The building screamed.
But no sound came.
It was the kind of scream that rattled the bones, twisted the air, and shattered the silence in a way that felt like being caught in the middle of a thunderstorm—only the thunder was the screeching of broken memories, and the lightning was the tearing apart of reality itself.
In the depths of the building, where Jamie stood at the precipice of the hole, the darkness swelled and writhed. The thing below him was not simply a shadow, not merely a creature; it was the hunger. A hunger that stretched through the walls, down the stairs, into the foundations of the structure itself.
Jamie looked into its eyes—two cold, black voids that mirrored the emptiness he felt when the Rewrite Machine first spat him out. He could feel the thing's desire. It wasn't just for flesh. No, it wanted more. It wanted memory. It wanted to devour everything that had ever been created, every life that had ever been written into this place's twisted narrative.
And Jamie?
Jamie was part of the building now.
The doors in the hallways behind him slammed open, then shut again. The walls moaned, the floorboards creaked in protest. The building was trying to contain something—but that something was no longer just Jamie. The thing below had begun to stir, its influence reaching out like a flood, warping the very fabric of the place.
And Jamie was its key.
Up above, Mira's heart thudded in her chest as the shadow moved forward. It was getting closer now, too close. Too real. She couldn't explain it. She had seen things like this before—things that shouldn't exist, things that came from places far beyond the physical world—but this was different.
This thing was part of Jamie. Somehow, it had become his shadow, his echo, his twisted reflection. It wasn't just a specter. It was alive.
Mira's breath caught as the figure stretched toward her. It moved without a sound, its shape shifting, writhing, like it was never fully solid. One moment it was a grotesque version of Jamie's face, frozen in a silent scream. The next, it was a stretching form of limbs, arms too long, fingers clawing at the air as if trying to pull her into it.
"Jamie!" she whispered, her voice trembling. "What have you become?"
The shadow stopped.
For a heartbeat, it hesitated, and for the first time, Mira thought she saw recognition in the empty eyes of the thing. Jamie's eyes. The ones she had once known. But then it was gone, replaced by something far darker.
The shadow lunged.
Ansel had no idea how long he had been in the room with the Rewrite Machine. Time seemed to collapse into itself, folding over and over like the pages of an old, forgotten book. He had touched the machine. He had whispered Jamie's name.
But something else had answered.
A cold rush of air filled his lungs. His head spun. He staggered back, pressing a hand to his forehead, but the world kept shifting around him. The walls rippled, the shadows twisted. The floor tilted beneath him.
The machine groaned.
It wasn't just a machine. It was more than that.
The gears spun faster, and Ansel could hear voices now—whispers, soft but growing louder. They sounded like the echoes of lost souls. People who had never existed. The whispers twisted into a single voice. A voice that wasn't Jamie's but was.
"Come closer."
Ansel took a step back, his breath catching in his throat. The voice grew louder, more insistent. It beckoned him. And though every part of him screamed to turn around and run, he couldn't stop himself. He felt it pull at him—like a rope around his chest, tightening with each step.
The Rewrite Machine pulsed again, and the air thickened with the scent of decay. But this time, it wasn't just the building that was alive. It was something deeper, darker, pulling at the very core of Ansel's being.
A shadow touched his foot.
Ansel looked down.
It was the shadow of something that should not be. A mass of blackness, seeping out from the seams of the floor, moving like liquid, as if it was searching for a way to consume him.
He screamed. But the sound never left his mouth.
The building silenced him.
Jamie's fingers twitched.
He hadn't noticed how long he'd been staring into the hole, lost in the depths of the creature's eyes, before the darkness reached out and touched him.
It was a cold, clammy sensation at first. Then the cold spread, crawling beneath his skin, up his spine, filling every inch of his body with a whisper of ice. The building groaned louder now, its old walls shaking, the foundations cracking.
The creature in the hole moved.
Its limbs twisted, unfurling like the roots of a tree reaching toward the sky. The shadows thickened. The darkness spread upward like ink spilling from an overturned bottle, flooding the hallway.
Jamie could feel its hunger.
It wanted him. It needed him.
But he wasn't afraid.
Not anymore.
Instead, he took a step forward, letting the darkness surround him, feeling it wrap around him like a cocoon.
The creature's eyes burned into his soul. The darkness surged, trying to pull him in. But Jamie grinned, his heart thrumming with a power he didn't fully understand.
"I remember you."
The darkness hesitated.
Then, in a rush, it swarmed.
Mira's scream echoed through the hall, cut short as the shadow engulfed her. The last thing she saw was a fleeting glimpse of Jamie's face, twisted in agony. She couldn't tell if he was real anymore, or if this was just a part of the madness.
The building felt alive again. No. Not alive. Hungry. It had always been hungry, but now, it was something worse. It had woken, and it had found what it wanted.
The shadow vanished with her. Gone into the folds of the building, into the cracks between the walls.
Ansel couldn't breathe.
The shadow consumed him too.
The building trembled again.
And deep beneath the earth, something ancient began to laugh.
The darkness has claimed its first victims. The thing beneath the building grows ever closer, consuming everything in its path. Jamie walks deeper into the chaos, no longer a pawn but a force in his own right. The building is changing—and its hunger is far from satisfied.