Chronikles of the Keepers. Voice of the primordial darkness

He became an assistant to Miles Henry — a detective with a quiet but impeccable reputation. Miles wasn’t a celebrity and didn’t like high-profile cases, but in Arkhanum, those who understood the value of real work knew his name. He was about fifty, his pipe rarely left the corner of his mouth, and his gaze from under heavy lids seemed lazy only to those who couldn’t tell calmness from attentiveness.

His very first case proved Isaac had landed where he belonged.

It was a burglary case involving a factory owner’s safe. At first glance — dirty but routine work. A broken lock, ripped-open drawers, frightened servants, an angry owner, and accounting books that everyone only flipped through for show. It was in those books that Isaac noticed a discrepancy. One digit. One omission. One movement of money that didn’t match the rest. That was enough to expose a fraudulent accountant — and then the entire scheme.

Miles looked at him for a long time then, blowing smoke from his pipe.

— Kid, — he finally said with a hoarse chuckle, — you’ve got a mind like a chess grandmaster. Sometimes it’s almost scary.

Isaac averted his gaze, pretending the praise hadn’t touched him. But inside, something quietly, almost shyly, straightened its shoulders.

The work was going well Isaac had solved numerous cases. Miles had even considered retiring and handing the agency over to his clever protégé. The work on Miles’s last case took a week. They tracked down the kidnappers, but unknowingly pulled a thread that led not to petty thieves but to one of the syndicates that held the district in an iron grip. When they entered a dead-end alley for a meeting with an “informant,” it all ended before it became clear exactly what had gone wrong.

Fire opened from the warehouse windows.

A lead downpour struck them suddenly and thickly, like rain from a rotten sky. The world slowed down. Isaac heard his heart pounding against his ribs, heard the clatter of falling shell casings on wet cobblestones, heard Miles curse through his teeth. Then something rose inside him.

A hum.

At first distant. Then closer. As if someone was swinging a pendulum right inside his skull. The air around him trembled, tautened, and began to turn white.

He came to sitting on the ground, leaning against a wall.

In his ears wasn’t silence — it was its deafening absence. The white mist slowly dissipated. No mafiosi, no gunfire, no screams remained. Just the wet alley, dead light, and Miles lying a few steps away.

His mentor’s vest was slashed with dark stains spreading rapidly across the fabric. His eyes, still alive, sharp, ironic not long ago, stared at the gray sky, seeing nothing. There were no bullets, no casings around. No traces of the shootout except his body, riddled with lead that seemed never to have existed.

Isaac didn’t understand what had happened then.

He only understood that Miles was dead.

And that in the moment the world turned white, something had happened to reality that shouldn’t have.

Five years ago.

Isaac was already working alone. He had a license, a decent suit, his own clientele, and exactly enough reputation that people with money and problems came to him. He moved precisely, spoke little, worked cleanly. From the outside, it might have seemed like he had everything under control.

If you didn’t look into his eyes.

If you didn’t notice that sometimes, too-long pauses came not from thoughtfulness but from internal struggle.

That day, he was interrogating a witness. Routine work. A room, a chair, a glass of water, the smell of old wallpaper and cheap soap. The witness was nervous, mixing up details, trying to remember the color of a coat he’d most likely never really seen. Isaac had almost guided the interrogation where he needed it when the world began to drift again.

Not sharply.

Worse.

Slowly.

The edges of objects began to blur, like ink on wet paper. Contours of the table, faces, windows — everything became uncertain. Panic, cold and too familiar, gripped his throat.

No. Not now. No. No-no-no.

Isaac swallowed hard and stared at the wall behind the witness, as if he could force reality back into its frame. Several agonizing seconds passed before the world became solid again.

— Are you feeling unwell, Mr. Isaac? — the witness asked cautiously.

Isaac picked up the glass, took a sip of ice-cold water, and muttered:

— Migraine. Continue.

From then on, fear became a constant companion. Not open. Not loud. Worse. Quiet. The kind that sits at the back of your mind and waits for you to forget about it long enough to strike again.

At night, he was haunted by the same nightmare: an endless, dark, soundless space with no sky, no floor, no exit. He ran, but the walls closed in, the ground gave way beneath him, and the darkness grew denser until he understood that this wasn’t a dream about a trap. It was the trap itself. A prison made of his own mind.

He woke up screaming, in a cold sweat, and the first hour of the morning was spent convincing himself: the ground beneath his feet was real. The room was real. Breathing was real. And he hadn’t yet been permanently locked away in that white, silent void.

Four years ago.

The fateful case.

The disappearance of the Hawkins family.

The house on the outskirts smelled of dust, old wood, and an apple pie that had never been finished. It was the kind of smell that made you uneasy not because it was frightening, but because it was too human for a place where something inhuman had already happened.

Isaac crossed the threshold.

The heavy oak door slammed shut behind him with a bang, as if struck by a gust of wind.

Only there was no wind.

Chaos reigned inside. Not the kind left by panic, but something wrong. In the living room, a vase fell and shattered with a crash, though no one was near it. In the dining room, a salt shaker tipped over on its own, white grains scattering across the tablecloth like ash on a coffin lid.

A draft. Settled floor. Logical. All logical.

He repeated this to himself almost angrily, like a man who knows he’s lying to himself but isn’t quite ready to stop.

The air was thick, sweetish, with a hint of ozone, like after a thunderstorm, and something rotten. Then he heard a groan.

Quiet.

Prolonged.

Inhumanly cut off mid-sound.

Then another.

A child’s.

Isaac’s heart slammed against his ribs so hard it drowned out everything else for a moment. He almost ran up the stairs, gripping his revolver.