"Is this tiny scrap of light really enough to keep us safe?"
The grimy walls of Ryan Cross’s home offered no answer.
Petra Marlowe was still being granted what her captors called "maximum freedom." She could pace the cramped, miserable room, or choose any posture that made her comfortable, whether sitting or lying down. But "freedom" in a place like this was its own brand of torment.
The mattress was a lumpy, thin slab of moss-scented misery. The lone wooden chair was missing two slats right down the middle, pinching her backside every time she tried to rest. Even the simple act of taking a step across the floor felt sticky, the soles of her shoes peeling off the grimy concrete with a disgusting, viscous pull.
And then there was the sanitation. They had graciously provided her with a brand-new, bright red plastic bucket. To Petra, the gap between a bucket and a proper flush toilet was an impassable chasm of civilization.
Yet, despite her deep, grinding discomfort, she had to admit these Nightbound were treating her with an odd sort of courtesy. Whenever nature called, the two masked men would quietly step outside.
But the drafty, rotting door of the semi-basement didn't block a single sound. Even with the room empty, Petra felt a suffocating sense of exposure, as if eyes were watching her through the splintered wood.
She had endured an entire day of this psychological torture.
When night finally fell, the Half-Masked One flipped on the Lumcore, carving out a meager sphere of safety against the encroaching dark.
But the pale, flickering light did nothing to soothe Petra's frayed nerves. It was too weak. In her world, the only defense against a Voidstrider was a brilliant, blazing Lumcore—the kind that flooded her family’s estate and the homes of all her wealthy friends. She had never known a night this dim, this suffocatingly close.
"Most ordinary folk get by on exactly this much light," the Half-Masked One said. He was sprawling lazy-legged on the hard cot that had once belonged to Ethan Kane. One hand cradled the back of his head; the other tossed a polished dagger into the air, catching it effortlessly on its descent.
Petra frowned, her lips thinning. She knew she was privileged, but she had never imagined that people in her own city lived like animals in the dirt. During her long hours of confinement, a single question had looped in her mind: How does anyone actually survive here? Do they not smell this stench?
It hadn't occurred to her that the sour, heavy odor clinging to the walls came from the very people crammed into these slums.
"Aren't you... aren't you going to contact my father?" Petra asked, her desperation to escape finally boiling over.
"No need," the Half-Masked One replied, eyes tracking the spinning dagger. "Our demands have been sent. If your father complies, we'll know immediately."
"But... what if he's hesitating?" she pressed.
"Then we definitely shouldn't call him." The man scoffed softly. "As long as you're in our hands, he's the one who should be sweating. If we reach out first, it makes us look desperate. Don't you think?"
Petra opened her mouth, but no words came out.
Thunk.
The dagger buried itself deep into the rotting wooden ceiling.
"Of course," the Half-Masked One murmured, "whether he's actually sweating depends entirely on how much Victor Marlowe truly values his little girl."
Ethan Kane woke to pitch blackness and the sound of sobbing.
The dark was absolute, but Ryan Cross’s pathetic whimpering told Ethan exactly where he was. That, and the lingering, sour stench of the Calloway brothers. The nightmare was over; reality had resumed.
A sharp ache throbbed in his jaw. Ignoring Ryan’s desperate begging, Ethan gently massaged his bruised face, mapping out his situation in his head.
He had disabled the Lumcore himself. The dark was expected, a tactical choice, but it was no less oppressive.
He pushed himself up from the floor.
Across the pitch-black room, the sound of shifting weight sent Ryan into a fresh panic.
"Ethan? Is... is that you?"
Ethan didn't offer a word. He began to grope through the dark, tracing the layout of the cramped semi-basement in his mind. He didn't need to see; he knew this miserable square of concrete like the back of his hand.
His fingers brushed the cold, damp plaster of the wall, sliding along until they met the rough grain of the door.
Creeeak...
The groan of the old wooden door was merely annoying during the day. In the suffocating silence of the night, it sounded like a dying gasp.
"Ethan! Answer me! Is that you?!" Ryan shrieked, his voice climbing an octave.
Still, silence. Only the soft, rhythmic drag of footsteps moving across the room.
The sheer lack of visual confirmation was driving Ryan to the brink of madness. In the dark, he couldn't even be sure if those footsteps belonged to Ethan. And even if they did, that was hardly comforting after the brutal, unhinged display Ethan had put on earlier.
"Get me out of here! Let me go!"
Ryan thrashed wildly, his bindings creaking under the strain. Driven by pure, unadulterated terror, he managed to snap a couple of the makeshift cloth strips. Even he hadn't realized he possessed such strength—a desperate surge of adrenaline that might have actually given Hayes Calloway a run for his money.
Like a wounded grub in the mud, Ryan squirmed and writhed against the floor.
"Ethan! Ethan Kane! Cut me loose!"
Ryan’s voice cracked, degenerating into a raw, inhuman screech.
But the room remained dead silent. The footsteps had stopped.
Ryan’s sanity was redlining, teetering over the precipice of total collapse.
Then, his screams abruptly cut off. A heavy, ragged breathing filled the void.
"Ethan...?" Ryan whispered, his voice trembling violently. "I'm sorry. I swear I'm sorry! Just... turn the Lumcore back on. Please. I don't want to die!"
He couldn't see that Ethan was standing barely two feet away, watching him through the gloom. The sudden shift from screaming rage to pathetic begging wasn't because Ryan had had a change of heart.
It was because Ryan had felt something brush against him.
A touch. A cold, tracing caress.
There were only supposed to be two of them in this room. Ryan desperately prayed it was Ethan playing some sick trick—because the alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.
Ethan’s eyes narrowed in the dark as he listened to Ryan's sudden pivot.
There it is, Ethan thought. Rule number one of the Voidstrider: It hunts by sound.
Ethan silently tightened his grip on the heavy kitchen knife. He knew exactly where Ryan was tied up, which meant he could pinpoint the approximate location of the entity touching him.
Unlike his terrified roommate, Ethan had no illusions. He knew exactly what was stroking Ryan's skin.
The Voidstrider had arrived.
Ethan had cracked the door for this exact reason: to invite the nightmare inside.
For someone at the absolute bottom of the food chain, there was no library of lore on Voidstriders. He hadn't even known if a physical door would stop them. Before tonight, he would never have dared to test the theory.
But now, with Ryan serving as the perfect bait, the first piece of the puzzle had clicked into place.
Ethan was closer to the door, yet the entity had bypassed him entirely to glide toward the noisy, thrashing Ryan.
More importantly, while Ethan hadn't heard the creature slip through the crack, his senses caught something else: a scent.
It was a smell unlike anything in his memory, but his mind instantly gave it a name. The scent of absolute dark. It was faint, almost imperceptible, or perhaps Ethan’s human nose simply wasn't sharp enough to fully grasp it.
A second later, a far more familiar scent choked the air.
Fresh blood.
Along with the metallic tang came a wet, tearing sound and a guttural scream that rattled the basement walls.
It was Ryan.
The Voidstrider had begun to feed.
A massive chunk of flesh was ripped from Ryan's calf, sending a hot spray of blood across the floor. The sharp, copper stench immediately drowned out the subtle musk of the abyss.
It was distracted.
Ethan didn't rush in. He crept silently toward the doorway, securing his positioning.
Another agonized shriek ripped from Ryan's throat as the entity tore into another piece of him.
Ethan took a deep, steadying breath. Then, he slammed his hand onto the Lumcore switch.
Bright, harsh light flooded the room.
SCREEEECH!
An ear-splitting, metallic screech pierced Ethan's eardrums. The sheer agony of the sound forced him to drop his knife, his hands flying to cover his ears as his vision blurred.
Through the glare, he finally saw the monster.
It wasn't a beast of flesh and bone. It was an erratic, shifting mass of static-like black lines, pulsing violently between expansion and contraction under the Lumcore's light. With every spasmodic twitch, it emitted that agonizing, high-frequency wail.
It had no limbs, no head, no eyes, and no mouth.
How did it eat? How did it track?
The thing defied any biological logic.
But Ethan had no time for anatomy lessons. Scorched by the sudden radiation of the Lumcore, the shifting mass of black threads writhed, hissed, and began to hurtle back toward the safety of the dark outside the door.
Right toward Ethan.
Despite the ringing in his ears and the blinding glare, a cold, predatory clarity settled over Ethan.
In the light, I own you.
If he let the thing slip back into the dark, he was dead.
Abandoning his weapon, Ethan threw his hands down from his ears and lunged forward, tackling the thrashing mass of black lines.
The Voidstrider was surprisingly small—barely three feet across when fully extended. Ethan slammed into it, dragging it to the floor and locking his arms and legs around the writhing shape like a vice.
The static-like threads instantly turned razor-sharp. Every thrash of the entity sliced into Ethan's skin, carving deep, jagged welts across his chest and arms.
Blood seeped through his clothes, painting him red. To the horrified, bleeding Ryan, Ethan looked like a man possessed, his neck veins bulging, his face contorted in a silent scream of agony as he only squeezed tighter.
Ethan felt the pain. It was a searing, freezing torment that threatened to short-circuit his brain, but he didn't let go. This was his only shot.
"AAAAAHHH!"
Ethan’s roar drowned out the creature's fading shrieks.
Slowly, agonizingly, the thrashing began to weaken. The razor-sharp threads softened, losing their edge, though the heavy, choking scent of the dark grew almost suffocating.
Under the relentless burn of the Lumcore, the Voidstrider began to shrink.
Finally, it collapsed into a solid, compact sphere inside his grasp. A pitch-black marble no larger than a fingernail.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Ethan collapsed backward, splayed out on the concrete in a widening pool of his own warm, red blood. His body was a map of agony, but his eyes burned with a manic, triumphant fire.
I did it.
I killed a Voidstrider.
They weren't immortal gods of the dark. They could bleed. They could die.
The night wasn't an invincible monster.
Every step of the gamble had played out exactly as he’d calculated while lying awake. Kill the light. Open the door. Let Ryan’s terror-fueled screaming act as the beacon. Wait for the beast to commit to its meal, then spring the trap with the Lumcore. Block the exit, use the light to weaken it, and choke the life out of it.
It was a desperate, suicidal plan. But it had worked.
And in his victory, Ethan finally understood why the wealthy hoarded the Lumcores.
To the wretched masses, light was just a shield to hide behind. But to those who knew how to wield it, it was a weapon. A sword to pierce the dark.
Clink. Clink.
The sound of something small rolling against the concrete broke his reverie.
The tiny, solid black bead that had been the Voidstrider slipped from his chest, rolling across the floor before settling in a dusty corner.
Ethan rolled his head to watch it, but his gaze drifted further—toward the spot where Ryan had been tied up.
The corner was empty.
Ethan tried to push himself up, but his muscles screamed in protest, and he collapsed back onto the bloody floor. The adrenaline dump had left him completely hollowed out, without a scrap of strength to move a finger.
But in that brief moment he’d managed to lift his head, he had seen where Ryan went.
The Voidstrider had chewed Ryan's leg to ribbons, but the thrashing and the tearing of flesh had also loosened his makeshift bounds. In his desperate terror, Ryan had managed to break free.
Staring at the ceiling, Ethan let out a dry, raspy chuckle that slowly dissolved into a bitter, ragged laugh. Tears of exhaustion and dark amusement welled in his eyes, tracking through the grime on his face.
"Oh, Ryan..." Ethan whispered. "You really are beyond saving."
In that single glimpse before his strength failed, Ethan had seen his roommate. Leg mangled, trailing a thick smear of blood, Ryan was dragging himself across the floor, his eyes wild with a manic, desperate hatred as his fingers reached for the fallen kitchen knife.