The false dawn cracked open over the city in muted silence, washing the ruins in a weak, colorless light.

  Ren crawled out of the maintenance tunnel just as the mist began to retreat, dragging the stench of wet stone and old blood behind it.

  He hadn't slept.

  Not really.

  He'd spent the night listening to the city's breath — a low, endless wheeze of crumbling buildings and unseen horrors shifting through the rubble.

  Every time he'd closed his eyes, he'd heard the whisper of claws on concrete, the wet scrape of things too large to fit through the tunnels that still tried.

  The hunger had paced the walls of his mind like a caged animal.

  He kept it leashed.

  Barely.

  Now, he moved through the ruined streets, slower but sharper than the day before. Every step placed with care. Every shadow studied before he entered it.

  The ruin thickened ahead, a visible haze in the air. Threads stretched taut between broken streetlamps, between the hollowed corpses of buildings, thrumming faintly with invisible life.

  He didn’t know where he was going anymore.

  There was no map.

  No destination.

  Only survival.

  Only forward.

  The hunger whispered otherwise, urging him to dive into the densest ruin, to feast on it, to become part of it.

  He ignored it.

  Mostly.

  Mid-morning, he found the signs.

  Footprints.

  Not the twisted drag-marks of Nightkind.

  Boots.

  Heavy. Deep.

  Recent.

  Another human.

  Maybe.

  Ren crouched beside the tracks, studying them.

  They led west, toward the collapsed heart of the city where the ruin boiled thickest.

  A trap?

  Maybe.

  But also maybe... something else.

  Answers.

  Supplies.

  Information.

  He followed.

  Carefully.

  Step after step, the tracks wove deeper into the ruins.

  Here, the buildings leaned drunkenly over the streets, their facades cracked and pitted. Vines of black ruin-thread coiled around lampposts and signs, pulsing with faint, sickly light.

  The air grew thicker, harder to breathe.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The hunger buzzed harder against the back of his skull.

  He tightened his grip on the rebar and pressed forward.

  The footprints led into a collapsed plaza, where a massive statue — a weeping angel of steel and glass — lay shattered across the square. Its wings were twisted wreckage, its face a jagged hole staring blindly at the sky.

  The footprints ended there.

  Ren scanned the ruins cautiously.

  Movement.

  A shadow shifted at the far edge of the plaza, half-hidden behind a fallen column.

  He froze.

  The figure stepped into view.

  Human-shaped.

  Human-sized.

  At first glance, it almost looked normal — a man wrapped in tattered leather and cloth, a battered rifle slung across his back.

  But the longer Ren looked, the more wrongness he saw.

  The way the man's limbs moved — too loose, too fluid.

  The way his head tilted at odd angles, like an animal scenting prey.

  The way his eyes — black, glistening pits — locked onto Ren and didn’t blink.

  Ruinbound.

  One of the broken survivors who had given in fully to the hunger.

  Ren knew it without needing words.

  The man smiled — a slow, wide thing full of teeth filed into jagged points.

  "New blood," the man rasped.

  His voice was a dry rattle, like dead leaves scraping across stone.

  Ren didn’t move.

  Didn’t speak.

  The man circled him slowly, boots crunching over broken glass.

  "You feel it, don't you?" he whispered. "The pull. The need."

  Ren tightened his grip on the rebar.

  The man laughed softly, a sound without joy.

  "I fought it too. At first."

  He leaned closer, the smell of rot and ash rolling off him in waves.

  "But fighting just makes it worse."

  Ren said nothing.

  The man shrugged, a liquid, boneless gesture.

  "You'll see. Sooner or later."

  He turned and sauntered back toward the fallen angel, one hand trailing along the jagged remains of a wing.

  "You’re still soft," he said over his shoulder. "Still thinking you can stay clean."

  He laughed again.

  "Nothing stays clean here."

  Ren watched him disappear into the deeper ruins.

  Every instinct screamed at him to follow, to attack, to tear the threat out by the roots.

  The hunger howled agreement, a rising tide of fury and need.

  He stayed still.

  It wasn't time.

  Not yet.

  The man was wrong about one thing.

  Ren wasn't trying to stay clean.

  He was trying to stay human.

  There was a difference.

  And he would hold onto that difference as long as he could.

  He turned away from the plaza, ignoring the thick pull of ruin, ignoring the hunger that clawed at his gut, and slipped back into the shattered streets.

  The encounter left a weight on him that didn't lift as he moved.

  The world pressed harder against him now.

  The ruin seemed to throb with every step, threads twisting tighter, drawing him deeper into the city’s infected heart.

  By midday, the sun was little more than a raw wound behind the thickening clouds.

  Ren scavenged what he could — a rusted crowbar from a collapsed tool shop, a half-full canteen of foul-tasting water from a wrecked apartment.

  It wasn't enough.

  But it was something.

  He rested briefly in the shell of an old subway station, hiding from a pack of smaller Nightkind that slithered through the streets above — quick, snatching things that moved too slow.

  The hunger urged him to fight them.

  To spread ruin and grow.

  He crushed it down with grinding teeth.

  Patience.

  Strength without control was just another form of death.

  Late in the day, he stumbled into another survivor's camp — or what was left of it.

  Charred bones and twisted metal lay scattered in a ring around a blackened firepit.

  Symbols were scrawled across the walls in ash and blood — desperate pleas, curses, prayers.

  Nothing had saved them.

  He picked through the remains cautiously.

  Found a half-melted backpack with a few scraps of canned food inside.

  Found a broken knife, still sharp enough to gut if used right.

  Found a photograph, half-burned — a woman holding a child, both faces smudged and peeling away under the heat.

  He pocketed the knife and the food.

  Left the photograph where it lay.

  Some things weren't meant to be carried forward.

  As the false sun sank again, bleeding out across the ruins, Ren found shelter in a crumbling warehouse on the edge of a collapsed industrial park.

  He blocked the doors with rusted machinery.

  Set small noise traps with broken glass and scrap wire.

  Huddled in the corner furthest from the windows, rebar and crowbar within arm’s reach.

  Outside, the Nightkind woke again, their cries and growls filling the dying light.

  Ren sat in the dark, sharpening his instincts against the edge of fear, refusing to sleep, refusing to surrender.

  The memory of the ruinbound man circled his thoughts like a vulture.

  That could be him.

  Would be him.

  If he let it.

  If he lost the thin, fragile line that still separated him from the monsters outside.

  He flexed his hands slowly, feeling the rough edges of new growth under his skin — bone and claw and ruin.

  Still human.

  For now.

  Tomorrow would be worse.

  It always was.

  But tomorrow, he would be ready.