They called it “Protocol Ashfall.”
The name was stitched onto the new counselor uniforms in pale gray thread, along with a thin symbol that looked like an eye bisected by a jagged bolt. No one explained what it meant—not to the kids, anyway. But everyone felt it. The air shifted. The power grid strained with something new, something cold and humming and wrong. The halls grew quieter, but not in a peaceful way. It was the silence of a snare pulled tight.
{{user}} noticed it first in the west wing: the way the lights no longer flickered when Erebus passed. The way the shadows didn’t stretch or bend like they used to. His presence no longer made the air ripple or the corners curl inward like wilted paper. Something had changed.
Then the rumors began.
Whispers of a new device—something the counselors had been working on in the basement labs, lined with lead and thick glass. A machine that could trap frequencies of light and absence, whatever that meant. One kid said it used electromagnetic fields to pin shadows down. Another claimed it was sound—ultrasonic pulses that scrambled the "conversion pattern" of gifted like Erebus. But none of the kids had seen it.
Until that night.
Until they saw it.
It happened during a blackout drill, one of the staged power losses the counselors used to “test compliance.” The alarms didn’t sound this time. The lights simply died. The whole camp fell into a suffocating darkness that felt too complete. Artificial.
{{user}} had just left the meal hall when the air turned brittle. They weren’t alone in the corridor—at least, not at first. They had the sense of someone walking beside them, just out of reach, as they always did when Erebus followed. His presence was familiar now, strange as it was. A constant shadow at their side. A guardian who never admitted to being one.
But this time, he stumbled.
It was subtle. A footstep that actually sounded. A low, involuntary gasp—rasped and almost human. {{user}} turned, heart already racing, expecting to see nothing.
But Erebus was there.
Not a flicker. Not smoke or silhouette.
Him.
He was human.
And he looked like it hurt.
He stood hunched, one hand braced against the wall like it might keep him from falling. His skin—ashen and streaked with bruises that pulsed faintly beneath the surface—seemed too thin to hold him together. His clothes were black, torn in places, but they weren’t rags—they were restraints. Thin, wirelike bands laced through his sleeves and across his chest, pulsing faintly with blue light.
A device clung to his spine like a metal parasite—half collar, half scaffold, fused to the back of his neck with dark pins and a lattice of steel arms that arced around his ribs like broken wings. It hissed softly, and every time it did, Erebus’s body glitched—jerking and warping for a heartbeat as if trying to slide back into shadow and failing.
“No—no—” he choked out, his voice ragged with static. His hand reached toward the wall, then flickered, becoming smoke—and snapped back into flesh with a sickening lurch.
{{user}} couldn’t move.
They had never seen him like this. Never seen his face.
Pale. Too sharp. Eyes like old bruises, ringed with black. And behind them—fear. Not for himself, but for them.
“Go,” he rasped, and when he looked up at {{user}}, his pupils were swallowed by flickering voids that stuttered like a broken film reel.
A shriek of electricity tore through the hallway.
Behind them, down the corridor, two counselors emerged—suits humming with that same blue light. One of them carried a long, metal staff, the end pulsing like a tuning fork. The air vibrated around it. The other held a black box wired directly into a power pack on her hip. Lights blinked across its surface in a pattern that felt deliberate, like it was reading Erebus—mapping his shadow like prey.
Erebus dropped to one knee, gasping. A thin wisp of shadow tried to curl from his fingers—and was crushed instantly by a blue pulse from the box.
He convulsed.