Part II — Digital Ghosts
By the time the city began its morning routine—traffic veins pulsing, holo-ads bleeding slogans into the fog—Kai was already deep in the glow of three monitors.
Coffee gone cold, his fingers danced across keys like an exorcist conjuring ghosts from code.
He wasn't looking for fame clips anymore.
He was looking for himself.
First, he trawled the usual myth databases—Wikipedia, academic papers, fringe religion blogs. Nothing but noise.
Then he dove deeper—old hacker boards, occult archives, darknet corners where folklore and encryption intertwined.
Somewhere between the static of abandoned pages, he began to find patterns.
Threads titled:
> "The Wolf That Spoke the Moon's Name."
"Lunaris Lupus: origin suppressed by the Church of Dawn."
"Echo frequencies tied to lycanthropy mutation—HELP."
The last one froze him.
He clicked through. The forum's interface was old, text bleeding green on black. A single post:
> User: AntennaChild
"If you're reading this, you've already heard it—the hum beneath the hum. Don't listen too long. Don't play it back. The sound is a key. And the key opens blood."
The reply count: zero.
Last active: 12 years ago.
Kai leaned back. The word blood seemed to pulse on-screen.
A phantom ringing filled his ears—like a note just out of range, waiting to be tuned.
He whispered, "What the hell am I?"
And the speakers, dead silent a second ago, hissed softly in return.
A whisper, like interference: "Wolf of the Moon."
He yanked the power cord. The screen died, but the voice lingered an instant longer than it should have.
Kai's apartment suddenly felt smaller.
He turned toward the window; the city outside shimmered, haloed in heat haze that wasn't heat. The hum of traffic warped into rhythm, like the streets themselves were alive.
He grabbed his jacket, laptop bag slung across one shoulder, and bolted.
He needed air—real, human noise.
---
Downtown, daylight hit hard. Vendors shouted, trams screamed along rusted lines, someone's portable speaker blasted a synthpunk remix of one of Echo's older tracks.
He kept walking, half in the world, half in static.
Every sound had layers now—undertones, harmonics that shouldn't exist. Even the city's stray dogs barked in chords.
He ducked into an old cybercafé—one of the few left untouched by the sleek corporate nets.
Inside, walls buzzed with dust-coated monitors and ancient routers, their lights flickering like dying stars.
The owner, an old woman with eyes too sharp for her years, gave him a slow nod. "Back again, Echo?"
"Just need the noise, Mama Z," he muttered.
"Noise finds you, boy."
He smiled weakly and chose a terminal in the back, plugged in his drive, and dove again. This time, he searched Wolf of the Moon in every dead language file he could decrypt.
Fragments came through—cuneiform tablets, Norse runes, African oral myths encoded by colonial linguists. All different, all describing the same being:
> A being born of both god and beast, marked by the moon's silver fire.
Its voice could break the sky.
Its howl could wake the dead.
When it returned, the old order would tremble.
Kai exhaled. "No way."
Then his reflection in the dark screen blinked after he did.
He froze.
The hum returned—low, intimate, inside the bones.
He shut the laptop, heart racing.
The city outside the café window flickered again—like a frame skipping in a film. For a moment, he saw it: a wolf's silhouette walking inside his own shadow.
---
lyric fragment from Echo's notebook:
"Ghosts in the circuit, silver in the code / my blood hums in binary, my howl uploads."
---
Mama Z glanced up from her counter.
Her eyes—normally dull with neon reflection—glowed faintly lunar.
"Careful where you listen, Echo," she said softly. "Some frequencies remember."
Kai turned to ask what she meant—
But the doorbell jingled, and a figure stepped in.
Tall. Hooded. Smiling like he already knew the question.