By IMERPUS RELUR
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The town was silent. Too silent.
Imer stepped into the empty marketplace where no one bartered, no one watched. The smell of incense from the old shrine still lingered in the wind, but there was no offering. Only dust.
A child's doll lay on the cobbled ground, its porcelain eye cracked open like it had seen the end and remembered it too well.
"Something passed here," Imer whispered.
Not something. Hunger.
The type that didn't feed on flesh or gold—but on longing, on wishes unspoken, on truths left unclaimed.
He walked deeper into the alleyway, past a mural painted in blood and pigment. A smiling face. A warning? Or a mirror?
Each footstep brought echoes. Not from the ground. But from himself. They were stepping too. Following. His other selves.
Then, behind him, a voice.
"You found the smile, didn't you?"
It was a boy's voice—but layered. Too many voices at once. Too much memory. The voice of an entire timeline fractured and funneled into one mouth.
"I'm not here to feed it," Imer said, keeping his steps slow, careful.
"Oh?" The boy tilted his head. "But it's been waiting for you. Your taste is unlike theirs."
The boy's body flickered. A glitch in reality. He was here and not here. Real and a rumor.
Imer walked past.
"No one is supposed to feed it anymore," he said, not for the boy—but for the smile on the mural. "But I'll eat it instead."
The boy screamed.
But not out of pain.
Out of relief.