The first scream cut through the rain like a torn siren.

Leila didn’t look back. She jumped the gap between rooftops, boots slipping on wet stone, and landed hard enough to rattle her teeth. Beside her, Omar crashed down with a grunt, clutching the leather satchel to his chest like it was a newborn.

“Keep moving!” Leila shouted over the storm. “He’s right behind us!”

Behind them, thunder rolled across the city of Athar, swallowing the echo of footsteps, sirens, and the distant chant of Friday-night prayers. The old quarter sprawled beneath them, a maze of domes, minarets, and alleys that had swallowed empires and spat out ghosts.

Tonight, it had spit out something worse.

Something they had woken up.

---

Six Hours Earlier

The mission had sounded simple, almost noble.

Recover the Oration of Khayyam—a lost speech carved into the stone walls beneath the city, rumored to tell the true history of Athar before the rulers rewrote it. The government called it “Operation Peroration”—a discreet historical retrieval, buried below street level, above top secret.

“You go down, scan, record, get out,” their handler, Rana, had said in the briefing room. “No excavation, no touching, no theatrics. This is about history, not heroism.”

Leila, once a professor of antiquities before politics turned her field into a battlefield, had stared at the flickering hologram of the old tunnels.

“This inscription… it’s under District Twelve?” she’d asked.

“Under the oldest part of it,” Rana confirmed. “The city built over a necropolis. Then a fortress. Then a synagogue. Then a mosque. Then a subway line that never opened.”

“As if no one ever heard of bad omens,” Omar muttered.

Leila’s team was small, surgical:

• Leila – historian and field lead, sharp-eyed and stubborn.
• Omar – tech specialist, drone operator, sarcastic encyclopedia.
• Yusuf – ex-military, silent, always scanning the shadows.
• Samira – linguist and cryptographer, soft-spoken but the first to grab a crowbar if needed.

The elevator dropped them from an abandoned metro station into the dark underbelly of the city, where power cables hummed like trapped bees and old stone sweated history.

The deeper they went, the older things felt.

Walls shifted from concrete to brick, from brick to blackened stone. The air cooled. The thin smell of rust gave way to something older: dust, incense, and the faint scent of salt, as if the sea had once flowed here and never fully left.

“We’re below sea level,” Omar said, checking his tablet maps. “If this floods, we’re done.”

“Comforting,” Samira replied.

They reached a vaulted chamber at the end of a collapsed corridor. Their lanterns painted the room in harsh arcs of light: massive pillars, cracked but standing; a raised dais; and a long, curved wall covered in carved text.

Leila stepped forward, breath caught in her throat. The script wasn’t one language. It was three.

Ancient Aramaic. Old Arabic. And something older between them, like a spine of glyphs that refused translation.

“The Oration…” she whispered. “It’s real.”

Samira shot photos, her tablet stitching them into a composite for analysis. “The central script is… odd,” she said. “It looks like instructions. Or… warnings.”

“Read later,” Yusuf said flatly, sweeping his flashlight across the ceiling. “We don’t have all night.”

The far wall caught Leila’s eye. Unlike the rest of the room, it wasn’t carved. It was sealed. Smooth black stone fit so tightly she couldn’t slip a fingernail between the slabs. In the middle, there was a faint outline of a shape—a circle with a vertical slit, like an eye that had been stitched shut.

“Scan that too,” Leila said.

While Samira and Omar worked, the storm started above—first as a distant murmur, then as a slow, rhythmic thudding that made dust fall from the ceiling in soft, gray flurries.

“The city’s getting hammered,” Omar said. “We should wrap this up before the tunnels flood.”

Then Samira froze.

“Leila?” she whispered. “You need to see this.”

On her tablet, the glyphs glowed, reconstructed and enhanced. The translation wasn’t perfect, but it was clear enough to chill the room.

Let no blood be spilled before the Wall of Listening.

Let no blade be drawn and no strike be cast,

For what hears an attack must answer it.

Born of those who drowned and burned,

He turns to water when harmed,

And takes the attackers into himself,

Until their bodies forget they were ever separate.

“Wall of Listening…” Samira said, voice barely audible. “That’s this chamber. That sealed wall.”

Yusuf shifted his rifle uneasily. “So we don’t attack anything while we’re here. Easy.”

Leila swallowed. “Let’s not test the superstition. We’re here to observe, not interfere. We get our scans and go.”

That was when they heard the first drip.

---

At first, it was just water.

A leak from above, they assumed. Droplets fell from the far end of the ceiling into a shallow stone basin near the sealed wall. Each drip echoed a little too loud, a little too slow, like time was stretching around the sound.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Samira frowned. “…That basin is dry. Where is the water going?”

The lantern beams converged. The droplets hit the basin and vanished, absorbed instantly, leaving no trace of wetness. The floor around it was bone-dry.

“Thermal,” Leila said.

Omar lifted his tablet, flicked filters. His eyes widened.

“It’s… warm,” he whispered. “The basin’s as warm as a human body.”

The wall trembled.

Just a shiver, like stone exhaling. Hair rose along Leila’s arms.

“Pack it up,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “We’ve got enough—”

The sound came again, from above them.

Not a drip this time.

A slow, viscous sluicing.

Leila turned her light upward.

Something dark and thick was seeping through the cracks in the ceiling, flowing along the stones with the slow deliberation of oil in zero gravity. It clung to the rock in ropes and sheets, ignoring gravity until it chose to fall.

A glob of it dropped to the floor with a wet whump beside Yusuf’s boot.

It rippled. Then rose.

Not ugly.

That was the first thing that made Leila’s mind recoil: this… thing was not the grotesque monster she’d have expected. It flowed upward into the rough outline of a man—tall, nearly two meters, shoulders squared, posture almost elegant. The liquid was dark—somewhere between ink and mercury—its surface reflecting their lantern beams in soft, shifting highlights.

Where the face should be, features suggested themselves: a mouth, cheekbones, eyes, but as if sketched in smoke on water, never fully fixed.

It was human-shaped.

Human-sized.

And yet impossibly, profoundly wrong.

It took a step forward, and the floor didn’t splash beneath it; it simply accepted its weight like a memory accepting a returning thought.

Omar whispered, “What the—”

Yusuf’s training took over.

His rifle flashed up.

“Don’t—” Samira started.

He fired.

The gunshot exploded in the confined space, deafening. The bullet struck center mass—and vanished. There was no spray, no impact, just a momentary distortion in the creature’s body, like a pebble dropped into a pond.

The creature paused.

Then it changed.

Its entire form loosened, edges blurring. Smooth surfaces broke into turbulent waves. Its “face” melted, features dissolving.

It was turning into liquid.

“Back!” Leila shouted. “Fall back! Don’t attack it!”

But Yusuf already had his finger on the trigger again.

“Yusuf!” she screamed.

He fired twice more.

The creature collapsed—not falling, but spilling—forward at them, its upper body dissolving into a black tidal surge. It hit Yusuf’s legs first.

He didn’t get a chance to scream.

The liquid climbed him like living tar. It didn’t splash; it climbed. It flowed up his boots, over his thighs, around his waist, tens of thousands of tiny black currents threading under his clothes, between his fingers, over his face.

Leila lunged forward, grabbing his arm.

“Yusuf! Take my hand! Take—”

His eyes locked on hers for a heartbeat. They were wild, terrified—and then something else slid behind them.

The blackness slipped under his eyelids.

His pupils dilated until his eyes were almost completely dark.

His scream died mid-breath.

Leila yanked her hand back with a cry. The skin on Yusuf’s forearm rippled—no, not the skin—the thing inside him. Whatever it was had stopped being around him and had become within him.

His veins darkened, spiderwebbing up his neck.

He straightened abruptly, like a puppet being pulled upright by invisible strings.

“Yusuf?” Omar whispered.

The thing wearing Yusuf’s skin turned its head slowly.

Not ugly, Leila’s mind repeated numbly.

His face was still his face.

Just… wrong.

His eyes were bottomless now, reflecting their lantern light but not returning it. His mouth smiled, but the muscles didn’t quite line up with the expression.

And all the while, his body twitched in tiny, involuntary tremors, as if what was inside him was still adjusting to its new shape.

“He’s—he’s still there,” Samira choked out. “He has to be—”

Yusuf took a step forward, the tendons in his neck jerking.

“What hears an attack must answer it,” Samira whispered, the text from the wall burning through her thoughts. “It turns to water when harmed… takes the attackers into itself…”

“Don’t shoot,” Leila told Omar through clenched teeth. “Don’t touch him. Don’t attack it again. We run. Now.”

As if the thing inside Yusuf had heard her—and maybe it had—his head cocked in eerie curiosity.

Then it moved.

Fast.

---

They fled.

For a while, fear was faster.

The tunnels were a blur of stone and shadow. Lights flashed, boots pounded, breaths tore ragged in their throats. Behind them, Yusuf’s voice called after them, distorted and echoing weirdly in the narrow corridors.

“Leila—stop—”

It sounded like three voices speaking at once: Yusuf’s, something deeper, and something faint, like a memory of a voice.

“Don’t listen,” Leila panted. “Omar, route us up. Find a way to the surface.”

“I’m trying!” he snapped, tablet bobbing in his hand as he ran. “Half of these passages weren’t on any blueprint. It’s like someone redrew the map after an earthquake.”

“Can we trap it?” Samira gasped. “If we can’t kill it, can we trap it?”

“It turns to liquid when attacked,” Leila said. “It embodies whoever hurts it. How do you trap something that can flow through cracks and wear people like clothes?”

“That inscription…” Samira said, breathless. “It called this place the Wall of Listening. Maybe there was another part—about how they bound it.”

“And we didn’t read that far.” Omar cursed. “Perfect.”

Behind them, something splashed, even though there was no water.

“Left!” Omar shouted, and they plunged down a narrower tunnel lined with rusted pipes. The air changed—damper, colder. The sound of the storm grew louder above.

“We’re under District Nine,” Omar huffed. “If we keep going, we hit the old aqueduct.”

“An aqueduct?” Leila said. “As in water?”

“As in a lot of it.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what we need,” she said.

“Leila, it turns into liquid,” Samira stammered. “Why would we—”

“Because it’s not water,” Leila said. “It’s something else. Something that mimics it. What if we can drown it in the real thing? Dilute it, disperse it, break its shape.”

“And then what?” Omar asked.

“Then we trap it in the city’s pipes,” she said. “Let it stay history instead of walking through it.”

Omar winced. “That is terrifying and brilliant. I’m in.”

They burst into a cylindrical chamber lined with ancient stone, the air humming with the whisper of moving water. Below a grated walkway, a dark river rushed through a tunnel—the old aqueduct, still feeding the city’s reservoirs.

“This connects to the whole grid,” Omar said. “Treatment plants, storage tanks, towers…”

“Good,” Leila said. “If we do this, we do it once.”

“Assuming we live long enough to try,” Samira breathed.

Footsteps echoed behind them, too heavy and too slow to be Yusuf’s normal stride.

They turned.

He stood at the entrance to the chamber, silhouetted by their lantern beams.

Not running.

He didn’t need to.

He took one step forward, and blackness leaked out of the hems of his clothes, pattering onto the floor like ink rain. It pulled itself back toward him after every drop, stretching into thin tendrils that rejoined his body.

“He’s not… he’s not fully solid,” Omar whispered. “He’s holding himself together.”

“Yusuf,” Leila said quietly, heart pounding. “If you’re still in there… if you can hear me… fight it. Don’t let it use you.”

A flicker crossed his face.

For a second, it was completely, painfully him.

“Leila…” he croaked, voice torn between layers. “It’s… inside… so cold…”

Then the thing inside tightened its grip.

The black bled farther into his eyes, until his irises were gone.

Leila forced herself not to step back.

“I’m not going to attack you,” she said. “We’re done fighting you. We just want to leave.”

The thing smiled with his mouth, tilting his head in a disturbingly curious angle, as if considering an insect.

When it spoke, its voice was layered, distorted, but carrying something like… amusement.

“You… woke me,” it said. “You spoke… before my wall. Fired metal… into my flesh. You are already inside me. Your sound, your heat, your fear. You called to me.”

“We didn’t know,” Samira said, voice shaking. “We should never have come.”

The thing stepped closer. “Every age does,” it said. “You build on bones. Hide your truths. Then dig for them again. You never remember why you buried them.”

Leila’s mind raced.

“We didn’t bury you,” she said. “Our ancestors did. They warned us not to attack. They sealed you away.”

“Yes,” the thing mused, almost fondly. “They learned. After I learned them.”

It smiled wider.

“I like being people. You make such strong shapes for me… to wear.”

Samira gagged. Omar swore under his breath.

Leila’s hand tightened around the small device in her pocket—the emergency override for the aqueduct gate locks, patched into the system by Omar ten minutes ago while running.

“How do we stop this?” she asked. “How did they bind you before?”

The thing paused.

For a moment, its shape flickered. Shadows rippled under Yusuf’s skin, like something shrugging inside him.

“They didn’t stop me,” it said finally. “They made a bargain. They built me a city.”

Leila’s blood ran cold.

“What?”

“Their leaders came,” it said. “Priests, generals, kings. They had seen what it meant to swing a sword at me. So they made a deal. They would feed me what the city could spare—those it burned, those it drowned, those it discarded. I would wear them… slowly. Quietly. I would not spill over. I would not break walls.”

Samira covered her mouth.

“A… sacrifice pact,” she whispered.

“A containment pact,” the thing corrected, almost gently. “Cities are not built on stone. They are built on what they are willing to lose.”

Leila felt sick.

“And when they stopped feeding you?” she asked.

The thing’s eyes darkened.

“They forgot their promises,” it said softly. “They called me a myth. They sealed me away. But a myth is just a debt with a pretty name.”

It stepped fully into the chamber now, boots ringing on the metal grating above the rushing water.

“Tonight,” it said, “the wall cracked. Sound came. Blood came. You attacked. The debt is open again.”

Leila swallowed hard.

“Then make another deal—with me,” she said quietly.

Omar’s head snapped toward her. “Leila—”

“Trust me,” she murmured without looking back.

The thing tilted its head, amused. “I’m listening.”

“You want to live in this city?” Leila said. “You like wearing people? Fine. But not us. Not tonight. Not anymore. We woke you; we disturbed the bargain; let us be the ones to fix it.”

“And why,” it asked calmly, “would I not just take you and walk to the surface?”

“Because you’re not like us,” she said. “You’re older. Smarter. You know what happens when a monster walks through a modern city. Phones. Cameras. Fire. Chemicals. Tanks. Weapons that don’t care if you turn to liquid or stone. Maybe you win. Maybe you drown the city. But it becomes a war. You’re hunted. You’re studied. You become… contained. For real.”

The thing’s gaze sharpened.

“You’re dangerous,” Leila said. “But the world has gotten very good at killing dangerous things. I don’t think you want that. I think you want what you had before: quiet. Shadows. History.”

She gestured to the aqueduct beneath them.

“Let me give you that,” she said. “Let us go. In return, we bury your truth in the pipes and reservoirs instead of stone. The city will drink you every day and never know. You can live in every tap, every rusted pipe, every flood channel. Everywhere and nowhere. The perfect prison. The perfect home.”

Samira stared at her like she’d lost her mind.

Omar whispered, “This is your plan?”

“It likes being everywhere,” Leila murmured. “It likes being a part of people. Let’s make it so big it can never fully pull itself together again.”

The thing considered her.

She could feel it thinking—not with eyes or a human brain, but with currents and tides. It looked down through the grating at the rushing water. When it spoke, its voice was almost hungry.

“Everywhere…” it said thoughtfully. “In everyone…”

“It’s not freedom,” Leila said. “It’s dispersion. You’ll feel everything, but never be one thing. In exchange, you don’t kill us. You don’t come to the surface. You stay diluted. A whisper instead of a scream.”

The thing smiled slowly.

“You bargain like the old kings,” it said.

Then it shrugged, and the motion rippled through Yusuf’s body like a wave.

“Very well,” it said. “But deals are made with blood.”

Leila nodded once, heart hammering.

“I know,” she said. “And we already spilled some.”

---

She moved faster than Omar thought she ever had.

In a single motion, she pulled the override device from her pocket and slammed her hand down on the red lever. The aqueduct gate alarms shrieked through the chamber—then the flow beneath them roared.

Massive sluice gates deeper in the system opened at once, redirecting thousands of liters of storm-swollen water through this section of the grid. The current exploded upward, spraying foam through gaps in the grating.

The thing wearing Yusuf’s body staggered.

“What are you doing?” Omar yelled over the roar.

“Fulfilling the deal,” Leila shouted. “On our terms!”

The surge was so strong it vibrated the entire walkway. Bolts screamed in protest. Rust showered down.

The thing tried to take a step back—but Leila lunged forward and grabbed Yusuf’s hand.

For an instant, she felt Yusuf, truly him, beneath her fingers—calloused skin, the faint tremor of a man who’d spent too long on battlefields.

Then the creature inside reacted.

Blackness rushed up his arm, over her hand, cold as submerged steel.

It flowed across her skin, searching for a way in—eyes, mouth, wounds. For a second, she felt it pressing against her pores like a rising tide.

She didn’t let go.

“You wanted everywhere,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Take it.”

Yusuf’s boots slipped on the shaking grating. The walkway buckled.

The three of them went down together—Yusuf’s body, Leila’s weight, and the thing inside him—all crashing through the old metal as it finally tore free.

The water swallowed them whole.

---

Cold.

Impact.

Darkness.

The current slammed Leila against stone, ripped the air from her lungs, spun her end over end. Something dark and thick coiled around her, trying to force itself into her mouth, her nose, her ears.

She clamped everything shut and reached for the only solid thing she could feel: Yusuf.

Her hands found his vest, fingers locking into straps.

The creature inside him exploded outward.

Not because of her.

Because of the water.

The sheer volume and speed of it tore through its cohesion, shredding its liquid body into thousands of filaments. It tried to surge together, but every time it thickened, the current ripped it apart again, dragging pieces downstream—toward the treatment plants, the towers, the endless maze of pipes feeding the city.

Leila felt some of it trying to anchor in her veins, to make her a vessel—but the massive water flow yanked it away, thinning it, diluting it faster than it could bind.

It wasn’t dying.

It was being scattered.

Everywhere.

She held her breath until her lungs felt like they were filled with fire, until black spots burst in her vision, until instinct screamed at her to inhale liquid.

Hands found her—human hands, strong and desperate.

She was yanked upward, through churning foam, through a jagged gap, onto another section of the grating.

She coughed up half the aqueduct, choking and clawing at the air.

Samira knelt over her, sobbing with relief.

Omar dragged Yusuf’s limp body beside them, rolling him onto his side.

“Breathe!” Omar shouted. “Come on, man, breathe!”

Yusuf convulsed, gagged, and vomited out a mouthful of thick, black sludge that hit the floor, quivered, and then thinned into dirty water, running toward the drain.

His eyes fluttered open.

They were brown again.

“Did we…” he croaked.

Leila leaned over him, soaked, shaking, and grinning through tears.

“We drowned a myth in the plumbing,” she said hoarsely. “Yeah. We did.”

---

Later

Emergency crews never knew the whole story.

They blamed the tunnel collapse on the storm, the damaged grating on old corrosion, the strange contamination spikes in the water systems on “a minor chemical incident.”

The city boiled and filtered the water aggressively for weeks. People complained about the taste. Some claimed they had strange dreams—of standing at the bottom of the sea, of walls that listened, of a voice like rushing water whispering in their ears.

The reports were logged, dismissed, forgotten.

Operation Peroration’s official file said:

Objective partial: Oration not fully captured. Team survived with minor injuries. Structural instability in tunnels renders further exploration inadvisable.

Unofficially, in her private notes, Leila wrote:

The Oration was never just a speech. It was a contract. We found the monster they bound beneath this city.

We didn’t kill him.

We gave him a larger prison.

Sometimes, late at night, when the taps in her apartment rattled and gurgled before running clear, Leila would pause and listen.

In the quiet hiss of the water, she could almost hear it.

A faint, amused voice, spread across a thousand kilometers of pipe and pressure.

Cities are not built on stone.

When the sound came, she always answered the same way, half warning, half prayer:

“Stay where you are.”

And somewhere in the dark maze beneath the streets, in every tank and tower and flooded tunnel, a not-quite-ugly, human-sized thing that could turn to liquid when attacked drifted in microscopic pieces, unable to fully gather, feeling the city’s pulse in every drop.

Waiting.

Listening.

Remembering that once, long ago, someone had dared to attack it.

And that the debt was never really paid.

Only… postponed.

Epilogue – The First Peroration

Centuries before Leila was born, before the tunnels were mapped or the citadel took its final shape, the city had already learned to be afraid of water.

It began with a year people later called The Drowning of Names.

The rains came early that winter and never really stopped. The river swelled, smashed its banks, and tore through the lower quarters in a single night. Houses folded like paper. Lanterns went out one by one, swallowed by black water. Families woke up as the floor under them simply vanished.

For three days, the old city screamed.

When the river finally shrank back into its bed, it left behind a carpet of silt, broken wood, and bodies tangled in fishing nets, laundry lines, and shattered carts. The smell of rot spread faster than any official decree.

The ruler at the time, Titus Demetrius, ordered mass burials. Men with covered faces walked through the wreckage with long hooks and ropes, dragging the dead to pits outside the walls. Names blurred. Families were merged or erased entirely. It was faster that way. Cleaner.

But the bodies didn’t stay buried.

Within weeks, people started whispering.

Not about ghosts.

About “water”.

Laundry women at the river claimed the current sometimes turned thick and dark, clinging to their arms, trying to pull them in. A child fetching water swore the bucket came up already full, though he hadn’t lowered it all the way—and for a moment the surface looked like an eye, closing as he screamed and dropped it.

A guard at the harbor watched a capsized boat drift in, empty, and saw the sea itself stand up beside it in the vague shape of a man before collapsing back into the waves.

The stories reached Titus Demetrius.

Like most rulers, he did not believe them at first.

Like all rulers who want to stay alive, he sent someone else to check.

Priests and scholars went to the river with incense and recitations. Soldiers went with spears. They came back pale and tight-lipped, or didn’t come back at all. Those who did spoke carefully, as if the air might overhear.

“The current… rises,” one old priest whispered, kneeling before Titus in the audience hall. “It listens. It remembers the dead we fed it. It wants more.”

Titus ordered the usual response to fear: control.

The first attempt was force.

Forty of his best soldiers, armored and blessed, marched to the riverside with chains weighted by stone idols and crates of burning pitch. They were to “purify” the water, as if it were an enemy army.

The city heard the screaming that night.

The next morning, their armor washed back alone.

After that, power shifted from the barracks to the council chamber. If swords failed, then deals must be made.

Titus met in secret with three kinds of men: a judge, a general, and the high priest whose hands never stopped shaking now. They descended together beneath the citadel to the lowest chamber, where the rock still smelled faintly of sea-salt, and where the first version of the Listening Wall had been carved—blank and waiting.

They brought with them no soldiers, no torches beyond what they could hold in bare hands, and no priests chanting loudly enough to annoy a god. The stories had been clear about one thing:

Do not shout at the water.

Listen.

So they did.

Standing in the damp blackness beneath the city, the four men spoke not to the heavens, but to the dark.

“We know you are there,” Titus said, voice steady despite the cold trickling behind his ribs. “You were not here before this winter.”

The air responded with a soft, wet sound, like a drop falling into a deep well.

“You are made of what we lost,” he continued. “Of those who drowned. Of our dead. Of what we threw away because we had no room to grieve it properly.”

The drip became a trickle.

The trickle became a slow, thick flow.

From the cracks in the stone floor, liquid darkness emerged, pulling itself together with obscene elegance, forming into a human shape half glimpsed in the dim torchlight.

Not ugly.

Just wrong.

The general stepped back, hand twitching toward his sword.

The priest seized his wrist before he could draw it.

“No attacks,” he hissed. “Not here.”

The thing watched them.

Its face was only a suggestion—forehead, cheeks, the hollow where a mouth should be—but its attention was as sharp as a knife.

“You notice quickly,” it said, voice like many streams poured into one channel. “Most of your kind take longer to admit something new exists.”

“We don’t want you here,” the general growled.

The thing tilted its head, amused. “You brought me here. You poured me in pieces into ground and river and sea. You burned and drowned and abandoned. I am that forgetting, standing up.”

The judge, who had remained silent until now, cleared his throat.

“If you are made from what we discarded,” he said carefully, “then you are also made from our crimes.”

The thing smiled with no lips.

“Yes,” it said.

Titus swallowed.

“Can you be reasoned with?” he asked.

It considered this.

“I can be… fed,” it said.

That was when the real negotiations started.

The ruler proposed floodgates of stone and bronze, shrines, sacrifices of animals. The thing did not care about architecture or livestock. It wanted something else.

It wanted continuity.

“A city is a river with walls,” it said. “People flow through. Power flows through. You dam some, divert some, drown some. Give me what you already throw away. Those you burn, those you drown, those you fear too much to try in the daylight. Feed them to me, and I will not rise. I will eat quietly. I will wear them slowly. Your streets will stay dry.”

The judge objected. “You are asking us to—”

“I am observing,” it interrupted. “You already do these things. The difference is whether your forgotten ones lie still… or learn to stand up.”

The priest’s hands shook harder.

The general stared at the thing as he might an enemy army he secretly knew he could not beat.

Titus listened.

He thought of flooded streets and washed-away warehouses, of panicked merchants and muttering soldiers, of the way fear eroded loyalty faster than any river eroded stone. He imagined telling the people that the city’s dead had risen as water, and that their only hope was to repent.

He imagined the riots.

In the end, he did what rulers of fragile cities had done for thousands of years.

He chose secrecy over righteousness.

“What guarantees do we have?” he asked quietly. “That you will not break the walls anyway?”

“You don’t,” it said. “But you will have patterns. When you feed me, I sleep. When you starve me, I remember.”

The priest whispered, “We could try to bind it with holy names—”

The thing laughed, a sound like bubbling mud.

“You already bound me,” it said. “With bodies.”

The judge looked at Titus.

“You know what this means,” he said. “We would be building our safety on the disappearance of those we choose. Criminals. Enemies. Inconvenient witnesses. The poor.”

Titus held the creature’s gaze.

“We already do,” he said. “This way, at least, we know where they go.”

He stepped forward until his sandals touched the edge of the slick black pool at its feet.

“Very well,” he said. “Here is my offer. We make you part of the city.”

He pointed toward the tunnel where they had descended.

“We will dig you channels. Cisterns. Quiet places. We will mark this wall with warnings so our descendants do not attack you in ignorance. In return, you will not break the surface. You will not flood our streets. You will only take those we send you.”

The thing watched him, expression unreadable.

“You would make a pact with what you fear,” it said.

“That is what power is,” Titus Demetrius replied.

Silence.

Then the shadow extended an arm—an illusion of a hand, formed from that same shifting darkness.

Titus hesitated only a heartbeat before reaching out.

For an instant, the liquid climbed his wrist like ice-cold smoke. He felt it tasting his pulse, his memories, the weight of decisions he had made and would make.

Then it sank away, back into the pool.

“A bargain, then,” it said. “You feed me what the city can spare. I stay under your feet. If your children forget… I will remind them.”

The Peroration—the carved text Leila would one day read fragments of—was chiseled in the weeks that followed.

Part history.

Part warning.

Part contract.

It spoke of the Listening Wall, of the one who “turns to water when harmed,” of the demand that no blade be drawn before the stone. It encoded in three languages the terms of a deal no one wanted to admit existed, wrapped in enough metaphor to pass as theology rather than policy.

Over generations, the details blurred.

Titus Demetrius died.

The judge, the general, and the priest were buried in proper graves, their names inscribed in public stone. The ones they had quietly condemned to the water never were.

Some rulers honored the pact precisely.

Some abused it.

Some doubted it and tried to starve the darkness, pretending the flood years were just weather and coincidence.

Eventually, like all difficult truths, the pact was pushed into the basement of memory, under piles of newer stories, then bricked up entirely.

Until someone, centuries later, broke the silence with a gunshot in front of the Listening Wall.

And the dark man remembered a hand extended long ago, and a city that had once promised:

We will feed you what we can bear to lose.

This time, though, the city didn’t feed him to keep him below.

Leila and her team fed him to something worse for him and better for everyone else:

A thousand pipes, a hundred cisterns, a river, and a sea—

So that the old pact became something new:

Not one ruler talking to a monster, but an entire city carrying him in its veins, never quite letting him gather again.