The silence pressed closer thicker than the dark.
I could still hear echoes that weren't there: the scrape of metal, the snap of bone, the sound of my own voice breaking into something other.
But now there was nothing. Only me.
I pushed myself up, palms sliding through cold water and soot. The cell door hung open or what was left of it. It looked as though something had torn through it from the inside. I didn't remember doing it.
Maybe I didn't want to.
The hall beyond was quiet, except for the hum of dying lights and the drip of water onto concrete. I followed it step by step, bare feet leaving faint wet prints behind me.
Every corridor was a grave.
Rooms gaped open, cages split apart, papers scattered like feathers after a storm.
And then that smell again. Blood. But not human. Not exactly.
I found a small control room, its glass cracked and screens flickering. A body slumped over the console eyes wide, mouth frozen mid-scream. His badge still gleamed faintly. I took it, more from instinct than intent, and the computer blinked awake beneath my touch.
Files. Names. Images.
Mine.
And another.
"Subject 01: Reav. Status: Undetermined."
"Subject 02: Sylvia. Status: Contained."
I opened more files, hands trembling. The words blurred, full of numbers, tests, rituals I didn't understand. But one phrase stood out, repeated over and over:
Lunar Synchronization:
incomplete.
Bond unstable.
Separation may cause deterioration of both entities.
My throat closed. The mark on my arm flared, searing through the thin skin. I pressed my hand against it the pulse inside it no longer mine alone.
"Ashael..."
His name felt heavy on my tongue. Forbidden. Remembered.
For a moment, the air shimmered - and I saw it again, just for a heartbeat: gold eyes through the mist, watching me from beyond the glass.
And then gone.
Somewhere deep inside, the wolf stirred, restless.
Whatever had bound us was not broken. It was waiting.
I glanced at the shattered door, the long dark stretch of the hallway beyond.
Freedom waited out there or something worse.
But staying meant rotting among ghosts and ash.
So I stepped into the corridor, the glow of my mark lighting the walls like a faint trail of gold fire.
The cell door hung half-broken, steel bent outward like a wound. Beyond it, the corridor breathed faintly the air warm with iron and static. I stepped through. The walls trembled with old whispers, and the mark on my arm flickered in answer.
Every cell I passed was empty. Some still hummed faintly, the scent of scorched metal and chemicals seeping through the cracks. Then, down the last hallway, I heard it - a sound too human to be mechanical, too sorrowful to belong to the living.
A voice.
Crying.
It rose and fell like wind through glass, soft and cold and endless.
I followed it.
The door at the end of the hall was still locked, light bleeding through the frame. I pushed it yielded with a brittle sigh. Inside sat a figure, pale and trembling in the corner. Her hair fell over her face, a silver snarl of light and shadow. Her lips moved in a broken hum, the sound shaking the air like a breath caught between worlds.
When she looked up, the room chilled. Her eyes were gray not dead, but ancient.
"You broke your chains," she said, her voice hollow, musical, the edges shimmering with something not entirely human.
"Who are you?" I asked.
Her smile was thin, cracked. "What's left of a scream.."
The sentence shivered through the air like a note of grief.
"I heard you crying," I said softly. "I thought-"
"That I was alive?" she interrupted gently. "No. I'm what happens after."
Her voice wasn't cruel; it was tired. "They kept me here to test the limits of silence. To see if a banshee could forget her own voice."
Her gaze flicked toward the walls. "They failed. I remember everything."
It wasn't a sound of terror.
It was a warning.
She exhaled sharply, voice hoarse but steady.
"You woke it," she said.
I swallowed hard, the taste of blood and smoke heavy on my tongue.
"I don't remember."
"You don't need to. It remembers you."
"I can get you out," I said, though I didn't know how.
Reav tilted her head. "You can't free a sound once it's already escaped. But you can listen."
She reached toward me, the air trembling where her fingers might have touched. "The moon carried your cry here. That's why you woke. You heard it calling back."
My throat tightened. "I don't understand."
"You will," she murmured. "When the forest finds you. When the mark remembers what it means."
She looked toward the broken window at the far end of the room. The night was pale there - almost blue, the kind of light that remembers death.
"They'll come soon," she said. "The ones who still think you're theirs. You have to go before they
return." "Run moon marked one"
"I won't leave you," I whispered.
A sound, low at first - like the hum of wind in a graveyard.
Then rising, trembling, until it cut through the silence: a cry that was too human to be a ghost and too hollow to be living.
The chains around her wrists hissed, breaking as if her words had weight. She rose slowly, unsteady, a faint shimmer around her form. The air moved with her - like her grief had its own gravity.
"I'm Reav," she said after a pause. "They called me the banshee. Said my scream kills."
Her mouth curved into something between a smile and a wound. "They weren't entirely wrong."
I stared at her,the way her presence seemed to pull at the edges of the world.
She looked as lost as I felt.
"Then scream for me again," I said. "Let's kill what's left of this place."
Her laugh was brittle, but real.
"You're mad."
"Probably."
We walked through the ruin together, the corridor lined with shadows that seemed to breathe.
Each step echoed.
The lights flickered above us, red to white to black.
Somewhere far behind, I thought I heard movement the shuffling of bodies that should've been still.
"They'll come back," Reav murmured.
"They always come back. Screaming makes them remember they're dead."
"Then we don't stay."
We moved faster.
The world beyond the last door waited like a wound.
Cold air rushed in as I forced it open moonlight cutting through smoke.
The forest stretched out before us, silver and endless. The blood moon hung low, its glow tangled in mist.
I stumbled once, my body reminding me of every wound that hadn't yet healed. Reav caught my arm. Her touch was cold not lifeless, but like water drawn from the deepest well.
"You should rest," she said.
"If I stop, I won't start again."
She studied me then nodded, her expression softening just slightly.
The sound of leaves stirred behind us. The facility groaned as it began to collapse, the last remnants of its curse sinking into ash.
"Do you ever wonder," Reav whispered, "if maybe we were the monsters all along?"
The question lingered between us like fog.
"Maybe," I said. "But monsters don't bleed this much."
A faint smile ghosted across her lips.
She tilted her head, and for a fleeting second, I saw what she once had been human, fragile, alive.
Then she looked toward the forest.
"They'll hunt us," she said. "You feel it too, don't you?"
I did.
The pull. The warning. The whisper of something vast and waiting beneath the trees.
My mark pulsed once, golden light flickering through the mist.
Reav's eyes caught it, reflecting that glow in shades of pale sorrow.
"Then let them hunt," I said quietly.
And together, we stepped into the forest the banshee and the cursed wolf, bound by ruin and rebirth.
Behind us, the world burned.
Ahead, the moon watched.
And somewhere in the distance, something howled back.