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> "Zhruul'vha—"
The syllable was a splinter of ice in my throat, slicing downwards, lodging itself deep where no surgeon's scalpel could ever reach. The sound — though sound is too coarse a word — seemed to birth itself not from breath, but from marrow, from the subterranean caverns of my bones where no light, no warmth, had ever trespassed. The air thickened, clotting in my lungs. I felt my own voice scatter into a thousand directions at once, as though each utterance had been a stone dropped into an infinite well, rippling through a reality I could neither see nor name.
The crumbling church groaned in answer. The warped beams above me trembled as if they, too, had heard something not meant for ears of timber or man. The ancient dust that lined the pews rose in soft spirals, curling upward toward the vaulted shadows, then hung there in trembling anticipation — a congregation of motes awaiting their god.
I had not spoken the whole name. No — some cowardice, some primal shackle embedded deep in the hindbrain had halted my tongue at the precipice. Yet even that fractured syllable was enough to draw its gaze.
Something… shifted in the unseen. The candle flames along the altar shuddered inward, as though recoiling, and then leaned toward me again with the slow curiosity of a predator tasting the air. The shadows stretched wrong, bending toward my collapsed form with the hunger of roots reaching for a buried corpse.
A taste spread across my tongue, metallic yet sweet — like copper soaked in rotting fruit. My teeth ached. My ears rang with a thin, constant note, as if the world itself had been strung taut.
That was when I felt the first step.
Not a sound — not even the weight of displacement — but rather a fissure in the air where it moved. Each pace was the erasure of something; memories blurred in its wake. My mind tried to recall the month, the season, even the shape of my own face — and each attempt met only static, as though my thoughts were printed on wet paper and smeared into nothing.
It was here.
And I had called it.
And it remembered me.
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