Voices from Below

Rain hammered the city, carving rivers of filth and glass along the gutters, drowning sirens and screams alike. It was 2:13 a.m.—the hour when everything broke, when the phones wouldn’t stop and nothing sane dared walk the streets. Shane sat slouched in the window of his crumbling apartment, watching halos shimmer along every wet surface. He didn’t dare sleep. The glyphs crawling on his arm pulsed and ached, warning him of something drawing nearer by the minute.

Outside, the world bellowed.

The first real sign was the shuttle of police radios, hacking through static: shots fired, north end; fire in a public library; woman on the roof screaming in tongues. News blogs exploded—threads loading and crashing, words blurring with typos: “MASS HYSTERIA”—“POSSESSION?!”—“Shadows in lockup eating their own faces.”

Shane tried to block it out and failed. Every sound through the wall, every voice echoing from the street, seemed to vibrate wrong. In the reflection on the window, his own eyes glowed sickly, hellruned. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but dreams found him all the same.

He stood on a battlefield of mud and rebar; horses screamed, men dropped grapeshot and spears, but the enemy was not of flesh—something ancient, horned and bladed, poured out from a black wound in earth. At the center of the slaughter, a woman in battered mail—her nose, his nose—carved glyphs into her thigh with a bloodied knife. She howled through the pain. The wound spewed red light. The things from the pit recoiled, their shadows rippling. One word carried up through generations: “Guardian.”

He woke, clutching his arm, feeling scars older than his own body stinging under flesh. The phone vibrated—an unknown number. The message cracked his chest open:

[6th & Wainright. Come alone. Child in trouble.]

He should have ignored it. He couldn’t.

The streets were carnage-streaked, cars mashed into parking meters, windows shattered by bodies thrown or dashing at random. A man with three faces screamed into a storm grate. Shane almost turned away—except only one face was real, the rest hallucinated by his bleeding, waking mind. But every horror-corner now felt sharper, less like a dream, more like being trapped underwater while the world burned above.

Sixth and Wainright: yellow tape fluttered, meaningless. The old tenement crouched behind rows of ruined vehicles, every window a jagged grin. A woman in a soaked nightrobe sobbed on the curb, bloody handprints littered the entry. Shane steeled himself and ducked inside.

The stink of bile and fresh meat hit him—and a voice from the inner stairwell, low, choked, speaking a child’s name in a language older than stone.

“Junie… Junie, come back. Papa—” and then the voice reared, howled, became something not-human. A sobbing girl shrieked in answer.

Shane crept closer, every sense keening. The glyphs on his skin thrummed, burning cold; vision wavered, and for an instant he could see through the walls: a darkness inside the man’s body, slick and coiling, tendrils in the child’s direction. The little girl cowered behind a splintered door, her father’s form bulked and inhuman, eyes filmed over black.

He charged—no plan, just terror and training. The father flung himself at Shane, jaws snapping wide enough to break bone. Shane braced as teeth clamped into his shoulder; agony tore through muscle—but he didn’t go down. Instead, a new sense rose: the shape behind the wound, the thing that rode the man, shrieking in tongues it wasn’t meant to know.

Shane pressed his palm to the glyph on his forearm. He pictured a wall—red and old, thicker than this world. He spoke—not words he knew, but syllables his dreams had left behind.

“Out!”

The father spasmed. Shadows ripped free, tearing bloody rents in the air; Shane staggered, every bone crackling with horror. The man collapsed, weeping, and the girl screamed, backing away, clutching her own hands. Shane, barely able to breathe, called softly: “It’s okay, kid. He’s back.”

But the glyphs wouldn’t let him leave so easily. His blood ran hot, his mind flickered—he saw for a blur of seconds other places, other times: men and women clutching blades, faces knotted in agony, standing between monstrous, breaking worlds and terrified children. Generation after generation. He saw his father—his mother—bleary and lost. Saw himself, younger, watching someone bleed out in a hospital cot, his inability to help.

He blinked. The world returned, rain hammering his eardrums.

Cops poured in. Shane shielded the girl, barking for medical. They took him for a lunatic at first, yelling about blood and demons; then someone recognized his badge. “Everhart? He saved the kid, get him out.”

Hours blurred: hospital—statements—paramedic patching—Shane, beefed up with bandages he didn’t recall needing. No questions about powers, no one noticed his wounds didn’t line up to the violence he’d survived.

As he staggered into the night, the city was wilder—gas stations aflame, people howling at invisible things, sometimes tearing themselves, sometimes each other. The glyphs on his forearm shimmered in the dark like an open wound. He needed Mara. Needed an anchor.

Mara’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a thin, leaning brownstone sagging above an alley full of broken glass. Shane buzzed once; no answer. The door was ajar—wrong, Mara never left it open.

His hand found the hidden blade at his ankle (he’d started carrying it after the third body). He edged inside. The lights flickered. Candles burned, guttering—each flame trembling with a cruel, blue-black tongue. Occult charts covered every available space. Mara lay sprawled on the rug, body arched in seizure, mouth working around broken syllables.

A black, tar-thick shadow clung to her throat. Eyes rolled to whites; lips bled. Books flew from shelves, pages flapping like caged moths. Shane crossed the room, slapping a ward of salt around his skin. As he neared, the glyph on his arm blazed—a true fire this time, licking up to his temple. He felt the same raw strength as before, something punching through the world’s crust.

The thing inside Mara laughed with her voice, then twisted: “You are too late, Bastion. She is ours. You will bleed the city dry.”

Shane dropped to his knees, pressing his good hand to Mara’s brow. “Wrong. She’s not yours to take.”

It was instinct—desperation mixed with heritage. He focused, letting the pain of his own wounds, his failures, and his loves empty out through his palm. The glyphs writhed, burning a hole in the skin, letting vermillion light spill into the world. Images flooded his mind: children sleeping safe behind guardian arms, midnight battles against nameless things, an endless chain of defiant souls refusing the dark. He held Mara together with everything he was—a Bastion made of scars, not hope.

The thing screamed, a noise like buildings collapsing. Candles blew out. Mara’s body bucked, then stilled. The tar slid from her throat and melted into the floor, leaving a pool of charred air. Mara gasped, clawing for the world, pupils wide and staring.

“Shane…”

He caught her, cradling her as she shook. The connection between them—a thread of mutual trauma, shared battle—flared and faded. Together, they crawled to the kitchen. Mara wept dryly and then, after a long silence, found her voice apropos of nothing: “You saw it too, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “It’s not just the gate. It’s everywhere. It’s… in our blood.”

She squeezed his hand, then let go. Neither said what they both felt: another inch lost from sanity, another life against the tide. But they were alive. For the moment, that was enough.

Outside, the city howled. Shane looked down and saw the glyphs had gone pale, spent of power—for now. He pressed the side of his head to the cold tile floor, eyes grit with tears he hadn’t planned to shed. Mara forced a laugh—bitter, exhausted. “Guess you really are the last Bastion. Let’s hope that’s enough.”

Far below, in a coal-black subway tunnel, something new woke to the scent of open blood. The next night would be worse.