Just when Seyfe thought the night would end without much disarray, he was proven wrong—very wrong.
A sharp, piercing cry shattered the silence, jarring him from the edge of sleep. He flinched so violently he nearly slammed his head against the already fractured wall beside him. His pulse hammered in his ears as he sat frozen, heart racing, breath caught somewhere between fear and disbelief.
The crying didn't stop. It only grew louder—more desperate, more pronounced.
An infant.
Left alone, it wouldn't last long. The twisted and the echoforms would be drawn to it like vultures to a corpse. And then there were the scum from the outskirts—vile enough to snatch the child, harvest its organs, or sell it whole to the highest bidder.
Seyfe knew all this. And still, he hesitated.
What if it wasn't a baby at all? What if it was an echoform, mimicking the cry of a child to lure in the soft-hearted and foolish? A perfect trap. A perfect kill.
He didn't dismiss the thought. He never did.
Risk was not something Seyfe welcomed—not without reason. Not without proof.
And especially not tonight.
He reached for the rusted blade tucked beneath the ragged bedding, its edge dull but still sharp enough to remind him of the stakes. Slowly, he rose to his feet, every movement deliberate, practiced. The cries echoed again, bouncing off the crumbling stone and warped metal of the building like a haunting chant.
Seyfe moved toward the door, stopping just before the threshold. He pressed his ear to the cold surface, listening—really listening. The cry carried no warble, no distortion, none of the sickly resonance that usually came with an echoform's mimicry.
But that meant nothing. They were evolving.
He clicked his tongue twice—soft, sharp sounds designed to test the air, to trigger movement, to bait a reaction.
Nothing. Just the relentless sobs of a helpless child.
His jaw clenched. Damn it all.
Against better judgment—or perhaps because some fractured part of him still clung to the idea of decency—Seyfe unlatched the door and stepped out into the cold night.
Blade in hand. Heart on edge.
He stepped past the rusted stairwell, blade raised, breath caught in his throat.
The sound was just ahead—behind a collapsed doorway, buried in shadows and ash.
Then he saw it.
A bundle. Small. Shaking. Wrapped in what looked like shredded fabric and plastic.
As he raised the blade, ready to strike at whatever horror might lie within, the bundle twitched—and let out another piercing wail.
Seyfe flinched back.
It was an infant.
No twisted illusion. No echoform mimicry. Just a tiny, real, screaming child.
His chest tightened, not from fear now, but something colder—heavier. The kind of dread that didn't claw at your flesh, but sank into your bones.
Because something had left it here.
And in this cursed part of the city, nothing did anything without a reason.
Still, he wasn't entirely sure.
Every inch of him buzzed with doubt, every breath pulled tight by the threads of suspicion that stitched themselves deep into his mind.
It looked like a baby. Sounded like one too. But Seyfe had seen mimicries more convincing than this.
And yet… something about this one screamed real.
Too real.
The cries hit him again—raw, shrill, almost painful—as if the sound itself was trying to claw past his mistrust and into the marrow of his soul.
His grip tightened around the blade.
For a flickering second, his hand moved without thinking. The tip of the dull blade inched closer—just close enough to test, to see if it would bleed like something living.
Then he stopped.
His eyes widened as if waking from a trance, yanking the blade back in horror.
"What the hell is wrong with me…" he whispered to no one.
The baby kept crying.
And Seyfe, heart hammering, realized he had a choice to make. A dangerous, irreversible one.
Seyfe lowered the blade with a shaky breath, his hand trembling as he reached forward. Slowly—hesitantly—he let his fingers brush against the child's cheek.
Warm. Soft. Fragile.
The child's wails quieted, fading into soft hiccups and whimpers, as though it recognized something—someone. As though it could feel, even in its tiny bones, that a human had found it. That it wasn't alone anymore.
The small body leaned into his touch, instinctively drawn to the heat of another living being.
As if Seyfe was a protector. A savior.
But in truth, it was the same boy who, just moments ago, nearly pressed cold iron against that tender flesh—ready to draw blood just to prove a point to his paranoia.
His chest tightened. The guilt hit sharper than any blade.
Yet the child didn't know. Didn't care.
To it, Seyfe was already something more.
And that scared him more than anything else.
Just then, a tremor rippled through the ground—slight, almost imperceptible to anyone who wasn't as attuned to the world's subtleties as Seyfe.
To most, it would've gone unnoticed. A casual shift in the earth. A mild inconvenience.
But to him? It was a warning.
The faintest whisper of something shifting, a tremor that spoke of far worse things to come.
The layer was about to shift.
The Broken Layer.
Seyfe's instincts flared—every nerve in his body going taut. He had lived through this before, felt it in his bones too many times. The air grew thick, like something choking the world itself, and the land began to glitch, as if reality itself was fracturing.
The light around him flickered, twisted, until everything seemed to warp in on itself.
And then came the mist.
Seyfe's breath caught as he looked around, realizing the truth of it—he was no longer standing in the crumbling remnants of a city. The familiar walls, the ruined doorframe—everything had dissolved. Replaced by something darker, colder, more sinister.
A world on the edge of ruin.
He could feel the temperature drop, the air turn sour, as if even the wind itself recoiled in disgust. The mist thickened, swirling around him like it had a mind of its own, and with it, the sounds—the eerie whispers, the distorted screeches—of the Broken Layer began to rise, reaching into the very depths of the world.
Seyfe wrapped the infant tightly in his arms, a desperate instinct taking hold. The baby's warmth against him was the only thing that made him feel tethered to any kind of reality.
He could feel the shift. The impending horrors of the Broken Layer.
And there was no way out—at least not without surviving the hell that now surrounded him.
Seyfe's surroundings warped further, and with it, his sense of time seemed to collapse.
He blinked, and when his eyes opened again, he was no longer standing in the ruined city. Instead, he found himself in a place that could have once been civilization, but now was only a shell of its former self—a desert of crumbling stone and rusted steel.
Towering structures, twisted and broken, rose from the barren land, their once-proud spires now infested with grotesque writhing worms. The creatures gnawed at the metal skeletons of the buildings as if the very bones of the city were their prey.
Above, the sky hung heavy with an unnatural grey hue, the sun a dim, sickly thing behind the layers of dust and smog.
The worst part, though, was the flying gears—great, rusted mechanisms that drifted lazily through the air like dead birds. Some were massive, their sharp edges catching the faint light as they spun slowly, while others were small, barely larger than a fist, yet still ominous in their erratic movement.
The sound was unbearable. The grinding of metal, the squealing of rusted parts scraping against one another, and the low hum of some distant engine that never seemed to stop.
It was a place lost to time—a ruin that didn't belong in this world.
A realm created by the Broken Layer.
Seyfe stood frozen, staring at the desolate landscape. He could feel the baby shifting in his arms, its soft cries muted against the chaos of this place.
But there was no comfort here. No refuge. Just the oppressive weight of the layer pressing down on him, as if the very air itself was trying to suffocate him.
And in the distance, he could just make out figures—shapes that seemed to move, but not in any natural way. Were they human? Or something else?
There was no time to wonder. The mist still clung to his skin, thick and suffocating. The Broken Layer had chosen him. And now, he had to survive it.
Without another moment's hesitation, Seyfe began to move. His instincts screamed at him to get out of the open, to find cover, but the landscape was barren, its ruins nothing more than jagged husks of a dead civilization. The ground beneath his feet cracked with every step, and the air tasted of rust and decay.
He barely took a dozen steps before he heard it—faint at first, then growing louder, a sound that made his blood run cold.
The screech of wings.
His heart pounded in his chest as he spun around, eyes scanning the sky, searching for the source.
And then he saw them—birds.
At least, they were once birds.
Now, they were twisted horrors, black-feathered creatures with eyes that bore into him like voids, endless pits of darkness. The air around them shimmered with a malevolent energy, their eyes leaking streams of blood as if they wept in agony. The birds circled above, the beating of their wings like the crackling of dry leaves, their feathers falling apart, decaying into nothingness as they flapped.
But worse than the sight was the sound—the horrible, echoing screech that rattled his bones, like the cry of something tortured beyond comprehension.
Seyfe stumbled backward, his grip tightening around the baby. He had no choice now but to run.
The creatures dived suddenly, their beaks wide, jagged, and sharp like the fangs of wild canines. Their wings fluttered with the sound of crumbling paper and grinding metal as they closed in on him, circling with unnatural speed, a nightmarish frenzy. He could see the decay in their wings—bones jutting out, feathers falling away in chunks, as though they were held together by the sheer will to destroy.
Blood continued to spill from their eyes, staining the air as though they were crying in agony. Yet, there was no pity in their gaze. Only hunger.
And they were hungry for him.
Seyfe didn't think. He sprinted, pushing through the heavy air, his boots kicking up dirt and dust as he desperately searched for anything to hide behind. But there was nothing. Only the hollow remains of twisted towers and rotting skeletons.
The birds screeched again, diving closer, their fangs bared, their wings decaying faster with every beat. Seyfe's pulse thundered in his ears. He could feel their cold breath on his skin, hear the scrape of their wings just above his head.
The Broken Layer wasn't just a place—it was a hunting ground.