They called it The Dimming.
No one knew exactly when it started—only that one day, the sun stopped rising properly. Light dimmed, shadows grew longer, and a bruised twilight settled over the world. The sky bled color. Birds stopped singing.
Then the Hollows came.
They looked human, at first. But up close, they were wrong—bodies stretched too far, faces cracked like old porcelain, mouths that didn't open but split. They hunted warmth. Noise. Blood.
The world burned in less than a year.
When the cities fell, the ones who survived fled underground. Metro tunnels. Basements. Quarantine zones. That's where they found us. The Duskbound.
We thought they were soldiers. Maybe scientists. Something official.
We were wrong.
They wore masks—smooth, matte black, with a red slit where the eyes should've been. No names, no ranks. They moved in silence and took what they wanted. Food. Weapons. People.
"Testing," they called it.
It wasn't voluntary.
They came to our bunker in the middle of the night. Floodlights. Guns. They didn't even knock. A girl named Maren tried to run—they shot her in the leg and dragged her off screaming. She was twelve.
Me? I was seventeen, and I stayed quiet.
Until the third night, when the Mark appeared.
It started with heat. My arm burned like it was melting. I woke gasping, my sister Nia staring at me from the other cot, eyes wide with fear. My skin glowed—a black eclipse spreading across my forearm like ink spilled on fire. I clawed at it, screamed.
That's when the Duskbound returned. No words. No emotion.
Just a needle to the neck—and darkness.
I woke up in a transport cage with four others.
No windows. Only flickering red lights and the soft hum of air filtration. The others were scared. One was crying. Another was mumbling to himself, repeating "it's not real, it's not real."
Then the voice crackled over the intercom:
"Five Marked subjects. Classify and assign. Bring them to the Riftline."
That was the first time I heard the word.
Riftline.
They weren't here to protect us. They were using us. We were weapons.
We were Duskbound.
And me? I didn't care what they wanted. I only cared about one thing:
Getting back to Nia.
Even if I had to burn this broken world down to do it.