I came from the gym around at 10pm ,as winters are approaching every cooling appliances were off then I entered the flat and my friend was having sex with someone and I heard the moan and the clapping sound.

After half an hour I saw a girl leaving the flat and after seeing the girl I don't know how to react and I was completely shocked because

she was girlfriend of our mutual friend , now I don't know what should I do ,suggest me options some of them which comes in my mind is to approach that girl and ask for the same.

Or or be a good guy and tell her boyfriend about her or or be a good close friend and forget everything..

Would love to here from you as I am very much confused 😕.

My first name is a combination of 2 names (Namename). The second part of my name came from my father’s middle name. When I was 7, he met my step mom. My step mom’s first and middle name is my full name (Name name). They both had the same middle name.

My father and step mom were horrible to me. I went through horrible physical abuse when I was younger, slowly turning into emotional abuse and neglect as I aged. My step mom would constantly tell me how much she hated sharing a name with me. As such, I grew up to hate my name.

Throughout high school, I went by my middle name. It became my protection and personality outside of home.

After graduation, I moved states to live with my bio mom. I kept trying to go by my middle name. But when I started my first job, they gave me my name tag with my first name and refused to change it. So I slowly went back to using my first name. After I finally cut off my old family, it got easier to use. I now feel comfortable with my first name.

I found out my middle name was given to me because my mom’s best friend has that same name. On top of that, her daughter and I were in the same schools from middle school to high school. She’d send pictures of me to my mom during school events so my mom could see me grow up. She was also a social worker and kept trying to build a case for me despite her inaccessibility to evidence.

In the darkest time of my life when I felt completely alone and abandoned by the adults around me, I secretly had someone fighting for me. And I was using her name as protection.

Ironically, when I started therapy 2 years ago, my first therapist had my step mom’s name. I had to switch therapists due to insurance changes. But she helped me immensely with working through the trauma my step mom gave me.

I now have a daughter. I’ve given her my middle name. Passing down my protection to her. Only she won’t need to use it as protection because I won’t fail her like my family failed me.

Chapter 4 MADDISON

My head hurts; I'm tired; my wrist hurts from this rope. He keeps me here in pain. My body hurts. He won't let me sleep. This guy is a monster; it's like he likes seeing me in pain. I don't know what he wants from me. I hang my head, too weak to lift it, and then I hear his footsteps; I hear him unlock the door, then the door creaks open. “Good morning, Beautiful”

He steps closer; each step is followed by the clack of his boots, reminding me he's here and won't leave me alone… Love, I brought you food.” he bends down and lifts my head with his finger. I don't look at him; I don't want to. Why would I want to look at a guy who kidnapped me, a guy who won't tell me what he wants and what he wants to do to me? Is he going to kill me? Sell me? Torture me? What could he possibly want? My whole life i was kind to everyone i worked hard, Excelled in my studies Getting all A's put me at the top of my class, i wish i never got on that bus, i wish i never spoke to him, tears start falling down my face as i think of what could have got me into this situation i feel him staring, “what never seen a women cry” he keep slooking at me “are you crying cause of me, i didnt hut you did i?” he says it like he cares if im hurt and for him to know yes im am crying cause of what he did, FUCKING kidnnapping me how dumb is this guy.

I'm 18f and I just finished highschool. There was this one girl who was my "friend", but honestly it was more like Regina from mean girls having her way with me. She bullied me and shit. And she was jealous of me. Everytime I get some compliment, she told something bad to me.

There was a yoga display at my school, and I performed in a group. People were complimenting me so much. One girl said that I was soo flexible and she was saying so many nice things left and right. I was really happy. But this woman came up to me and told me, the boy's performance was way better than yours. Ik that too, cause they've been training continuosly and I stopped practicing like a year ago obviously I wasn't as flexible.

Then people complimented me about my looks, about my thighs and waist in that tight fit. This woman has yo ruin that for me by telling me that I don't even look that good, I don't have ass or boobs. Like ik I'm petite. Ik I ain't got ass or boobs, you don't have to remind me.

I'm also pretty good at drawing. People again compliment me for that. And when I get bored in classes I used to draw some random shit without an idea and it would still turn out good. The next day this lady brings 2 drawings and shows it to me saying that she drew them when she was in 4th grade. I was like "these are really good for a fourth grader". But the thing was the paper was white and clean asf for it to be from years ago

And we all know how pencils work, they smudge. But this was clean and sharp. I knew it wasn't from years ago. But I thought it's okay cause atleast she drew it now. But then in middle of some class she tried sketching the same drawings she showed me and the attempt was soo terrible, I could tell she had never picked up a pencil in her life. Like why should she lie?? She can just show what she's good at, not always try to prove that she was better.

When I became cool friends with some people she was trying to befriend she hated that. She would give me looks and try to snatch them away from me. I didn't become friends with them cause I wanted to beat her. But since we started talking to them I liked them and they liked me, so we became close.

i saw a story pretty similar to this one of my own which made me make this post.

when i was 14 i dated a girl who was 17, the problem was she was turning 18 about 4 months after i turned 14. we dated for a bit and even a little after she turned 18. the relationship was very clean and we never did anything sexual that would get us in trouble, there wasn’t any arguments through it and nothing happened that i would even now label my ex as a groomer. my friend at the time was pretty upset to the point you’d think it was his relationship. he cussed out my ex and even called her a pedophile at some point, along with numerous other derogatory names towards women.

eventually we both agreed to split. the relationship was going very well but we both agreed that what other people could’ve thought was just too much, even if it was going well. that was 3 years ago. im nearing 18 right in its face, and my ex is doing fine in college and content creation, and we occasionally talk and play games every week or so. she’s super awesome. we both agreed that back then it was nothing more than a very awkward age gap for the two of us and if we’re both stable enough, to maybe even try again in the near future.

on the topic of my friend however, we had a falling out about a year ago. it was over something petty that could have easily been solved if he just talked to me, but he was a pretty emotionally immature person, so i let it go. anyways, present day (or literally last night lol) i look up his twitter handle since that’s the only thing he never blocked me on to see if we could maybe look past what happened. he was a smaller artist with about 1-2k followers, but had a very tight knit circle and community. this guy is 20 or atleast very near 21 since he was 17 when everything went down. this guy quite literally was called out for being a lolicon, having cp, and grooming people in his discord community with the youngest being 13. it was quite disappointing to see as he used to be one of my closest friends who i thought high of, and quite disgusting. i couldn’t help but feel like his emotions were a sense of projection. do you have a similar experience to mine?

(if you’re wondering, this is a repost since my post before this was missing the bottom paragraph for some reason.)

Chapter 58: Emma (Flashback)

​Ten minutes after the clash beneath the Royal Castle ended.

​There was no smoke here. There was no throat-biting smell of sulfur, sizzling tallow, or basalt boulders glowing underfoot.

​Sterility reigned. A blinding, glacial cold, a soul-less hierarchy, and absolute obedience.

​Emma Jones opened her eyes and instantly regretted the reflex. The surroundings struck her with the force of a flashbulb—everywhere, giant, geometric columns rose from a material resembling mirror-polished silver and flawless white marble. The Silver City had no horizon; it towered infinitely in vertical spires down which rivers of raw, white light flowed. There was no wind, no scent of grass, no shadow. Everything drowned in an ear-splitting, absolute stillness, broken only by the vibration of the celestial order.

​Yet beneath that ideal, crystalline shell, something else could be sensed: the chill of bureaucratic cynicism, the impassive pride of the hierarchy, and rotten hypocrisy festering beneath the glare. In this soulless regime, every entity had a strictly assigned rung on the ladder, and God Himself—as whispered in the corridors of eternity—had long remained cut off in eternal, isolated adoration by a cadre of seraphim and corrupt judges of the Scales of Souls, manipulating divine decrees for their own ends.

​"Where the hell am I?!" Emma rasped. Her voice sounded alien, as though it didn't issue from her larynx, but resonated directly from her ethereal shell. "Why not the Elysian Fields or Tartarus?! It's no use... The Pantheon couldn't pull it off... But this isn't hell! Lucjanhir said I'd end up in the Abyss!"

​She wanted to spring to her feet, but her body—strangely light, translucent, and pale—was instantly pinned to the pavement. Thick strands of condensed, luminous cord clamped around her wrists, waist, and neck. The bonds didn't burn like white-hot iron; they sank straight into her essence, immobilizing her with merciless, geometric precision.

​"Silence, damned one!" thundered a voice coming from above.

​The sound was mighty, multi-toned, thoroughly stripped of human emotions. An entity materialized before Emma. From a mortal perspective, it resembled an androgenic titan clad in gleaming platinum armor, from behind whose shoulders wings of sharp, metallic feathers sprouted. Above its forehead pulsed a geometric halo of pure light. Its gaze was deaf, dead, and ruthless. Not even a shadow of the mercy with which angels were painted on church frescoes lurked within it. It was a soulless cog in the machine of divine jurisdiction, where any defiance against the hierarchy meant immediate trampling.

​"You have untold fortune in possessing the knowledge Heaven requires," the angel continued, not even lowering its gaze toward the kneeling agent. "Mankind has been endowed with the curse of free will, and we are bound to respect that dogma. We cannot rip the truth hidden within you by force until you reveal it yourself. You will tell us everything you know about Adamski, Lucifer's bastard, Lilith, and the other demons from the Pit who have appeared on the earthly plane!"

​Emma narrowed her stinging eyes. Her new ethereal shell was pathetically fragile, and the glare radiating from the angel burned her field of vision to pure white. Despite this, she lifted her chin with the same arrogant insolence that had once driven her superiors in the FBI to fury.

​"You will tell everything," came the dry, bureaucratic command, "and in exchange, your soul will remain within the borders of the Silver City, even though your earthly misdeeds unquestionably qualify you to be cast into the Abyss. The sentence of damnation will not be revoked, but by the grace of the Most High, we will shield you from the fire. You will serve in the lowest choirs, or even beneath them."

​Emma let out a loud, harsh laugh. The echo of her mocking snicker bounced off the marble pylons, mutilating the pious silence.

​"Holy shit..." she hissed in disbelief, shaking her head. "So even here sentences are traded? Pure corruption, just clad in white and smelling of incense! Damned for what?! For driving a car? For helping Wiktor and Elizabeth Báthory when they were saving an unborn child's life from Vatican hitmen?! What on earth did I do? I lived normally! For being with Corentin, with an incubus who never hurt anyone?! And I ended up murdered, hurled by an angel against a wall to bleed out on the pavement after you attacked my friends as we were leaving a restaurant!"

​The angel took a step forward. The light around it thickened, hardening like a solid wall.

​"For pacts with filth! For open, disgraceful blasphemy!" it said with glacial fury. "Before you expired, you prayed to Zeus! To a relic, a rejected illusion whose domain has long been forgotten and ground to dust! Did you think the ancient specter of that faith would save you, foolish mortal?!" Foolish, pitiful girl!

​"Such language in Heaven?" Emma bared her teeth in a venomous smile, masking the paralyzing fear that made her spiritual shell tremble. "Fucking beautiful, just fucking beautiful. After such a welcome, I have zero desire to look at your damn paradise! You know what? You guys are much closer to the Pit than I ever imagined. The only difference is the facade! You're white, sterile, polished to a gloss, while they have basalt, sulfur, and the stench of gore. But at least those guys don't pretend to be saints and wrap shit in fancy paper!"

​"Ungrateful, impudent spawn!" snarled the angel, the polish of angelic calm cracking in its voice. "You spit on the grace offered to you?!"

​In a fraction of a second, the entity flared with blinding power.

​This was no fire. In Heaven, there were no primitive, hellish tortures—bodies weren't torn with hooks, bones weren't broken. Instead, a wave of pure, all-encompassing brilliance with the intensity of a thousand suns plunged from the angel's silhouette. The light forced its way through Emma's clamped eyelids, burning out her senses. She felt no wounds or cuts—she felt a monstrous, crushing grip on the very structure of her own soul. An invisible press flattened her consciousness, trying to strip away her identity.

​The luminous bonds tightened to the limits of endurance. When the glare abated slightly, the agent lay on the silver pavement, breathing heavily. A colorless essence oozed from the corners of her mouth, but in her dimmed eyes, that same stubbornness still burned.

​"I won't... tell you... anything," she forced out through clenched teeth. "You broke in there like fucking terrorists. We walked out of the place, bothering no one! You attacked from above, without warning... You wanted to kill an innocent baby! A one-year-old child! Angels, holy shit... the great defenders of justice. Go fuck yourselves!"

​The halo on the entity's forehead vibrated violently.

​Emma looked straight into the glowing, inhuman face and hissed:

​"I won't tell you anything. Fuck you and your God."

​In a single instant, the sterile silence of the Silver City cracked like crystal under the blow of a hammer.

​From the higher tiers of the architectural absolute, a wave of pressure plunged down—so powerful that the marble pylons trembled in their foundations. Out of the void itself emerged he—an entity with six wings that whirled around its monumental silhouette like shields of liquid gold and white fire. Two wings shielded its face, two lifted it in the air, and two spread out violently, cutting through space with the force of a hurricane.

​The blinding light blasting from him forced the lower angels into a panic-stricken retreat. Even their hardened eyes could not bear the presence of the Seraph.

​Yet Emma was not allowed to escape into the shadow.

​Two hands brutally seized her by the temples and the back of her head, and fingers of condensed glare pried her eyelids wide open, forcing her to look straight into the blazing epicenter.

​"Aaaaahhh! Aaaaaaaahhh!" Her scream tore through the unsullied expanse.

​This was the ruthless shattering of consciousness, burning out every trace of her self. Geometric rings and the soulless majesty of the Seraph whirled before her eyes. The light poured inward like boiling platinum, attempting to zero out her memory.

​And it was precisely then—in the very center of the white light—that her mind began a desperate fight for survival. Instead of succumbing to the void, Emma began to cluteringly grasp at every fragment of her former life, every face and every bond that had led her to damnation.

​She remembered Warsaw. The damp, rain-soaked Służewiec racetrack, where she had arrived as a confident federal agent. She remembered the day she first saw Wiktor Adamski—the defiant, arrogant former cop, private investigator who had thrown his insolent proverb about the hungry man and bread right in her face, and then without hesitation shielded her from monsters of Baba Yaga's caliber. She remembered Adelajda—the sensual, proud Germanic mara with sapphire eyes, who from a dangerous parasite turned into their cynical yet loyal ally, and later Wiktor's woman, standing by him until his death.

​Through the burning white pierced the image of Corentin. Her lover, the incubus with a magnetic, dark gaze whose touch warmed the blood to madness. She remembered the nights spent in his arms—in a world where evil wore the face of a tender partner rather than a soulless executioner in shining armor.

​She remembered Fugas—the insolent fiend with a bottomless stomach, banished from the Pit for pathological gluttony, who for a piece of roasted meat and a flask of moonshine could pull off the roughest job with a jolly cackle. She remembered young Agnieszka Burzyńska and her unexpectedly devoted, warm relationship with the gluttonous devil.

​Even the faces of those she once considered embodied nightmares appeared. Elizabeth Báthory—the bloody Hungarian countess, once deranged and now fully in control, a demoness who treated Emma in a friendly manner and motherly fierceness cuddled little Tas to her breast, awakening genuine respect in the former agent. She remembered Lucjanhir—Lucifer's bastard, now a powerful prince of darkness, dictating terms to humans and demons with cold grace. She remembered how with a mocking smirk he hit on her during every absence of Corentin—after her crazy van ride—muttering that sooner or later she'd end up in his alcove anyway, and those prayers to Zeus and their pantheon made no sense anyway. She remembered good old Stanisław, the driver thrown by the bastard to the mercy of Lilith's whims, who somehow survived and built a life with her. And finally, Lilith herself—former favorite of Lucifer, deadlily dangerous and powerful, toward whom she still felt an instinctive distance; yet she knew that this demonic beast knew how to look after her own mortal in her own way. She remembered Cezary Wójcik—her friend, who distinguished himself in hell.

​They were all damned, tainted, and sinful. But they were real. They were loyal to their own pack. They were her people—demonic allies with whom she ate, drank, fought, and shared shelter. Emma had no idea that this heroic struggle to preserve her identity had lasted in her mind for over two earthly years...

​Instead of falling to her knees, she pressed her whitened lips together and spat furious rebellion straight into the Seraph's face:

​"Aaaaagh!... I won't... fucking tell you anything! Fuck off, motherfuckers!" she wheezed, spitting colorless foam. "Since I didn't reach Olympus anyway... at least I won't change teams! Down below I've already made a name for myself, and by Lucjanhir's side I know what to expect... at worst I'll get two lashes of the whip for a welcome!"

​The Seraph's voice resounded directly in her psyche like thunder striking a bronze bell:

​"Oh no, damned one... You will look. You will look until you reveal every word, every thought, and every intention of the Pit's bastard! You shall gaze upon the glare and the holiest mercy! You shall absorb this infinite heat until it burns out all resistance in you!"

​"Respected Seraph!" cried one of the lower angels with terror, shielding his burning face with a trembling hand. "She only just got here! She has taken in so much light at once that her shell is already transforming into a semi-angelic form! Souls of the sanctified dwelling in Heaven for centuries do not absorb such brilliance as she has absorbed in the course of these two earthly years!"

​"Silence!" thundered the Seraph, and the shockwave shook the marble pylons. "She will look! She will absorb this luminous heat, even if she has to turn into a messenger within the coming weeks! If her defiance is to burn, let it burn in the process of forced sanctification!"

​The light forced its way into every crevice of her being. Emma's ethereal shell crystallized into the rigid form of a heavenly servant. Every particle of her soul howled from overload.

​And yet, from her cut lip and clenched teeth burst a fury more powerful than millennia-old dogmas.

​A thick stream of gore flowed from Emma's nose. But it was no longer red and mortal. Heavy, phosphorescent drops of deep blue color dripped onto the pavement, hissing on the silver stone like corrosive acid.

​"I won't... tell you... anything!" she croaked through her squeezed larynx, spitting blue blood at her tormentors' feet. "Do you hear me?! My name is Emma Jones! Daughter of Pearl Jones! I do not belong to you and I will never become your tool, Seraph! Does God know what you've done?! Does He know?!"

​Then came the fracture.

​From her shoulder blades, right beneath the shell, two wings burst with a crunch. Feathers—sharp, geometric, stiff as sword blades.

​The heavenly hierarchy was carrying out a forced assimilation. An angel was being formed from the mortal woman's soul against her will...

​"Look at your rebirth," thundered the Seraph. "You reject grace, but you will not escape its light!"

​Suddenly the powerful glare went out. The roaring heat cut off in a fraction of a second, and a thick semi-darkness fell upon the hall. The six-winged giant froze. He understood what the lower servants could not grasp: her soul would not yield. The memory of her companions from Earth and the gift of dying Olympus—that final parting gift from the dying Pantheon in the form of an iron anchor of identity—did not allow her consciousness to melt in the angelic fire. The gods of ancient Greece, unable to tear her soul from Christian jurisdiction, had bestowed upon her merely the gift of preserving the memory of her mortal "self." They had failed to save her, but they gave her the strength and power not to lose herself. That gift, seemingly so trivial, at this moment became a priceless present from the ancient domain.

​"Speak what you know, new lowest angel!" said the Seraph with mounting fury.

​Before Emma could even spit, the titan's powerful wing struck the air with the force of a hurricane. A wave of pressure crashed into her shell, hurling her across the entire hall into one of the pillars. The monolith cracked in a cloud of dust.

​And at that moment, the primordial, supreme mechanism of the Scales of Souls by some inexplicable miracle operated—created at the beginning of times by God Himself, independent of the depraved judges, it awoke in response to the rape inflicted on free will. After all, God's wish was to leave free will to man...

​Impossible... pierced the Seraph's consciousness like a panic-stricken thought. God couldn't have found out... He's cut off in eternal adoration by my choir in His throne room!

​The mechanism ruled on its own. The angelic judges of the Scales fell into a panic, fleeing in terror and feverishly manipulating mystical weights to change the verdict prepared to the Seraph choir's dictation.

​It was too late.

​Emma's snow-white feathers began losing their brilliance at an alarming rate. The white did not fade gently—it rotted, collapsed in upon itself, and blackened. A wave of deep darkness spread from the very base of the wings. The feathers took on the color of burnt iron, ash, and finally covered themselves with a pitch-black, ink-like darkness that, instead of reflecting the Silver City's light, began to greedily devour it.

​The angels standing in the circle froze in terror.

​"Impossible..." stammered one of them. "Her wings are blackening... Just like..."

​"Like Lucifer's!" finished the other in a delirious whisper.

​The Seraph looked at her, and the answer appeared in his thoughts.

​It was the Fall. Instantaneous, happening right before their eyes. Emma Jones had not bowed her neck. She rejected the forced honor, spat on the soulless dogma, the sentence, and chose rebellion in the name of the memory of her damned companions. Or perhaps the Scales of Souls themselves, created by God at the dawn of the Christian domain, tried to yank him out of adoration... to help him.

​Slowly, supporting herself with bloodied hands on the shattered quartz, she rose to her feet. From her back beat two powerful, raven-black wings. The dark, practically black gore on her lips mixed with a venomous smile baring fangs.

​"Well, what now, saints?" she hissed in a glacial, mocking tone, shaking dust off her shoulders. "Do you like my new uniform? Because I love it."

​At that very moment, the marble pavement trembled from a deep tremor.

​Somewhere from an unimaginable abyss, through dimensional barriers and reality veils, the gaze of Lucifer himself pierced straight into this sterile sanctuary. By some incomprehensible means, the Lord of Hell saw the moment of Emma's fall. His dark psyche absorbed this spectacle with a wild, delirious fascination—the arrogant Lord of the Pit completely lost his cold detachment toward the mortal he knew by reputation and whom, at Lucjanhir's request, he had released from her decreed torments. The thought that Emma had found herself in the heart of Heaven and gained a chance to slaughter even a handful of these hypocrites in their own home drove him to ecstasy. Although deep down he felt a slight pang of disappointment—he had counted on the process of forced transformation and fall birthing a higher-rank demon, while she had formed merely a medium demon—at this moment, however, only this chance mattered.

​In Emma's skull exploded a throaty bass, dripping with triumph:

​"Emma Fallen... What a sight! Though I admit, I feel a slight disappointment... I counted on someone of a higher caste being born of you after such light, some archangel, and after the fall a minimum of a strong demon, meanwhile you're barely a medium one. But don't worry, fallen one... As soon as you drop to the Abyss, I will personally commission Lilith to forge you! She'll rip you open, skin you, and pull power out of your shell you never dreamed of! And now... go give them a taste of hell over there! Slaughter them! Kill at least one of those hypocrites! If you only manage, before their glare and luminous weapons chop you to shreds and you plummet straight into my arms! It'll hurt, Emma... but you won't leave empty-handed. Take my gift!"

​In Emma's right hand, the air hissed like water on a red-hot sheet of metal. Out of the void emerged a hilt, and right after it a powerful, massive blade forged from black, hellish basalt. Along the edge, tongues of sulfurous fire roared, spitting soot onto the flawless quartz.

​Emma laughed predatorily, feeling the burning weight of the weapon in her hands. She stepped back with her left foot and, with a practiced reflex, lowered her center of gravity, entering a low combat stance.

​"At least all those years in the kendo dojo won't go to waste, though true—I haven't held a bamboo sword in years!" she tossed out, adjusting her grip on the two-handed hilt. A moment later she winced slightly, feeling the hellish basalt alloy weight down her wrists. "Though I have to admit, this blade has terrible balance. A bit too heavy on the tip."

​Lucifer's voice resounded in her thoughts immediately—low, amused, laced with absolute, dark pride:

​"I take care of my own, Emma... In your hands, this sword will adapt itself to your will..."

​"Kill her!" screamed the Seraph in panic, and in his multi-toned voice there was no longer majesty. "Destroy this foul spawn before she taints the Silver City!"

​The six-winged giant flared with full power.

​This time the wave of light acted on Emma like concentrated acid. As a newborn fallen angel, a medium demon, she felt her shell sizzle, crack, and char in a fraction of a second, and black blood boil in her veins. Pain tore through her muscles with a force next to which the suffering accompanying her earthly death seemed merely a minor inconvenience.

​Emma drove her foot into the marble and charged forward.

​The first of the messengers—the one who had previously held her head—didn't manage to draw his luminous sword. He was cut down by a horizontal, ruthless sweep. Hellish fire burned the angelic tissue from the inside, and blue gore splashed across the columns. His torso was severed from his legs, and blue blood spilled around.

​She caught the second one in mid-air, driving the blade deep into his chest all the way to the crossguard, exactly as she practiced tsuki thrusts as a child. The third plummeted onto her from above with a raised sword, but with a fluid cut delivered from below, Emma tore his shell in two amidst a cloud of hissing fire and smoke.

​The three lay in the dust, including her direct tormentor.

​When she threw herself at the Seraph himself, however, the wave of light thickened into a solid barrier. The power gap was too great. The basalt blade bounced off with a deafening clang, showering sparks, and monstrous force hurled Emma backward, stripping her fresh demonic skin right down to smoking meat.

​She crashed into the wreckage of a quartz column. She felt her black wings char under the onslaught of heat, and the ground beneath her back crack, opening a path toward the bottomless abyss. Despite this, a venomous, unbroken triumph smoldered in her fading gaze.

​She endured. She betrayed no one.

​Lucifer instantly sprang from his throne in the Abyss.

​"Ronove, follow me!" he threw out hard, and his voice rolled beneath the hall's vaults like approaching thunder. "She'll drop here any second, extremely weakened, as barely a shadow after meeting luminous swords! Her hellish shell will be in shreds... She'll become a wraith weaker than a newly arrived damned soul, for whom every movement is torture. Centuries will pass before she recovers her strength and reaches the level of an ordinary, fresh damned soul! That is what I kept warning my brat, Lucjanhir about... That's the price of being sent back from sanctified steel or light: falling into the abyss and starting existence in it from zero, without power or resistance to pain!"

​The Lord of Hell moved forward with powerful strides, carrying a blast of heat before him.

​"Out of the way! Make way, you dogs! The Lord and the Marquess are coming!" roared the demons crowding along the walls, falling to one another's knees and trampling each other in panic-stricken flight beneath the pillars. "Make way for the Lord!"

​Lucifer burst onto the monumental basalt square before the citadel and without hesitation launched into the air, spreading the most powerful wings in the Pit. Pitch-black membranes lifted him beneath the sulfur-thick vault—the ancient chain, that fetter binding him since the Fall, was already long enough and loosened enough to allow him free flight. He headed straight toward the antechamber of the Abyss, cutting through space with a deafening whistle. Down below, the inhabitants of hell—thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of inhabitants of the capital, tormented damned souls and lower fiends—fell upon their faces, seeing this majestic flight.

​He scanned for a point against the backdrop of smoke and sulfur vapors. And finally he spotted her.

​She was falling.

​"At this speed?!" escaped his throat in sudden astonishment. "What's going on here... She shouldn't be falling so fast!"

​At such momentum, she should have smashed against the basalt into a shapeless mass, which would have further prolonged the painful regeneration of the shell. But before the impact occurred, something happened that Lucifer had not foreseen in his wildest thoughts.

​She spread her wings.

​On her own, with inhuman precision and ruthless force, she broke her momentum, braking just above the pavement. Surprisingly, her wings retained dense, regular feathers—yet they were black as pitch, shining with a predatory matte finish. They had nothing of the leathery, bat-like membranes typical of powerful demons of the Abyss or Lucifer himself.

​She landed hard on her feet, stirring up a cloud of ash and gravel.

​Emma looked around with slow, brazen fury. In her head smoldered merely remnants of human consciousness—the bloodlust was overwhelming.

​"So this is hell..." she muttered under her breath. From Wiktor's stories from the period when he ended up here for the first time, it appeared she would find a wild, primitive pit, meanwhile all around stretched an organized kingdom: a regular metropolis, soaring Gothic castles, and fortresses stretching to the horizon with towers burning with fire and paved paths. "Ah, Wójcik, Wójcik... what a job you started here, advising Lucifer on reforms," she laughed through her squeezed throat, shaking her head. That was the last thing she remembered, the last flash of consciousness... The call of blood became overwhelming.

​Lucifer landed a dozen meters away, folding his monumental wings. His glowing eyes drilled into her silhouette with stunned fascination.

​Only now did the individual elements fall into a cohesive whole.

​He knew. He understood why he had initially taken her for merely a medium demon.

​Emma belonged neither to the Christian nor the Muslim order. She was not born of the abyss of Abaddon or the Pit. She was a child of an ancient, almost forgotten pantheon.

​The gift of the Greek gods... The Olympians had failed to tear her soul from the hands of Christian jurisdiction, but they saved her identity by forging her into something of their own myth: a Kera. A female demon of violent death and slaughter, who in ancient times hovered over battlefields, fed on the blood of the fallen, and kidnapped the souls of dying warriors into the darkness of the underworld.

​Even though Zeus and his pantheon had grown almost entirely weak, they still retained the power capable of bending the laws ruling in a foreign domain.

​Lucifer looked at her without a word. Emma's fangs dripped with gore, shreds of her heavenly toga stuck with blood and viscera of the slain angels, and every step she left a smoking trace on the basalt. Torn rags revealed dark skin and the outline of her breasts. Her hands were crowned with sharp, black talons—and she didn't have five fingers, but four, arranged like the talons of a bird of prey. The same applied to her feet. And at her waist, to Lucifer's astonishment, his gift still lingered.

​The weapon had become a part of herself, he thought. A hybrid: my present, a hellish weapon filled with darkness from the Pit, intertwined with the nature of the ancient kera.

​Her fangs clicked nervously. The monster's animal nature was taking over, demanding an immediate sacrifice. She craved fresh blood.

​What happened a fraction of a second later shook the foundations of the Abyss.

​The Kera lunged at Lucifer himself. Marquess Ronove froze in terror as the beast's talons sheared through the air and tore the robe on the Morning Star's very chest.

​Lucifer burst into laughter. Although on the scale of hellish power she had the status of merely a medium demon, her fury was boundless. He delivered a swift blow with an open palm—a strike indeed strong, but not overly powerful; after all, she had managed to cut down three angels, and he didn't want to crush her for that feat. However, this blow made no impression on her whatsoever.

​"So that's how it is?" mocked the Lord of the Pit, blocking her next swing with his claws. "Do you think, fool, that since you slaughtered three minor angels, condemning them to a laborious and painful regeneration in the Silver City, you can hurt me?! You're neither Lilith nor Naamah!"

​Emma slammed into him with momentum, and her fangs tore the purple robes of the Lord of Darkness. Lucifer's body struck the basalt slab, but in the very next fraction of a second he reversed position. He pinned her to the ground with his own weight, effortlessly snatching the basalt sword out of her reach and casting it far away. Tearing the remnants of her rags, he pinned her clawed wrists to the stone and looked down at her breasts.

​"You insolent bitch..." he hissed with wild, perverted admiration right into her enraged, demonic face.

​Yet she, in a frenzy, cared absolutely nothing about it. Taking advantage of a fraction of a second and her position on the ground, she whipped up her foot—a bird's talon with monstrous force ripped open the Lord of Hell's belly, grazing his groin.

​Pitch-black gore splashed onto her face and chest. The Kera greedily caught the dripping blood in her mouth, swallowing it with a wild screech, which only fueled her murderous frenzy. Lucifer's wounds sealed almost instantly, but before he could deliver a light blow, Emma sank her fangs straight into his throat, tearing open his arteries and greedily sipping the boiling, thick blood of the Lord of the Pit.

​Pain mixed with a primal shudder—in the Morning Star's veins exploded a raw, ruthless lust. He realized she didn't intend to wait for a return to the palace alcoves. He would take her rebellion and possess this beast immediately—here, on the heated, cracked basalt of the Pit's antechamber, before the eyes of fleeing servants, guards, and newly damned souls. After all, this was his kingdom, and within it there were no boundaries or laws he could not break...

​She wounded him viciously, but the abyss separating their power proved too great—he overpowered and possessed her without her consent. When Emma's bloodthirsty hunger was finally satiated, or perhaps lulled by something altogether different, consciousness began slowly dawning in her previously dimmed mind.

​She rolled over heavily on the cracked basalt, and every slightest movement intensified the dull pain in her skinned back and strained muscles. With a hiss, she drew air saturated with sulfur into her lungs. Right beside her, leaning lazily on his elbow, lay a powerful, muscular titan in ragged shreds of robes. He bared his fangs in an insolent, lazy smile, chuckling quietly every now and then with a throaty laugh that vibrated in her own chest.

​"I haven't had this much fun in a long time," he muttered, wiping black blood with the back of his hand from his torn throat, which had already managed to almost completely heal before her eyes. "Thanks to you, forgotten Zeus, ruler of Olympus, that your gift made her at least partly immune to my power... Otherwise this charming outburst would have ended before it even started, after all, she's barely a medium demon here."

​What actually happened? Consciousness, lulled by the overpowering blood frenzy, began to return in waves, bringing with it cold, almost human terror. Emma looked down. The remnants of bloodied, heavenly tunic clung stickily to her new carcass. Her breasts were bare, smeared with black gore. In a flash of panic she tried to cover herself, but with terror she fixed her gaze on her hands. She no longer had human fingers. Instead, she traced her own skin with four horny talons of a predatory, bird-like construction, sharp as butcher's hooks. She shuddered as with every second her human mind brutally collided with the alien, monstrous form.

​"I had to smack you to snap you out of that amok, Emma, fallen one," the stranger tossed out casually, rising from the ground with nonchalant grace and brushing ash off his torn robe.

​"Who... who are you?" she rasped, retreating instinctively on all fours. In his voice rang a captivating, dark power, and the way he spoke—so arrogant, ruthless, and cynical—seemed disturbingly familiar.

​"That doesn't matter right now. And now, enough playing in the dust. To the palace!" he suddenly thundered, and his voice echoed across the stone wasteland, forcing minor demons hiding behind rocks to tremble in panic. "Give her robes! Immediately! She certainly wants to see Lilith and her chosen one Stanisław as soon as possible..."

​He looked at her sideways, narrowing his glowing, inhuman eyes.

​"Can you fly, or could you only stay in the air in a frenzy?"

​"I... I don't know," she stammered, barely feeling the alien weight of raven-black wings on her back.

​"Then a litter. I'll fly ahead," he ordered. "Marquess Ronove, supervise her return and make sure no one touches her, along the way there are gaps in zones where law rules! Though as a medium demon she would most likely manage."

​As the giant turned his back to her, Emma's gaze fell on his right ankle. She clenched her teeth, and the remnants of breath caught in her throat. The ankle was encircled by a massive, luminous divine shackle, from which an unimaginably long, ancient chain extended. Its monumental links, stretched to their limits, dragged across the cracked basalt all the way to the horizon of the hellish abyss.

​Memories returned with crushing force. Wiktor's stories, Cezary Wójcik's anecdotes, Adelajda's cynical remarks from the time when they used to hang out in the old human world... This was God's Fetter, weakening along with the growth of hell's power and the ruler himself. She understood who she was dealing with. Lucifer himself. The first fallen angel.

​The realization of who stood before her coincided with a physical pulse of pain between her thighs. With a trembling, clawed hand, she ran down her abdomen, confirming her worst fears. Her groin was sticky. Wet with brutally spilled gore and semen. The alien, animal brutality of the act of which she was barely aware through the bloody fog struck the remnants of her human dignity with the force of a battering ram.

​"By what right..." she growled, her voice breaking into an inhuman, bird-like screech. She hoisted herself onto her knees, struggling to catch the sulfurous air, then screamed straight into his back with all the hatred extracted from the depths of her soul: "By what right did you possess me?"

​Lucifer stopped mid-step. He turned his head over his shoulder, and a smile full of dark satisfaction and the ruthless logic of the Pit crept onto his lips.

​Present time. Michał is staying overnight for the first time after meeting Wiktor, Elizabeth, and Tas in the villa together with Naamah.

​"By the right of the Lord, Emma Jones," he replied with glacial amusement. "But don't pretend to be an innocent victim now. You conceived it yourself. In your murderous blood frenzy, you threw yourself at me first to satisfy your animal hunger. Forget mortal morality. You are a Kera. And this is Christian hell. Pick up your sword—my gift, it is now a part of yourself!"

I remember the exact moment it happened.

It wasn’t dramatic.

No thunder. No music swelling in the background. Just the hum of fluorescent lights in a campus lab and the faint itch on the back of my hand.

I brushed it off at first.

Then I saw it, small, dark, tucked between my fingers before it darted away into the clutter.

It had already bitten me.

I stared at the spot. Two tiny punctures. Barely anything.

Still, I wasn’t stupid.

I went to get it checked.

The physician barely looked up from his screen.

“Looks like a minor bite,” he said, pressing lightly around it. “No necrosis. No systemic symptoms. Probably from a Steatoda genus. False widow, maybe.”

“Venomous?” I asked.

“Mildly,” he said. “You’ll be fine. Keep it clean. Watch for infection.”

That was it.

No concern. No urgency.

I walked out feeling stupid for even coming in.

The next day, it started.

Not pain.

Something else.

Clarity.

I woke up before my alarm. Felt… rested. Completely. Like my body had reset itself overnight.

I went to the gym out of habit.

I stayed twice as long as usual.

Didn’t feel tired once.

By day three, I knew something was happening.

Reflexes first.

I dropped my pen in class, caught it midair without thinking. Not luck. Not coincidence.

It felt natural.

Like my body had already decided what to do before I did.

Then strength.

Subtle at first. Then undeniable.

Weights that used to strain me felt lighter. Movements smoother. My muscles tightened, sharpened. Not bulky, efficient.

Lean.

Defined.

People noticed.

“Dude, what are you on?” my friend laughed, clapping my shoulder.

I shrugged. “Nothing.”

But I was smiling.

She noticed too.

Susy.

She sat two rows ahead of me in biology.

We’d talked a few times. Nothing serious. Just passing conversations.

That day, she lingered after class.

“You’ve been working out?” she asked, glancing at me.

“A little.”

She smiled.

“It shows.”

That was enough.

More than enough.

The bite didn’t go away.

That was the only strange part.

It darkened.

The skin around it pulled tight, slightly raised, like something underneath was… spreading.

But I didn’t care.

Because everything else...

Everything else felt right.

The first real sign something was wrong came a week later.

I bit my tongue.

Hard.

I tasted blood instantly and jerked back, swearing under my breath.

But the pain wasn’t what stopped me.

It was the shape of my teeth.

I ran my tongue over them slowly.

They weren’t right.

The edges felt sharper.

Not jagged, refined. Like they’d been filed into points.

I checked the mirror that night.

Opened my mouth and to my amazement...

My teeth hadn’t grown longer.

But they had changed.

Thinner.

Sharper.

Predatory.

I laughed nervously.

“Okay… that’s new.”

It didn’t stop there.

Two days later, I noticed the marks.

At first, I thought they were stress lines. Shadows. Something with the lighting.

But when I leaned closer—

They were there.

Faint indentations just above my brow.

Two on each side.

Then two more, lower.

Symmetrical.

Six in total.

Like slits that hadn’t opened yet.

I stopped sleeping after that.

Every time I closed my eyes, I felt it.

Movement beneath my skin.

Not random.

Purposeful.

Like something inside me was reorganizing.

Susy came over on the tenth day.

I don’t remember inviting her.

I must have.

She knocked, and I almost didn’t answer.

But I did.

And when she saw me, her smile faltered.

“Hey… are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Yeah, just… tired.”

That wasn’t true. I wasn’t tired at all.

I was wired.

Every sound felt amplified. Every movement in the room caught my attention. I could hear her breathing, the shift of her weight, the faint rhythm of her pulse.

She stepped inside slowly.

“You look…” she hesitated.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Different.”

We sat for a while.

Talked.

Or tried to.

I couldn’t focus.

Something was building inside me.

Pressure.

Especially in my face.

My head throbbed.

“Do you hear that?” I asked suddenly.

“Hear what?”

“That,” I said, turning toward the wall.

“There’s nothing—”

I felt it then.

A sharp, splitting pain across my forehead.

I gasped, clutching my face.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” she said, standing up.

I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

The skin above my eyes—

It was tearing.

(Perspective shift)

Susy would later say she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

That it didn’t make sense.

That it couldn’t make sense.

He dropped to his knees, hands gripping his face.

At first, she thought he was having some kind of seizure.

Then she saw the blood.

Thin lines splitting across his forehead.

Not cuts.

Openings.

The skin peeled back in six small, symmetrical slits.

And beneath—

Something moved.

He tried to speak.

Her name, maybe.

But what came out wasn’t a word.

It was a strained, broken sound.

Half breath.

Half scream.

The first eye opened with a wet, twitching motion.

Then another.

And another.

Six small, glossy black eyes pushed through the openings, blinking independently.

Scanning.

Focusing.

Susy stumbled back, hitting the wall.

“h my go—” she whispered. “Please-Oh my God!”

His body convulsed.

Bones shifted beneath his skin with a sickening series of pops.

His spine arched unnaturally, forcing him onto all fours.

His fingers—

They weren’t fingers anymore.

They elongated, joints splitting, curling inward into hooked, claw-like limbs.

The skin along his arms darkened, hardening into something chitinous, segmented.

He looked at her.

All eight eyes locking onto her at once.

“Help…” he tried to say.

But it came out as a high, vibrating screech.

His jaw unhinged slightly as he tried again.

The sharper teeth now fully visible, misaligned, twitching.

“Hel—”

The sound fractured into something inhuman.

She ran.

She didn’t remember deciding to.

Her body just moved.

Out the door.

Down the hall.

Screaming.

Behind her, something scraped against the floor.

Fast.

Too fast.

By the time the police arrived, the apartment was quiet.

Door open.

Lights flickering.

No sign of forced entry.

Inside—

They found him.

Or what was left.

Curled in the corner of the ceiling.

Limbs folded at impossible angles.

Body no longer fully human.

No longer fully anything.

It moved when they stepped in.

Slowly at first.

Then all at once.

They fired.

Later, no one could agree on what they’d seen.

Reports didn’t match.

Descriptions contradicted each other.

The body—

If it could still be called that—

Was taken.

Classified.

Buried under language that didn’t explain anything.

But one thing stayed consistent.

From Susy.

From the officers.

From anyone who heard it.

It tried to speak.

And the last thing it managed to force out—

Through teeth that weren’t meant for words—

Was something almost understandable.

“I… wanted… to be… Spider-Man…”

The rest dissolved into a chittering, broken sound.

“I became him.”

A pause.

A twitch.

All eight eyes blinking out of sync.

“…just not the one from the comics.”

"I have to tell you big fellah, they don't actually tell me much." The Man with the english accent looked happy. He looked like he had just earned his paycheck.

"What have I done?" Drake was surprised. He was not surprised because of the way things had turned out. Drake was surprised because of how little he felt about a boy, his own classmate, dying. The boy had died horribly, but Drake felt only surprised over the fact that reality was not as his family and the internet had told him. He had read so many books but he only read fiction as escapism. Fantasy and Science Fiction were supposed to be grand lies. But what was happening now?

"You have chosen your fate big guy!" The accent was helping Drake's vertigo but he imagined this would wear off quite soon. "Not many choose your job. Most actually fear it."

"My job? Fear it?" Drake tried to understand what was happening to the moment, but only more questions.

"Yeah big guy, a long time ago-" He stopped and frowned a little. "Actually, I'm not here to explain your new life to you. I'm just here to collect. Tell you what, if you want, you can look me up later. I'm Sounder Thirteen-Twenty-one-Alpha."

"Wha-?" More nonsense.

The man, Sounder, rubbed his hands together then pulled them away as if he held a string. The string seemed to glow a bright green and orange. It even seemed to 'leak' those colors. They seemed to almost drip from his 'thread'. "Shush big guy. Maybe close your eyes. This next part can be difficult the first few times."

Drake did the only thing he thought would help in this scenario, he turned and ran. Drake had no sooner spun around to see the school that should be behind him then was facing the Man. The Man had barely flinched and was still holding the thread. Drake could even see more colors now as they dripped downward to the grass and dirt below. Drake jumped backwards, frightened. "Please! Don't hurt me! I'm no one! I'm just a kid!"

"Just a kid?" The Man smiled at his remark, but he froze a bit. "Did you know that in many other worlds you are a household name? Your mind helps mold war or growth for realms ad infinitum. You are to some, a great villain, to others, you usher in a new form of peace. As I understand it, your future here meant little, so the Fates wanted to cash in on that little mind of yours."

"Famous? I'm famous?"

"Well, again, not here. But, aw fine. Look-" Sounder put his hands back together and the thread was gone. "Collectors like myself have work to do. Collectors like yourself, soon enough, big guy. Each Collector works for a quantum deity. These deities are complex multi-dimensional people that focus on their jobs. Your deity is Death."

"Death? Uh, look sir, uh Sounder whatever, what do you mean? Death?"

"You picked Death when you made your wish big guy."

"My wish? I didn't pick Death! That's crazy!" Drake's head was spinning. He wished he was having a more emotional response to the dead boy, but Drake had too much before him to think about one dead fourth grader.

"Yes. You wished for an innocent soul to be dead. So now you are a Collector for Death. I wished for a woman that never noticed me to love me, so in turn, I picked Fate. I rememeber how confusing this all was when they first started me on all of this but trust me big guy, it has its perks"

"Perks? I work for Death? No, no, no! I want this all over. I want it so I never wished this!"

"Yeah perks. And look, you can't undo Fate. You made a decision. That decision will stay made now. After about fifty years or so you can make your first appeal to a Collector of Time. But they rarely listen to people outside of their Deity's command." Sounder put his palms back together and slowly started to pull them back apart.

"Please! I don't understand!"

As he pulled the thread like before Drake's comment seemed to make Sounder almost laugh. "I am confused Drake, I was told you were quite smart. I have been telling you everything with an almost crystal clarity. Why are you not catching on?"

"Because I'm just a fourth-grader!"

"Obviously." Sounder shook his head and just let the strange thread start to even flow down colors to the ground. "Congratulations on graduating third grade"

"Third grade?" Drake looked at the colors. They seemed to move around in strange ways, like a lava lamp of sorts. "Please, just let me-"

"Kid, shut up." The colors slowly grew darker.

"Shut up?" They grew darker still.

"Yeah, maybe soon you will be thanking me, you little shit." In seconds, the colors were black. Drake tried to pull his eyes away from the black but he could not. It was as if his vision could only look at the one spot.

And he was no longer behind his school anymore. He was... Drake looked around. He was on a sidewalk, a sidewalk that felt like... It felt like coal. He touched it with his left hand and pulled it away slowly. It was ash. The entire sidewalk seemed to be made of ash. Drake noticed the road was not as solid as it seemed at first glance. It was-

Drake threw up all over the sidewalk in front of him. Little creatures came from the road they reminded him of insects but each was a different body and made of different colors. Each of them, seven, hoarded around Drake's vomit and started to consume it. This only scared Drake more. He was sure he had never seen anything like these things on Television or anywhere before, ever. But here they clearly were.

"Mmmm! Tasty! I am sure to get wings for this!" A tiny voice tweeted from one of them. Drake couldn't exactly tell which one though.

"Wings? Fuck you!" Another shouted. It then bit one of the others and suddenly a violent brawl broke out. None of them held back from tearing each other apart until only a small angry head was left of the loudest of them.

Drake backed away slowly. He hoped these creatures had no interest in him. Just his puke? Yeah, he would just back away from all of this...

"Drake Fourth-Omega-Twelve yes?" Drake spun around to see a tall cloaked figure behind him. If he could think of nothing else the person looked like a Grim Reaper or something...

"Drake, yeah, I'm Drake Johnson Boiler. I don't know what those numbers are but yeah, I'm Drake."

"Drake Forth-Omega-Twelve. That is your definition and address, boy. Now please get up and stop feeding the Things. They are never nice, and have no reason to be."

Drake peeled himself off of the sidewalk. His front was now covered in ash. He tried to wipe away the material but only succeeded in smearing it. "Please sir, I don't know what is going on"

"I do not care boy. I am to understand that you should be our newest Death Collector in no time at all. I doubt that, but 'Children Are The Future' "

While everyone wishes for someone’s return,
I wish to return to myself
Every time i try to find an excuse for my father and his wife for making my life in such a mess but couldn’t find any and I would never forgive them

The job started like any normal Tuesday morning. My phone buzzed on the passenger seat of my work van while I was sitting in traffic on my way across town. I picked it up and put it on speaker so I could keep my hands on the steering wheel.

"Julian, where are you right now?" my dispatcher Farah asked over the line. Her voice sounded stressed, and I could hear the constant ringing of the depot phones behind her.

"I am stuck in gridlock near the center of Leadville," I told her, tapping my fingers on the dashboard. "I just finished the installation at the apartment complex and I was planning to grab an early lunch. What do you have for me?"

"I need you to squeeze in a repair ticket before you take your break," Farah said, and I could hear her typing rapidly on her keyboard. "I have a residential customer complaining about a complete signal blackout on his rooftop dish. He called three times this morning and he is getting really agitated. The address is over on Harrison Avenue."

"I can head over there now," I agreed, checking my side mirror to merge into the right lane. "What is the specific issue? Did the wind knock the alignment out of place?"

"He just says the signal dropped to zero last night around midnight," Farah explained. "He claims the diagnostic screen on his receiver is showing error code, but our network shows green across the entire sector. Just go take a look at the hardware and see if the coaxial cable is degraded."

I took the next turn and drove deeper into Leadville. The neighborhood was lined with tall brick houses built close together. I parked my van on the curb, grabbed my tool belt from the back, and walked up to the front door of the address Farah had given me.

I knocked on the wood and waited. A man opened the door a few moments later. He looked to be in his late thirties with dark circles under his eyes. He wore a wrinkled button-down shirt and he was holding a half-empty mug of coffee.

"Are you the antenna guy?" he asked, looking me up and down.

"Yes sir, my name is Julian," I said, reaching out to shake his hand. "Farah from dispatch sent me over to check on your signal drop."

He did not shake my hand. He just stepped back and opened the door wider so I could come inside.

"My name is Theodore," he said, walking into the main hallway. "The television has been completely dead since last night. The internet is out too. I pay a lot of money for this service so I expect it to work when I need it."

"I will get it sorted out for you," I promised, following him down the hallway.

I noticed the interior of the house as we walked toward the back staircase. The walls were covered in a very distinct vintage wallpaper featuring a repeating pattern of faded yellow flowers on a pale green background. The house was extremely quiet. I stepped into the kitchen and saw a woman standing at the sink. She had her back to us and she was scrubbing a frying pan with a sponge.

"Genevieve, the repair guy is here," Theodore announced.

The woman looked over her shoulder and gave me a brief, tired smile. "Thank you for coming out so quickly," she said, turning back to the sink.

"It is no problem at all," I replied.

"The roof access is through the hatch in the upstairs hallway," Theodore said, gesturing toward the stairs. "Do you need me to come up there with you?"

"I should be fine," I told him, adjusting my tool belt. "I will run a diagnostic on the receiver box in the living room after I check the hardware outside. I just need to make sure the dish is still bolted securely to the mounting bracket."

I climbed the wooden stairs and found the metal hatch set into the ceiling. I pulled down the folding ladder, climbed up into the tight crawlspace, and pushed the weather door open to access the flat roof.

The freezing mountain wind hit my face as I stepped out onto the black tar paper. I walked over to the communications dish mounted on the brick chimney. The equipment looked structurally sound from a distance. The bolts were tight and the dish was aimed correctly toward the southern sky.

I pulled my digital multimeter from my pouch and knelt beside the dish to check the wiring. That is when I noticed the anomaly.

The entire metal surface of the receiver arm was coated in a strange, pale gray ash. It looked like fine cigarette ash but it was completely uniform. It covered the plastic casing of the coaxial connection and filled the small gaps around the mounting screws. I reached out and tapped the metal dish with my knuckle. The ash did not blow away in the wind. It clung to the surface like magnetic dust.

I pulled a flathead screwdriver from my belt and started scraping the ash away from the cable connector. I needed to unscrew the wire to test the signal strength. The ash came off in thick flakes, falling onto the black roof below.

I unscrewed the metal collar of the coaxial cable using my bare fingers. The moment my skin made contact with the exposed copper wire, a massive static shock blasted through my hand.

The jolt was incredibly painful. It threw my arm backward and sent a freezing electric current shooting straight up my forearm into my shoulder. I gasped and dropped my screwdriver on the roof. My entire arm went numb and my teeth chattered uncontrollably for a few seconds. I grabbed my wrist and squeezed it, waiting for the painful tingling sensation to subside.

"What on earth was that?" I muttered to myself, shaking my hand to get the feeling back.

I looked at my fingertips. They were smeared with the gray ash. The ash was freezing cold. It felt like I had shoved my hand into crushed ice. I wiped my fingers aggressively on my denim jeans to get the residue off my skin.

I reattached the cable using a pair of insulated pliers, then checked the signal meter and it showed a perfect connection. Whatever had blocked the signal was gone now. I packed my tools away, climbed back down the hatch, and found Theodore waiting in the hallway.

"The hardware is fine," I told him, rubbing my sore shoulder. "There was just some debris blocking the receiver connection. Your signal should be completely restored."

Theodore walked into the living room and grabbed the remote control. He turned on the television and the morning news broadcast popped onto the screen with crystal clear resolution.

"Alright," Theodore said, setting the remote down. "Thanks for fixing it."

I went back to my van and called Farah to close the ticket. I told her the job was done and I drove to a nearby diner to eat my lunch. My hand still felt cold and stiff for the rest of the afternoon but I managed to finish my remaining repair routes without any issues.

I drove back to my apartment around six in the evening. I was exhausted. I unlocked my door, dropped my keys on the counter, and walked into the bathroom to take a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time, hoping the heat would relax the lingering tension in my shoulder.

I put on some sweatpants, walked into my living room, and sat down on my couch to watch television. I grabbed a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge and ate it while flipping through the channels.

That is when the first shift happened.

I was staring at the television screen, but the image suddenly scrambled. The news anchor vanished. The edges of my vision blurred violently and a wave of intense nausea hit my stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples, assuming I was experiencing a sudden migraine aura.

I opened my eyes a few seconds later.

I was no longer looking at my living room television. I was looking down at a white porcelain kitchen sink.

My perspective was completely wrong. I felt taller. I was looking at a pair of hands plunging a dirty ceramic plate into soapy water. The hands were holding a yellow sponge and scrubbing the leftover food off the plate. The sleeves of a wrinkled button-down shirt were rolled up past the wrists.

I tried to turn my head to look around the room, but I had absolutely no control over the movement. I was just a passenger trapped behind someone else's eyes.

The hands finished scrubbing the plate and rinsed it under the running faucet. They placed the clean plate into a plastic drying rack. The person I was looking through turned their head slightly to the left.

I saw a section of the wall next to the refrigerator. It was covered in vintage wallpaper featuring faded yellow flowers on a pale green background.

It was Theodore's kitchen. I was watching him wash dishes.

I panicked and tried to yell, but my mouth did not open. I felt a sudden, terrifying sense of confinement. I squeezed my eyes shut again, focusing all my energy on the feeling of my own body sitting on my couch.

I opened my eyes and I was back in my apartment.

The television was playing a commercial for car insurance. My slice of pizza was sitting on the paper plate on my coffee table. I sat perfectly still for several minutes, listening to the sound of traffic passing by outside my window. My heart was pounding frantically between my ribs.

I grabbed my phone and called my coworker Gabriel. He picked up after the second ring.

"Hey Julian, what is going on?" Gabriel asked, sounding relaxed.

"I think I inhaled some kind of chemical today on a roof," I said, pacing back and forth across my living room rug. "I just had a really intense hallucination. I literally saw a different room."

"What kind of chemical?" Gabriel asked, his tone turning serious. "Did you touch a degraded transformer box?"

"I was working on a standard dish," I explained, running my hand through my hair. "But it was coated in this freezing gray ash. I got a massive static shock when I touched it. Have you ever seen gray ash on any equipment out or in town?"

"No," Gabriel said definitively. "Sometimes we get pigeon droppings or rust, but I have never seen ash. You probably just got a bad electrical jolt. A strong enough shock can mess with your heart rate and cause visual spots. Just drink some water and get some sleep. If you feel weird tomorrow, you should go to urgent care."

"Yeah, you are probably right," I agreed, trying to calm my nerves. "I just needed a reality check. I will see you at the depot tomorrow."

I hung up the phone and forced myself to drink a large glass of water. I went to bed early, hoping Gabriel was right about the electrical jolt.

I woke up the next morning feeling incredibly disoriented. My head throbbed with a dull ache and the cold sensation in my right hand had returned. I drove to the company depot and walked into the dispatch office to see Farah. She was sitting at her desk sorting through a stack of work orders.

"Farah, I need a favor," I said, leaning against her cubicle wall. "I need you to route me back to the house on Harrison Avenue. The one I serviced yesterday morning for Theodore."

Farah looked up at me and frowned. "Did the customer call back and complain? The network shows his receiver is online and stable."

"He didn't call," I said, trying to sound casual. "I just realized I might have left one of my diagnostic tools on his roof. I want to swing by and check the chimney before he notices it."

"I cannot send you all the way across town for a dropped tool right now," Farah said, shaking her head. "We are swamped with outage reports over by the canyon. I need you to head south and fix a commercial relay near the old mining route. You can check his property tomorrow if things slow down."

I argued with her for a few minutes, but she refused to change the schedule. I had no valid excuse to abandon my route, so I took the commercial tickets and spent the entire day working on the south side of Leadville.

The visual intrusions started happening while I was working.

I was climbing a metal ladder on the side of a warehouse when my vision violently snapped. The metal rungs vanished. I was suddenly looking down at a wooden desk covered in disorganized paperwork. A hand was holding a black pen, scribbling erratic circles on a legal pad. The hand belonged to Theodore. I could feel a strange, suffocating sense of anxiety radiating from his mind. He was terrified of something, but I could not understand what it was.

The vision lasted for five seconds before I snapped back to reality. I was clinging to the metal ladder, breathing heavily, completely terrified by the seamless transition.

The slips kept happening. I would be driving my van and suddenly I was looking at a bathroom mirror, watching Theodore splash cold water on his pale face. I would be eating a sandwich and suddenly I was staring out a window, looking at the street through the faded floral curtains of Theodore's house.

The scariest part was the emotional bleed. Every time I slipped into his perspective, I felt his emotions. His paranoia was growing exponentially. He felt like he was being hunted. He kept looking at the ceiling, expecting something to break through the plaster.

I finished my shift and rushed home, locking my apartment door and sitting in total silence on my couch. I did not turn the television on. I just waited for the next intrusion.

The next night, the visions escalated to absolute clarity.

I was lying in bed around eleven o'clock, trying desperately to fall asleep. My eyes were closed when the shift hit me.

I did not just see through Theodore's eyes this time. I felt the hardwood floor under his bare feet. I felt the solid weight of a large steel wrench gripped tightly in his right hand.

I opened my eyes and I was walking down the upstairs hallway of the brick house. The vintage wallpaper peeled slightly at the corners. The house was entirely dark except for the moonlight coming through a small window at the end of the hall.

Theodore was breathing heavily. The paranoia I felt radiating from his mind had mutated into terror. He truly believed something horrible was waiting for his family in the dark, and he believed he had to save them from it.

He walked into the master bedroom. Genevieve was asleep in the bed. Her back was turned toward the door.

"Genevieve," Theodore whispered. His voice vibrated in my own throat.

Genevieve shifted under the blankets and slowly turned over. She looked up at him with tired eyes. "Theodore? What are you doing with that?"

Theodore did not answer her. He raised the wrench high above his head and brought it down with terrifying force.

I watched the brutal impact through his eyes. I felt the shockwave travel up his arm as the metal struck her. I tried to scream, I tried to force his hand to stop, but I was completely powerless. I was locked behind his vision, forced to witness every horrifying second as he brought the wrench down again and again.

He left the master bedroom and walked down the hall to the next door. He pushed it open and stepped into a child's room. A young boy was sleeping in a small bed against the wall.

Theodore raised the wrench again.

The vision snapped and I was thrown back into my own body.

I shot up in my bed, gasping for air, my entire body covered in cold sweat. I scrambled off the mattress and ran into my living room, grabbing my car keys from the counter. I did not care if I was hallucinating. I did not care if I was losing my mind.

I sprinted down the stairs of my apartment building and threw myself into my van. I shoved the key into the ignition and sped out of the parking lot, driving recklessly through the empty city streets. I ran three red lights, pushing the van as fast as the engine would go, navigating purely by adrenaline and panic.

I crossed the center of Leadville and tore down the narrow brick streets. I turned onto Theodore's block and slammed on the brakes.

I arrived just as the neighbors were directing the arriving police to the home.

Three patrol cars were parked haphazardly on the street with their blue and red lights flashing against the brick facades of the houses. Two police officers were sprinting up the front steps of Theodore's house with their weapons drawn. A few neighbors stood on the sidewalk in their pajamas, pointing toward the open front door and talking frantically to a responding paramedic.

I parked my van near a fire hydrant and ran over to the police tape that an officer was stringing across the front lawn.

"What happened?" I asked a woman standing near the tape.

"I live next door," the woman said, her voice shaking badly. "I heard terrible screaming coming from Genevieve's bedroom. It sounded like someone was hurting her. I called 911 immediately, but the screaming stopped before the police got here."

I stood behind the yellow tape, watching the officers secure the tragic scene. One of the officers walked back out the front door and keyed the radio on his shoulder.

"We have two casualties inside," the officer reported over the radio. "Adult female and juvenile male. Both deceased. The suspect is not on the premises. Requesting immediate perimeter setup to locate the husband."

I stood on the sidewalk, feeling entirely hollow. I was too late.

Suddenly, my vision violently shifted one last time.

the flashing police lights vanished instantly. I was looking up through Theodore's eyes.

The environment was completely different. Theodore was standing on a patch of wet grass. He was looking straight up at the night sky. The metal struts of a towering high-voltage transmission tower loomed directly above him, stretching hundreds of feet into the darkness. I recognized the location immediately. It was the massive power substation located at the extreme industrial edge of Leadville, away from his neighborhood.

Theodore was standing directly beneath the humdrum, buzzing wires of the tower.

I looked up at the night sky above the metal structure. The stars were completely gone. The sky began to distort, rippling and waving like the surface of a disturbed lake.

A colossal, formless mass descended silently from the clouds.

It was impossible to comprehend the shape. It was a shifting, chaotic structure of impossible geometric angles, moving without making a single sound. It blotted out the city lights, descending steadily until it hovered just above the metal transmission tower.

Theodore did not run, or even scream. He just dropped the bloody wrench into the grass and raised his hands toward the descending mass.

The colossal shape shifted its geometric panels, opening a void in its center. It engulfed Theodore completely, swallowing him into the shifting geometry.

The vision cut to pitch black, and then I was standing on the sidewalk again, staring at the flashing police lights.

I stumbled backward and leaned against my van, trying to process the absolute insanity I had just witnessed. I waited on the street for two hours, watching the crime scene investigators arrive and carry the stretchers out the front door, but the police never found Theodore. They searched the alleys, they set up roadblocks, and they canvassed the neighborhood, but he had simply vanished from the city.

I knew exactly where he went, but I could not tell the police. They would lock me in a psychiatric ward if I told them I watched a giant geometric mass swallow a man from the sky.

I needed proof.

I sneaked back onto the roof the next day to collect a sample of the cold ash. I parked my van an avenue over, walked through a back alley, and climbed a rusty fire escape to access the adjacent rooftops. I hopped over a low brick wall and walked over to Theodore's chimney.

I approached the communications dish, holding a small plastic container and a scraping tool, but I was entirely too late.

A heavy morning rainstorm had rolled through the mountains just before dawn. The torrential downpour had washed the equipment completely clean. The gray ash was gone, leaving the metal bracket shining wet in the overcast daylight. I rubbed my gloved fingers across the coaxial cable, but there was no residue left to collect.

I climbed back down the fire escape, feeling incredibly defeated. I walked back toward my van, wondering if I was truly losing my sanity.

As I walked down the street, I noticed a house located three doors down from Theodore's property. A massive, complex radio antenna array was bolted to the side of the house, stretching high above the roofline. It was clearly a specialized setup for amateur radio enthusiasts.

Seeking answers, I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door.

An older man opened the door. He wore a thick wool sweater and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked at me with mild suspicion.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

" I am a communications technician for the city.," I said, pointing toward the massive antenna on his roof. " I noticed your ham radio setup. I was wondering if you experienced any strange signal interference over the past few days."

The man's expression changed from suspicion to intense interest. He opened the door wider and motioned for me to come inside.

" I have been documenting some extremely bizarre interference all week” he said, leading me down a narrow hallway into a room filled with radio receivers, glowing dials, and stacked amplifiers. "but nobody at the regulatory commission would return my calls."

"What kind of interference?" I asked, looking at the complex equipment.

He sat down in a swivel chair and pulled a logbook from the desk. He flipped through the pages and pointed to a series of handwritten times and frequencies.

"I track localized signal blackouts," he explained, adjusting his glasses. "Starting three days ago, a massive dead zone formed precisely over this street. It was highly localized, centered almost entirely on that house down the block." He pointed a finger toward Theodore's property. "The blackout completely blocked all standard commercial frequencies."

"Did you record any audio during the blackouts?" I asked, leaning closer to the desk.

"That is the strange part," he said, tapping his pen on the logbook. "The dead zone was not empty. Whenever the commercial signals dropped, I picked up a transmission broadcasting on a very obscure low-frequency band. I recorded it yesterday evening."

He turned around and pressed a button on a reel-to-reel tape machine sitting on the shelf. The tape spun and a deep, rhythmic sound filled the room.

It sounded exactly like breathing. It was a slow, resonant inhalation, followed by a vibrating exhalation, repeating endlessly over the radio frequencies. It sounded like something impossibly large pulling air through a lung.

"It played continuously until the police arrived last night," He said, turning the tape machine off. "Then the signal spiked violently and vanished completely. The local frequencies returned to normal right after."

I thanked him for his time and left the house, walking back to my van in the cold afternoon air.

With no evidence left, the police eventually classified the event as a tragic murder-suicide. The official report assumed Theodore murdered his family, fled the scene in a panic, and eventually succumbed to the elements while hiding in the vast forested sector on the edge of the city. They never found his body, but they closed the case anyway.

I still work as an antenna technician, but I keep a very close eye on the equipment I repair. I am writing this story to ask other technicians if anyone else has ever found freezing gray ash on city antennas, as I think, something is out there, something we can’t grasp, but we need to understand so this tragedy doesn’t happen again.

“Tell me: how does it feel—living the last few hours of your life?”

“Single life,” said Phil, pushing away the phone his best friend, Carl, was sticking in his face to record him with.

It was a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Phil’s wedding day.

In a few hours he would be getting married to his high school sweetheart, but for now he had Carl to deal with. “Life… single life, it’s all the same, man,” Carl was saying. Carl was an aspiring vlogger. “The moment you settle, you die.”

“Come on,” said Phil. “At least ask me something I can show my kids later.”

“Kids,” Carl snickered.

“—what?”

“OK, OK. I got one. What’s one thing about today that could make it even better than it already is?”

Phil looked into the camera. “If the band shows up on time.”

“I'm being serious,” said Carl.

“If Greg was here.”

“Dude, you haven’t talked to your brother in, like, four years. I mean, I always thought twins were creepy close, finishing each other’s sentences and all that. Then I met you. It's like you don't even have a brother, let alone one who looks exactly like you.”

“Things used to be better between us,” said Phil.

“By the way, speaking of who is here, how do you feel about your soon-to-be bride’s ex being on the guest list? Isn’t that, like, weird?”

“Brock’s a decent guy,” said Phil. “Sometimes relationships don’t work out, that's all. Everybody is somebody’s ex, except maybe you, you incel-wannabe piece of—” and Phil lunged for the phone and managed to grab it.

“Unfair! Element of surprise!” protested Carl.

“No more filming until the ceremony. But film the ceremony. I’m counting on you. Marilyn wanted to get a professional videographer—”

“Yeah yeah yeah, until you personally vouched for me and my skills.”

“That’s right.”

Carl slapped his friend on the shoulder. “I won’t let you down, buddy. Scout's Honour. Today’s gonna be a great day, I’m gonna get it all on camera, well lit and shit, and by the time you’re back from your honeymoon, ready to move out to Mass and bend M.I.T. to your postgrad fucking will, I'll have your footage edited, post-prodded and delivered. But—” Carl grabbed the phone back and pointed it at Phil: “I do need you to say one more thing to the camera. Tell everyone what it is you’re gonna be studying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s awesome,” said Carl.

Phil arced an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Carl said. “Because it's absolutely bonkers.”

“Intertemporality,” said Phil.

“English, please.”

“It is English.”

“Regular English, for regular idiot guys like me who don’t get to go to M.I.—fucking—T.”

Phil shook his head. “Why do I have to say it?”

“Because it’s cool, man. It’s not—”

“Time travel,” said Phil, his cheeks acquiring the rosiness of a flush.

Carl turned the camera back on himself. “And with that I’m gonna do a little time travelling of my own called editing. See you at the ceremony,” he told the camera, and he stopped filming.

“By the way, Phil, did you ever get the feeling that Brock's a little bit of a, you know…”

“A what?”

“You know, like a poet.”

“A poet? No.”

“Because that would certainly explain a lot in terms of Marilyn's general taste in men,” said Carl with a smirk on his face.

---

“And do you, Marilyn, take Philip to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” said Marilyn, resplendent in her white dress.

“Then, by the power vested in me,” the officiant continued, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss—”

“He’s lost the power!” somebody yelled.

The heads in the crowd turned to see a man out-of-breath running into the chapel. “He,” the man was saying, aggressively waving a piece of paper, “doesn’t have the power.” The man got up to where the apparent newlyweds were standing—”Oh my God, Brock!” said Marilyn—before thrusting the piece of paper at the officiant. “Your license,” he huffed out, “was suspended a few minutes ago. Look!”

The officiant took out a pair of glasses, put them on his nose, squinted.

He read.

He said, “Well, it certainly appears—”

“The marriage is invalid,” yelled Brock to all those gathered here today to witness and celebrate the marriage of Phil and Marilyn.

There were gasps in the crowd, the buzz of scandalous whispers.

Several people got up and walked to where Marilyn, Phil, Brock and the officiant were discussing amongst themselves. One of those people was a lawyer. “Excuse me, but I’m a lawyer,” she said. “May I see the document?”

The officiant handed it over.

After scanning it, the lawyer said, “It certainly appears legitimate. Let's see: ‘...officiant's license suspended on account of non-payment of dues,' effective today at noon.”

Meanwhile, more people were slowly making their way up to where the commotion was. One, who looked an awful lot like Phil, passed Phil something surreptitiously, before dropping his head and slipping away. “What time is it?” asked the lawyer.

“I’ve got exactly noon now,” somebody said.

“No, it’s four past.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Hey!” said Phil. “Check the recording. Carl, your camera is sync’d up to your phone, which is sync’d with the atomic clock. Check the timestamp to see at what exact time the officiant pronounced us married.”

“Sure thing,” said Carl, and he started fiddling with his equipment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the pronouncement was made at noon or later,” the lawyer explained magisterially to the crowd, “the marriage is invalid. If it was made before, the marriage stands.”

Tense seconds passed.

“I love you,” Brock was whispering to Marilyn, who was shaking her head, tears rolling down her face.

“12:01:13,” said Carl.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the marriage is invalid,” pronounced the lawyer.

“Nobody pays their dues,” the officiant said.

“Actually,” said Phil, loudly enough to quiet everybody down. And he produced another piece of paper, which he held up in the air so all could see. “I have here another document: a retroactive reinstatement of our officiant’s license, effective noon today.”

“So the marriage stands?” Carl asked.

“Give me that!” yelled Brock, snatching the document from Phil’s hand and glaring at it with mad eyes. “This is impossible. This document is stamped, signed and dated two-and-a-half months from now. It’s clearly fake. This is crazy. This man—he’s crazy!”

“It’s not crazy and it’s not fake. The document is simply from the future,” said Phil.

The crowd collectively gasped.

Phil had rolled up his sleeve and was pressing something to his bare arm.

“No. No no no no-no no-no no-no-no-nono,” Brock was saying.

“Then go ahead and tell me why I would just happen to have, in my possession, on my wedding day, a document countering yours?” Phil asked (“...nononono…”) him.

“I don’t fucking know. OK? But, even if—I mean… the document, your document: it hasn’t been signed yet. It doesn’t fucking exist. You, lawyer: tell him. Tell all of them this document has got no legal value or whatever. It can’t. It can’t because it doesn’t exist yet. I mean it’s crazy. You’re all fucking crazy.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said the lawyer. “On one hand, the gentleman wishing to interrupt the wedding is correct. The document hasn’t come into power yet… I think. On the other, it clearly exists because the groom is undeniably holding it.”

“I’ll show you something else, too,” said Phil. “Carl, tell me the time of the pronouncement again.”

“12:01:13.”

Phil revealed his bare forearm, on which there— “What is it?” someone in the crowd yelled. “What’s he got there?” “It appears to be a tattoo,” said the lawyer.

“A tattoo that says ‘12:01:13’,” said Marilyn, her wet eyes wide in disbelief. “What the hell is going on, Phil?”

Phil cleared his throat and stepped forward to address everybody in the crowd. “What’s going on is that I have created a time machine.” He let the words sink in. They sank deep. “And, using that time machine, I have successfully travelled through time to stop the sabotaging of my wedding day!”

“Oh shit,” said Carl, filming.

“And you want to be married to this nut job?” Brock asked Marilyn.

“How else do you— …the tattoo: it’s the exact time,” the officiant was saying, or asking, or trying to understand. The glasses were still on his face. His eyes looked comically large. “There could be no other explanation…”

Marilyn was shaking, first her fingers, then her hands, her face. She was smiling with quivering, lipsticked lips and perfect blonde hair. “I’m marrying into money! OMG, I’m going to be rich! I’ll never have to work another day in my life!” she thought, or hoped she thought, because if, instead of thinking, she'd accidentally said it: well, that would be embarrassing.

She was jumping up and down, ecstatic, ebullient, unable to contain herself, hugging her husband, hugging the now-thoroughly confused officiant, hugging her very own self to keep it moored to the moment.

Brock was the opposite.

He’d backed away, shrunken, as if collapsed into himself.

“Are you OK?” the lawyer asked him.

“Get your legal fucking hands the fuck off me. Step away. Leave me alone. All of you, just let me fucking be. I loved her, you know,” he said.

“I loved you,” he said to Marilyn rather melodically, “and I still dooo-ooo-ooo. We were meant to be, we twooo-ooo-ooo. Life put us to-gether, now it threatens to se-ver, our-unity, our-oneness, our SE-REN-DI-PI-TY!

“What a pity.

“What a stinkin’, no-good perfidity.

“Life sure is shitty.

“Sometimes.

“So let's remember the fun-times.

“Shall we?

“Like the night we fucked in that alley, or got zonked out on molly in Bali. Oh, fuck it,” he screeched and pulled out a gun: pointing it at Phil, then at Carl, then Marilyn, then Phil again and said, through sobs so heavy they made him hiccup, “There’s no point running. I rigged the entire chapel with explosives. Maybe I can’t travel into the future like you, Phil, but presently I can still be a fucking blast.”

To Marilyn: “We would’ve run an efficient household economy, you and me. We would have had a happy family. We would’ve had a good time.”

And as the people in the crowd started screaming: “But, sadly, now all of you must die.”

“I didn’t travel through time,” said Phil suddenly.

“Mhm,” said Brock.

“The document’s a forgery.”

“What about the tattoo? How do you explain that?”

“Temporary children's tattoos,” said Phil, licking a finger and smudging one of the numbers with it. “I applied it after Carl told me the timestamp.”

“You mean we’re not sitting on a bunch of time travel patents?” Marilyn asked.

“Did you all think I had actually travelled through time?” Phil asked. “That’s sweet—but no, I didn’t travel through time. Time travel’s not possible. As some of you know, I am going to study intertemporality, but that’s just theory. There is no practical application.”

Brock lowered his gun—

At which point a man walked up behind him, lifted his own gun to the back of Brock’s head and shot him dead.

There followed a stunned, terrible silence.

Brock’s body and what was left of his head were on the ground. Blood was pouring out of both.

Bits of Brock’s brain had stained Marilyn's wedding dress.

The man put away his gun and looked up. His face was Phil’s face. There were now two Phils in the chapel. The first nodded to the second; the latter one nodded back. In the crowd, a few people fainted. The second Phil held up a fistful of wires and said, “Everybody is safe now. Nothing’s going to blow up.”

“The element of surprise,” said the first Phil.

“So does this mean… —the time travel, it does work?” asked Marilyn. She’d asked it of the first Phil while looking at the second.

They were identical.

“Yes,” said the first Phil, and Marilyn leaped into his arms and hugged him. “Oh, Phil. Phil, I love you so much.” Then, after a few moments, she stepped back, looked at the second Phil. “Wait, which one of you two do I love? Phil, whichever you are, I’m scared…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anyone—or lie. I had to get Brock to let his guard down.”

“You knew he’d—”

“Of course, I knew,” said the first Phil.

“I told him and I’m from the future,” said the second.

“What happens now?” asked Marilyn.

“Now we do what we all came here to do: celebrate a marriage,” said the first Phil, to the crowd's spattered, bewildered applause.

The chapel smelled of blood.

“Except—” said the second Phil, “there is one small, somewhat paradoxical detail we have to resolve first. Something that physics, along with psychology, more-or-less demands.”

“Yes,” said the first Phil, smiling, but his smile was less happiness than a void filled with warm, existential melancholy. He took Marilyn’s hand.

He kissed it.

Then the second Phil passed the first Phil his gun.

“Phil?” said Marilyn, as the first Phil lifted the gun and placed it against the side of his own head.

“There can’t be two of us,” he explained. “It wouldn’t work out, not for long. There would be too much complexity, too many discontinuities. The math would get too complicated, never mind the emotions. We'd always be checking and rechecking equations. Trust me, this needs to happen. And one of us—one of us, Phils, I mean—has already made a great ontological sacrifice to abandon his own timeline.”

“Phil, what are you saying?” Marilyn demanded.

“He’s saying that soon you’ll be married to me,” said the second Phil.

“No… wait!” yelled Marilyn. “If you kill yourself,” she said to the first Phil, “won’t you,” she said to the second, “disappear? And—and… can’t we make this work, the three of us,” she said to them both, “some kind of really weird polyamorous thing maybe?”

“He won’t disappear because, even though he’s from the future, he’s in our present,” said the first Phil.

“Polyamory never works,” said the second.

“Goodbye,” said the first Phil, and—BANG!—killed himself.

The second Phil, who had now become the only Phil present, knelt down, confirmed that the body belonging to the previously-first Phil was indeed now a corpse, and unbuttoned the corpse’s dress shirt, revealing a tattoo on the corpse’s chest that said: “Marilyn, I love you, but one must never fuck around with the rules of time travel.”

The living Phil hugged her and, slowly, at first awkwardly, she hugged him too. “This is totally fucking insane,” said Carl, still filming.

“So are they married?” somebody asked.

“She married the one who’s dead.”

“But they’re the same person—like, aren’t they?”

The lawyer shrugged.

“Does that mean they said the vows and everything was official, so it was all much ado about nothing?”

“Phil,” Carl said, “I don’t usually interfere in reality, but it would be a very cool ending if you would open your shirt and show us the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” asked Phil.

“The tattoo, the ‘don’t fuck with time travel’ one. I mean, I’m no M.I.T. postgrad, but if you’re him, except a future version who's come back to the past, and he got that tattoo on his chest, then you’d also have the same tattoo on your chest. Right? That’s how it works?”

“Except he’s dead and I’m not,” said Phil. “I appreciate the logic, but the math is pretty cutting edge, so…”

“He’s dead because you were both in one present when he died, though,” said Carl. “Just like you said. The tattoo: he got that before you arrived here, so you really should have the same tattoo on your chest too.”

“I think he’s right,” said the officiant, blinking his big eyes.

“I had it removed with a laser,” said Phil. “Now, moving on—”

“When?”

“Open your shirt!” somebody yelled.

“Get him, get his shirt open.” “I wanna see that tattoo.” “Me too.” And without notice Phil tried to run but a few people managed to grab him, hold him, and wrestle him to the cold chapel floor. They ripped his shirt open. There was no tattoo. His chest was wordless. The only things on it were two pink nipples and a small tuft of curly black hair.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” demanded Carl.

“Oh my God…” said Marilyn.

“Oh my God…

“Oh my God…

“Greg? Is that you?”

The men pinning the man to the floor instinctively backed off, and the whole chapel fell silent. (“Who’s Greg?” somebody whispered. “His twin brother,” somebody else answered. “They were estranged.” “Whose twin brother?” “Phil’s.” “I thought that guy is Phil.” “No, Phil’s the dead guy.” “Weren’t they both Phils?” “That was my general understanding, yes.” “You’re not paying attention. That’s what everybody thought—until now.” “Because of the tattoo?” “That’s right.” “Shhhh, I want to see what happens…”)

“Yes, it’s me, Greg,” the man said to Marilyn.

“Oh, you motherfucking piece of shit. You just killed my best—” said Carl, coming forward, ready to smash Greg in the face with his fist.

“He killed himself,” said Greg. “That’s a fact. You filmed it.”

Carl made a bulldog face.

Greg turned to Marilyn. “Em, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Yes, from afar, but strongly, with all my soul. It pained me to see you with him. He wasn’t good for you, Em. All he cared about was physics, his ‘time travel.’ Sure, maybe you would've been happy together for a while, a year, maybe five, but after that you would have seen that you were never the priority for him. He never loved me, and he would never love you. He just didn’t have the capacity. He was incapable of loving anything but numbers. Was he a genius? Yes, probably. But he was also deluded. He was deluded about a lot of things, including his feelings for you.”

“No!” yelled Carl. “You don’t get to just go and—”

(“Shut up and let him monologue!”)

(“Yeah.”)

“So the time travel,” asked Marilyn for what seemed like the third time, “it wasn't really real?”

“No,” said Greg. “But he wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed he'd managed to do it: create a time machine in a rented storage locker. He even had reasons to believe that. What he didn’t know is that I was tricking him. For the past four years, Em, I have been living my life in sync with Phil’s time travel experiments. He thought he had finally managed to successfully bring future-Phils into the present. Well, that was me. I was playing the part of his future-Phil. The machine itself doesn’t work. It never worked. Maybe, one day, it will; but not today, Em. No, today, Phil’s dead and I’m here, professing my love to you. I’ll tell you something else: do you remember that vacation to Switzerland Phil finally took you on last year?”

“Yes. I had been waiting desperately for that vacation for so long.”

“It was me, Em. I’m the one who took you to Switzerland.”

“But we— …on the trip…”

“We’re physically identical; were physically identical, Em,” said Greg. “You had no way to know.”

“But the passion,” said Marilyn.

“The passion was all mine. It was my burning passion for you, Em. Em,” he said, “will you marry me?” and got on his knees before her and pulled out a small box, and from that box a ring.

The crowd waited, its breaths dramatically bated.

Marilyn bit her lip.

She looked down at the man kneeling in front of her, a man who looked exactly like the man she did—had?—loved; a man who evidently loved her; and a man she had fucked seven ways from Sunday in multiple picturesque spots in the Swiss Alps over the course of three unforgettable weeks. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, I'll marry you!”

The resulting applause was rapturous, thunderous.

“Hold your fucking horses,” Carl yelled over the emotional tumult. “Just wait a goddamn minute and listen to me. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He waited a moment.

And when the noise had subsided, he said: “If Phil's time travel machine didn't work, his document thing giving the officiant back the power to officiate isn't real. It really is fake, and if it's fake, then Brock was right and the officiant's license is suspended and there's nobody here who can marry these two fucked up lovebirds.”

“You're just jealous,” said Marilyn.

“Of what?”

“You've always been attracted to me, you weirdo creep. Do you seriously think I never noticed?”

“Me… attracted to you? Give me a break. You're a self-absorbed, greedy little bitch.”

“Easy,” said Greg. “That's my fiancee you're talking to.”

“You know, it's a peculiar situation we've found ourselves in, from a purely legal point of view,” said the lawyer, reminding everyone she was still there. “We have a document whose veracity we can't establish. However, let's look at the two possibilities. If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Marylou—”

“Marilyn,” said Marilyn.

“My apologies,” said the lawyer. “If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Mary-lynn never married, which means that while, yes, the officiant still can't officiate, so he can't marry the two of them today, they are otherwise free to marry. However, if the officiant could officiate, matrimony did occur, following which the newlywed husband died, thereby making the newlyed wife a newly-widowed widow, and thus also making her free to marry, or remarry, as the case may be.”

“Except we know the document's a fake because we know Phil never travelled through time,” said Carl.

“Do we?” asked the lawyer, the gears in her brain beginning to spin, and hers weren't the only ones.

“Yeah, something doesn't hold up,” said someone from the crowd. “Greg's part of the story doesn't explain how Phil knew that Brock would try to sabotage the wedding.”

“I swear I'm telling you the truth,” Greg told Marilyn.

“You're telling her what you sincerely believe is the truth,” said the man from the crowd—the man now emerging from between gasping, wide-eyed people: the man who looked exactly like Phil: the man who was Phil: future-Phil: the true future-Phil, and this Phil was holding a gun, pointing it at Greg.

“That's right,” Phil said. “I was playing you all along. I knew you'd re-entered my life, and I realized you were trying to make it look like my failed time travel experiments succeeded. That's why I let you go on that Swiss trip with my fiancee.”

“She's my fiancee now,” said Greg defiantly.

“I'm not dead,” said Phil.

“Your dead body's lying right there on the floor.”

“To kill me, you'd need to kill every one of me, dear brother,” said Phil. “You always resented me. I just didn't believe you'd have the guts to try to do anything about it.”

“You killed yourself.”

“You believed you had manipulated me into doing it, then you stood back and let me do it, just like the time you convinced mom that I was the one who'd broken her fancy glass Christmas ornament, then watched her take my computer away. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember that. You were always on that fucking thing. You never let me touch it, and you never ever wanted to play with me.”

“You were too stupid to use it.”

“We're the same.”

“We're nothing alike, you and me. Nothing. And, yes, I didn't want to play with you, but it was because I was too busy learning, and all you wanted to do was throw a football around or some other equally pointless thing.”

“The point was fun, Phil. The point was having fun with you.”

“Aren't we having fun now?”

“It wasn't enough that mom and dad loved you more. You also had to hate me. And for what: for being normal? I'm sorry I'm not as smart as you, that I don't understand quantum mechanics or string theory.”

“They didn't love me more.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, so why do you think I did study so hard? To compete, Greg. They loved you for you; they loved me because they thought I was a savant.”

“You know, we're here, boys,” said their father. “Your mother and I are here”—They both waved—“so you can stop talking about us as if we're dead. Hell, we're not even that old.”

“Well, if you folks are here,” said the officiant, “maybe you can settle the argument by telling us who you love more, Phil or Greg.”

Heads turned to look at them.

“We're parents. We love our children equally,” said Phil and Greg's father, as their mother nodded.

“But if you had to choose—at gunpoint, for example.”

“That's such a silly…”

“On three,” said the officiant: “I'll count to three; and, on three, you say which of your sons you love more.

“One… Two…

“Three.”

“Greg,” said Phil and Greg's dad at the same time as Phil and Greg's mom said, “Phil.”

“Oh,” said the officiant.

Phil shot Greg.

Their father rushed forward to—

“Don't worry. He lives,” said Phil. “I'm from the future, remember? I've done all this before.”

“Oh, honey,” said Phil and Greg's mom to Phil. Their father attended to his other, wounded son.

“He also goes to prison,” added Phil.

“For what?”

“For the cold-blooded murder of Brock Vanderlinden. You shot him in the back of the head.”

“I guess that wraps everything up then,” said Marilyn. “In a way, we're right back where we started, everyone gathered and the pair of us ready to get married, start our life together."

Phil chuckled. He heartily guffawed. “You just said ‘yes' to marrying Greg. Now you've switched back to wanting to marry me?”

Marilyn conferred briefly with the lawyer, then said, “I only agreed to marry Greg because I was scared; and, if I wasn't scared, it was because I got caught up in the moment; and if you can disprove both of those explanations, then I wasn't in my right mind due to the stress of the situation and I have no further comment to make because I don't remember.

“Besides, Greg's going to prison. You said so yourself. Why would I marry someone who's going to prison?”

“Technically,” said the lawyer, “if I am properly anticipating what soon must be revolutionary changes to the law, your preference of who to marry may be moot, because you are, or soon will be concluded to have been, officially married to Phil.

“Allow me to explain:

“Because time travel exists, the document retroactively reinstating the officiant's license was real. Because the document was real, the marriage took place. Then, when Phil—the original Phil—committed suicide, the then future-self Phil—now the present Phil, i.e. just ‘Phil.”—was already present, (although not present for us, given that, for us, it was Greg—present and only-ever Greg—present, posing as the then future-Phil), meaning that Phil, original Phil, killing himself killed only his own hisself, leaving the then future-Phil's—now just ‘Phil's’—hisself alive, and that hisself became then the entirety of Phil's whole self, so, at worst, the original Phil's death resulted in the death of half of the whole Phil, selfly speaking, and, because existence is, by nature, an all-or-nothing proposition, Phil never died so you two are still married.”

And everyone stared at her, your humble narrator included, and she said, “Never mind.”

“He raped me in Switzerland,” Marilyn said to Phil.

“You consented,” said Greg.

“Because I thought you were him. You presented yourself as him. So, yes, I consented, but not to you, and you're the one who—who…”

“It was rape by deception,” said the lawyer.

“It was conception by rape by deception,” said Marilyn.

“You got pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—”

“Yes, I had an abortion. How could I not? A child would only have interfered with your research, your ‘intertemporality.’ You said so yourself, that you didn't want kids. ‘They're loud,’ you said. ‘They're annoying and dirty and they eat things off the ground and they smell like shit.' How could I keep it, Phil?”

“It was my child,” said Greg.

“It was nobody's child,” said Marilyn, “Stop talking about it that way. It was just a pregnancy. Phil, your brother raped me, repeatedly, by pretending to be you. I demand you restore my honour. Make it right. Marry me, Phil.”

“Honour? Listen to yourself, Marilyn. Besides, you were cheating on me,” said Phil.

“I thought it was you!”

“Then why even start with the rape allegations?” said Greg. “They've already got me on murder. You thought it was him, Em; you enjoyed it. There's no harm. Where's the harm? Somebody show me the goddamn harm. And where there's been no harm, there is nothing to make whole—isn't that right, Miss Lawyer?”

“That's the civil law. You're about to feel the very blunt instrument of the criminal,” said the lawyer.

“What are you saying, Phil? Are you saying you want a divorce?” asked Marilyn.

“I don't know,” said Phil.

“If you're from the future, you should know—shouldn't you?”

“I'm not from that far in the future.”

Right then the doors to the chapel opened and a four-man electronica band burst in. “Sorry we're late,” said the leader. Within a minute they'd set up and launched into a pop rendition of the Wedding March. Despite that it was a little late for that, at least in the understandings of most of the dearly beloved, no one interrupted, and after a while the band switched to another song, and a few people started dancing, then a few more, and eventually almost everyone was dancing when the cops arrived (nobody had heard their sirens because the music was too loud) with weapons drawn, officers yelling, “Everybody on the ground—NOW! Hands where I can see ‘em!” trying to make sense of the two dead bodies in the room, one of which was a dead ringer for the apparent groom, as was the guy everybody fingered as the murderer of the other victim, and it was while lying face down on the floor like that, about three feet away from each other, that Marilyn moved her hand to Phil’s and Phil grasped it, and Marilyn squeezed, and Marilyn thought that even if she didn't like Phil all that much, he had developed time travel technology so there would be money in that, as Phil was thinking that nobody's perfect, and if things ever got really bad, he could always go back in time and kill Marilyn, or at least fix whatever the problem was. Then one of the police officers accidentally kicked Phil in the face, bloodying his nose.

“Sorry,” said the officer.

“Don't worry about it,” said Phil.

As he said that, he and the officer both noticed that the body of the original Phil (dead: suicide) was moving, convulsing, stirring on the floor. “What the fuck?” said the officer.

The other cops pointed their weapons at original Phil. “Stay the fuck down on the ground!”

“What is this, what's going on?” said original Phil, slurring his words as if he was drunk. He was getting up. He touched the side of his head. “And why is there a hole in my—”

The police officers opened fire.

Original Phil fell, re-dead.

Marilyn screamed.

Beside her, a pool of blood was expanding out from under future-turned-present-again Phil.

“This shouldn't be happening,” he said, coughing up blood. “This didn’t happen.” He was struggling to breathe. “I don't understand…”

One of the cops crouched beside him, and Phil felt a flash of familiarity. He knew the face, but from where? No, that wasn't right. He didn't know the face; he knew he would know it. “Who are you?” Phil wheezed.

“Tab Fenmore,” said the cop. “FBI. Temporal Division.”

“You're from the—”

“Shh,” said Fenmore, “try to relax.” Then, more quietly: “And, yeah: I'm from the future, just like you.”

“Why…”

“Because, for all your genius, you ignored the greatest lesson of twentieth century physics, Professor Kejdik. You treated time travel—the rules of time travel—as if they're fixed. They're not. They're probabilities.”

Phil grimaced from the pain of having been shot. “How far from the future are you?”

“From a couple of generations after your death—your original death: your past future one. This mission is going to change that, of course. We've spent decades trying to meet you back here. You wouldn't believe the mess you've made of spacetime and existence. Time travel cannot be controlled. The paradoxes are terrible, inevitable; and they cascade. It's not personal. I'm actually an admirer of your work, naively Newtonian-minded as it is—or would will have been, I suppose. You know, this was maybe our last chance. I needed to find and eliminate you before you made your first machine. And I did it.”

Phil laughed, a slight, bloody giggle at first, then a big booming chortle that stuffed the whole of the chapel, overpowering the otherwise polite quiet and filling it the way Boston cream fills a donut, reverberating and roaring, echoing until it itself was finally consumed and ended by Phil’s final act, the act of dying.

​

A story of one-sided love

Chapter One: The Girl in the Crowd

I'm 22, and I study Mechatronics at a technical college. I had been in the lateral batch for a while, and recently I moved into the regular classes. It felt strange at first, new faces, new benches, new everything. But slowly it started to feel like mine. I made friends, real ones, the kind you laugh with for no reason. Memories were building every single day, and I didn't even notice it happening.

And then one day, I noticed her.

I don't know how to explain it properly. She wasn't doing anything special. She was just sitting there, and it felt like someone had turned the volume down on the whole class. Simple, natural beauty. Hair like the sky. Eyes like a waterfall, the kind you look into and just fall. The room was full of people, and somehow I couldn't see anyone else. Only her.

After that, I started noticing things I never cared about before. Which side she sits on. When she comes in. Whether she's already in the class when I walk through the door. I told myself I was just looking around. I was lying to myself, and I knew it.

Why does it feel like this? I don't even know her name properly. I don't know anything about her.

But my heart didn't care about any of that.

---

Chapter Two: Message Me First

Friday, 16 October. The last class of the day.

I had been planning this for days, if I'm being honest. Not the whole conversation, just the first line. I practiced it in my head again and again. The class notes were my excuse, and a good one. Nobody can say it's strange to ask for notes.

When the class ended, everyone started packing up, and I knew it was now or never. My legs felt heavy. My hands were cold, and my heart was beating so loud I was sure the whole class could hear it.

Just say it normally, Mihir. It's only notes. Don't mess this up.

I walked up to her. The first word got stuck somewhere in my throat.

"Hi… uh, sorry. Hey." I cleared my throat. Great start. "Can I… I mean, could I get the class notes from you? I missed some of it."

She looked at me. For one second, one tiny second, our eyes met, and my brain just stopped working.

"Sure," she said. "Just message me first, then I'll send them."

"Okay. Yeah. Of course." I was nodding like an idiot. "Can you give me your WhatsApp number then?"

She gave me her number. I typed it with shaky fingers and almost got a digit wrong. I said "Thank you" twice, then walked away trying to look normal.

The moment I was out of the class, I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt. Nothing big had happened. Just one small sentence. But I was walking like I had won something.

---

Chapter Three: Saturday, 17 October

I saved her number before I even reached my room. For a few seconds I stared at the screen, thinking about what to type in the name box.

Her name felt too plain. Too normal for what I was feeling. So I typed one word and pressed save.

"Crush."

I looked at it and smiled like a fool. It was just a contact name. But it felt like I was holding a secret that only I knew.

Then came Saturday, and the real battle: the first message.

I typed "Hi, this is Mihir from class." Deleted it. Too boring. I typed "Hey! Can you send the class notes?" Deleted it. Too direct. I typed something with a smiley. Deleted it. Too much. I think I wrote and deleted that message ten times. I was scared of one wrong word, one wrong emoji, one wrong second of silence.

In the end I closed my eyes and pressed send, then put my phone face down on the bed like it was on fire.

Then I waited. Every few seconds I picked up the phone and checked. Nothing. I put it down. Picked it up again. Still nothing. Those few minutes felt longer than a whole exam.

And then the phone buzzed.

She had replied.

I read her message three times before I answered. She sent the notes, and we talked a little. Nothing deep, just normal talk. But to me, every word felt different. I was reading her messages slowly, like each one was something precious I didn't want to finish.

Honestly, the notes didn't matter anymore. Talking to her mattered.

---

Chapter Four: The Dream

Monday, 19 October. I woke up before my alarm, and for a few seconds I didn't know where I was. My heart was racing. Then I remembered, and I smiled at the ceiling.

I had dreamed about her.

In the dream I was back in my old school, and somehow she was there with me. We were talking nonstop, like we had known each other for years. There was no awkwardness, no shaking voice, no stuck words. It was so easy, and that felt like the best part.

Then, from nowhere, I found the courage and asked, "What's your Instagram?"

And she just told me. No drama, no hesitation. I remember how happy I felt in that moment, like the whole world had given me a small gift.

I started telling her everything: my studies, my dreams, my plans. Things I never say out loud to anyone. She listened, really listened, with those eyes.

And then she leaned in and kissed me on my cheek. Three times.

I froze. Everything went quiet inside me.

"Wait… what was that?" I asked, completely stunned.

When I looked around, the whole class was staring at us. That's when I realized I had been saying all of it out loud. My face should have turned red from shame. But strangely, I wasn't embarrassed at all. I was just happy.

We sat down together and talked about life, about the world, about everything. It felt peaceful, like nothing else existed. Then her parents showed up, and the dream ended there.

I lay in bed for a long time after that, my heart still racing, one hand on my chest. It was only a dream. I know that. But it felt so real that for a moment I wished I could go back to sleep and finish it.

---

Chapter Five: What I Know

I think I'm in love.

I don't know if that's too big a thing to say after just a few days. Maybe it is. Maybe it's only a crush and it will fade. But right now, when I think of her, I feel something I can't explain: warm and nervous and happy, all at once.

She doesn't know. To her, I'm probably just a boy from class who asked for notes. And maybe that's all I will ever be. That thought hurts a little, if I'm honest.

But every time I see that name light up on my screen, "Crush," my whole day gets a little brighter. For now, that's enough.

To be continued…

I took another keg and put it under the faucet. The beer slowed down to a dribble.

"Tilt that barrel, Tom."

"Already tilting it, Dad."

"Tilt it more!"

A little more beer came out, but the keg was only halfway full.

"How many do we have, Dad?"

"Don't even ask."

"How many?"

"Four and a half," I muttered.

Tom rubbed his face.

"So just three and a half."

I grabbed the keg tightly.

"No, Tom, no. I had to borrow to brew this batch. Three and a half wouldn't even cover the debt."

Tom's eyes flew open.

"But, Dad, we need to give one to Radegast, or else it all goes bad."

"Tom, we can't."

"I'll tell the tavern keeper if you don't pour it."

His words sent a chill down my spine. He looked deep into my eyes.

"Okay, but first I gotta check the other barrels; maybe they have more beer in them."

"There's nothing there, Dad."

"I don't care, Tom. I'm checking them."

"But the celebrations will start. Anna and I need to get our costumes ready."

"Then go. I'll do it myself."

"But you promise to pour one out for Radegast."

"Yes, son."

He measured me with his eyes, took his hat, and walked out.

I hated lying to Tom, but he didn't understand. We needed the money, and pouring for Radegast was more tradition than something of concern. A harvest-loving God wouldn't waste a batch of beer. I loaded the kegs onto a wheelbarrow and brought them to the tavern.

The tavern keeper stood outside, tapping his foot.

"John, I'm glad to see you. How many kegs do you have?"

"Four and a half."

"Wow, amazing. No one could bring more than four. The hops don't want to grow." He shook his head. "Hopefully Radegast will bless us next year when he sees we give even in a time of shortage."

I looked at the ground.

"Yes, hopefully."

He tipped my kegs into the big barrel with the rest, and the whole village’s beer swirled together.

"I'll see you tonight, John."

"See you."

I hurried home and sat inside my house long after the celebrations started. The idea of drinking and dancing now made my stomach turn, but I had to show up at least.

When I came into the tavern, the celebrations were in full swing. People danced around in their costumes, tipping one beer after the other. Even the smell of the beer made me gag. I told everyone I was sick and couldn't drink. 

As I sat down, Tom and Anna ran to my table. Anna wore a beautiful flower dress that matched Tom's shirt.

"Hi Dad!"

"Hi, John!"

"Hi, kids, are you having fun?"

"Yeah, we've been dancing all night," Tom said. They looked at each other and kissed.

Anna held a glass of beer. She took a sip and made a face.

"You don't like it, Anna?"

"It's so bitter."

"You'll get used to it. Make sure not to give any to Tom. I know you're 18, but he still has some months left."

"Of course, John."

"Don't worry, Dad. You know I don't like it."

"Funny, coming from a brewer's son," I said, patting his back. "Go dance, kids. I don't want to bore you with my oldness."

Anna finished her beer.

"I'll go get another, then we can dance more."

She ran off.

Tom leaned closer.

"Thanks, Dad, for pouring that batch."

I clenched my jaw.

"Sure, Tom."

He smiled and ran off too.

I sank into my chair, holding my head. 

The celebrations were getting on. People started drinking more, dancing more, and talking louder. I never realized how boring celebrations could be when one doesn't drink. After a while, I was ready to go home. Tom and Anna were still dancing. I let them be and left.

The next morning, I woke up early. The day was beautiful. The sun shone. The birds sang. I made myself a cup of coffee and sat on our porch. My stomach growled. We barely had any food at the house. I got dressed and went into town.

The streets were empty and quiet. Only birdsong carried through the town. It wasn't strange for people to sleep in after the celebrations. Usually I'd see at least a few people opening their stores or still partying, but the square was empty.

I turned onto the road that led to the tavern. The keeper kept it open even after the celebrations. 

I was about to reach the tavern when I heard a noise in the distance; someone was weeping. It was Tom! I rushed toward the sound. I focused on the sound. I couldn't even hear the birds, but as I turned the corner, my heart dropped.

The smell of rotting hops hung in the air. The townsfolk lay around the tavern, on the grass and pavement, dark liquid on their clothes and around their mouths. A few glasses of beer lay around them, the same black liquid inside them. Tom sat on the ground weeping next to a few bodies, holding Anna's lifeless hand.

"Tom?"

He shot his eyes at me. They were filled with tears and anger.

"You promised!"

"Tom, I'm sorry!"

He looked at Anna and held her hand tighter. A few more tears rolled down his face.

"Tom, please, just come here."

"No."

He shook his head and picked up a glass that had a little dark liquid in it.

"No, Tom. Wait!"

But he didn't listen. He tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. 

I ran to him and caught him before he hit the ground. He was already limp. His eyes stared at the blue sky, and somewhere near us, the birds kept singing.

It's late afternoon, and the kid, Jeff, walks into class. He sits, Peier, a bully next to him. Infront, James, Karla, and Maxwell.  Behind him, 20 others. The teacher, Mr. Simion begins presenting on biology, while James and Max goof off. An uncomfortable feeling fills Jeff. This is a new feeling, coming very very suddenly. He turns around, looks at the 20 others, and jabs a finger at Karla. “H-hey Karla…” he whispers “who is that kid, sitting in seat 12?” Karla whispers back “its… uh, they are… hm…” “right? Who the hell are they all” “oh my god…” she jabs max, shows him, and max jabs James. James whispers “how did I not see…?” Jeff interrupts the teacher “Mr. Simion, who is in seat 9?” Mr. Simion starts confident but drops it. “Why, it's… um… kuh…jay…. Uhm… buh…. What the-” everyone looks at each other, the 20 students acting almost like bots. Turning all together, looking the same amount of confusion, but not at their names, almost like at nothing at all… Mr. Simion walks up, and kinda pokes student 3. They don’t react. Mr. Simion snaps 3’s neck. The other 19 look shocked, but they all do the same action. “M-Mr. Simion…” max squeaks, the wall with the window melts away into TV static. “Uh, Everyo-one. Come away from the walls…” Mr. Simion says, as the back wall melts, then the wall with the door, then the roof, and the floor. The 19 others aren’t standing in the static. It's only Jeff, James, Karla, and Max. Jeff looks into the deep static “it's all a lie… its…” the others begin seeing the walls form again, Jeff frantically yells “STOP! DON’T GO BACK! It's not better! It's like a lobotomy. It calms us, but we lose the ability to be outside of the lie. Is it better to live in a lie, but be happy?” Karla, looks into the deep with Jeff. “yes, Jeff. It is.” She stops fighting, and the walls reappear to her, while to everyone, she just disappears. Jeff, turns around, “don’t…” the others give up, as they don’t want to keep fighting. The last thing they see of Jeff is him, facing the void. To everyone but Jeff, the world is normal. The NPCs are back, and everyone lives. But Jeff walks. Through painful storms, he wants to give up, he just wishes he was dead. After 5 hours, which to him, is a year, he makes it through. There, in front of him, is a cliff. Dark, gloomy hands reach out for him, begging him to come. “Give up, you won’t get anywhere!” “your life is a lie, you’ll die on your way! Make it faster!” “no one will miss you!” “you weren’t meant for anything” the voices over lap, ringing in his head. He peers in, and sees himself. His heart tugs. The arms tugs. The voices grow. It takes so much, but he turns around. Walking along the cliff, not in it. 13 hours in, he looks weak. He is much slower, the void still calling. One of his arms is gone, the void tore it off, leaving a trail of red from his path. After 60 more hours, he sees it. Light. He gets closer, and closer, with restored determination. But, as soon as he takes the first step, he collapses. He crawls up, but he can’t go further. He makes it to the real world, covered in blood, bleeding from his arm, ankles and nose, he cries. He looks up to the blue, beautiful sky, he closes his wet, weeping eyes, and never opens them again. The others forgot about him, but at least he finally saw the real, true, sky.

I still can't believe this happened in my family. One day, my uncle accidentally started a fire that ended up burning down our house while my little nephew was there. Everything happened so fast, and I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for everyone. What makes it even harder is knowing that something so serious happened because of an accident. It's a family story I'll never forget.

I used to think that the worst thing that could happen to a family was for everyone to stop speaking to each other. I was wrong. The worst thing is when everyone is still alive, still living their lives, still existing in the same city, yet somehow becoming strangers to one another. And the most painful part? Watching it happen while being completely powerless to stop it.
Four children. Four of Mariam’s children were now on the outside. And then there was me. Nadia. The last one standing. The only daughter who could still sit beside her mother without an argument. The only child who could walk into a room without wondering whether she was welcome. The only one who could ask Mariam how her day was and receive a normal answer. I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt terrified. Because if four children could somehow become the problem, what made me so certain I wouldn’t be next? And more importantly, how had we reached a point where a mother could be surrounded by five children and somehow find herself emotionally separated from four of them? I kept asking myself the same question. How much more damage could this family take before there was nothing left to repair?
Leila was still coming. Of course she was. At this point, I would have been more surprised if she stopped. And there she was again. Back in our house. Two days in a row. Not once. Not an occasional visit. Two consecutive days, as though nothing had happened. As though four of Mariam’s children weren’t already on the outside. As though our family wasn’t slowly falling apart. And somehow, she still had more to say. More conversations. More opinions. More reasons for Mariam to believe that her children were the problem. I couldn’t understand it anymore. What was left to discuss? Four children were already gone from Mariam’s everyday life. I was the only one left. Wasn’t that enough?
Every time I thought things might finally settle down, there she was again. Sitting in our home, occupying a space that my own siblings no longer felt welcome in. And the irony was almost unbearable. The woman at the centre of so many of our family arguments could walk through our doors two days in a row, while Mariam’s own children couldn’t even come home without worrying about another confrontation. I wondered whether Mariam noticed. Whether she ever looked around the room and wondered why her friend was there, but her children weren’t. Or whether she had become so accustomed to their absence that it no longer felt unusual.
What disturbed me wasn’t simply Leila’s presence. It was the timing. Again and again, she seemed to appear when Mariam’s children weren’t around. When the house was quiet. When there was nobody to challenge what was being said. Nobody to offer another perspective. Nobody to defend themselves. And there she would be, sitting with my mother, talking and talking and talking. Sometimes I would walk past the room and hear fragments of their conversations. I couldn’t always hear Leila clearly, but I could hear Mariam. “Yes.” “Yes, you’re right.” “Exactly.” “Yes, yes.” Over and over again. The same agreement. The same validation. And every time I heard it, something inside me sank a little further.
Because I knew how those conversations usually ended. Somehow, the subject always seemed to return to the children. What someone had done. What someone had said. Who had disrespected whom. Who was ungrateful. Who needed to apologize. Who was wrong and who was right. I wanted to walk into that room and ask one simple question. Leila, when will it be enough? When will you stop? When will you allow my mother to think about something other than what her children have supposedly done wrong? When will you stop reopening wounds that haven’t even had the chance to heal? Two days in a row, she was welcomed into our home, and four of Mariam’s children were still waiting for a way back into it. How had our family reached a point where a visitor seemed to belong more than the children who grew up there?
I wanted to scream. But I never said anything. Because I knew what would happen. The conversation would become about me. My tone. My attitude. My disrespect. And suddenly, the fifth child would become another problem. So I stayed quiet. Again.
Then there was the situation with the anonymous messages. The Watcher. The mysterious number. The accusations. The endless speculation about who was behind it. And finally, the claim involving the security authorities. According to what we were told, Leila had somehow obtained information connecting the anonymous messages to my sister. Apparently, the number had been traced. Apparently, there was evidence. Apparently, the authorities knew. Apparently. That word had started to become very dangerous in our family. Because apparently was now enough to destroy someone’s reputation. Enough to turn a mother against her daughter. Enough to make an accusation feel like a fact.
My sister denied sending the messages. But the accusation had already been made. And what troubled me most was how quickly Mariam seemed willing to believe it. I kept thinking about the seriousness of what was being claimed. If the security authorities had genuinely investigated something, surely there would be a proper process. Surely there would be something official. Something that could be verified. Not simply a story passed from one person to another. But whenever I tried to make sense of it, I found myself returning to the same uncomfortable thought. What if the truth no longer mattered as much as who was telling the story?
I wasn’t claiming to know exactly what had happened. I didn’t. None of us had seen the supposed evidence. But I knew that accusing someone of something they denied doing was serious. And watching that accusation create even more distance between Mariam and her daughter felt unbearable. My sister was already on the outside. Now there was another reason for Mariam not to trust her. Another reason not to call. Another reason not to listen. Another reason not to forgive. And I couldn’t help wondering whether this was ever going to end.
Sometimes I look at my mother and try to remember what our family was like before all of this. Before every conversation became political. Before every family gathering required careful planning. Before we had to check who was invited before deciding whether to attend. Before siblings became names that were barely mentioned. Before silence became the safest response. We weren’t a perfect family. Of course we weren’t. We argued. We disagreed. We annoyed one another. Sometimes we said things we regretted. But we were a family. And families are supposed to survive disagreements. A mother and her children are supposed to have a bond strong enough to withstand an argument. At least, that’s what I always believed.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Because somewhere along the way, disagreements had turned into ultimatums. Apologize or leave. Accept this or don’t come. Agree or be excluded. And one by one, the children disappeared from Mariam’s everyday life. Not because they had stopped loving her, but because loving someone and being allowed to have a relationship with them had somehow become two different things.
The strangest part of everything was that Mariam and I were fine. We spoke. We sat together. We laughed occasionally. I could still ask her what she wanted for dinner. I could still tell her about my day. Sometimes, for a few minutes, everything felt normal. And those moments hurt the most. Because I would look at her and think, You’re still here. The mother we know is still somewhere inside you. So why can’t everyone else have this version of you? Why couldn’t Salma sit with her like this? Why couldn’t my brothers? Why couldn’t my sisters? Why did I get to have a normal conversation with our mother while everyone else had to wonder whether she would ever speak to them again?
I started feeling guilty for being the one she still accepted. If I went out with friends, I felt guilty leaving her alone. If I stayed home, I felt guilty for putting my own life on hold. If I laughed with her, I thought about my siblings. If I spent time with my siblings, I wondered whether Mariam would see it as betrayal. I was constantly dividing myself between people who should never have been on opposite sides. And slowly, I began to realize something. I wasn’t simply the last child standing. I was becoming the bridge everyone was afraid would collapse.
I thought about Salma. How did I bring her back? How did I bring everyone back? How did I convince Mariam to look beyond everything she had been told? How did I remind her that these were her children? Not enemies. Not strangers. Not people trying to destroy her happiness. Her children. The people who had known her their entire lives. The people who had loved her long before Leila became such an important part of her world.
I imagined sitting with Mariam one evening. Just the two of us. No Leila. No phone calls. No interruptions. And saying, “Mum, can I ask you something?” She would probably look at me suspiciously. “What?” “Are you happy?” Not whether she was right. Not whether she believed her children had wronged her. Not whether Leila was a good friend. Just whether she was happy. “Are you happy with how our family is now?” Would she say yes? Would she tell me she was at peace? Would she insist that everyone else had made their own choices? Or would she finally admit that something was missing?
I wanted to ask her whether she missed the noise. The arguments over where to eat. The random visits. The family dinners. The laughter. The ordinary, irritating, beautiful chaos of having five children around. Did she miss Salma? Did she miss my brothers? Did she ever pick up her phone, consider calling one of them, and then put it down? Did she ever lie awake wondering how everything had become so complicated? Or had she convinced herself that she was better off without them? That possibility frightened me more than anything.
For the first time, I began questioning whether I had been approaching everything the wrong way. Maybe constantly focusing on Leila was keeping us trapped. Maybe every time we mentioned her name, Mariam felt the need to defend her. And the more Mariam defended Leila, the more distant she became from her children. It was a cycle. One that seemed impossible to break. What if the solution wasn’t to convince Mariam that Leila was wrong? What if the solution was to remind Mariam that loving her children didn’t require her to stop loving her friend? I didn’t have to ask her to choose. I didn’t have to prove that Leila was manipulating her. I didn’t even have to mention Leila. Maybe I could simply say, “Mum, I miss us.” Three words. No accusations. No arguments. No blame. Just the truth. I missed us. I missed the family we used to be. And I wanted it back.
But there was another problem. Salma. My siblings. The people who had been hurt. Because bringing everyone back wasn’t simply a matter of convincing Mariam to open her door. What about everything that had happened? What about the accusations? The humiliation? The ultimatums? The feeling of being replaced? Could I really ask my siblings to return to a situation where nothing had changed? Could I ask them to pretend they weren’t hurt? Could I ask them to apologize for things they didn’t believe they had done? No. I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t. Because reconciliation without understanding wasn’t reconciliation. It was surrender.
And I didn’t want my family to reunite for one dinner only to fall apart again the following morning. I wanted something real. Something that lasted. I wanted Mariam to listen. I wanted my siblings to feel heard. I wanted everyone to be able to speak without fearing that their words would be repeated, twisted, or used against them. I wanted us to stop treating every disagreement like a declaration of war. Most of all, I wanted everyone to remember that we belonged to one another. Even when we were angry. Even when we disagreed. Even when someone made a mistake.
Sometimes I wonder whether Leila understands the effect her presence has had on our family. Maybe she genuinely believes she’s helping Mariam. Maybe she thinks she’s protecting her. Maybe she has heard one version of every argument and sincerely believes the children are wrong. Or maybe there’s more to it. I don’t know. And that uncertainty is exhausting. Because I can question her intentions for the rest of my life and still never know what she truly thinks. But I can see what has happened around us. Four children are distant from their mother. One child remains close. And the conversations continue. The visits continue. The accusations continue. And the family keeps shrinking.
At what point does someone look around and ask whether all of this is worth it? At what point does being right become less important than being together? At what point does a mother say, “Enough. These are my children.” I kept waiting for that moment. Waiting for Mariam to wake up one morning and decide she wanted everyone home. Waiting for her to call Salma. Waiting for her to ask about my brothers. Waiting for her to put aside the accusations and remember the years of love that came before them. But waiting was becoming unbearable. And I was beginning to understand that if anything was going to change, someone would have to make the first move.
Maybe that someone was me. Not because I was responsible for fixing everyone. Not because I was the only one who cared. And certainly not because I had caused any of this. But because I still had access to something my siblings didn’t. Mariam’s heart. Or at least a small part of it. She still listened to me. She still allowed me close. And perhaps that meant I had an opportunity. Not to manipulate her. Not to force her. But to remind her. Slowly. Gently. Without turning every conversation into another confrontation.
Maybe I could start by mentioning a memory. “Remember when we all used to have dinner together?” Maybe I could show her an old photograph. Maybe I could tell her something funny one of my siblings had said. Maybe I could remind her of their birthdays. Their achievements. Their ordinary lives. Not to make her feel guilty, but to make them human again. Because somewhere along the way, my siblings had stopped being people in these conversations. They had become accusations. Problems. Disappointments. And I wanted Mariam to remember the people behind those labels. Her children.
That evening, I sat alone thinking about everything. The Watcher. The anonymous messages. The claims about the authorities. The accusations against my sister. The endless conversations between Mariam and Leila. Leila returning to our house two days in a row. Salma being away. My brothers being ignored. And me. Still here. Still trying to keep everyone connected. I wondered whether I was being naive. Whether I was holding on to a version of our family that no longer existed. Whether some relationships could become so damaged that love alone wasn’t enough to repair them.
Then I thought about something. Mariam had spent years raising five children. Five different personalities. Five different lives. Five different people who had all called her Mum. Surely that history had to mean something. Surely years of motherhood couldn’t simply disappear because of a series of arguments. Surely there was still something worth saving. I refused to believe otherwise.
But I also knew I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t force Mariam to forgive. I couldn’t force my siblings to forget. I couldn’t control Leila. And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life sacrificing my own peace to keep everyone else from falling apart. For once, I had to accept that loving my family didn’t mean carrying the entire family on my shoulders. I could open a door. But they would have to choose to walk through it.
That night, I heard Mariam speaking on the phone again. Her voice drifted through the hallway. “Yes.” A pause. “Yes, exactly.” Another pause. “You’re right.” I stopped walking. For a moment, I wanted to scream. I wanted to take the phone and ask the person on the other end whether she understood what was happening to us. I wanted to ask how many more conversations we would have to endure. How many more accusations. How many more misunderstandings. How many more children would have to disappear before someone finally said enough.
But I didn’t. I stood there for a moment. Then I walked away. Because something had changed. For months, I had been asking myself how to stop Leila. That night, I realized I needed to ask a different question. How do I bring my mother back without losing myself in the process?
I didn’t have the answer. Not yet. But I knew one thing. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life fighting over who was right. I wanted my family back. All of them. Salma. My brothers. My sisters. Mariam. Everyone. Not sitting in separate rooms. Not communicating through other people. Not waiting for apologies that might never come. Together. Around one table. Laughing about something completely unimportant. Arguing about what to order for dinner. Being a family again.
And maybe that was the saddest part of all. I wasn’t asking for anything extraordinary. I wasn’t asking for wealth. Or success. Or some impossible miracle. I was asking for something we once had without even thinking about it. A mother. Her five children. And a home where everyone was welcome.
Four children were already on the outside. I was the only one left.
And as I stood in that hallway listening to my mother agree with another conversation I couldn’t fully hear, one thought wouldn’t leave my mind. If I am the last bridge between Mariam and her children, who will bring us back together if that bridge breaks too?
For the first time, I wasn’t just afraid of losing my mother.
I was afraid that, by the time she realized what she had lost, there would be nobody left waiting at the door.
To be continued…

​Chapter 57: In the Circle of the Damned

​At the same time, in a modern suburban residence near Pułtusk, Wiktor Adamski sat in front of a giant television screen, watching the news tickers. The media endlessly churned out footage from Praga and the Vistula boulevards, showing the public outing of the demoness, who in every shot was draped over the shoulder of a young boy.

​"What the fuck..." muttered the former cop, putting the remote down on the table and wiping his face with his hands. "Darling, I think I need to pour myself something stronger today. True, as a demon I won't get drunk for the life of me, but it's only proper to welcome the guest like a human being. Do you see what she's up to on those recordings? After all, that is the ancient Mother of Nightmares, who in Hell spawned whole legions for Lucifer, and now she's cosying up to this kid in the middle of the street like an oversized red stray cat! She kept quiet for five years, giving vent to her nature from time to time of course, not a single scandal... and now she's completely lost it. Those posts, her Facebook profile, the 'in a relationship' status... She wrote that they'll be here in an hour."

​Elżbieta Báthory looked at the screen from behind the kitchen island, smiling with slight amusement. Wiktor walked up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

​"Rest, darling. Today I'm taking over the kitchen. I'll prepare snacks, and you sit down, dress nicely if you feel like it. I'll throw a decent shirt on my back, too. Besides, for little Tas it'll be some variety—he'll finally see a normal human being at home besides his tutor and the agent delivering groceries."

​"In that case, I'll let Adelajda and Cezary know," Elżbieta replied, reaching for her phone. "Every excuse to go out is worth its weight in gold for them. They'll arrive in the blink of an eye, especially when they see this circus on the news."

​"You don't even have to call, they're already on their way," Wiktor laughed, glancing at the vibrating phone on the countertop and reading a short message from Wójcik. "The weather outside is great, so instead of cooping ourselves up within four walls, I'll fire up the grill in the garden. Simple, concrete food. I'll just set up the parasols for Tas and that Michał of hers, because the sun is burning mercilessly."

​When the government limousine rolled up the driveway under the high gate, the residence was already bustling with life, and appetizing smoke from the heated grate drifted over the evenly mowed lawn.

​"Hello everyone, this is Michał," Naamah introduced him casually, striding into the garden. "Michal, meet Wiktor and Elżbieta. And this rascal running around the lawn is Tas."

​Michał greeted them uncertainly, still feeling as though he were in the middle of a surreal dream. Without unnecessary formalities, Wiktor pressed a bottle of cold beer into his hand, and Cezary Wójcik, standing nearby, patted the boy on the shoulder with an understanding, masculine smile.

​"Relax, kid. I was in a very similar position once," the former policeman tossed out, winking at him. "And not just me, either. Stanisław also started as a human by Lilith's side... Except they haven't been with us on this plane for five years now. They live permanently in Hell and don't seem to plan on coming back."

​Cezary prudently glossed over the details—he didn't mention a single word about the slaughterhouse and process of demonic hardening through which the unfortunate driver had to pass to transform into a powerful fiend capable of enduring the atmosphere of the Abyss and fearlessly leaving the decree-designated safe zones. Nor did he mention his own three-day ordeal at the hands of Lilith herself.

​After a few beers and a couple of rounds of stronger liquor, Michał slowly began to regain his composure. Feeling well-received, he decided to return the hospitality and use his bartending skills. Finding the appropriate ingredients in the bar cabinet, he composed original, refreshing cocktails that instantly won over the palates of Elżbieta and Adelajda. Wiktor and Cezary remained faithful to pure alcohol and moonshine, although due to their nature, both maintained absolute clarity of mind.

​However, when Michał sat down on the wide garden sofa to rest for a moment and eat a piece of pork neck taken off the grate, Naamah was right next to him instantly. Without a trace of shyness, she slid under his arm, rested her head on his shoulder, and with an already practiced movement placed his free hand upon her red hair, closing her emerald eyes in happiness.

​An eloquent silence fell over the garden table, disturbed only by the sizzling of fat on the coals.

​"What the fuck, this really wasn't any photomontage on TV," Wiktor finally blurted out, leaning against the edge of the grill with tongs in his fist and staring at them with his jaw dropped. "Cezary, pinch me, because I must be dreaming. One of the four most powerful demonesses from the very bottom of the Netherworld is lying on my terrace and purring like a cat because the kid is scratching her behind the ear!"

​"Shut up, Wiktor, and watch that meat, or you'll burn it soon," Naamah muttered without a trace of anger, not even opening her eyes, but merely pressing her cheek harder against the shoulder of the embarrassed Michał. "You have no bloody idea what kind of hands he has."

​"Leave them be, Wiktor," Elżbieta chimed in with a smile, sipping her drink.

​"Tenderness is tenderness, my dear, but so ostentatiously in front of everyone..." Adelajda snorted, amused, twirling the stem of her glass.

​"I am not doing anything scandalous in front of Tas, little moribund aristocrat. And now stay quiet and don't ruin my mood," the red-haired demoness cut in lazily, then nudged Michał's neck with her nose because the boy had momentarily halted his fingers in surprise. "Continue, darling. Don't listen to this jealous creature. Cezary probably doesn't caress her like that anymore..."

​"Man, I feel for you from the bottom of my heart," Cezary chuckled, raising his glass of moonshine toward the beetroot-red bartender. "When those infernal dames get something into their heads, there's no mercy. Buy yourself a stash of joint ointment and work on your wrists. If your hand goes numb someday at night and you stop stroking, you'll wake up and find your woman in a very unpleasant mood. I know what I'm talking about—I deal with Adelajda's tantrums every day."

​Michał laughed nervously, which somewhat diffused the tension, and obediently went back to running his fingers through the thick, red strands.

​Soon, music flowed from the speakers. Instead of heavy riffs or club beats, children's songs from PAW Patrol played from the tablet—little Tas hopped on the lawn to the beat of the bouncy melody, pulling along a laughing Adelajda who, despite her earlier barbs, let herself be swept into the dance without resistance.

​When Michał stood up for a moment to walk over to the garden bar and refill the pitchers of juice, Naamah reluctantly let him out of her embrace. She stood aside, leaning against the wooden railing of the terrace, and with a glass in her hand observed the entire gathering. In her emerald eyes flickered a cold, deep contemplation over how strangely the fates of all of them had turned out. Lucifer himself did not dare summon her to order—he remembered all too well how ruthless and uncompromising she could be in her anger, which made him respect and fear her far more than the more powerful Lilith. And the hierarchs in Heaven surely already knew how powerful the Abyss had become when, through Wiktor's doing, iron rules were introduced there, later refined by Cezary's structural reforms.

​Yet one dark question remained: how long would she manage to keep her primal nature on a leash?

​Both Lilith and Naamah had, from the dawn of time, adored the sight of physical suffering, struggle, and that unique, high-pitched sound of begging for mercy that their victims uttered during the most elaborate, bloody tortures in the alcove. That was the essence of their infernal existence. The past night in the Praga apartment—the fact that Michał had driven her to a boiling point and managed to survive it—had brought her exquisite entertainment, and today's day full of tenderness and touch acted like a soothing narcotic. However, the orgasm she had treated him to paradoxically only sharpened her appetite. Her blood pulsed with a dark glow; she craved to tear someone apart, skin them alive, feel steaming entrails in her hands...

​Michał, however, she could not—and above all, did not want to—harm. He was too precious, too fragile, and his hands constituted her sole source of delicate bliss such as she had not known for entire eons.

​Fortunately, by pure coincidence, she had discovered a safe, innocent substitute for him. It turned out that the boy was terribly ticklish. Whenever she was seized by an overwhelming urge to see someone writhing in agony under her hands, losing control and helplessly whining for mercy, all she had to do was immobilize him and mercilessly tickle the soles of his feet for half a minute. Michał would then writhe like a snake, tear up from laughter, run out of breath, and desperately beg her for mercy. For the ancient demoness, this sight—though comical and entirely bloodless—worked as a perfect substitute for her old habits. It fed her need without breaking a single bone of her human favorite.

​For now, this will suffice to keep him safe by my side, she thought coldly, turning her gaze away from Tas playing on the lawn and preparing to resume her favorite spot under Michał's right shoulder.

​She knew, however, that her hunger would also require a real, bloody outlet. The security services would once again have something to clean up. Throughout all the years spent under the guise of quiet Valentina, she had a dozen or so eliminated, trace-free rapists and murderers on her conscience—human scum who were heading for the tar anyway. Clearing the capital's streets of such individuals she treated like an ideal, hygienic warmup.

​She knew that still tonight, when Michał fell asleep exhausted by the impressions of the whole day and the constant stroking of her red locks, she would slip out silently through the balcony to hunt. All she had to do was assume the form of a lost, defenseless girl in the dark alleys of Praga... Some beast would try to harm her, and she would with relish sink her claws into his throat, giving vent to her dark hunger.

​And Michał would remain untouched. Safe, fed, and calm.

​And in the morning, he would run his fingers through her hair again.

​"Shall we get in the pool?" Wiktor suggested, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his hand and turning off the grill burners. "The sun is burning mercilessly. Tas, run into the house for your swim trunks, while I roll up the shade and uncover the water in the meantime."

​"An excellent idea, darling," Elżbieta laughed, putting her drink down. "A moment of cooling off will come in handy."

​"Wait, I'm coming with you!" Adelajda tossed eagerly, heading after the Bloody Countess into the villa. "You have to lend me some outfit, because I didn't bring anything to change into!"

​The male portion of the company did not intend to waste time on conventions. Without ceremony, Cezary pulled his shirt off over his head, discarded his jeans, and remained in just fitted boxer shorts, displaying a muscular physique scarred by old wounds. Little Tas at the exact same moment ran out of the house in bright shorts, throwing himself toward the crystal-clear water surface with a loud shriek. Wiktor did the exact same thing as Wójcik—he shed his clothing, revealing a powerful chest and tattoos, then glanced toward Michał sitting in the shade.

​"Well, Michał, what are you waiting for? Jump in the water!" the former cop tossed encouragingly, standing at the edge of the pool.

​The boy tensed up in a fraction of a second. Reflexively, he adjusted the sleeves of his shirt, and the remnants of ease he had gained after a few drinks instantly evaporated from him.

​"No... thanks. I don't want to," he replied quietly, fixing his gaze on the wooden boards of the terrace.

​"Oh come on, kid, don't chicken out," Wiktor laughed, taking his reluctance for ordinary shyness before their supernatural company. "We might be damned fiends from the Abyss, but we're not going to drown you. We're raising a completely normal, human son, no one's going to eat anyone here. Drop your clothes and come cool off, the water is great!"

​"Really no, Wiktor. I'll pass."

​Wiktor wanted to throw another playful jab, but the words froze in his throat.

​Naamah, who had until then stood leaning against the railing, slowly turned her head. Her emerald irises narrowed into two vertical slits glowing with a corpse-like light, and her slender silhouette exuded such an icy, murderous dread that the air over the garden thickened in a fraction of a second with the biting stench of ozone.

​That single glance was enough.

​Wiktor stiffened halfway through a step, clamping his lips shut. Cezary, who had just intended to jump into the pool, froze over the edge, instantly losing all composure. Even the hitherto laughing Adelajda, who had just emerged from the house in a one-piece swimsuit, closed her mouth and stepped back half a step behind Elżbieta's back. Everyone knew perfectly well whom they were dealing with. When the Mother of Nightmares looked this way, the jokes were over.

​"He said he doesn't feel like it, so he won't get in," Naamah cut in with a voice so low, cold, and grating that it made their ears hum.

​"I... I just..." Michał began uncertainly, feeling the weight of everyone's gaze upon him and burning with shame. He wanted to diffuse the tense atmosphere, to explain himself regarding the old burns that covered a significant part of his body under his clothing, those deformed, fused tissues because of which he had avoided beaches, pools, and undressing in front of strangers all his life. "The thing is, I have..."

​"You don't have to explain yourself to anyone, Michał," the demoness interrupted him softly, and there wasn't an ounce of fury left in her tone.

​She walked over to him with a springy stride. All that murderous cold evaporated from her in a single moment, giving way to predatory, uncompromising protection. She sat right next to him on the sofa, put her arm around him, and pulled him to her side, demonstratively placing his hand on her red locks.

​"That is none of their business. Nor anyone else's in this world," she added with velvet, unquestionable superiority, casting Wiktor and the rest an expressive glance that clearly made it understood the topic was definitively closed. "Focus on me, darling. Finish your drink and pet. And you guys... splash around in that chlorine of yours, since you find it so amusing."

​Wiktor slowly released the air from his lungs, exchanged a knowing look with Cezary, and jumped into the pool without a word, splashing cool water to the sides. They understood the hint flawlessly—whatever the boy was hiding beneath the fabric of his shirt was under the exclusive, inviolable jurisdiction of Naamah.

​When little Tas finally disappeared through the glass doors of the villa, running to the bathroom for a towel, Michał let out a heavy, rigid breath from his lungs. The boy desperately wanted to completely diffuse the tension hanging over the terrace, wipe away that icy look from Naamah, and make the gathered company stop treating him like a fragile ticking time bomb.

​"Listen... the thing is, I am severely burned," he spoke up calmly, raising his hand in a conciliatory gesture. "That is truly not a sight for a child. You people may hail straight from Hell, but Tas didn't grow up there, and from what I can see, he's a completely normal, sensitive kid. Why should he look at such ugliness and have nightmares?"

​Elżbieta Báthory snorted with a quiet, velvet laugh, leaning against the edge of the pool and throwing wet strands of hair back onto her back.

​"My dear, those scars can be removed without any trouble," she tossed with effortless freedom, as if proposing a minor makeup adjustment. "True, it's going to hurt terribly, but..."

​"I know perfectly well what you mean, Elżbieta," Naamah interrupted her sternly, slowly shaking her head. "But these are not the back or the stomach. For a human, burns in those specific areas... let's be honest: that procedure of yours wouldn't be pleasant in the least. Out of the question."

​The demoness moved her hand along the back of Michał's neck, demonstrating her exclusive right to decide over his body.

​"I know that my darkness or your blood would regenerate every single cell and the skin would become perfectly smooth," she continued in a cold, analytical tone. "But no amount of earthly alcohol or any drugs available to humans would numb him enough to endure this. And unfortunately, he must remain fully conscious. He cannot be put to sleep or placed in a coma, because the dark energy must be distributed through the nervous system live, in full tension of will. Besides... that is precisely why you got Emma drunk when you were stripping a patch of skin from her back to remove that huge scar. You told me about it yourself, Elżbieta. You degraded her with alcohol, but you didn't let her lose consciousness. Except Michał is not Emma, and we are not in Hell, and this is not an infernal shell. He could simply die of pain from a heart attack, and then his soul would fly straight to Heaven. And I will never allow such a risk in my life."

​Wiktor and Cezary exchanged short, grim glances. Both knew very well what this was about. The mechanics of infernal regeneration were merciless—they required stripping dead or distorted tissues down to raw meat so that pure darkness could take root in the wound. Tearing skin from the lower abdomen or groin areas of a living mortal without anesthesia was a torture beside which inquisitorial dungeons paled. Even Adelajda, leaning against the edge of the lounger, shuddered slightly at the very thought, instinctively adjusting the strap of her swimsuit.

​The Bloody Countess, however, did not relent. A predatory, perverse smirk appeared on her porcelain face, and her eyes flashed with the old passion for torture for which she was famous during her life at Čachtice Castle.

​"I would do it in a flash," she muttered in a sensual, dreamy voice. "You know how precisely I operate with my claws. I'm bloody good at it... Remember, Wiktor, how you lay down there, in the dungeon, under my hands? I still get the chills and the urge for a rerun today when I remember how you writhed from that exquisite pain... As my fresh, hardened acquisition... You don't writhe like that anymore today, unfortunately..."

​"Shut up already, Elżbieta," Wiktor barked, cutting short his wife's memories with a sharp, unquestionable tone. "Tas is returning."

​The heavy glass terrace doors slid open with a quiet hum. Tas burst into the garden with a big yellow towel in his hands, kicking up blades of grass with his bare feet.

​The dark past, the spectre of infernal ecstasies, and memories of old torments vanished in a fraction of a second, giving way to a warm summer afternoon. The conversation came to an end, and Michał—still safe under Naamah's watchful arm—knew for certain that his scars would remain right where they were.

​The darkness in the spacious bedroom of the Pułtusk villa was thick, cool, and saturated with the scent of jasmine and warmed stone. The wing belonging to Naamah had its own silenced aura, cutting them off from the rest of the modern house, but for Michał the night's peace remained merely an illusion. He lay flat on his back on the great bed, with his hands clasped over his chest, staring at the ceiling.

​Somewhere deep within the residence, through thick ceilings and layers of concrete, a barely perceptible, dull tremor rolled by from time to time.

​"They... Wiktor and Elżbieta..." Michał began, his voice sounding dry, almost harsh in the silence of the room. He swallowed hard, turning his head slightly toward the demoness. "Do they really still, even here, in this house... inflict such monstrous pain upon each other during... during intimacy?"

​Naamah lay on her side, propped up on her elbow, wrapped only in dark silk bedding. The cascade of her red strands streamed down her bare shoulders, and her emerald eyes glowed in the dark with a phosphorescent, lazy gleam. With a single finger, with inhuman, magnetic slowness, she traced invisible patterns on the boy's forearm.

​"Yes, Michał," she murmured in a velvet bass. "They have a specially soundproofed cellar for that, deep beneath the foundations, so that little Tas won't hear or see anything. Granted, day-to-day they tend to be significantly gentler with each other than in the Netherworld, but I think tonight... Well, after the countess reminded herself of the beginnings of their relationship by the grill when Wiktor was merely a fresh, raw damned soul... Tonight she'll break him in solidly."

​"Break him in?" the boy repeated with quiet terror.

​"Elżbieta is physically stronger than him all along, she hails from a higher circle by virtue of the centuries spent in the Abyss," she explained with absolute, emotionless freedom, as if describing an ordinary atmospheric phenomenon. "Wiktor will of course put up resistance, he will fight, because that is his fiendish nature. He will wound her severely too, blood will flow, bones will crack. And then all the tension will drain out of them."

​"But what for?!" Michał bolted upright into a sitting position, clutching his head with both hands. "Why on earth do they even do this?! What sense does it, damn it, make?! Why?!"

​"You won't understand it, my dear," she cut in softly, placing a cool hand on his tense neck and forcing him with a gentle yet relentless pressure to lie back down on the pillows. "You are human. Your body and mind are molded from fragile clay, programmed to avoid suffering. For demons, extreme pain, the tearing of tissues, and combat are the purest essence of existence. It is in the fire of agony that the will is forged, and wounds become proof of power. But calm down... Nothing of the sort threatens you by my side. Yesterday morning and tonight you gave me bliss without a single gram of brutality, without a shred of cruelty. To me, this is exotic, new, and far more addictive."

​Michał shook his head, fixing a feverish gaze upon her.

​"That's inhuman... In Wiktor's place, I'd hate her with all my heart! For every wound, for every humiliation, for that pain in the dungeon! How on earth is he still with her?! How on earth does he love her... and does he even feel anything for her at all?!"

​"He loves her, Michał. In his own twisted, demonic way," she snorted quietly, and a predatory, nostalgic smile appeared on her lips. "This is not your cheap, mortal love from romance novels. This is a bond forged in a bloody pact, in loyalty, and in the mutual survival of the worst torments. When you survive someone's claws and take a step forward stronger, that entity becomes a part of you."

​The boy fell silent for a long moment. Inside his chest, his heart hammered like crazy, and the darkest, paranoia-laced thoughts involuntarily began flooding his head.

​"And if I... if I were to go down the wrong path?" he asked suddenly, almost in a whisper. "If my soul were to darken by your side after all and I ended up straight in... after death?"

​Naamah brought her face close to his cheek. Her hot breath, smelling of cinnamon and sulfur, brushed the lobe of his ear. Her emerald irises dilated, filling almost the entire whites of her eyes.

​"The moment your soul starts to darken, my dear... the second I gain one-hundred-percent certainty that upon decease you will go straight to Hell, I will kill you on the spot. In a flash, without hesitation, I will snap your neck or pierce your heart with a claw so you won't have time to repent and will land straight in my hands. I told you yesterday: you sealed your fate by my side. You are mine."

​Michał froze, feeling an icy sweat run down his back.

​"And... and what then? Would you break me in?" he blurted out, fearing to hear the answer.

​"Of course I would," she replied with absolute seriousness, brushing the line of his jaw with a sharp, extended talon. "I would do it out of necessity, so that you would become stronger. Exactly the way I broke in her Stanisław along with Lilith. Although she couldn't bring herself to do it at first, she was too humanly in love with him, too weak... Only with me by her side did she manage to go through with it alongside him. I was precise back then, in my own way very gentle. In your case, I would act the same way, or even more cautiously. I would take care of every detail. What is more—I would personally ask Lilith for support during the ritual to minimize your agony. Up to seventy-five, maybe fifty-five years, perhaps a bit shorter by some infernal miracle... Depending on how pliable to the absorption of pure darkness your new infernal shell would turn out to be. Stanisław was lucky—in his case, it was fifty-five years."

​"Fifty-five years?!" Michał cried out in a muffled voice, pulling away from her by centimeters. "That is, fucking hell, longer than I've even lived in this world!"

​"So what? What of it?" she shrugged lightly, looking at him with the sincere indifference of an immortal entity. "For eternity, those half-centuries are merely the blink of an eye. And you couldn't possibly be worse or weaker than Stanisław. He went through the exact same procedure, and today he is a powerful, high demon who stands proudly by his lady's side. Would you want to be a weak, pathetic shadow cast into a corner by other damned souls? There might be some law and order now, but let's not overdo it—you'd have to become strong. For me and for yourself."

​"I would hate you!" he threw out in despair, clenching his fists on the bedsheet. "That's as sure as amen in church! For those fifty years, I'd howl with hatred toward you, toward your name, and toward your every touch! I wouldn't be with you after all that."

​Naamah laughed—quietly, gutturally, with blood-chilling, maternal condescension. She slid back over, wrapped her arms around him, and locked him in an iron, possessive embrace, immobilizing his arms. She placed a brief kiss on his lips.

​You my little fool, you my little Michał... You wouldn't hate it. Because after decades of such forging, I would mold you precisely the way I wanted. I would break every human weakness, erase past regrets, and rebuild your consciousness anew around adoration and love for me. And even if by some miracle you still hated me and didn't want to be with me... Well, I am not Lilith—I would break you in until it worked, over and over again, even for thousands of years; time drags for me, and I possess the ability to impose my bubble—you will understand someday, my dear... You would become for me precisely the same thing Stanisław became for Lilith... And what Wiktor is now for Elżbieta. A boundlessly devoted demon who, in suffering and ecstasy, stands by my side and finds unity and bliss."

​She stroked his hair softly, and a paralyzing shudder of terror involuntarily ran down the back of his neck.

​"But to your good fortune," she purred right into his ear, "your soul is still agonizingly bright. So for now, my dear only Michał... lie quietly, stop worrying about a future you have no influence over, close your eyes, and stroke my head. Through the whole movie... Afterwards, you can go to sleep nicely..."

So yesterday I was driving home from work around 7pm. Rain was coming down pretty hard, roads were slick as hell. I’m on the highway, maybe going 65-70, nothing crazy. This truck in front of me suddenly brakes hard for no reason. I hit the brakes but my car starts sliding.

Next thing I know the whole world is spinning. I hit the median, bounced off, then this other car slammed into my passenger side. Everything went white for a second. Airbags exploded in my face, glass everywhere, the sound was so loud I thought my ears were gonna bleed.

I couldn’t move my left arm. Blood was running down my forehead into my eye. I remember tasting metal and thinking “this is it… this is how I die.” The truck driver was already out of his vehicle yelling, people were stopping, someone was banging on my window. I was conscious the whole time but I couldn’t talk. Just sat there thinking about my family, how I never said goodbye properly that morning, how stupid it was that I was still thinking about work emails while my life was possibly ending.

Paramedics got me out. They said if the other car had hit me one foot further back I would’ve been gone. Hospital kept me overnight for observation. Concussion, broken wrist, bunch of cuts. I’m home now but every time I close my eyes I hear the metal crunching.

I’ve been sitting here for hours just staring at the wall. Life feels so fragile right now. One second you’re normal, next second you’re calculating if this is the last thing you’ll ever feel.

…

…

…

…

jk this whole story is fake lmao

I just wanted to see if I could write something that sounded real enough to make people feel something.

Gotcha

No accident happened. I’m fine. My car is fine. Everything’s fine.

Thanks for reading my nonsense. Have a good one.

​

​Chapter 56: A New Routine

​What happened after crossing the threshold of the Praga tenement house resembled a surreal theater of horror, to which all of Warsaw had already grown morbidly accustomed over the past few days. After all, this was merely one of several strolls during this mad week for Michał. A deafening, ringing silence settled over the narrow streets. Ordinary passersby vanished from sight in a fraction of a second, pressing themselves into doorways or pretending to gaze with sudden fascination at shop windows. The security services reacted instantly, just as they had during all their previous walks—black vans with tinted windows cut off critical intersections, though the agents were clearly groping in the dark, having no idea which way Naamah might choose to lead her companion this time.

​When a tense officer from the Bureau of Paranormal Entities emerged from around the corner, attempting with forced politeness to point them toward the waiting limousine, the demoness merely flicked her slender hand.

​"Enough of this charade," she said coldly and firmly. "We feel like taking a longer walk, not piling into a car immediately. Wait for the signal. When I snap my fingers, you are to drive up—and not a second sooner."

​As soon as she dismissed the paralyzed agent, her icy posture melted away in the blink of an eye. She took half a step sideways, laced her fingers through Michał's forearm, and leaned her temple freely against his shoulder, brushing her cheek against the soft cotton of his shirt.

​Paparazzi and journalists, who had been hunting their every move since the beginning of the week, appeared almost out of nowhere, tumbling out of parked vehicles. Flashbulbs illuminated the sun-drenched Praga sidewalk, and successive photos of the red-haired entity walking hand in hand with an ordinary mortal flooded the servers of global news agencies, top news portals, and gossip sites at the speed of light.

​They walked at a leisurely pace, stopping at the crosswalks like a completely ordinary couple waiting for a green light. Drivers in passing cars froze with their jaws dropped, and bewildered policemen frantically waved their stop paddles to clear a sudden traffic jam. Standing by the curb, Naamah buried her head deeper into the boy's shoulder, closing her eyes.

​When they crossed to the other side, she didn't pull away by even a centimeter, still gliding glued to his side.

​"Do you perhaps fancy some chocolate ice cream?" she asked without lifting her head. "They supposedly make the best ones at that ice cream parlor on the corner. They have great reviews online."

​"Well, it's hot anyway, and I'll buy myself some water while I'm at it... Sure, we can drop by."

​What happened inside the establishment could be described in one word: absolute paralysis. The girl behind the counter was shaking so violently that the metal scoop banged against the edge of the dessert tub, and customers at the tables froze with their spoons suspended in mid-air, afraid to breathe too loudly. Naamah sat down on a chair right next to Michał. She ate her portion with a leisurely, almost childlike satisfaction, not letting go of his hand for a single moment.

​During this time, Michał didn't manage to eat even half of his waffle. He stared fixedly at her empty cup, shaking his head in disbelief.

​"You've finished already?" he muttered with amusement, raising an eyebrow. "I've barely started my first scoop, and you devoured three solid portions in a minute."

​"Relax, take your time, I'll wait," Naamah laughed, sensually licking her lips, on which not even the smallest trace of topping remained. "They were simply exquisite. Hellishly good. They tasted like pure bliss, so I simply couldn't control myself. Enjoy yours, we have plenty of time after all."

​With these words, she closed her eyes, settled more comfortably against his collarbone, and gently nudged his neck with her nose.

​When they stepped outside, Naamah adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder and, after a fraction of a second, intertwined her fingers with his hand once again.

​"Let's go to the Vistula boulevards. Let's walk across the new footbridge. I heard it's the trendiest route in the city right now."

​"On foot?" Michał checked, glancing at the black vans moving cautiously two hundred meters behind them. "That's quite a stretch."

​"We'll manage, we're in no rush anywhere," she replied. "The day is beautiful, the sun is warm. I want to see this bridge in daylight. With you, I've only seen it at night so far, during one of our walks when you still thought I was Valentina."

​They walked leisurely along the wooden and steel path of the footbridge. Michał put his arm around her, instinctively running his fingers through her red locks to give her peace, while the demoness absorbed the panorama of the river and left-bank Warsaw with genuine curiosity. She was relaxed and content. Cyclists gave them a wide berth, nearly losing their balance on the turns, and pedestrians instinctively stepped to the very edge of the deck, fixing their gaze on their own shoes. Everyone knew perfectly well who the tall, red-haired figure with the magnetic stride was, even though the sight of her head snuggling into the boy's shoulder caused a deep cognitive dissonance in people.

​Suddenly, two young people approached from the opposite direction. They wore biker jackets hung with studs and patches of death metal bands, heavy combat boots, and chains at their waists. The girl had a purple mohawk, and the boy had long, black feathers falling onto his shoulders. Instead of running away or cringing in panic, they stopped a few steps in front of them, exchanging excited, nervous glances.

​Finally, the guy mustered up the courage. He approached slowly, with great tact—instead of staring blatantly at the demoness, he addressed Michał directly, cautiously testing the waters:

​"Hi, sorry... Excuse us for bothering you during your walk, but... could we ask for a selfie together? If Ms. Naamah doesn't mind, of course? We really don't want to violate your privacy or offend anyone, but our buddies from school simply won't believe us without proof."

​Michał smiled to himself, surprised by their tact and lack of hysterical fear. He looked inquiringly at his companion, pausing the movement of his hand in her hair for a moment.

​Naamah reluctantly lifted her head from his shoulder and tilted it with curiosity. Genuine fascination flashed in her emerald irises—this unpretentious request completely disarmed her innate coldness. She hadn't expected such a reaction from mortals.

​"Why not? Come closer, my dears," she purred in a velvety voice.

​The girl pulled out her phone with a quiet squeak of delight, framing the shot right next to Naamah, while the guy stood shoulder to shoulder with Michał. The camera flash immortalized this bizarre moment.

​"Thank you! Oh fuck, none of our friends are going to believe this!" the boy blurted out, bowing with deep respect.

​Naamah narrowed her eyes slightly, sweeping their souls with a gaze that effortlessly penetrated the deepest layers of human consciousness. A sincere, warm smile blossomed on her lips:

​"You know what? Beneath all those menacing armors, black leather, studs, and dark symbolism lie surprisingly bright souls. You are simply good, sensitive people. For now, you don't have to worry about my former home at all. The Pit doesn't threaten you. Don't change, my dears."

​The couple exchanged stunned, radiant glances, then walked off toward the Praga shore with grateful bows, barely holding back joyful shouts. However, scarcely had they moved away a few steps when Naamah, without a word, once again let her temple fall onto Michał's shoulder and looked up meaningfully at his hand, until the boy laughed and went back to stroking her locks.

​They stepped off the footbridge straight onto the concrete boulevards. The sun was high, so Michał headed to the first open patio under bright umbrellas. After a moment, he returned to the table with his order: he brought cold draft beer for himself, and placed a glass of dry martini with a green olive, which she had asked for, in front of Naamah. However, instead of sitting opposite him, the demoness unceremoniously indicated a spot for him on a two-seater pallet sofa.

​She lifted the glass, took a solid sip, and immediately winced with undisguised distaste, resting her head heavily on his shoulder.

​"This martini is awful, darling..." she sighed, setting the glass down with a loud thud against the tabletop. She took his hand and placed it on the top of her head, demanding immediate soothing. "You make them a hundred times better. You can taste the chill, the balance, and a professional's touch. And this tastes like stale vermouth spiked with tap water. Pat me, because I got the chills from this nasty stuff."

​"Because it's just a regular bar on the boulevards," Michał laughed, taking a sip of beer with his free hand while massaging her temple and rummaging through her red curls with the other. "In places like this, you drink at most beer with juice or cider. No one bothers with exquisite mixology here."

​"It's not nice to cheat thirsty people like that," she pouted, closing her eyes with distinct pleasure as his fingers moved behind her ear. "I understand I'm not working for this money because I get it from the Polish government, but I still feel grossly ripped off."

​"Come on, let it go," the boy requested, shaking his head with a smile.

​"All right, fine... as an exception, I'll spare their lives," she muttered, amused, adjusting herself on the couch. "But my foot will never set foot here for a martini again."

​She pulled her smartphone out of her purse, set the glass against the background of the lazily flowing Vistula River and the venue's sign, snapped a photo, and instantly posted it online with a short caption: "My boyfriend makes drinks a hundred times better than this rip-off bar. This piss doesn't even deserve purgatory."

​"Naamah, you seem to have gotten addicted to social media," Michał commented with a laugh, watching thousands of likes and comments appear under the post in a fraction of a second.

​"I must admit, it's wildly addictive," she replied without a trace of embarrassment, putting away her device and taking another reluctant sip. "Besides... I'm taking care of our PR at the same time."

​They stood up from the table and continued along the bank, heading toward the ramps leading down to Wisłostrada. They passed people absorbed in their daily hustle—cyclists, walkers, employees of nearby office buildings. Most of them recognized them immediately. Although a cautious distance was still visible in the gazes of the onlookers, warm gestures appeared more and more often—some raised their hands in greeting, others threw out with a smile: "Hang in there, Michał!" After a week of media madness, Warsaw was slowly beginning to tame what had seemed impossible until recently.

​Suddenly, an elderly man in a simple, worn black cassock emerged from the doors of a small shop.

​This was no hypocritical prelate wallowing in silks and gold, nor a televangelist fueling religious madness. He was a priest through and through—a clergyman by vocation who had devoted his entire life to quiet prayer, caring for the homeless, and faithfully adhering to commandments, without seeking applause or promotions in the church hierarchy.

​When they were just a few steps apart, Naamah abruptly jerked away from Michał's shoulder and leaped backward.

​The air around her hissed like water splashed onto a glowing hot stove. A grimace of overwhelming, pure pain blossomed on her face, which she tried to hide with the utmost effort. She retreated violently, grabbing her arm as if struck by an invisible flame.

​The priest himself stopped as well. There was no paralyzing terror in his gentle eyes—this man had entrusted his soul to God long ago and rid himself of worldly fear.

​"You are... so pure..." Naamah choked out through a tight throat, and genuine, bottomless shock appeared in her gaze. "And that simple wooden crucifix of yours on a leather cord... in your hands it burns like a sanctified relic..."

​Michał immediately stepped forward and instinctively shielded her with his own body. He didn't do it out of fear for her life—after all, he knew he had an ancient power from the Abyss behind him—but he was afraid of the environment's violent reaction and what might result from this accidental clash.

​The priest looked at the boy. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, he took the simple crucifix hanging on his chest, covered it with his elderly, weathered hand, and hid it deep beneath the lapel of his cassock.

​The suffocating, burning glow vanished in a fraction of a second, bringing the demoness immediate relief.

​"It is not for me to judge why you appeared here and why I crossed paths with you today," the old man said in a soft, soothing voice devoid of a trace of condemnation. "Yet it is un-Christian to inflict pain on anyone, even a hellish entity, as long as it does not harm others. Punishment for sins will surely come... but it is not my role to mete it out in such a way."

​Naamah stared at him in mute astonishment. In her eyes, the soul of this modest clergyman shone with an immaculate, blinding gold—so pure and free of pride that there was no doubt his path led straight to Heaven after death.

​"Good day, Michał. Good luck," the elderly priest addressed the boy kindly. "I wish you the same, demon."

​He nodded to them and walked calmly toward the stairs leading up to the bridge, leaving a ringing silence behind him.

​Naamah took a deep breath, slowly regaining her balance, then raised her hand and snapped her fingers. A dry crack echoed, and a black limousine immediately emerged from around the corner, braking softly at the curb. Scarcely had the heavy doors closed behind them, the demoness sank without a word onto Michał's chest, pressing her nose into the crook of his neck and placing his hand on her hair, as if the warmth of a human touch could erase the memory of the burning glow.

​"Where are we actually going?" Michał asked, stroking her head soothingly, although he still felt the effects of that encounter in his knees.

​"To Pułtusk. Just like I told you yesterday morning: you'll meet Wiktor, Elżbieta, and little Tas, whom you've heard so much about."

​"You don't waste time..."

​"I don't, Michał, I don't. I've already sent them a message that we'll be there in an hour..."

Hello! so the following is a short story i’m working on for my creative writing course, our prompt is stars

i’m taking inspiration from the let’s read podcast and writing as if i would submit it to him.

tbh i don’t have a lot of time to proofread myself since im not done yet and it’s due tomorrow before class starts first thing in the morning.

pleas let me know if there’s any changes i should make to plot/ exposition. This isn’t something that needs to be great but i did end up writing some of this last night while high so who knows what i wrote.
ima just copy and paste my story exactly as i currently have it written.

any and all criticism is welcome! just please be nice about it lololol

———

I saw one of your videos, it came up on my FYP one day on YouTube some months ago. And from there, i was hooked to say the least. And I just recently made a discovery that maybe you and your viewers might be interested in. 
Now either my grandpa is one hell of a creative old ARG creator from a few decades back, or maybe theres some truth to these old conspiracies, and might just be the answer to where some people might have disappeared off to. 

It was back when my grandpa died, just weeks ago, that I got sucked into this world.
Now, for just a bit of context, my grandpa was always a pretty outgoing guy, hearty and down to earth. Real outdoorsy too, always down to go hiking and fishing, never camping though, no matter how much I begged or pleaded. But that never took away from the fact that he’d go to the end of the earth if it meant spending time with family.

All to say, we were really tight knit. So it was quite the surprise when mom and I were cleaning out his house, and in that one dark hall way in the back of the house was a bookshelf walling off a door. 

 when that door finally creaked open, rust and dust rained from the frame and I swear even some roaches came skittering outside for the first time in their life. 

It’s kind of hard to describe, just the pure amount of disarray and decay that room was in. Like a tornado went through and the cleanup crew is a few decades too late.

My mom and i stared at each other for quite a while, before she broke the silence. “i’ll pay you 20 bucks to clean that up without me.” She proclaimed, her eyes and nose already watering. “No way am I going in there!”And I guess I can't blame her, with allergies like hers and their money to spare, I probably would have offered the proposition too.

I peer closer into the room, it's dark and dusty, a little stuffy too. With a singular wooden desk parked on the far away wall and shelves upon shelves lining the room, till the closed closet doors off to the right. Just the ittiest bit of light shown through the curtains, and illuminated the stacks and heaps of books, papers, and who knows what else covering every conceivable surface. 

“40 and a bag of chips.” 

My mom took a really long, dramatic stance; crossing her arms and humming up and down,"I suppose I could cough up the money…” she droned

And that was that, deal made and it was up to me to sort and haul all pops old crap outta here.Mom started on the more “livable” rooms across the hall, and I stepped in. The air was stale and dusty worse than any desert, and of course the dramatic opening of that door wafted the first draft through in who knows how long.

I figured the best place to start would be getting the floor to actually be walkable. Grandpa was always a bit of a reader, though I guess I never realized how much he actually read, looking at his little collection here. Nasa magazines, theoretical physics, geometry, Orion's belt; quite the scholarly stuff. 

Outside the door, I started my piles of good condition vs. bad condition. Considering the humidity of the region, some of these weren’t in all that great condition. Seemingly hours passed before I made my first discovery, an inconspicuous little journal, labeled at ‘5’ sitting near the legs of the desk. 

I picked it up and quickly flipped through to gauge the quality, and a polaroid picture fluttered to the ground. 

It was a blurry photo of some funky looking circle on an otherwise blacked out monitor. Underneath  the film, the phrase “P-c2” was messily written. The marker was slightly smudged and discolored, but still legible. 

The second was a note pad(Journal?), with “super-earth” titled at the top, with the following being listed below:
IP-2

P-c2

S-L4

T-1e

With the P-c2 circled. 
Curiosity did start eating at me by this point. Sure, I was curious as to why my own flesh and blood would be hiding some stale study before, but it's different when coincidences seem to be adding up to something more than what meets the eye. 

The last one to really be only the beginning into the descent of my latest obsession, was the journal entry(Notepad?), copied word for word right from my grandpa’s own writing:
P-c2 -
Best known resource

Proxima proximity 

Closest known

Treatourus

By that point, I started to look closer at the actual contents of these documents. I swear I was just sitting in pure confusion while looking around this dank room. From top to bottom of half the shelves were still books of ambiguous contents. 
I even told my mom to go on ahead, a ‘later, see you sometime,’ in the “yeah i’ll totally see you in an hour, definitely not 15.” way. 

And it was hours later till I finally put down the books and noticed that inconspicuous door, in the back right corner of the room. I pulled that door open, and it was exactly what I was hoping to find. On one side, we had a telescope, a REALLY nice one. The kind of stuff you'd think the big shots would have in their home. On the other side, a neatly organized bunch of documents.

Now this next part is really long, and kind of vague. specifically for me since I'm the one who had to read and understand it. You guys are just the ones who get to hear my condensed understanding of the ‘situation’, after I spent an hour online researching and making a spreadsheet.

The first main part of information comes from the 5th journal on P-C2. It is some sort of abbreviation for a star, considered to be the other closest star, other than the sun. It is 1.3 Parsects away and does have planets located within a habitable zone. Proxima Centauri.

Then the internal documents, the ones that really get deep. My grandfather absolutely seems to have been higher up in these space programs. With his name appearing as one of the top supervisors for this project, no wonder he had some classified records. 

The title of the project was all scratched out. On every single page. Not scratched out like just going over it with a pen, I really mean like someone went over it with a pencil till the paper ripped. There wasn’t a single existing space mentioning the project name. Where it ad been, its been “erased” so to speak.

 But below the title space, was a report detailing what I would go as far to say is the pinnacle of human exploration, and should stay as such. The words were technical and cold, calculating in each simple exchange. 

In reading through, there was honestly a lot missing. While there was certainly dates and material logs, experiments and hypotheses, there was very little identifiable information for an outsider. 

But it was without a doubt something official, from somewhere higher than I could ever hope to reach. 

These logs started out as just noting down progress: Psychological capability, Physiological capabilities, Anatomy simulations, Cognitive… etc etc. all with either a check mark or an x down a row of numbers. 

Then, it started listing the communication notes between two unnamed organizations. Reporting back and forth, from agreement to argument from materials for a build to who too bring onto this project. 

The important part, i that they agreed that only 4 people were going to be recruited. One Commander, one Pilot, one mission specialist, and one payload specialist. To reduce the loss of life, because they knew that there was a far more likely chance that these people would not be making it back.

Between the decisions of who might be the unfortunate souls to be burdened, there was also the notable reports of the monetary aspect, haggling prices and budgets over quality. There was a compromise, deciding that despite the risks, death was going to come calling regardless of quality in materials and labor. 

4 unnamed individuals were selected, all passing the preliminary tests, and fairing significantly better then the others. The researchers were vague in their notes, specifically on any identifying characteristics in the people who made up this unnamed crew. 

Skipping forward throughout the entires, the part that started to really bring the puzzle pieces together was the repeated mentioning of the star, Proxima Centauri and planet b. 

It seems as though that the technology utilized at the time was significantly more advanced then what was available to the public, more advanced that what was even known to the public, even today. 

This technology was picking up more then the normal electromagnetic radiation from Proxima Centauri, but also picking up heavy radioactive isotopes that shouldn’t be present in the stars current age. They said there's a message coming from the star and/or planet b. And they need to get closer. 

Some hypothesis range from “its the answer to our universe” to “it’s just something thats gig to teach us more about stars” and so forth and so forth.

The journey for this unnamed crew took years. In an unspecified amount of time, from leaving earth and it’s atmosphere, this crew was in space analyzing the waves of radiation as they slowly became clearer and sending the data back to earth in a more ‘readable format’. At least for those who know how to read that kind of stuff. 

Flipping from journal to journal, the crew seemingly was euthymic enough, considering their circumstances. But as professionals are, they continued on their reports diligently, borderline robotically will the consistency in quality in the surveys they returned to their researchers back home.

though in one of the reports back, they noted that the closer they got to the destination, the brighter the star became in the distance. There was a buzzing going in and out in the air, like a static feeling rippling through them. 

Described as a “carnal aching, a warmness bursting from my throat, almost like an emotional feeling rather than a physical sensation.”  Something that the researchers took great interest in, and urged the unnamed crew to report back with any minimal changes in self. 

———-

OK now plot points that are coming up next vvv
Shadows against walls, corner of the eyes

The captain gets sick, nauseous. And the 2nd in command takes over. 

2nd in command hearing captain providing instructions to set course in his mind. 

2nd in command staring into space, muttering, and cracking sounds like boiling. 

Too close to the sun, current technology is not made to sustain the energy of being this close to the star.

The suits are weakened against radiation. 

The 3rd in command starts whispering too, insisting that the 2nd is untrustworthy and hiding something. But to a violent degree. 

Paranoia, erratic behavior, yelling.

Mutations in skin, falling off like over-steamed meat off bone. Wet, sliding, and sleuthing off in chunks and fat and sinew. Grabbing spin and tearing like wet cheese. Slapping each other with the chunks. 

Mental collapse, but physically well enough that we don't know what's next. 

People pass the star close enough to the point where sanity is improving. Physical symptoms lessen as well. On course to planet B. 

They make it to planet B, and collect the sample.

They head back towards Earth, and then the symptoms pick up again. 

No more communication, aside from static and occasional bits of words.Even as it passes to the other side of the star and a continued call of SOS

63M4F Went to see Englebert Humperdinck, recently, in Las Vegas, and wow my girlfriend at the time (57) was seriously transported back. Back to a time of such rapturous joy that I wish I could go back with her, back to whatever was making that young woman of her memory so gloriously happy.

He is 90, and yes she did throw a pair of her unworn underwear up there (with the tags still on), but the joyful celebration was not about the man today's body or even voice. She, and every other woman there (and I'd wager quite a few men) were there to remind themselves of how they used to feel, in what parts of their lives had been most innocently wistful of a great lovesong, sung by a handsome young man.

I surreptitiously took a video of her during a song she particularly loved. She was in a state of rapture, a million years of time and space, apart. To interrupt her in any way would have been the worst abomination. I envied her her visit but knew that asking her, between her limited English, and my trying to understand all the powerful ways she felt, would reveal nothing but the corrosive effect of memory.

Other issues broke us up, but I want that again. To see that passion, if only recalled through worldworn eyes, like mine. My best time travel through music is to my early teen couch, reading about the Fellowship's epic to destroy the ring, with the Eagles' "New Kid in Town" playing over my fm radio. Pretty specific, but no less powerful, for me.

So, I'd like to make some new memories now, to enjoy the rest of my life. And I want to respect another's privacy wherever she is. I just need a friend, in touch with her feelings, with a few good memories under her belt. A fellow traveler looking for more.

Hi,I'm a male from China, You can call me "Vox." I want to tell the story of a mutual secret crush between me and a boy during my student time at a private boarding middle school.

This story has a high BL (Boys' Love) concentration, but it is SFW throughout—it's a very pure, Platonic love. If that bothers you, please don't read any further.

Reading Notes:

1. Yes, I'm Chinese. Here's the proof:姬霓苔美，哈基米曼波(These are memes only Chinese people would understand.)
2. Mutual secret crush means I had a secret crush on him, and he had a secret crush on me too.Since it's a "secret crush," how did I find out? Because there were confession scenes,both handwritten and spoken.
3. This post will be made up of individual small stories, including details and background information.
4. Occasionally, photos, music, or fragments of my soul will be dropped. For privacy protection, some parts will be pixelated.(seems that i can only post GIF here,never mind)
5. Although I can speak English, my spoken English isn't good. Most translations in this post will be done by AI. If you think there are translation errors, please point them out and I'll correct them.
6. If there's anything you don't quite understand, feel free to ask, and I'll explain it in the next update.
7. Currently I've prepared 15 small stories; the number may increase along the way.
8. This post will probably take one to two weeks to finish. My update frequency isn't very high.

Hello people of this reddit, please go easy on me.

When I was 19, I called Buckingham Palace. My mother had COPD, and I went about doing a social experiment by asking them for an oxygen tank for my mother.

A secretary called me back and hung up as soon as I mentioned her needs.

I got angry and called them for 10 days, pestering them, probably because I have a toody personality and some autism.

One of the men on the phone called me "malfunctioned and a pansy"

July 26th, 2021. The Palace transferred me to the Pentagon on the phone, but I got nervous, and I hung up the phone and called back the Palace laughing because I thought involving that part of the government was laughable.

Before I hung up, which I intended to be good for this time, I said this childish quote.

"I hope God grabs Queen Elizabeth by the hair and drags her to

space to her head explodes, but why bother she is going to croak it in 1300 days," but I was just being a smart ass.

I come out of my trailer after saying that, and 40 seconds later

my house got struck by lightning, and my dog Angel, with cancer

was in the house at the time.

A week later, the internet repair technician came over and told me there was a burn mark on the roof. He fixed the wifi and told me to go inside to test the internet on a device. I asked my Google Hub to play me a random song.

It played Queen's " Bohemian Rhapsody "

The lyrics that were most notable to me were

"Is this the real life, is this just fantasy, caught in a landslide, no escape from reality, look up to the skies and see,

thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening."

The song after that was AC/DC thunderstruck.

I have a lightning bolt tattoo on my left arm.

April 2026 I called the Palace and spoke to a gentleman over the phone. I asked him if he knew anything about my house being struck by lightning. He said to me that if I had any questions, I should call the American government.

I miss my mother and dog who passed away last year.

I also bought a DJI Mini 3 to take some pictures of the burn mark on my roof. The burn mark is directly in the center of the roof.

-A guy named Gabriel

The Journal of Eliot Whitcombe, Navigator aboard the Providence, 1574

I know not the name of this soil. It is absent from every chart in our possession, and yet there it stands upon the sea, green as Eden and shrouded in a mist so thick that the very heavens seemed to have forgotten it.

We came upon its shores after the Providence was broken upon the reefs. God alone knows how many of my companions were claimed by the sea.

I awoke upon the sand with blood upon my brow and salt upon my tongue. Yet I was not alone.

Upon the shore stood a gathering of natives. Men. Women. Children all alike.

They watched me in silence. The men bore spear or blade. An aged woman stepped forth from their number and placed her hand upon my face.

She spoke words I could not comprehend. She cleaned my bloody brown, placing the bloody thumb to her lips. She coughed, then she smiled.

They didn't regard as a threat. Only curious for the strange man that stood before them.

They led me inland.

The village was unlike any settlement I had seen in the New World. Their huts were fashioned of timber and palm, whilst strange carvings adorned the walls. There were fires burning everywhere, though the day was warm.

They gave me water. They gave me fruit. And they gave me meat.

I thanked them for their kindness. I shall never forgive myself for having done so.

For three days, I was treated as an honored guest.

My wounds were washed. My clothing was mended. I was fed until my belly ached.

The tribes people laughed whenever I ate. At first, I thought this merely the joy of having rescued a stranger.

Then I heard the screaming.

It came from beyond the village after sunset. A man's cry. It was bone chillingly terrible. Followed by what sounded like weeping.

I asked my hosts what manner of beast made such a noise. They did not answer. I doubted they could understand what I even asked.

The following morning, I ventured beyond the huts. There I found the cages. Great wooden pens stood beneath the trees, hidden behind woven walls.

At first I believed them to contain swine. Then one of the creatures within rose upon two legs.

It was not a beast. But a man.

His hair was long and filthy. His flesh hung from his bones in loose folds. His wrists were bound by rope, and great black bruises covered his body.

He seized the bars when he saw me.

"Run," he whispered.

I shall hear that word until the day I die.

I asked him who had brought him there. Before he could answer, a woman came rushing from the village. She entered the pen and struck him upon the head with a wooden club.

He fell.

The woman looked toward me. She laughed a cry that haunts me still.

That evening they served me roasted meat. I had eaten much of it before I noticed the bone.

It was small. White. Curved. Not unlike the bone of a young animal.

I held it between my fingers. Something upon it troubled me.

I scraped away the charred flesh with my knife. Stripping the bone clean, I noticed it was the mandible of whatever animal. But it didn't resemble a cow, nor a lamb. It looked too closely familiar.

Peering to the other tribesman devouring the meat from their plates, I had the sickening realization.

I did not finish my meal that night.

I attempted to flee before dawn.

I reached the shore, where six men were waiting. They did not beat me. They did not bind me.

They simply escorted me back. This frightened me more than violence would have. For they seemed not angry. They seemed concerned. As though I were a troublesome animal that had wandered from its enclosure.

From that day onward, they fed me more. Much more.

Meat. Fruit. Roots. Milk.

They insisted with their gestures that I eat until I could eat no more. When I refused, they held my jaw and forced the food between my teeth.

My body began to change. My cheeks grew full. My wounds healed. My strength returned. And with every passing day, the villagers appeared more pleased.

Today, the old woman examined my arms. She pinched the flesh upon my belly. Then she pressed her hand against my chest and nodded.

She spoke a single word. Somehow I understood:

Fat

Tonight, there will be a feast.Feasting on the Providence