The night felt… off.
The clouds above are swollen with rain that hadn't fallen yet, and the wind had this weird edge to it, like it knew something I didn't. Ahead of me stood the chapel. If you could even call it that. The roof had caved in on one side, and one of the stone spires leaned like it was bowing in shame. It looked less like a holy place and more like a mausoleum that forgot it was supposed to stay dead.
And then I saw him.
"Eli," I said.
He turned from under a dead tree by the fence. Even in the dim light, I could see how pale he looked. Soaked hoodie. Red eyes. Nervous hands that wouldn't stop twitching.
"You came," I said.
"Didn't really have a choice."
He gave this half-laugh that didn't sound anything like a laugh. "My parents told me to stay away from you."
"Yeah," I said. "That's smart advice."
"They said if I hung around long enough, I'd end up like your parents."
I didn't answer. I didn't have to.
"But I came anyway."
I looked at him. Really looked. Eli Tanner. My only friend left in this hell-hole. Scrawny, talkative, scared of everything — but loyal in a way that made no sense.
"I know," I said. And somehow, those two words felt heavier than anything else I could say.
Footsteps crunched behind us.
I didn't even need to turn around to know who it was. The smell of cheap cologne and inflated ego hit me first.
"Well, well," Marcus Vale said. "Look what crawled out of the gutter."
I turned. Marcus stood there with his usual smug smirk, hands in the pockets of a sleek black jacket like he thought it made him cool. Behind him were the other two — Rex Holloway, loud and always running his mouth, and Dane Cutter, tall, sharp-eyed, and silent like a coiled knife.
"Didn't expect to see you here," Rex said. "Rat's got company now?"
Eli shrank behind me. I felt his hand twitch near mine.
"You guys here for the same job?" I asked.
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Old guy in the coat? Yeah. Said there's something valuable there. Something only the best could retrieve."
"And that only one of us needs to come back with it," Dane added, voice like a stone scraping metal.
That made me pause.
"Are you serious?" Eli asked. "What does that mean?"
Marcus turned to him with that damn grin. "Means this ain't a field trip, kid. We're not here to hold hands and sing songs. It's a test."
"And we don't plan to fail," Rex said, cracking his knuckles.
I looked at all three of them. They didn't scare me. Not really. What scared me was that chapel, the pull it had on my gut, like it wanted to drag me inside and keep me there.
"We go in together," I said. "We come out alive. Whatever's in there, we deal with it first."
Marcus laughed. "Didn't think murderers got to make speeches."
"Didn't think cowards traveled in packs," I shot back.
His smirk faded just a bit.
We stood there, tension so thick you could chew it. The chapel groaned in the distance, like it was waiting for us to shut up and walk in.
Finally, Marcus scoffed and stepped forward. "Whatever. I'm not dying out here in the cold."
The gate creaked open louder than it should've. He walked through, Rex and Dane right behind him.
I turned to Eli. "You don't have to come, you know."
He stared at the ground for a second, then looked up at me. "Yeah, I do."
So I nodded.
And together, we stepped into the dark.
The chapel stank of old stone and wet ash.
My boots sank slightly into the cracked floor tiles, each step echoing like a whisper too close to the ear. Moonlight leaked in through jagged holes in the ceiling, turning everything silver and strange.
I couldn't shake the feeling that we'd just walked into a mouth waiting to close.
"Place gives me the creeps," Rex muttered, shining his flashlight around.
"You get creeped out by coat hangers," Marcus snapped.
"Shut up," Rex hissed. "I'm just saying—something's off."
Something was off.
The silence wasn't normal. It wasn't natural. It wasn't just quiet—it was wrong. Like even the air didn't want to be here.
"Lucan," Eli whispered behind me. "You feel that?"
I nodded. "Yeah. Like something's watching."
We crept deeper in, Dane leading the way with a machete he definitely didn't bring for show. The inside of the chapel twisted. Hallways that shouldn't be there, doors that looked too new for a ruined building. The deeper we went, the more the place looked like a mansion built inside a tomb.
We found the grand hallway around the third turn.
A massive corridor opened up, lined with dusty portraits of faceless people and statues that turned just slightly the longer you looked at them. There was a broken chandelier above and a spiral staircase leading into darkness.
"This place is bigger than it looks," Eli said, voice low.
"The old man didn't say anything about this," Rex grumbled.
"Let's get the artifact and bounce," Marcus said. "Before you wet yourself."
Then the air shook.
No—ripped.
A low, vibrating pulse burst through the walls like a soundwave from another dimension. It didn't make noise. It made pressure — enough to crush my chest for a second.
Blue, red, green — streaks of color flashing outside the windows like lightning made of swords. The entire chapel rattled as the world outside erupted in a battle we couldn't see.
"What the hell is that?" Eli said, stumbling back.
"Is that… people fighting?" Dane asked.
We ran to the window.
The chapel was no longer in the city.
I swear it was impossible, but outside, the streets were gone. Replaced by a wasteland of crumbling towers and floating stones. Beams of light shot across the sky, crashing into hulking silhouettes that moved like nightmares. Roars and explosions filled the horizon. People, or things that looked like people, clashed with claws, blades, and power that shattered the earth beneath them.
"Where are we?" I asked, throat dry.