The air outside felt wrong.
Søren stepped through the hospital doors and into a cold, gray morning. The light was thin and pale, as if the sun had been filtered through ash. A light mist clung to the streets, veiling the town in a dull, colorless shroud.
His clothes were borrowed. Too big. His shoes didn't quite fit. He carried nothing but a folded slip of discharge papers and the small, worn wallet that held his Danish ID card. No phone. No money. No history.
He walked.
The town Eyemouth, the nurse had said lay silent under a soft, unbroken sky. Rows of stone buildings lined narrow streets, their windows dark, their doors closed. The harbor, visible in the distance, looked abandoned, as if the sea had taken back what belonged to it and left nothing behind.
He headed toward the city center, hoping to find someone, anyone, who could point him toward the immigration office.
But the further he walked, the stranger things became.
There were no people.
Not a soul on the sidewalks. No cars on the roads. Not even a dog barking in the distance. The town that should've been alive with motion and sound was utterly, impossibly still. Even the wind seemed to have forgotten how to move.
He stopped near a small park.
There were benches. Trees. A rusted swing hanging by chains. But the leaves didn't stir. The branches didn't sway. He stared at a bird perched on a fencepost and realized with a chill that it wasn't moving. Not at all. No blinking. No twitching. As if it had been painted there, or frozen in time.
Søren turned in a slow circle.
Nothing.
No footstep but his own.
No breath but his own.
It felt like walking through the memory of a town, not the town itself like the world had been hollowed out and left behind as a husk. He could hear his own heartbeat, loud in the silence, thudding like a warning drum.
A pressure grew in his chest.
Not panic. Not yet.
But the sense that something was terribly, fundamentally wrong. That something beneath the surface of this world had shifted. And he had noticed when he wasn't supposed to.
His footsteps echoed too loudly on the pavement. The sound came back to him with a delay, like it had to travel farther than it should have.
He passed a café. The sign swung on a rusted chain but there was no wind.
He passed a row of houses. Curtains hung in the windows but behind them, only darkness.
Then, as he reached an intersection, he stopped.
At the far end of the street, something moved.
It was small. Just a shadow, quick and low to the ground. It darted behind a lamppost and vanished. Søren took a step back, unsure he'd really seen it. He stared at the spot where it had disappeared.
Nothing.
Then a sound, soft, almost inaudible.
A scraping.
Not metal. Not stone.
Something softer.
Like flesh against brick.
He looked up. The sky had grown darker, though he couldn't tell if it was the clouds or just his eyes. The buildings seemed taller now, somehow, more oppressive. Their angles felt wrong. Tilted in ways he couldn't explain. He looked down at his hands.
They were shaking.
He clenched them into fists.
"This isn't real," he whispered. "I'm still recovering. Hallucinating!"
But he didn't believe it.
Because the silence was too perfect. The stillness was too complete. It was the silence of something that was watching. Waiting.
The streets around him stretched like veins in a dead thing, empty, endless, quiet.
The mist thickened.
He no longer knew which way the hospital was.
No longer knew where the sea was.
No longer knew if he was still in Scotland at all.
He walked on, faster now. Not toward the immigration office. Just away. From what, he didn't know. But his body did. Some ancient instinct in his bones screamed at him to move. To escape.
Behind him, something shifted again.
A faint, wet sound. Like the ragging of something heavy.
Søren didn't look back.
He had taken only five steps into the fog when he heard it.
A wet, clicking sound, soft at first, like claws tapping against damp stone. Then louder. Closer.
Søren froze.
From the mist ahead, something emerged on four legs.
It was a dog.
Or, it was once a dog.
Its body was wrong, stretched and broken in places where flesh should not stretch. Jagged bone jutted out of its limbs like roots growing through thin soil. The skin around its ribcage pulsed, shifting like it was breathing from too many lungs. Its tail was nothing more than a whip of muscle, twitching erratically.
But the eyes were the worst.
Twin orbs of deep red, each filled with dozens, maybe hundreds of tiny black pupils. They quivered and spun in place like insects trapped in glass. The eyes didn't blink. They shivered, as if trying to pull the world apart by sight alone.
The thing looked at him.
Søren's breath caught in his throat. His body screamed at him to run but he didn't. He couldn't. He took one step back, then another, slow and deliberate, like backing away from a bear in the woods.
"Easy," he whispered to himself. "Don't startle it."
But deep down he knew: it wasn't startled. It was curious. And curious things sometimes bite.
The creature's lipless mouth curled back to reveal teeth, not sharp, but long and twisted, as if they'd been grown from hate instead of bone. It made no sound. Just tilted its head, pupils vibrating faster now, as if seeing him too clearly.
Søren took one last step back.
Then it moved.
Fast, impossibly fast.
A blur of twisted limbs and snapping jaws, it lunged straight for him. Søren barely dodged, throwing himself sideways and crashing hard into a metal trash bin. Pain shot through his shoulder, but he didn't stop, he scrambled to his feet and ran.
There was no plan.
No direction.
Only survival.
His lungs burned. His legs screamed. But the thing behind him was relentless, gaining with every step. He could hear its claws skittering across stone, the wet slap of muscle and bone, the gurgling breath that sounded more like laughter than panting.
He turned a corner.
Dead end.
"No, no no no..."
He spun around just in time to see the creature leap.
Teeth bared. Eyes wide.
It slammed into him.
Søren fell hard, his back striking the pavement. The world spun. Claws tore into his coat. He threw his arms up in desperation, but the creature pinned him down, hot breath pouring over his face.
Its mouth opened.
Then-
CRACK.
A thorn.
Thick, black, and gleaming, shot through the creature's torso.
The beast let out a high-pitched shriek like metal scraping against bone and was yanked backwards. Søren watched in horror as a vine, covered in thorns the size of knives, coiled around the beast's limbs and slammed it against the wall.
Again. And again.
The creature screeched, flailed. More vines shot up from cracks in the ground, spearing it from all sides. It convulsed once, twice, and then went still.
For a moment.
Then the body melted.
The bones dissolved into a thick, dark liquid that writhed on its own as if still alive. It pulsed, bubbled, almost tried to crawl away. But the vines pierced it again, and it finally stopped. The liquid slumped into stillness, twitching faintly.
Søren lay there, gasping. His hands trembled.
Then he saw the figure.
A person stepped forward from the mist, quiet as death.
They were tall. Slender. Their clothing was loose and tattered, like old ceremonial robes now soaked by the fog. But Søren barely noticed that.
He was staring at the face.
No, there wasn't a face.
Instead, thick green vines wrapped around the figure's head, covering both eyes entirely. From where the eyes should have been, a sticky, brownish fluid slowly oozed down their cheeks, soaking into the vines. The fluid steamed faintly in the cold air.
"Are you hurt?"
The voice was impossible.
Male and female at once. Soft and sharp. Warm and cold. It echoed, but not outward, instead inward, resonating in Søren's chest like a second heartbeat.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came.
The figure stepped closer. The vines around their eyes writhed slightly, like they were tasting the air.
"You're lucky, most don't survive a Ka'thul." They said.
They extended a hand. The fingers were long, pale, and looked almost normal, except for the thorns trailing beneath the skin.
Søren stared at the hand.
The silence returned, thick and heavy.