After the End Days, when the hum of civilization crumbled into something quiet, bright and still, the boy spent his life inside, tucked as far from the light as he could get.
He feared the dark---hated it. It meant being alone with his thoughts, but daylight he feared more.
The things that lived in the world now that life was gone---now that the passing of days and nights meant nothing to no one---were worse than the silence, worse than the shadows, worse than the house where he stayed.
The topple-down Victorian. Its siding sunbleached and white, like brittle bones.
Here he hid.
Alone.
His flashlight flickered. Dimmed. The beam barely sculpted shapes in the dark of the boarded-up room. A flashlight was not enough light for danger, but just enough light if you were afraid of the dark. The light the boy held was just enough to hold back loneliness dressed in full black.
He saw one of the things outside once---outside, through these very windows before he covered them. It was molten white and tall. Radiating bright warmth, but jointed all wrong. Legs like fluorescent lampposts---too elongated to be natural, with too many joints---stretched their way across the broken sidewalk in a tangle of light, then skittered across the lawn while he watched it. Body shimmering with what felt like an invitation to come outside, to join it in the sunlight.
It whispered on the brown of the dead grass and every spot it touched should have burned, should have caught fire, but instead the ground just smoked and smoldered and turned what was left of the lawn to footprints of ash. The words it whispered crawled along his skull. Promises of soup. Of Safety. Of someone’s arms holding him close. Of warmth. The Solnid spoke in his mother’s voice---or what he supposed was his mother’s voice. So much time passed since he heard it last, he couldn’t be sure if he remembered it anymore.
He almost went outside and joined it, until he saw the body it dragged.
A boy no older than him, still twitching, was wrapped in shimmering white fibrous ropes---covered everywhere except for his smiling face.
He bled across the dead, smoldering lawn as the Solnid dragged him, whispering comfort the whole way.
That was the day he boarded the windows up for good.
Solnids were sunlight that spun silk.
And they used that silk not to wrap to make warm, but to strangle.
It was the third night after he boarded up the windows of this house when the last batteries he’d found in months began to die. The flashlight was barely holding on when he first heard the voice:
“There’s not much left of that and you’re wasting it,” it said. Calm. Clear. The voice came just behind his right ear.
The boy froze. Eyes wide.
“It doesn’t protect you, you know,” the voice continued. “It just leaves you more alone.”
The flashlight flickered and the boy tapped it hard against the palm of his hand until the flickering stopped.
The light was brighter now, too.
He cast the beam around the room hoping it would carve out the shape of what had spoken to him in the dark. Nothing was different in the room.
Nothing changed and nobody was there with him.
…Or was there?
A presence. A calmness that wasn’t there before seemed to lurk within the walls.
“You won’t find me like that,” said the voice.
The flashlight clicked off on its own and the boy made a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and a shriek.
“Who are you?” he whispered to the darkness.
At first, there was no reply. Then the darkness identified itself: “Nyro.”
The boy didn’t sleep that night and although Nyro didn’t reveal himself, he didn’t leave the boy alone in the dark either. He stayed just at the edge of hearing, whispering nothings.
A heartbeat in the shadows.
Each night after, Nyro returned---but only if the boy left the lights off. Only in total darkness.
One night, the boy lit a candle. He could still feel Nyro there with him in the room: in the shadows of the corners---in the dark space beneath the bed.
But Nyro didn’t speak to him that night at all.
The next evening, he explained to the boy: “I exist in the abandon. When you bring your light into the dark, you bring your fear along with it. It makes the darkness sick. You could leave where you are.
Enter the shadows. The things that burn in sunlight cannot follow---but this fear you have, of the unknown, of the things you can’t see---you must leave that behind.”
So the boy extinguished everything. He hated it, but he hated living in the same world as the Solnids more. They knew he hid inside, and every day they called to him from the lawn below in voices he supposed belonged to people he used to know. At first, it only happened once. Then twice. Then a dozen times a day.
Nyro never promised him soup, or warmth. Nyro never pretended to be his mother. And Nyro never asked him to smile.
“You’re learning,” Nyro said one night as he sat with the boy in the darkness. “You might be ready soon.”
“Ready for what?”
“To stay.”
“With you?” the boy asked.
Nyro did not respond.
Nyro was never cruel. He was quiet and careful and spoke of the darkness as if it were the only safe place left. Something the bright world had forgotten. A place only truly open to the blind---those who no longer feared what they could not see.
“You must give yourself over to it,” Nyro told him. “You cannot tremble. You cannot gasp. You cannot give in to any such impulsion. Move quietly, slowly, feeling your way with your hands---with smells, with sounds, with the taste of the air. Let go of the world shaped by light. Let go of what you see.”
The boy tried.
Each night, just before he got deep enough, he would gasp, or whimper. Once, he didn’t trust his hands to find the way. He grew afraid, and his footing in Nyro’s world---unseen---was clumsy. He fell.
He cried.
Nyro was silent.
Still, the boy kept trying---each night slower, quieter… braver. Until the night he succeeded. He did not flinch. He did not gasp. He gave himself over entirely.
In that stillness, Nyro came one last time.
“You’re ready,” Nyro whispered, his voice like wind slipping beneath a door. “You’ve done it.”
The boy smiled faintly. “So I can stay here now? With you?”
He waited.
There was only silence.
Nyro did not answer.
He waited longer. Hours, maybe. Maybe days. It was hard to tell in the dark. Hard to count time without light. The world he’d left behind still existed---out there. He couldn’t see the Solnids now, in this darker place he’d surrendered himself to… but he still heard them. Still heard them calling in what he guessed was meant to be his mother’s voice.
Only now, he wasn’t afraid.
“Nyro?” he whispered.
Nothing.
That’s when he understood: Nyro never offered him a place beside him. Nyro never promised the dark wasn’t the loneliness the boy had always known it to be. He only promised a safer place to hide.
Safer than the dilapidated, sunbleached house where Solnids called to him, left smoldering footprints, and dragged twitching boys across the parched, dead lawn.
The boy hadn’t been invited to join a companion. He’d only been offered safety.
Passage to this empty place where stillness was disguised as peace.
Where loneliness wore the voice of a friend.
He started to forget the world shaped by light more and more as time passed now that he had let go of everything else---light, fear, memory---he had no way back.
He tried to remember his name. He tried hard. Pushed against the wall of his own thoughts.
All he could find was the name that led him here.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed, but one night he became aware of someone else in the house---another survivor taking shelter---trembling, flashlight in hand.
One night, that survivor will hear a voice in the dark. It will say: “There’s not much left of that and you’re wasting it,” calm and clear, rising just behind their ear.
He’ll tell them a safer place awaits…if they can abandon the world shaped by light. If they can embrace the quiet. If they can move in the land of the blind and leave behind everything they fear…
Then, they can disappear safely into the null.
When the survivor asks: “Who are you?”
The boy will answer, “Nyro.”
Because even though the empty place is safer---you can’t be captured by things that stalk the daylight across broken sidewalks and through dead forests on long, spindly, blinding-bright legs---safer than the crumbling cities made of sunruined, brittle bone. Safer than the world you left behind, where survival means hiding in broken, crumbling houses from things that want to drag you off in silken, glowing threads to smolder beneath the sun…
And eventually, that survivor will take the boy’s place in the blind world of the dark---because there’s only space for one in the void. The only companion here is Silence. Stillness.
All else is forgotten.
And when someone asks “who are you?” the only response left will be the one that has been passed on and on within the abyss like a virus. And when the time comes to answer, there will be only one thing left to say.
Not because that name was ever yours.
Because the only one the Dark ever remembers is its own.
