Tenaze was a town that seemed ordinary on the surface, with its winding roads, quiet alleys, and rows of houses built close enough for neighbors to whisper secrets across their balconies. Yet, everyone who lived there carried a strange heaviness, as if the very air pressed down on their chests. The elders would never say it out loud, but the people of Tenaze had long known that their home was not entirely theirs. Shadows lingered longer than they should, and whispers carried in the night even when no one was speaking.
It began one autumn night when the wind howled like a wounded beast and the electricity flickered in the houses on the northern edge of town. A young man named Elias had returned home late from the factory, his boots echoing against the narrow stone paths. He noticed something peculiar: every streetlight he passed seemed to die the moment he moved beyond it, leaving him with only the next circle of dim light. The darkness between each lamp felt thick, like it was alive, crawling closer with each step. Elias muttered curses to himself, quickening his pace.
When he reached his home, an old two-storied structure with peeling paint, he paused. From the window on the second floor, he swore he saw someone staring down at him. A pale face, too gaunt, too still, its eyes sunken black holes. But Elias lived alone. He bolted inside, heart hammering, but when he climbed the stairs and flung open the bedroom door, there was nothing. The air, however, was colder than it should have been. He told himself it was exhaustion. He didn’t notice the dark smear of something like ash clinging to the window frame.
The following days, people whispered of strange happenings. Livestock found drained of blood but without a single wound. Children claimed they heard voices calling their names from empty alleys. An old woman was found dead in her home, her face twisted in terror, and every mirror in her house shattered inward as though something had tried to crawl out. The authorities dismissed these as coincidences, accidents, or the foolish tales of overactive minds. But the people of Tenaze knew better.
Elias could not shake what he had seen. He began waking in the middle of the night to scratching sounds on his walls, as though claws raked against the plaster. The shadows in his room no longer matched the furniture; they seemed to bend and stretch unnaturally, sometimes standing upright as though mocking his shape. He tried to ignore it until one night, half-asleep, he heard a voice right next to his ear whisper, “You brought us back.”
Terrified, he sought the advice of the oldest resident of Tenaze, a recluse named Amara who lived on the hill by the graveyard. She was known for her strange rituals and for keeping her windows covered in symbols no one else understood. When Elias described what he had seen, her withered face grew pale. “The seals,” she whispered, “they are breaking.”
Long ago, she explained, Tenaze was built upon the site of an ancient tragedy. Before the town, there had been a settlement of outcasts who practiced forbidden rites, trying to open a door to something beyond. The villagers of that time had turned on them, burning their bodies and burying the ashes beneath stone markers at the edges of the land. To seal the place, they carved protective wards into the stones, keeping the restless dead from returning. But over the centuries, those stones had been forgotten, some destroyed, some built over, their symbols erased. Without them, the dead were stirring again.
Elias wanted to believe it was superstition, yet as Amara spoke, he remembered the ash on his window, the shadows that seemed to move on their own, the words whispered in his sleep. “What do we do?” he asked desperately.
Amara’s hollow eyes fixed on him. “The seals must be restored. But they will not allow it.”
That night, Elias tried to rally others, but fear had already gripped Tenaze. Few dared to act. Families huddled together inside their homes, burning candles through the night, praying in trembling voices. The streets became silent after dusk, though sometimes a scream would cut through the darkness, sharp and short, followed by silence that weighed heavier than before.
Determined, Elias went alone to the northern woods where one of the old stone markers still stood, cracked in two. He carried chalk and salt, tools Amara had given him, along with words to recite. The woods were suffocatingly silent, no crickets, no rustle of leaves, only the sound of his own breath. He found the marker, half-buried in moss, its carvings almost gone. As he bent to redraw the symbol, he felt a hand grip his shoulder.
It was not human.
The fingers were long and cold, pressing into his flesh like iron. He turned slowly, and his breath caught in his throat. A figure loomed behind him, taller than any man, its body made of smoke and bone, its face shifting like melting wax. Eyes hollow, mouth gaping, it leaned close, whispering with a hundred voices at once, “You cannot bind us.”
Elias fled, the chalk scattering, the salt spilling uselessly into the dirt. The thing did not chase him with speed but followed, its form flickering in and out of existence, always closer when he glanced back. By the time he reached the edge of town, his body was trembling, his vision blurred. He collapsed on the steps of his home, hearing the thing’s laughter echoing in his skull.
In the days that followed, Tenaze fell deeper into darkness. People disappeared without trace. Doors were found open in the mornings though bolted the night before. Smoke-like figures drifted through the alleys, vanishing when approached. And always, always, the shadows grew longer, stretching toward the living as if hungry.
Elias tried again and again to repair the seals, but each attempt failed. The entities grew bolder, whispering his name in every corner, leaving marks on his walls, clawing at his windows. He realized, with a horror that hollowed his soul, that they were bound to him. That night when he saw the face in his window, when he felt the whisper on his neck, something had chosen him. Not as prey. As a bridge.
The people of Tenaze began to avoid him, their eyes filled with both pity and terror. Rumors spread that Elias had invited the darkness himself, that his blood carried the sins of the old settlement. Alone, abandoned, and haunted, he sought Amara one final time.
She looked at him with sorrow. “You are the vessel now. They will not stop until they walk fully in this world, and they will do it through you.”
“Then what do I do?” Elias begged.
Her answer was soft but merciless. “End yourself before they fully open the door.”
That night, Elias lit a single candle in his darkened room. The walls writhed with shadows, dozens of faces forming in the black, all whispering, coaxing, pleading. He held a knife in his trembling hands, knowing that with his death, perhaps the town might survive. But as he pressed the blade to his chest, the voices changed. They were no longer cruel, but gentle, familiar. His mother’s voice. His father’s. Friends long gone. They begged him not to leave them, not to abandon them again. His tears fell hot onto the blade.
The candle sputtered out.
In the morning, his house stood silent. No body was ever found. Only shadows pooled unnaturally in the corners, never lifting, even in daylight.
From that day, Tenaze was never the same. The people still live there, carrying on with their lives, but the weight in the air is heavier than ever. They know Elias walks among them, though his face is hidden in the shadows. And when night falls, no one dares whisper his name, for fear the shadows will answer back.
The curse of Tenaze is alive, and the darkness is only growing hungrier.
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