The silence didn't just sit there—it cracked. Like old ice breaking under too much weight, something beneath the world started to wake up. The air got thick. Heavy. The kind of heavy that makes it hard to breathe, like being buried alive but still conscious. Still aware.
Every step he took made a dull thud that got swallowed immediately by the stillness. The whispers weren't distant anymore. They were right there, sharp and close, clawing at his ears—grief that had rotted into something angry and bitter.
He held onto the clay lamp like his life depended on it. Because maybe it did. The flame was the only proof he was still alive, still real. It strained forward, trembling, pointing toward something he couldn't see yet.
Then a new sound crawled up from the darkness. Not a whisper. A low, rumbling growl that vibrated through the dead ground beneath his feet. Ancient. Hungry. Patient.
He froze. His heart slammed against his ribs so hard it hurt.
Something moved in the blackness ahead.
He took half a step forward and the air itself seemed to shudder.
That's when he saw it. A shape on the ground. Struggling. It looked like a burned body, limbs shaking as it tried to stand. A voice tore out of it—dry, raspy, desperate.
"Help... please... help me..."
Every instinct screamed at him to run. But there was this stupid, human part of him that hesitated. That felt sorry for it. He moved closer, the lamp's flame stretching out, peeling back a thin layer of the darkness.
The light showed him the truth.
His stomach lurched.
It wasn't one body. It was dozens. Hundreds. At first they looked like statues made of ash, skin blistered and blackened. But they were moving. Arms twitching. Fingers—burnt, stick-thin—clawing weakly at the air toward him.
And their faces... he stopped breathing.
No eyes. Just empty sockets weeping shadows down their cheeks. Their mouths stretched open in silent screams, jaws hanging at angles that shouldn't be possible. He heard a wet crack as one head twisted toward him. Then another. And another. Until a sea of eyeless faces was pointed right at him.
They couldn't see him. Not with eyes. But they felt him. All of them. Their emptiness pulling at something deep inside his chest, like it wanted to drag his soul right out of his body.
Just when he thought the pressure of all those hollow stares would break him, something changed.
The air bent. The burned husks shuddered all at once, like puppets jerked by invisible strings. And from deeper in the darkness, more of them emerged. Dozens. Hundreds. A writhing mass of the damned, bound by chains that looked almost like they were made of smoke but cut into flesh that wasn't quite solid.
Their silent screams suddenly found voice. A suffocating chorus of pure agony that bypassed his ears completely and went straight into his brain. He staggered backward, hands over his head, but there was no blocking it out.
Then it stopped. All at once.
The silence that rushed back in was worse. So much worse.
One by one, the expressions on those charred faces started to change. The agony melted away. Replaced by smiles. Wide, serene, horrible smiles. The kind that didn't belong on anything human.
And deep in those empty sockets... something gleamed. Not light. Something else. Something aware.
Cold dread slid down his spine like ice water.
He stumbled backward—and hit something solid.
It wasn't rock. It was cold, but not normal cold. This was the cold of a tomb that had been sealed for centuries. And beneath his shirt, against his back, he could feel it.
Breathing.
His blood froze. He forced himself to turn his head. Slowly. So slowly. The lamp's flame bent wildly, throwing twisted shadows everywhere.
And he saw the face that had been waiting behind him all along.
The night exploded with car horns. A river of red brake lights stretched forever down the highway.
"Damn it all!" Sumit's uncle slammed his hand against the steering wheel. "We were supposed to be there before dark. It's eight o'clock and we're stuck in this metal coffin." He gestured angrily at the gridlock. "Look at them. Every single idiot thinks the road belongs to him. This whole country drives like it's the end of the world."
"Bhai," Sumit's mother snapped. "The boy is right here. Watch your mouth."
He went quiet, jaw tight, knuckles white on the wheel.
Sumit wasn't listening to them anyway. His face was pressed against the window, staring out into the darkness beyond the highway. The trees looked normal enough, but the spaces between them... the shadows felt wrong. Too deep. Too still.
"Maa... Mama..." His small voice cut through the tension. "Someone is following us."
The words hung there, heavy and wrong.
His uncle's head snapped toward him. "What are you talking about?"
Sumit pointed into the woods. "They've been there for a while. In the trees. But now... there are more of them."
His mother's breath caught. She looked where he was pointing, seeing only darkness and swaying branches. But her stomach twisted into a cold knot anyway. She knew her son. He wasn't making this up.
His uncle's face went hard. "Close the windows," he commanded, voice suddenly low and deadly serious. "Lock the doors. Both of you sit back and don't look outside again."
The car crawled forward. As they rounded a sharp curve, the headlights swept across the tree line in a wide arc.
For one heart-stopping second, the light caught them.
Dozens of eyes stared back. They weren't animal eyes. They glowed with this pale, dead light, like chips of frozen starlight. They belonged to figures woven into the gaps between the trees—tall, wrong, distorted shapes that weren't solid but weren't smoke either. Something in between. Like tears in the fabric of reality itself.
They didn't move. Didn't breathe.
They just watched.
Pure, animal fear shot through the uncle. His foot hit the accelerator reflexively even though they had nowhere to go. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead despite the AC blasting full force.
He glanced at his sister. Her face had gone completely white, eyes wide with a horror that stole the air from her lungs. The inside of the car felt thin, charged with something terrible. Less like a vehicle and more like a cage.
And the eyes in the trees remained. Unblinking. Patient. Utterly inhuman.
The pressure on his shoulder was crushing. Not just cold—this was the kind of cold that reached past skin and muscle straight into bone. Into soul. His breath caught in his throat, useless.
Slowly, like moving through concrete, he turned his head.
The figure looming over him was made of shifting smoke and solid shadow at the same time. Its form kept changing but stayed undeniably there. A face leaned close—a mask of calm amusement. Ancient. Knowing. Its lips, which looked more like a crack in its face than an actual mouth, curled into a smile.
The voice didn't come through his ears. It resonated directly inside his skull.
Finally. The blood of the Hidden returns to the fold.
His own voice came out strangled. Useless. "I... I don't know what you're talking about..."
The smile widened, revealing teeth like polished black glass. Its grip on his shoulder tightened—absolute, crushing power.
You were never meant to escape your nature. None of you were.
From the darkness behind it, other faces began to surface. Pale. Serene. All wearing that same awful smile. Their collective gaze pinned him in place, and their mouths moved in perfect, silent unison with the voice in his head:
Welcome home... to your family.
The flame in his lamp flared once. Violent. Desperate. A silent scream of light.
Then the darkness swallowed it whole.