Back on Earth, the wheel turned.
Aryan and Meera walked along the banks of the Kampot river. In the fading twilight, their shadows stretched and merged into one. He held her hand—a simple gesture, yet foreign to fingers that had spent a lifetime trained on triggers.
She laughed at something he said. The sound was bright, cutting through the static noise of his past. For a soldier built of scar tissue and vigilance, this peace felt heavier than war. It was fragile. He carried it carefully, terrified he might break it.
Deep in the Cambodian jungle, Silas watched the moon rise.
He sat perched on the crumbled stonework of an Angkorian ruin, miles from the nearest paved road. The air was thick, smelling of wet rot and wild orchids. Inside him, the Veil rippled. A spirit—a snarling, centuries-old Khmer warlord—thrashed against its cage, finally subdued, its jagged energy adding to the vast collection beneath Silas's skin.
Silas lit a cigarette. The sudden flame illuminated the deep hollows of his eyes.
He took a long drag, watching the smoke coil into the humidity. He looked back toward the distant city lights, thinking of Aryan. The kid was falling in love. The kid was happy.
Silas chuckled. The sound lacked humor; it sounded like gravel shifting in a fresh grave.
"Love," Silas whispered to the empty jungle.
He closed his eyes. The jungle vanished. The ruin vanished.
Memory replaced the world.
North Delhi. Six Years Ago. The Old Cantonment Cemetery.
The monsoon didn't just fall; it punished the earth. The graveyard had become a churning slurry of mud, rot, and bone shards.
Silas knelt in the filth. Zip-ties bit into his wrists, cutting off circulation. His left eye was swollen shut, blood curtaining his vision. But his right eye—the eye of a born occultist, the eye that had peered into the invisible world since boyhood—was fixed on Maya.
She knelt ten feet away. Even with mud staining her Customs uniform, she looked defiant.
Rana Singh stood over her. The Minister's son. A predator in a pristine white suit, holding a weighted English willow cricket bat.
"She cost my father two million dollars," Rana told his men, his voice bored. "That requires a balance."
"Rana!" Silas choked out. He didn't beg like a civilian; he bargained like a man who knew the currency of souls. "Let her go. I'll work the debt off. I can find things for you. Things no one else can see!"
Rana adjusted his grip on the handle. "Business, Maya."
He swung.
CRACK.
The sound was wet. Final. Like a melon dropped from a rooftop.
Maya collapsed face-first into the sludge. She didn't twitch. She didn't gasp.
Silas froze. The rain seemed to hang suspended in mid-air. He strained his good eye, looking past the physical world, peering into the ether.
He saw it.
A pale, glowing wisp rose from Maya's body. Her soul. It was blindingly white, untouched by the filth of the world. It didn't look at him. It drifted upward, pulled by a warm, golden gravity, ascending toward a place Silas knew he could never go.
She was gone. She was at peace.
And he was left in Hell.
Something inside Silas didn't just break; it evaporated. The tether to his humanity snapped.
He started to chuckle.
It was a low, wet sound, bubbling through the blood in his throat.
Rafeeq, the lead guard, raised a machete. "What are you laughing at, wizard?"
Silas looked up. His face was a mask of red pulp, but his eye was vibrating with a terrifying, fracturing mania.
He laughed harder. It grew into a cackle, a high-pitched, jagged sound that scraped against the inside of his skull. He threw his head back and howled at the rain, rocking back and forth on his knees.
"You idiots," Silas wheezed, spitting blood. "You stupid, little men."
"He's lost his mind," Rana sneered. "Cut his head off."
Silas stopped laughing instantly. He stared directly at Rana, his smile stretching unnaturally wide.
"You think killing me stops this?" Silas rasped, his voice dropping to a demonic whisper. "Go ahead! Cut my throat! Bury me deep! I will claw my way back out of the grave just to drag you down!"
Rana stepped back, unnerved.
"There is no Hell that can hold me!" Silas screamed, the mania taking over completely. "There is no God that can protect you from me! I will come back as a curse! I will come back as the plague! I will eat your family tree root by root!"
"Kill him NOW!" Rana shrieked.
Silas looked down at the mud. He looked through the crust. He saw the ley lines of the cemetery glowing like infected veins. He saw thousands of rot-eaten spirits trapped in the soil. And deeper, in the bedrock, he saw It.
The Warden. The Veil. A hungry, ancient void.
"I AM THE DOOR!" Silas roared at the ground. "I OFFER THE VESSEL! TAKE ME!"
The temperature plummeted. Frost instantly coated the tombstones.
Rafeeq swung the machete with all his strength at Silas's neck.
The blade hit skin—and shattered.
Shards of steel exploded outward like shrapnel. Rafeeq stumbled back, clutching his face.
Silas arched his back. And then, the true horror began.
SNAP.
The sound was like a gunshot. Silas's femur broke. But it didn't leave him crippled. It knit back together instantly, thicker, denser.
"AAAAHHHGGHH!" Silas screamed, a sound of pure agony and ecstasy.
CRUNCH. POP.
His spine elongated. The vertebrae cracked, spaced out, and realigned. He was growing. The zip-ties on his wrists didn't just break; they disintegrated into black dust.
Rana and his men watched in paralyzed terror as the occultist was unmade and remade.
His skin turned gray, then rippled as if centipedes were crawling beneath the dermis. Veins turned thick and obsidian.
"His eyes…" Rafeeq whispered, trembling.
Silas looked up.
His eyes didn't roll back. They curled. The eyelids retracted, and the eyeballs themselves seemed to boil, turning into pools of swirling, infinite darkness. In the center, a red singularity ignited—not a pupil, but a furnace.
CRACK-CLACK.
His jaw unhinged, dropping three inches lower than humanly possible.
Silas stood up. He moved like a broken marionette, limbs jerking into place with sickening grinding noises. He was a foot taller. The Veil was wearing him like a suit.
"Accepted," Silas spoke. The voice was a nightmare—his own rasp overlaid with the roar of a thousand screaming ghosts. "The Door is open."
"Shoot it!" Rana screamed, scrambling back toward the gate.
Three guards opened fire.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Bullets struck Silas's chest. They impacted with wet thuds. Silas didn't even flinch. He looked at the holes in his shirt. The black ichor underneath pushed the flattened bullets back out.
Plop. Plop.
Silas smiled. A graveyard grin, filled with teeth that looked too sharp, too many.
"Feed," the Entity commanded.
Silas vanished.
He moved faster than the eye could track, a blur of shadow. He reappeared in front of Rafeeq.
"You first."
Silas grabbed Rafeeq's head. His fingers were now tipped with translucent, obsidian claws. They sank into the skull like it was wet clay.
SQUELCH.
Silas squeezed. Rafeeq's head collapsed. Brain matter and bone sprayed into the rain.
A grey wisp—the man's soul—tried to dart away. Silas opened his unhinged maw and inhaled. The soul shrieked as it was sucked into the vortex of his throat.
"Monster!" another guard yelled, swinging a crowbar.
Silas caught the crowbar. He didn't pull it away. He stepped forward and punched through the man's ribcage.
CRUNCH.
His fist went through the torso. He ripped his hand back out, holding the man's still-beating heart. He crushed it into paste in front of the dying man's eyes.
It was a massacre. It was a harvest.
Silas was a whirlwind of violence. He tore arms from sockets. He kicked a man so hard his spine folded backward. He wasn't fighting; he was playing with his food.
Rana ran. He scrambled over the graves, slipping in the mud, sobbing, his expensive white suit ruined. He reached the heavy iron gates. Locked.
He turned around.
Silas was waiting.
The creature stood amidst the carnage, steam rising from his grey skin. The shadows of the cemetery coiled around his legs like loyal dogs.
Silas grabbed Rana by the throat and lifted him one-handed. Rana's feet dangled two feet off the ground.
"No… please…"
"Please! I—I have money. More than you can imagine. Gold, land, everything—take it all—"
Rana's words died in his throat. Silas's grip didn't change. Not even a breath.
Understanding dawned, slow and terrifying.
"You… you don't care about money," Rana whispered.
His body sagged, tears cutting lines through the mud on his face.
"Please," he broke down. "I'll stop. I swear. I'll walk away from all of it—no more crimes, no more blood."
He choked, forcing the words out.
"I'll make my father stop too. I'll beg him. I'll make him leave this life. Just… please let me live."
Silas brought his face close. The smell was ancient—wet earth, ozone, and old blood.
"Your father rules the city," Silas rumbled, the vibration shaking Rana's teeth. "I rule the dark."
"Mercy!" Rana wept.
Silas's red eyes narrowed. The maniacal laughter returned, but now it sounded like the grinding of stones.
"There is no mercy here. Only hunger."
Silas placed his other hand over Rana's face.
"Look at me."
Rana looked into the red abyss. He saw the thousands of souls swirling inside Silas. He saw his own eternity.
Silas pulled.
He didn't rip the flesh. He ripped the essence. Rana's body went limp, eyes rolling up, but a screaming, translucent grey shape remained in Silas's grip.
Rana's soul.
"Digest," Silas whispered.
He shoved the screaming soul into his own chest. The shadows absorbed it instantly.
Silence fell over the cemetery.
The red glow in Silas's eyes faded to a dull ember. The bones shifted back, shrinking, cracking into place with agonizing pops. The monster receded, leaving the man.
Silas collapsed to his knees in the mud next to Maya.
He reached out a trembling hand, his fingers still stained black, and touched her cold cheek. She was gone. Her light was far away, and he was covered in darkness.
Deep inside him, the Veil purred. It was full. It was satisfied. But it whispered a promise into his mind, a cold voice echoing in his cerebral cortex:
I will hunger again. You will feed me. Or I will eat you.
Silas wiped the blood from his mouth. His eyes hardened. He looked at the bodies of the criminals scattered around him.
"You'll get your food," Silas whispered to the demon inside him.
He stood up, the shadows swirling around his trench coat.
"I will feed you thousands of evil souls," Silas vowed, his voice cold as the grave. "I am starting the hunt."
Present Day. Cambodia.
Silas opened his eyes. The memory receded, leaving the cold sweat of trauma on his neck.
He stood up on the ruin. He touched the center of his chest, where the scars sat thick and knotted, and looked out into the night.