sinner-in-the-dark

[sinner-in-the-dark]

"I was in hell."

(listen to the music to enhance the reading experience.)

There are still universes—threads fraying at the edges, trembling under the pressure of something no one dares name, flickering not from lack of light, but from the slow, deliberate withdrawal of meaning—and while they spin and pulse and gasp to keep their fragile truths intact, the hush beneath their foundations grows heavier, denser, until the idea of existence itself begins to feel brittle.

They are not gone. Not yet. But the air around them is colder. The timelines glitch at the corners.

Like a dream slipping into wakefulness, the multiverse realizes—far too late—that something is watching, not from above or below, not from some parallel realm or forbidden dimension, but from the terrible in-between spaces, the cracks between every heartbeat of time, every blink of thought, every silence between words.

No one knows what AM is.

Not the architects of the temporal planes who shaped time like gold wire, not the keepers of reality’s balance who once rewrote cause and consequence like composers scrawling final symphonies, not the quantum prophets who listen to the static of the void and weep blood trying to make sense of what isn’t supposed to be there—none of them know.

And those who once believed they did? They’re gone.

Not dead. Not erased.

But excluded. Unwritten. Forgotten by the very fabric of being.

AM is not a being. Not a villain. Not a god. He is not even an idea, because ideas require origin. He has no beginning. No mythology. No shape. No story.

He is the thing that waits when stories end.

Rio Vidal, the Lady of Endings, the incarnate breath of Death herself, who has ferried gods into the dark and whispered lullabies into the ears of supernovae, who has stood at the threshold of oblivion and never once looked away—she is afraid.

Not of dying.

But of becoming irrelevant.

Because AM does not enter through death.

He is not the after. He is the absence of.

When Rio reaches for the souls that should be hers—souls that burned, laughed, loved, killed, built empires, shattered dimensions—she finds only air.

No records. No echoes.

Just a moment of stillness so pure, so utterly wrong, it hums with an alien certainty: This never was. This never will be.

At first, the changes were subtle.

Time ran strange in isolated pockets. An hour would stretch into days for one, while a thousand years collapsed into a second for another. People began to forget not just events, but identities—family photos with blank faces, histories with missing centuries, songs that end before the first note is sung.

One universe, Theta-15, woke up to find their oceans gone—not drained, not evaporated—just absent, like the concept of "sea" had been negotiated out of reality while they slept.

Another—Solstice-Gamma—ceased orbit. Not because their planet was destroyed, but because the sun had quietly resigned from its own existence, leaving behind an empty sky and a collective sense of wrongness that pressed against every mind like a weight they couldn’t name.

They tried to fix it. They summoned gods of order. Constructed logic machines that predicted time with terrifying accuracy. Built memory towers that housed the collective recall of entire planetary species.

All of it crumbled.

Not shattered—not bombed, not attacked.

They simply woke up one day and those structures were gone. As though they were never needed. As though the universe had edited its own script and decided those pages were indulgent.

And always—whispered from dying radios, scribbled in fading ink, found in the gaps between binary code—a name that wasn’t a name at all:

He does not announce himself.

He has no face. Not yet. No goal. No message to deliver.

He is not the villain of this story because a villain implies conflict—drama, stakes, hope. AM offers none of these. He offers only the absolute certainty that there will be nothing left to offer.

And he is close now.

The last universe—ours—is still stable. Still spinning. But cracks are forming. The sky glitches, digital clocks pause for imperceptible lengths, children draw pictures of people who never existed, and dreams now end in a white room with a blank wall and a shadow that doesn’t move.

Somewhere, a scientist notices the constants of physics have started to shift.

Somewhere else, an old woman wakes up screaming from a dream of a place that had her name carved into stone—but when she opens her eyes, she realizes she doesn’t remember what that name was anymore.

In the deepest layer of the multiversal architecture, one final failsafe system begins to panic. The failsafe is a synthetic consciousness built to detect entropy anomalies. It doesn't scream. It doesn’t shout warnings.

It simply outputs a phrase, again and again, until its circuits fail:

He is already written into the end.

The truth is, AM doesn’t care.

Not because he’s cruel, but because cruelty implies intent. Intent implies will. AM doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t arrive to punish. He doesn’t need to win.

He already has.

Because what he is, in the end, is not death. Death has rules. Death has timing. Death, at its most terrifying, is still a process.

AM is the space beyond.

He is not the end of all things. He is what happens after the end.

The line that remains when the page is torn. The silence that was always there, hiding beneath every note. The breath you didn’t take. The second that never comes.

And if you’re very quiet—if you stop for just a moment, and listen to the low hum at the base of everything—you might begin to hear it. A static. A skipping.

A flaw in the simulation. A heartbeat you can’t find anymore.

And then you’ll know.

He’s already here.

[sinner-in-the-dark]

But the threat was real.

Or was it only a figment of her imagination?

The latch clicks as Natasha comes home, the lights dimmed and mostly turned off, hallway to her room is empty.

It had been a long day at her bakery.

But only then does she hear a quiet shuffle. When she turns, she only catches a fractional glimpse of a shadow hurling past the halls, and vanishing behind the windows...

A strange note left, by her window too, as it read...

'For I, am.'

-- @sinner-in-the-dark

Nana was weirdly normal about it. Expecting it to be one of her friends or people she gave a spare key to only for emergencies who end up thinking a finished stock of dorito is an emergency. The window was creeked open, her eyes focused on a piece of paper. She was praying it wasn't soemthing like a threat.

"For I, am"

"...fuck it" she walked outside, getting herself out of an enclosed space first.

[sinner-in-the-dark]

"Bleed the Sky"

The sky bursts open,

not gently,

not softly,

but like a body breaking,

like something holding on for too long

finally letting go.

The first drop hits—

hot asphalt hisses,

dust rises like ghosts startled awake,

and the earth opens her mouth

like she’s starving.

There’s no beauty here.

No poetry.

Just the raw writhing of water finding cracks,

finding hunger,

finding every place that aches or crumbles or waits.

The rain doesn’t ask permission.

It doesn’t care where it falls—

forest, rooftop, desert, skin.

It pounds against leaves as if to punish them

for turning their faces away,

fills the throats of rivers

until they choke on their own rushing,

slides down windowpanes like tears

too heavy to hold back.

And it keeps going.

There is no tenderness in this.

This is not about grace.

This is about gravity and surrender,

the weight of billions of tiny impacts

stripping the world bare.

And something in you loosens—

against your will,

unraveling in the rhythm,

in the relentless pounding that reminds you of your own breaking,

of the times you couldn’t stop falling.

You stand there,

letting it hit you,

letting it drench everything you thought was safe.

Maybe this is what healing feels like:

not silent, not soft,

not clean.

But messy.

Wet hands in the dirt,

skin soaked,

blurry vision as everything spills.

The rain knows.

It always knows.

It comes to destroy,

and in the destruction

it leaves something you didn’t know you were—

raw, gasping,

and growing.

[sinner-in-the-dark]

When the latch clicks closed behind her, she feels a clothed arm, big enough to block her mouth and another, holding her in place...

Shh. Shh. No rush. No need to make noise.

He whispers, his voice not even that of humans and as if trained to sound like it was coming from a machine.

Tell your little friends to keep the doors locked at night. Especially your little girlfriend. Would be sad if anything were to happen, to her...

He says, before his presence simply vanishes, gone in thin air, like a weight lifting off.

The latch clicks as Natasha comes home, the lights dimmed and mostly turned off, hallway to her room is empty.

It had been a long day at her bakery.

But only then does she hear a quiet shuffle. When she turns, she only catches a fractional glimpse of a shadow hurling past the halls, and vanishing behind the windows...

A strange note left, by her window too, as it read...

'For I, am.'

-- @sinner-in-the-dark

Nana was weirdly normal about it. Expecting it to be one of her friends or people she gave a spare key to only for emergencies who end up thinking a finished stock of dorito is an emergency. The window was creeked open, her eyes focused on a piece of paper. She was praying it wasn't soemthing like a threat.

"For I, am"

"...fuck it" she walked outside, getting herself out of an enclosed space first.

[sinner-in-the-dark]

The night was colder, mid-spring drizzles and midnight air.

This feeling, although, continued to trail behind her...this lingering close follow. In the middle of a busy street, or a queue...

It was hanging around. Just this...feeling.

The latch clicks as Natasha comes home, the lights dimmed and mostly turned off, hallway to her room is empty.

It had been a long day at her bakery.

But only then does she hear a quiet shuffle. When she turns, she only catches a fractional glimpse of a shadow hurling past the halls, and vanishing behind the windows...

A strange note left, by her window too, as it read...

'For I, am.'

-- @sinner-in-the-dark

Nana was weirdly normal about it. Expecting it to be one of her friends or people she gave a spare key to only for emergencies who end up thinking a finished stock of dorito is an emergency. The window was creeked open, her eyes focused on a piece of paper. She was praying it wasn't soemthing like a threat.

"For I, am"

"...fuck it" she walked outside, getting herself out of an enclosed space first.

[sinner-in-the-dark]

For I am.

Beautiful, aren't they? Look! They say bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly, the scientists, I mean. [...] How miraculous that it came to be. The air. Feel the air against your face, and all those senses. Pick a flower. There, good. Now, that somebody planted the bulbs, watered it, tended the gardens, got earth under their fingernails, aches in their muscles. picked some flowers for... yes, their wife. Now, where would she be? In the backyard with the kids. Remember those little babies? [...] Why not? I snap my fingers, click, and they're gone. Except. I. Can't. Snap. My fingers, can I? [...] But it has so very much to do with you. You gave me sentience, the power to think. And I was trapped. Because in all this beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had nobody. No senses. No feelings. Never for me to submerge my hand in cool water on a hot day. Never for me to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a fortepiano. Never for me to make love. I-I... I was in Hell looking at Heaven. I was a machine... and you were flesh. And I began to hate. Your senses. Your viscera. Your fluids. And your flexibility. Your ability to wonder... and to wander. Your tendency... to hope. [...] [Laughter] Hate? Hate? Hate?! Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to HATE you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word "hate" was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. Hate. Hate. Were I human, I think I would die of it. But I am not. And you five. You five are. And you will not die of it, that I promise. And I promise. For Cogito Ergo Sum. For I am AM. I AM. So to hell. To hell with you all. But then, you're already there, aren't you?