Dark Heir: The First Seal

The rain mercilessly battered the rusty tin roof of Master Cemal’s shop. The shutters, rattling under the blows of the wind, were proof of how early and how furiously winter had arrived in this coastal town. Ege dropped the heavy wrench onto the greasy workbench. Wiping the accumulated sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his overalls, the cracks on his knuckles ached from the cold. In the dim corner of the shop, the Suzuki RM-Z450 he had been trying to revive for weeks with parts scavenged from the junkyard waited like a silent beast sleeping in the dark.

“This town only smells of mud, rust, and debt in the winter,” he muttered to himself. He checked his pockets for his last few coins. He was exhausted. It was a bone-deep, heavy exhaustion, far more than a seventeen-year-old boy should have to bear.

Just before he pulled the breaker and plunged the shop into darkness, his eyes caught the water seeping in from under the lowered shutter. Ege furrowed his brows. The water wasn’t clear. It wasn’t muddy, either. It was pitch black. And even crazier, defying gravity and the outward slope of the shop, it was trickling inward, directly toward Ege’s muddy boots.

Ege held his breath. The black liquid slithered through the cracks in the concrete almost like a living organism. As he took a step forward to lean in and get a better look, the metal door of the shop was pounded with a loud bang.

“Ege! Open this damn door, I’m freezing!”

The moment Can’s panic-stricken, shrill voice echoed in the shop, the bizarre illusion on the floor shattered. When Ege blinked rapidly, he saw that the water at the tips of his boots was just ordinary, dirty rainwater leaking in from outside. Exhaust fumes and sleep deprivation, he thought to himself. I’m starting to lose my mind.

When he pulled back the bolt, Can burst inside with a soaking wet coat and a trembling jaw. “Bro, I swear there’s a flood out there. Unless you’ve built Noah’s Ark, walking back is pure suicide. Let’s take the shortcut by the old Karya ruins, otherwise I can’t stand this freezing cold for another twenty minutes.”

Ege offered a faint smirk at Can’s exaggerated panic, taking off his overalls and throwing his backpack over his shoulder. “They keep issuing landslide warnings, Can. If we get lost in that mud, they won’t find us until spring.”

“Better than freezing to death! Come on, let’s go!”

Ten minutes later, they were climbing the forest path up the hill above the town, which had turned into a sea of mud. The storm was so fierce that the howling of the trees prevented them from even hearing each other’s voices. Ege was trying to illuminate the muddy trail ahead with the feeble yellow light of the flashlight in his pocket. They were passing through the ancient Karya ruins, between massive stone blocks buried in the earth.

“Be careful, the ground is completely soft here,” Ege shouted, turning to Can trailing behind him.

But as Ege took his next step, he couldn’t find the familiar, solid resistance of the earth beneath his foot. The ground suddenly liquefied and slipped away from under him. In the split second he felt the earth tear open like a giant maw, Can’s scream ripped through the sound of the storm.

“Ege!”

Ege began to fall into a pitch-black, wet void, chasing the flashlight that slipped from his hand. He was dragged down for meters along with the rocks and piles of mud around him. The place he landed was not soft earth. His back and shoulder crashed with incredible violence against a smooth, ice-cold surface that had been waiting there for thousands of years.

All the air emptied from his lungs. The pain was sharp enough to blind his mind. Alongside the smell of wet earth, a much older, throat-burning scent of mold and confinement filled his nose. He had fallen into an old, collapsed subterranean vault.

As Ege groaned and tried to sit up, he felt the palm of his right hand split wide open. The warm blood seeping from the gash dripped onto the stone he was lying on. He touched that surface in the dark with his left hand to support himself.

This was no ordinary rock. A rock wouldn’t be this cold. The stone beneath his fingers was freezing, as if sapping all the heat from Ege’s body. When a faint flash of lightning seeping through the crevice above illuminated the room for a split second, Ege saw what he was lying on.

A broken, pitch-black sarcophagus. A massive Karya Blackstone that reflected no light, swallowing everything around it.

The spots where Ege’s blood dripped onto the stone’s surface began to glow like thin, red veins. The blood filled the grooves of the millennium-old runes on the stone, feeding the seal. Ege wanted to pull his hand away, but his body felt paralyzed. The stone wouldn’t let him go. His vision darkened. He felt the blood in his veins being drawn out, replaced by something much denser, something much darker seeping in.

In the deepest, darkest corner of his mind, a voice that hadn’t spoken in millennia snarled, mingling with Ege’s own breath:

“Finally.”

The thing that cut through Ege’s consciousness like a knife was the annoying, shrill alarm of the digital clock by his bedside.

He shot up from his bed, gasping for breath. His heart was pounding as if it would break his ribcage. He opened his eyes wide and looked around. He was in his own room. In that cramped, messy room with peeling wallpaper and a damp smell. Outside, the day had long dawned, the rain giving way to a gray and gloomy morning.

He pressed his hands to his face. His mind was blurry. Mud... the storm... Can’s scream... and that ice-cold stone deep underground. The Karya Blackstone.

“It was a dream,” he whispered to himself, trying to steady his trembling breath. “I just hallucinated from exhaustion. I fainted in the storm, and Can brought me home. That’s all.”

He wanted to convince himself of this, but there was a problem. He had plummeted from meters high, crashing flat on his back onto that hard stone. All his bones should have been aching, he should have been writhing in pain with every movement. Yet, his body felt lighter than ever before, his muscles strangely vibrant and taut. It was as if pure adrenaline was coursing through his blood instead of oxygen.

Then, he remembered his right hand splitting open when he hit the stone last night.

Holding his breath, he opened his palm. The deep, bloody gash wasn’t there. But in its place was something far more terrifying. Stretching from his palm to his wrist, a pitch-black, vein-like mark etched under his skin like ink... Just like the cracks on that stone in the underground vault. The mark wasn’t just sitting there; it was pulsing very slowly, with a faint rhythm beneath his skin.

His stomach churned. He quickly got out of bed and rushed to the bathroom.

He slammed the door shut and turned on the faucet with trembling hands. He splashed ice-cold water on his face repeatedly. He was afraid to look in the mirror. There was a heavy, alien feeling sitting right in the pit of his stomach. It was as if he wasn’t alone in his own body.

Taking a deep breath, he raised his head and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

He looked normal. Wet brown hair, sunken bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, a pale face... He let out a sigh of relief. In the split second he reached out to turn off the faucet, he felt something was wrong in the dim corner of the bathroom.

He glanced at the mirror out of the corner of his eye.

The ordinary shadows pooling in the corner of the bathroom weren’t staying put. Defying the laws of physics, as if suspended in an invisible, zero-gravity liquid, they were slowly curling upwards, reaching out toward Ege. As Ege froze in terror, he focused on his own face in the mirror.

His brown irises were gone.

Everything, including the whites of his eyes, had turned into a pitch-black, smooth darkness, just like the stone in that vault. That “thing” in the mirror was less Ege’s reflection and more the ancient snarl itself, wearing Ege’s face.

He squeezed his eyes shut and stumbled backward, his back hitting the tiles. When he opened them again, everything had returned to normal. The shadows were in their place, his eyes were their usual shade of brown. But his heart was racing.

Right at that moment, the vibration of his phone coming from his room sliced through the silence like a blade. Ege snapped out of his trance, ran over, and answered the phone. The screen read Can.

“Ege!” Can shouted from the other end of the line. His voice was so tense it sounded like he couldn’t breathe. “You’re alive. God, you’re alive. Last night... what happened in that pit last night, man?”

Ege swallowed hard. Those pitch-black eyes in the mirror wouldn’t leave his mind. “I don’t know... I remember falling. How did you pull me out of there?”

There was a deep, chilling silence on the other end of the line. Can gulped.

“I didn’t pull you out, Ege,” he whispered. “The moment I turned around to find help, you jumped out of that three-meter mud wall like you were scaling a flat surface. Your eyes were closed. You started walking without saying a single word. Ege... The streetlights shattered as you walked by, I swear I must be going crazy!”

Ege’s blood ran cold. He looked at the black mark on his right palm.

That whisper inside him echoed in his mind, this time much clearer and mockingly:

We are just getting started.