The road unfurled like a necrotic vein beneath our tires, its asphalt cracked and bleeding shadows. Beyond the glass, specters floated with limbs akimbo—pale marionettes severed from their mortal coils. Their hollow sockets tracked our progress, drawn to the living warmth within our steel chrysalis. The streetlamps, jaundiced and feeble, cast elongated silhouettes that slithered across the sedan's hood like ink spilled from a forbidden grimoire. Not a single pair of headlights pierced the hinterland's void; we moved through a vacuum where even crickets held their breath.
Courage had always been my armor, yet now it fissured. Cold seeped through the leather seats, gnawing at my thighs.
Above each window hung talismans of the Obsidian Enclave—papyrus strips inscribed with the Drakos blood-oath, their edges charred from generations of ritual fires. Our personal amulets grew warm against our chests, their hematite cores pulsing in warning as wraiths pressed translucent palms to the glass. One entity, its jaw unhinged in a silent scream, dissolved into smoke upon contact with the wards. The acrid stench of burnt hair permeated the cabin.
The absence of conversation weighed heavier than any ghost. Father's profile resembled a marble effigy, his grip on the steering wheel etching crescent moons into the leather. Mother's reflection in the rearview mirror flickered—a moth drawn to some unseen flame. Their silence was a language I'd never mastered, vowels choked back, consonants buried beneath twenty-three years of matrimonial lies.
"What pact did you break?" My question hung suspended, sharp as a guillotine blade. "I heard 'pyre,' 'sacrifice,' and my name tangled in your whispers. Why must we flee Lujiagou at midnight?"
"It's nothing." Their unison reply echoed too quickly, the words overlapping like ill-tuned strings. Their eyes met briefly in the glass—a flash of complicity that left frost on my spine.
Mother turned, her jade earrings catching the sickly light. "Lila Voss, when we reach Blackthorn Manor, you will kneel before your grandmother's reliquary and swear upon the Drakos Codex. No returns. No farewells. Lujiagou is ash to you now."
"Ash?" The word tasted of funeral pyres. My plans—the quaint bookstore job, Sunday dim sum with Father, even the half-written thesis on funerary rites—crumbled like ancient parchment. "You'd sever me from our bloodline? From the village where every cobblestone bears our family's crest?"
Father's knuckle whitened against the gearshift. "If dawn finds you beyond the serpent's reach, your mother will take you to the coastal sanctuary. I remain to… settle accounts." His throat convulsed as if swallowing broken glass. In the dashboard's sapphire glow, I glimpsed the truth he couldn't voice: this was no mere departure, but a severance of cosmic proportions.
"Accounts with whom?" My nails bit into palms, drawing twin crescents. "The thing that's been hunting us since the ancestral hall? The reason Mother packed iron shavings in her valise?"
Their silence thickened, a living entity now. Through the rearview mirror, their eyes conducted a silent argument—Father's pleading, Mother's blazing with Valkyrie fury. The car swerved violently as a barn owl exploded against the windshield, its feathers leaving hieroglyphs in crimson.
I reached for my phone, its cold screen a tether to sanity. Grandmother's number glowed—eleven digits that now felt like a lifeline. As I typed, the glass vibrated beneath my fingertips.
"Return… Return… Return…"
The voice oozed through air vents, a honeyed poison. Beneath it swelled a primordial chorus: the susurrus of scales on loam, the wet pop of ocular membranes unsealing, the crepitation of ribs expanding in a too-tight hide.
I pressed palms to chilled windows. "Do you not hear them? The serpents—they're beneath us! In the earth!"
Father slammed the brakes. The sedan fishtailed, tires screaming as we skidded to a halt. His breath fogged the windshield. "What serpents?"
"Everywhere!" My reflection warped in the glass—eyes too wide, hair crackling with static. "Can't you feel the road breathing?"
Mother unsheathed a dagger from her boot, its obsidian blade swallowing the moonlight. "Drive, Elias! Past the boundary stones—now!"
The engine roared back to life. As we accelerated, the headlights illuminated a horror suspended between realms: the asphalt rippled like water, bulging upward in gelatinous waves. Something colossal shifted beneath the road's membrane, its scaled ridges fracturing the yellow lines.
"RETURN, BRIDE OF VEILS."
The command struck like a physical blow. The rear window shattered inward, showering us with diamond shards. Cold unlike any earthly winter poured through the breach—a cold that smelled of tomb mold and myrrh.
Father wrenched the wheel, narrowly avoiding a fissure that split the road. Within its depths, bioluminescent scales glittered—an abyssal kaleidoscope rotating counterclockwise. The sedan's undercarriage scraped against stone as we mounted the shoulder, wheels churning mud.
"The bridge!" Mother's blade traced a warding sigil in the air. "Cross the river and the covenant breaks!"
Ahead, the stone arch loomed—its keystone carved with the Drakos manticore devouring its own tail. The river beneath churned black, its surface alive with drowning lights. As we approached, the bridge's guardian statues turned their heads, granite eyelids grinding open to reveal hollow sockets.
The steering wheel shuddered in Father's grasp. "It's rejecting us! The wards—"
"Faster!" Mother's scream harmonized with the engine's death rattle.
The car lunged forward. For three suspended heartbeats, we hung between salvation and the abyss. Then the rear axle snapped. Metal shrieked as we spun, the world inverting in a carousel of shattered glass and spiraling shadows.
Through the fractured windshield, I witnessed the truth in stop-motion:
The river surged upward, its waters coalescing into a crown of liquid onyx.
The bridge guardians stepped free of their plinths, stone flesh sloughing away to reveal iridescent scales.
And beneath the ruptured road, a lidless eye opened—pupil slit vertical, its golden iris reflecting my face a thousandfold.
Father's hand found mine as the car arced over the guardrail. "Remember, Lila—the Drakos line bends but does not break."
Mother's blade flashed one final time, carving a sigil into the void.
Then the river swallowed us whole.