I’ve spent most of my life behind bars—both subjective and literal. I was told my father sold me when I was no older than a few months. The couple that bought me showered me with love; they taught me to read and write, and they listened to my singing day after day.

For a time, we were happy.

​Then, everything changed.

​The war was brutal on everyone,no one saw it coming, our enemy being a myth that had stayed in the shadows for so long we’d convinced ourselves the dark was empty — the kind of monster we told children didn't exist under their beds. It started slowly, with people going missing—shadows that simply never returned. Then, the silent killings began. Entire families were discovered days after their passing; some were still in their beds, looking hauntingly peaceful. Others were found in tangled heaps in the middle of their kitchens or living rooms, their faces frozen in expressions of absolute agony.

​Only one boy survived. They found him trembling under a mountain of blankets in a cedar closet, his eyes wide and hollow. He had stayed silent while his world ended; he had witnessed the slaughter of his entire kin, and the story he told wasn't one of men, but of the things we had always promised him didn't exist. ​The boy’s testimony was a jagged, nonsensical thing. He spoke of beings carved from the void itself—shadows so deep that the lantern light seemed to pass right through them, illuminating the wall behind as if they weren't there at all. And the wings... he described them as vast, silent spans of a starless night sky, unfurling in the smallness of his family's kitchen.

​​It made no sense. How do you fight a war against something the light cannot find?

​But after months of living in a fever dream of terror, the creatures grew tired of the shadows. They stepped into the open, slaughtering in plain daylight in the centers of our crowded streets. They brought a whirlwind of chaos and carnage everywhere they went, turning our bustling markets into abattoirs.

​​The myth had finally outgrown the dark. We still didn't really know what they were, and no one knew how to hurt them. Our weapons passed through them like smoke, and our courage broke against their starless wings.

​But when all hope seemed lost, a researcher unearthed a fragment of the past that the rest of the world had forgotten. Buried in the suffocating dust of an ancient library, hidden within the pages of a book so old its spine cracked like bone, lay the truth: their weakness.

​The weakness was as simple as it was impossible: sound. Specifically, a frequency so high it could shatter glass and bone alike.

The military moved with desperate speed, forging sonic weapons—massive, brass-rimmed emitters—capable of screaming louder than any man. But when the first waves of sound hit the invaders, the world learned a second, darker truth. The shadows didn't die; they dissolved. The "beings of void" we had been fighting were merely a front—a shifting, translucent disguise for the real monsters hiding within.

Blood sucking being, nightmare creatures.

Vampires.