The cheap motel room was a cage of darkness and decay. It was a place called ‘Paradise’ – it was far from it. Max Jaeger sat alone, cross-legged on the grimy carpet, surrounded by peeling wallpaper, cracked tiles, and shadows that flickered as if alive. The single lightbulb overhead buzzed faintly, casting everything in a dim, nauseating yellow hue. The air was thick, heavy with humidity and stale cigarette smoke, tinged with something sour, something forgotten, something hopeless.

  Mildew clung to the curtains, their faded floral print barely visible through decades of cigarette smoke baked into the fabric. A busted air-conditioning unit wheezed from above the window, exhaling warm breath like a dying animal. Outside, a neon sign buzzed erratically, stuttering the word “PARADISE” in broken red syllables. It cast long, twitching shadows across the stained ceiling, the flickering glow almost rhythmic – like a heartbeat struggling to stay alive. The enemy of everything you’d expect from gleaming, futuristic Singapore.

  The mattress on the bed sagged visibly, bowing under its own weight, mottled with brown rings that looked suspiciously like blood. A warped painting hung askew on the wall – an oil print of some impossible beach, blue waves frozen mid-crash, forever promising serenity to people who’d never find it. Somewhere next door, someone laughed – a single, short bark of madness that cut off too abruptly. Max didn’t flinch.

  The whole place felt like it was decaying in real-time, rotting from the inside out. Just like Liz.

  He hadn't slept in days. Every breath he took felt like a struggle against invisible chains wrapped tightly around his chest. Staring at the faded carpet, Max noticed stains older than his regrets, stains he didn't want to think about. A roach scuttled across the carpet, disappearing into a gap in the wall, mocking him with its quiet survival.

  He didn't belong here – didn't want to be here – but desperation had dragged him halfway across the world to Singapore, chasing myths and whispered nonsense, the kind of irrational, foolish hope he'd never believed in before.

  Yet here he was, reduced to nothing, clinging to fantasies because reality had left him with nothing else.

  On the floor in front of him lay an ancient leather-bound book, its cover cracked and faded. April's book. He traced the edges gently with his fingers, feeling the roughness, the memories, the sense of her lingering presence still trapped between those brittle pages. April had always chased the impossible – stories of monsters, hidden truths, mysteries whispered in dead languages – and he'd joked about it with her, dismissing her research as a hobby, a harmless curiosity. He never really understood his wife’s fascination with the occult.

  Until Liz fell asleep and never woke up.

  Until the world turned cold, and science, reason, and rationality all proved useless against whatever darkness had swallowed his daughter whole.

  He hadn’t planned to come here. Not really. Not like this.

  But when the doctors shrugged, and the priest muttered excuses, and the neurologist called Liz a “miracle” because nothing made sense – Max had started to read. He read everything April left behind. Every scribbled note in the margins, every email she sent to crackpot occultists, every scrawled translation that turned English into twisted Latin and something else – ancient Canaanite? Her entire life’s work, her “harmless obsession,” suddenly became the only thread he had left to hold onto.

  He’d spent weeks falling into those pages. Drinking in every half-insane theory and ritual recipe. He’d watched video testimonies, voice recordings, half of them sounding completely deranged – and still, he took notes. Desperation made every scrap of nonsense feel like gospel.

  When he looked at himself in the mirror now, he barely recognized the man staring back: unshaven, sunken-eyed, sad. A man who hadn’t eaten in two days and couldn’t remember the last time he slept more than an hour without jolting awake. He’d tried to reason his way out of this madness a thousand times. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw Liz’s lifeless face and knew logic was the luxury of people who didn’t have daughters rotting from the inside.

  Max’s hands trembled as he flipped open the ritual book. His fingers brushed April’s handwriting in the margins – careful notes, painstaking translations of languages that belonged to civilizations long dead. He read through the incantations, feeling foolishness bubble up again. Ancient Canaanite symbols drawn from religions long forgotten, religions humanity had buried beneath concrete and glass.

  What am I even doing here?

  He laughed bitterly, the sound hollow and harsh in the empty room. "April," he whispered, his voice cracked from exhaustion and grief, "I wish you would’ve left better instructions."

  He closed his eyes, exhaling slowly, counting to ten. Then to twenty. Then he stopped counting altogether, lost in a tidal wave of regret.

  …………………

  Liz’s face surfaced in his mind, crystal clear. He remembered Liz as a child. She was smiling – always smiling – her bright eyes filled with innocence and life. Of course, things have changed in the last seven years. Now she was sixteen years old, shedding the last of her childhood and awakening to the weighty world of adulthood. The image was so vivid, so painfully clear, that Max almost believed he could reach out and touch her cheek, ruffle her hair, hear her annoyed laugh as she shoved him away playfully. He still saw her that way even years later.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  But then the memory shifted, twisting into darkness.

  The cheerful kitchen filled with sunshine turned grey, the brightness draining away like watercolour bleeding off a canvas. Liz’s face contorted – not in pain exactly, but in recoil, as if hearing something Max couldn’t hear. Her eyes flicked upward, startled, confused.

  “Liz?” he’d called from the stove, flipping pancakes, not even turning around yet.

  Then the sound. A single gasp, sharp and wrong. He turned, spatula still in hand.

  She was just standing there, frozen mid-step, staring at the wall. Not at anything on the wall. At the blank plaster itself, eyes wide, lips parted as though something, or someone, had just spoken to her.

  “Liz?” he repeated, more sharply.

  She collapsed.

  It wasn’t like fainting. It was like a puppet whose strings had been slashed. Her limbs didn’t crumple - they dropped. Hard. Her head struck the tile with a sickening crack, and Max’s blood turned to ice.

  By the time he reached her, she was already twitching—subtle, rhythmic spasms he couldn’t explain. A whisper escaped her lips, so faint he thought he imagined it: a language that didn’t sound human. Her eyes were open but wrong—fogged, unfocused, as if someone else was behind them, watching him.

  Max had screamed her name, again and again, but Liz never answered.

  She still hasn’t.

  Doctors offered nothing but empty platitudes and baffled looks. MRIs, blood tests, CAT scans – all perfectly normal. No accident, no disease, no reason. Baffled by the cuts and sores that appeared from nowhere. They used words like "mystery" and "unexplained," while he begged, screamed, threatened, and pleaded for something real, some explanation beyond meaningless apologies.

  And when they gave him nothing, he’d spent the last of his money to bring her to a hospital in Singapore. It was only after another, final day of no answers that he'd finally turned to April's research.

  …………………

  Max rubbed his weary eyes, pulling himself out of the nightmare memories and back into the cramped motel room. He reached out, taking the brass bowl he'd bought earlier from a back-alley pawn shop. Cheap whiskey swirled inside, cloudy and bitter smelling, splashing gently against the sides of the bowl. The ritual demanded blood, but he hadn't found the strength yet to make that final sacrifice.

  Because deep down, he didn't really believe any of it.

  Demons? Contracts? Magical power to heal his daughter trapped between life and death? Absurd. It was madness, desperation, nonsense – yet here he was, clinging to the absurd because nothing else made sense.

  He whispered again, forcing the words past the lump in his throat:

  "By the Pact of Old, the Oath of Blood, the Names Carved in the Abyss…"

  The moment the words left his mouth, the air shifted—not violently, but subtly, like the pressure in the room changed by a fraction. Max paused, eyes flicking to the candle flames. They wavered. One bent sharply sideways as if caught in an unseen breath, then straightened again.

  His skin prickled.

  The lights overhead buzzed louder for half a second, like a power surge, then steadied. No thunder. No voice from beyond. No portal opening in the floor. Just... stillness. Heavy, unnatural stillness.

  A strange metallic taste coated his tongue. He tried to swallow it down, but it lingered.

  One of the roaches on the far side of the room abruptly stopped moving. Its twitching limbs stilled. Then it scuttled back into the shadows, disappearing completely.

  Max blinked at the ritual circle, heart pounding. Nothing was happening. No glow. No surge of power. Just his own breath, ragged and bitter.

  He exhaled, defeated, and muttered under his breath, “Of course it didn’t work.”

  He slumped, defeated. Idiot, he thought. Foolish, desperate idiot.

  He reached again for the bowl, lifting it to his lips, intending to drink the whiskey and forget this insanity altogether.

  And then he heard it – a tiny sound, almost imperceptible, coming from just beyond the flimsy motel door.

  He froze.

  …………………

  Outside, two shadows stood in the dim hallway, cast starkly against the faded wallpaper. They were silent, deadly, watching the door with predator calm.

  One was broad-shouldered, scarred from jaw to ear – a melted trench of old pain that gave him his name. He’d been in this business long enough to know when a job felt off, and this one itched at the base of his skull.

  The other, leaner and younger, tapped a vicious-looking long blade against his thigh, restless. His eyes flicked to the cheap room number, then to the flickering overhead bulb.

  “This the guy?” Scar murmured, barely audible.

  “Yeah,” the young knifeman replied. His voice was flat, like he’d stopped attaching meaning to death long ago. “Orders were clear. Doesn’t leave the room.”

  Scar frowned. “He’s not a threat. Just some broken-down reject, playing cultist with a bowl of whiskey. Why now?”

  “Because the boss saw something,” Gunman said. “Something bad. Shit you don’t wanna know about. Didn’t explain. Just said this one ends the world if we don’t kill him tonight.”

  Scar grunted. He hated jobs with mystics. They always got messy.

  He adjusted the knife strapped under his jacket. “Alright. Let’s make it clean.”

  They moved together in practiced rhythm, stepping silently toward the door.

  …………………

  Inside, Max’s pulse quickened as he strained his ears, listening intently. His heartbeat seemed impossibly loud, drowning out rational thought. Instinct took over – years of firefighting and emergency training snapping into place, adrenaline clearing away exhaustion.

  Someone was outside. Waiting. Watching.

  He reached down to the floor quietly, gripping the small folding knife he'd been holding for the pointless ritual he was performing – a pathetic weapon, but better than nothing.

  He rose slowly, quietly, muscles tense, his breathing controlled. His senses sharpened, every sound magnified – the creaking of the ancient wooden door frame, the faint shuffle of footsteps outside, the hum of distant traffic, the sound of his own heartbeat pounding like a drumbeat signalling the onset of battle.

  He knew, with absolute certainty, he was about to fight for his life.

  But it didn’t matter. If he died tonight, Liz would be alone, forever lost. He wouldn't let that happen. Couldn’t let that happen.

  He edged carefully towards the door, blade trembling in his sweating palm.

  Then – a pause.

  A sudden silence outside.

  His breath froze.

  And suddenly, violently, the door exploded inward, splinters flying, wood cracking sharply as two dark shapes surged into the room.

  Max barely had time to register their faces – cold, hard, murderous – before the world erupted into chaos and violence.