dissolves like smoke caught in wind, leaving behind only a faint smear of cold and the echo of its hollow gaze.

He can move again. His muscles scream as he forces himself upright, every bone aching as if they’ve been cracked open and carefully rearranged. His breath stutters in his chest. His hands shake.

He whispers into the dark, “Thank you.”

And somewhere beyond the veil of the world, She watches. She smiles. And he feels it—warm and terrible, filling the hollow spaces inside him he never knew were waiting to be filled.
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II. The Morning After

He doesn’t sleep after it’s over. He lies there, staring at the ceiling, ribs aching with every breath. The room feels different now. Not empty. Not his. The air hums faintly, as if carrying some distant song just beneath the edge of hearing.

When the sun rises, pale and thin, it stings his eyes. The warmth of it feels wrong against his skin. He moves slowly, joints stiff, as if his body belongs to someone else. The reflection in the mirror doesn’t look right. There’s something in his gaze now. Something watching back.

He traces the skin at his temple where he felt Her touch. There’s nothing there. No mark. But his bones remember.
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III. Days Later

Sleep comes less often now. Or when it does, it’s shallow, filled with images he can’t hold onto when he wakes—shapes in shadow, a hand reaching, teeth in the dark. He stops turning on the lights at night. The dark feels safer.

He finds himself standing in strange places, not sure how he got there. At the edge of the forest. On the overpass. At the lake where no one swims anymore. Each time, the air hums faintly, familiar, and he thinks he hears Her breath behind his ear.

He whispers to Her without thinking. Quiet words. Thanks. Pleas. Secrets he’s never told anyone. She listens. He knows She listens.
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III. Moments Between
III.a.
He dreams of Her fingers combing through his hair. They smell like rain on rusted iron. When he wakes, the shape of them still lingers, as if pressed into his scalp.

III.b.
He starts leaving his window open at night. Waiting. Hoping. Some nights the curtains flutter without wind. Some nights they don’t move at all.

III.c.
He carves small marks into his skin, just beneath the collar of his shirt. Shapes he doesn’t understand, but they feel right. His hands move without thought, as if remembering something he’s never learned.

III.d.
There’s a bird outside his window one morning. Dead, but untouched by anything but time. Its eyes are gone. Its feathers are black as oil. He buries it beneath the old oak tree at the edge of the yard, murmuring something that doesn’t sound like his own voice.

III.e.
He stops praying to the God he grew up fearing. The cross on his bedroom wall is turned upside down one night when he returns. He doesn’t touch it. He lets it hang that way.
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IV. Watched
 IV.a.
His mother watches him from the doorway as he sits at the kitchen table, staring at a candle’s flame until it gutters out. His little sister doesn’t come near him anymore. His father says little, just shakes his head at the boy who doesn’t smile anymore, who whispers to things no one can see.

IV.b.
At church, people ask if he’s feeling alright. He nods, polite and vacant, but no one meets his eyes for long. There’s something there they don’t want to understand.
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V. Distance

She doesn’t know why it’s so hard now. When he looks at her, it’s like he’s seeing through her, not past her, but beyond her. As if she’s not what he’s waiting for. They used to talk for hours, laugh about nothing. Now she can’t get three words out of him.

When they touch, his hands are cold. When they kiss, his mouth doesn’t move. It’s like trying to hold water in her hands, and she’s never been good at holding on to something that doesn’t want to stay.

One night she tells him, “I love you.” He nods. Looks away. She knows he didn’t hear her.
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VI. Searching

His nights are spent in libraries and online, scrolling through forums that promise forbidden knowledge. He orders books he hides under his bed. He copies symbols onto scraps of paper, practices the pronunciation of languages that scrape raw against his throat.

He lights candles at midnight. Draws circles in salt and ash. He speaks words with trembling breath. But She doesn’t come. Something else does.

Shadows move wrong in the corners of his room. He dreams of figures with hollow faces. Sometimes he wakes with bruises in the shape of hands on his arms. But never Hers.
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VII. Failing Light

His voice goes hoarse with chants that burn his throat. The pages he reads swim with shifting letters. The offerings rot untouched. The air in his room is heavy and foul. He burns incense that doesn’t cover the smell.

He sleeps less. Eats less. Draws sigils on his walls that smear and fade. He wonders if She was ever there at all. But when he closes his eyes, he still feels Her breath in his ear.

VIII. The Final Plea

It’s raining when he tries. Heavy drops against broken pavement. He kneels in it, not feeling the cold, the water soaking through his clothes.

“Please,” he says, voice raw. “Come back.”

He cuts his palm with a shard of glass he found in the street. Lets the blood mix with rain. He presses his hand to the earth, fingers splayed. Breath shaking.

And then—

The hum returns. Low and sweet. Like a voice singing a song made only for him.

He closes his eyes. Waits. And when the weight comes down on his shoulders, heavy and warm, he smiles.

She is here.

But She cannot stay... Not yet.
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IV. The Ritual of Becoming

The dream comes on the third night after he calls Her. In it, She shows him what to do. The sigils scrawled in bone dust. The blood—his own, fresh and willingly given. The offering of breath. The chant that pulls at his lungs like drowning.

He wakes before dawn and gathers the things She asked for:

Bone dust, ground fine from the skeleton of something that once flew.

Black candles, carved with the shapes that ache behind his eyes.

A blade sharp enough to cut clean, honed in silence.

His own blood, given freely.

A mirror, cracked.

He draws the circle on the floor in bone dust and ash. The symbols he writes in blood, one for each finger pressed to the floor, one for each word She whispered in his sleep.

He lights the candles. They sputter, then flare, flames black at their core.

He stands in the center of it all, bare and unhidden. He begins the chant, a rough syllable that scrapes his throat raw, and then the next, and the next. Each word pulling him deeper, drowning him, until he speaks without knowing what he says.

He breathes out, and the candles breathe in.

He takes the blade to his chest and draws the final mark over his heart. The blood runs cold and fast.

And when he falls, She catches him.

When he opens his eyes, they are no longer his.
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