Chapter 1: The Junk and the Jaws

Chapter 1: The Junk and the Jaws

The lukewarm grease of day-old pizza was starting to congeal on the paper plate beside Leo Vance’s keyboard. The screen glowed, illuminating a face that seemed perpetually caught in the headlights of oncoming mediocrity. Twenty-four years old, and his greatest professional achievement was his typing speed, a skill he currently employed digitizing death notices from 1978 for a genealogy company. His life wasn’t just mundane; it was a flatline.

He was scrolling through a list of job postings—data entry, junior analyst, data entry—when the buzzer for his apartment building blared, a sound as aggressive and unwelcome as an alarm clock.

He ignored it. Probably a delivery for the wrong apartment. But it buzzed again, longer this time, insistent. With a sigh that carried the weight of his entire uneventful existence, Leo pushed himself away from the desk.

"Yeah?" he grunted into the intercom.

"Package for Leo Vance," a muffled voice crackled back. "Signature required."

Leo frowned. He hadn't ordered anything. He lived on takeout and digital downloads, a life designed to minimize interaction. "I'm not expecting anything."

"From the estate of Arthur Vance," the voice replied, and a cold knot formed in Leo's stomach.

Great-Uncle Arthur. The family's resident eccentric, a man he'd met twice in his life and only remembered as a whirlwind of dusty tweed and the scent of old books. Arthur had passed away a month ago. Leo had received a brief, formal letter and nothing else. Until now.

He buzzed the courier up, a flicker of morbid curiosity briefly cutting through his apathy.

The package was a heavy, wooden crate about the size of a shoebox, bound with leather straps instead of packing tape. It looked ancient. After a clumsy signature, Leo hauled it inside and pried it open with a butter knife. Nestled in a bed of what looked like yellowed, shredded paper was a single, obsidian-black object.

It was a book-sized block of what he assumed was stone, intricately carved with geometric patterns that made his eyes swim if he stared too long. It had no discernible spine or pages, but it felt like a book, somehow. It was cold to the touch, a deep, unnatural cold that seemed to suck the warmth from his fingers. The material was matte black, absorbing the light from his cheap IKEA lamp rather than reflecting it. It felt… heavy. Not just in weight, but in presence. It made the air in the room feel thick.

"Weird," Leo muttered, turning it over. He half-expected to find a price tag or a 'Made in China' sticker. Nothing. It was just a profoundly strange, useless block of carved rock. He pictured his great-uncle, a man who probably thought this was a fascinating historical artifact. To Leo, it was just more junk to clutter his already messy apartment. He nudged it with his foot, planning to shove it under his sofa and forget about it. It didn't budge, as if it had instantly decided to anchor itself to his floor.

He sighed, giving up. "Pizza it is."

As he picked up his phone to order a fresh, hot meal to replace the sad, cold slice on his desk, the lamp on his end table flickered violently. Then the one by the door. Then the main overhead light. One by one, they buzzed and died, plunging the apartment into the murky orange glow of the city at night.

"Great. A power surge," he grumbled, fumbling for the flashlight on his phone.

That's when he heard the whispering.

It wasn't a sound from the hallway or the apartment next door. It was inside his head, a faint, sibilant hiss like sand skittering across glass. It was everywhere and nowhere at once. He froze, phone in hand. The whispers were indecipherable, a chorus of faint, sorrowful voices that made the hairs on his arms stand up.

Then, a new smell hit him. Not the city smog or his unemptied trash, but the scent of a damp cellar, of ozone, and something else… something like old, deep-seated grief.

The wall beside his television began to ripple.

Leo stared, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. The cheap, beige paint and the drywall beneath it were twisting like fabric in a breeze. The whispering grew louder, coalescing into words he could almost understand. Prison… Warden… Return…

A shape began to emerge from the solid wall, not breaking it but phasing through it. It was a form of pure, writhing shadow, a monstrous silhouette that resolved itself into a vaguely canine shape, but impossibly large. It was a quadrupedal beast of coalesced darkness, its form constantly shifting and smoking at the edges. It had no eyes, no face, only a gaping maw that opened to reveal teeth made of splintered, dark energy. The whispers emanated from it, a sound of absolute despair.

Leo’s breath hitched in his throat. A scream tried to claw its way out, but it died in a pathetic, choked gasp. His brain, so used to the predictable logic of spreadsheets and databases, simply shut down. This was impossible. A nightmare. A hallucination brought on by bad pizza.

The shadow creature took a step into the room, its non-feet making no sound on the hardwood floor. Its empty gaze—if it could be called that—fixed on the obsidian artifact sitting by the sofa. A low, guttural growl, like the grinding of tombstones, joined the whispers. It knew why it was here.

Leo finally found his legs. He scrambled backward, tripping over a stack of old magazines and crashing against his bookshelf. The creature ignored him, its focus entirely on the block of stone. It took another fluid, silent step.

Panic, raw and primal, finally broke through his paralysis. He grabbed the first thing his hand found—a heavy glass paperweight—and hurled it. The object flew straight through the creature’s smoky head and shattered against the far wall. The beast didn’t even flinch.

It was three feet from the artifact.

Suddenly, the window to his fire escape exploded inward in a shower of glass and splintered wood. A figure rolled through the opening, landing in a crouch amidst the debris with an athletic grace that seemed alien in Leo's cramped living room.

It was a woman. She was tall and lean, dressed in dark, practical clothing under a long coat. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, and her face, sharp and intelligent, was set in a weary, grim expression. But what seized Leo’s attention were her arms. From her wrists to her elbows, intricate silver runes were tattooed into her skin, and they were glowing with a soft, internal light.

She rose to her full height, a silver knife gleaming in one hand. She didn’t even glance at Leo. Her sharp, assessing eyes were locked on the shadow beast.

"Well," she said, her voice a low, gravelly tone that cut through the whispers. "You're a long way from home."

The shadow creature turned its featureless head toward her, its gaping maw widening in a silent snarl. It let out a wave of chilling whispers, a psychic assault of pure misery. Leo flinched, pressing his hands to his ears, but the woman just squared her shoulders, the silver runes on her arms flaring brighter.

"He's not your Warden," she snapped, taking a step forward, placing herself between the beast and the obsidian artifact. "And you're not taking the prison."

The beast lunged.

It moved with an unholy speed, a blur of shadow and teeth. The woman was faster. She sidestepped, the silver knife flashing in an arc that carved a brilliant line of light through the creature's flank. The beast shrieked, a sound of tearing metal and human agony that vibrated in Leo’s bones. Where the knife had touched it, its shadowy form sizzled and dissolved like smoke in the wind.

It recoiled, its form wavering. It was hurt. But it was also furious. It gathered itself, the shadows around it deepening, the whispers in Leo's head reaching a fever pitch.

The woman spared a fleeting, annoyed glance at Leo, who was still huddled by the bookshelf, looking utterly useless. "Get the box! Move!" she yelled.

Box? His panicked mind struggled to connect the word to the obsidian block. The artifact. The junk.

He scrambled on his hands and knees towards it. His fingers brushed against its cold, smooth surface. The moment he touched it, the whispers in his head stopped. A profound silence fell over his mind, a quiet so complete it was more shocking than the noise had been.

The creature shrieked again, this time a sound of pure rage, and lunged not at the woman, but at him.

The woman swore, diving to intercept it. She slammed a ward with her free hand—a gesture that left a glowing silver symbol hanging in the air—and the beast smashed into it, its form scattering for a second before coalescing again.

"It's just a Griever," she grunted, more to herself than to him. "But I can't hold it and fight it at the same time." She shoved it back with another flash of her knife. "Get behind me. Don't let go of the Codex."

Codex?

Leo didn't need to be told twice. He grabbed the heavy object, surprised by how easily it lifted now, and scrambled behind his insane, rune-covered savior. The apartment was a wreck. The air hummed with power he couldn't comprehend. A monster made of nightmares was trying to phase through a wall of glowing magic to get a rock that he had inherited from his dead great-uncle.

The woman drove the creature back towards the ruined wall with a final, vicious slash of her knife. The Griever let out one last, despairing wail and dissolved back through the drywall, leaving behind only the cold, the smell of dust, and a gaping hole in Leo Vance's understanding of reality.

Silence descended, broken only by the distant wail of a city siren and Leo’s own ragged breathing. The silver runes on the woman’s arms slowly faded back to inert tattoos.

She stood there for a moment, breathing heavily, before turning to face him. Her weary eyes took in his terrified expression, the trashed apartment, and the obsidian Codex clutched in his arms like a shield.

She let out a long, tired sigh. It was the sigh of someone who was profoundly out of patience with the universe.

"Alright, kid," she said, her voice devoid of any comfort. "Let's skip the denial phase, it saves time. Everything you thought was a ghost story, a myth, a bad horror movie? It's real. And you," she gestured with her silver knife at the block in his hands, "just inherited a piece of it that has painted a very, very big target on your back."