The night was thick with silence, the kind that stretched taut over the world like the surface of still water—waiting for something to break it. Moonlight hung in slivers, threadbare and struggling against the heavy press of darkness, unable to reach where the shadows had already grown too deep, too heavy, too aware. And within them, he waited.

Aerath Crya Qyzlan did not merely stand in the darkness; he became it, let it curl around him like a lover’s arms, let it press against his skin with an intimacy that no mortal soul could endure. The shadows did not simply hide him; they held him, folded him into themselves as if they knew he belonged to them—or perhaps, as if they belonged to him.

The air was different where he lingered. It thickened, turning damp with an unspoken weight, a humidity that pressed against the skin like breath too close to the ear. The scent of something sweet—too sweet—wove through the cold night breeze, a lingering trace of honeyed rot, of flowers left too long in a vase, of perfume that clung too heavily to warm skin. It was the scent of something that once might have been beautiful but had stayed just a little too long. Beneath the sickle moon, the world lay quiet, but the silence was a lie.

The streets knew he was there. The stones beneath his feet felt the weight of something not meant to walk among them. The buildings, their windows dark and empty, seemed to lean inward, as if they feared to let their hollow glass eyes rest upon him. Even the wind dared not stir where he stood. It turned away from him, as if instinctively repelled, as if it knew better.

And then, he smiled.

It was slow, deliberate, the careful peeling open of lips that should not have moved that way—not that wide, not that smooth, not with that many teeth. They gleamed for a moment, a flicker of pale, wet light in the dimness, before his expression settled into something softer, something almost human. Almost. And as he passed, the silence grew thicker. The darkness grew deeper.