The Marked Ones

The cave trembled violently. Rocks tumbled down in a chaotic rush.

Vandal, his fiancée Sandra, his best friend Darius, and his business partner Harland ran, dodging debris.

At one point Vandal realized the ceiling was on the verge of collapsing. There was no time for rational thought. Acting purely on instinct, he pushed Sandra toward Darius just as they neared the exit.

"Get out quickly!" Vandal shouted.

For a split second their eyes met. Something in her gaze felt off, cold, almost relieved. The thought flickered and vanished under the roar of collapsing stone.

Then the ceiling gave way. Massive slabs crashed onto his shoulders, back, and legs. Bones snapped. He screamed as he fell. Heavy rocks buried him in seconds. Blood filled his mouth.

From somewhere beyond the rubble he heard voices.

"Darius! Is he..." Sandra's voice cracked with terror.

"Yes, Sandra, I am certain he is more than dead, buried six feet under," Darius replied, calm as ever.

"I... he was not meant to die. This was not part of the plan," she said, hysteria rising.

"We just committed murder. I am not going to jail, Darius."

"You are not. The company is now ours, and Mr. Harland will finally uphold his part of the agreement and back our takeover, will he not, Harland?"

"Yeah, yeah. Let us just leave this place. I am filthy, and that was a narrow escape."

Footsteps receded.

Vandal heard every word. He knew those voices better than his own heartbeat. He coughed up more blood, eyes wide with disbelief.

Why?

Pain lanced through his skull, but memories flooded in, bright and merciless. Sandra's smile at their favorite spot on campus, palms shaped into a heart. "I love you. I will always love you." The way she used to trace the family heirloom necklace he wore, the eye encased in a triangle, and call it "cute" even though her fingers sometimes lingered too long, too curiously.

The small lies he had ignored because loving her felt safer than doubting her. The way she had started insisting they explore this remote cave system "just the two of us" for weeks, even though she hated dirt.

All of it clicked into place now.

A bitter, broken laugh tore out of him despite the blood gushing from his wounds. The sound echoed wetly in the dark. Rage and grief collided so hard inside his chest that the only release left was laughter, maniacal, unstoppable.

He had given her everything, trusted her with his life, and she had sold it for a company and a future with his best friend.

A massive slab broke free above him and hurtled downward. As it filled his vision, Vandal kept laughing, tears mixing with blood. He did not notice the necklace glowing an eerie red, soaking up the blood that spilled across the eye design.

Squish

Endless darkness. Eternal rest.

Then a bright red, flaming metallic blob hurtled toward his face like a meteor and plunged into his left eye.

His skull ignited. A silent scream ripped through him. Consciousness shattered.

The sweet embrace of nothingness.

A sharp slap jolted him awake. The sting compelled his eyes to flutter open. He was no longer in a cave.

"Wake up. I did not give you permission to sleep."

He was small, perhaps too small, gazing at his tiny hands and feet, bound in shackles. A woman loomed over him, exuding an air of elegance mixed with cruelty. Her cheekbones were sharply defined as if sculpted from a block of flesh.

Memories crashed in like a relentless tide. His mind flooded with waves of recognition that reflected in his pale blue eye.

This was her son. The boy she had brought here to complete what she had begun with the sister. The sister who had fled three months prior, leaving only screams and blood upon the altar.

The mother's name in this world was the same: Elizabeth. And she was smiling, a maddening grin, one that was strangely familiar to Vandal's own mother from Earth, the one who went insane when she told her own son she wanted to beat him into an early grave because he reminded her of all she lost.

She leaned closer. "Your sister ran. But you... You are perfect. So much purer. Once I take your Mark, the Nocthra clan will fear me."

Her fingers dug in. Purple light pulsed brighter.

Vandal's left eye burned.

Not metaphorically. Literally. She was attempting to pry his eye out.

He convulsed. Vision splitting. Trying desperately to move but his weak body betrayed him. The room sharpened to impossible edges. Each shade of shadow had weight. Every flicker of fire carried regret.

Within him was the same terror he felt when his own mother would lock him in a dark room at the slightest provocation. And in this mother's face, layered over her features like translucent scars, he saw flashes:

A younger Elizabeth weeping over a grave.

A knife in her hand, trembling, as she cut into something, someone, in a candlelit chamber.

The moment she first tasted another's Resonance and felt power flood her veins like wine.

The exact instant she realized she could consume her own children to ascend to a higher being.

Anger rose slowly, drowning his terror. Anger at the world, always taking, taking, taking everything from him.

Elizabeth's palm pressed harder onto his eye flesh. "It will be over soon, my gentle child."

"Get off me! Get off me!" Vandal thrashed beneath her weight. But when her nails scraped the rim of his socket the pain was white-hot lightning straight into his brain.

The eye answered with a savage spasm. The iris split wider. Obsidian black shot through with crimson threads like ruptured veins. It became a black hole in his skull, ancient and ravenous.

His pain turned his anger into rage. Vision turning monochrome red.

Something stirred behind the vertical pupil, something vast, patient, starving.

A voice, not his, not hers, whispered inside his skull, soft as a final breath:

I feeeast...

The vertical pupil dilated. The iris cracked wide like a chasm from hell.

The air around Elizabeth curdled. Shadows thickened into living tar, slithering up her ritual robes like starving worms. From the blackest pits of her soul, her own nightmares tore free and turned on their creator. She recoiled in terror.

First came the ghost of her slaughtered daughter, the sister who had escaped three months earlier.