Prologue

"I've been waiting for you."

In a room barely with any light, I laid on the cold floor, unable to move anything besides my head. When I first woke up, the rope I felt digging into my skin told me that both my arms and legs had been tied—extremely securely as if I were a prized prey they had anticipated to catch. Unable to register any faces or shapes, I laid there motionlessly in pitch dark, anxiously trying to remember the events before my capture. Even the voice that usually clouded my head was silent. The room remained in an eerie silence until a diabolical broke it.

"I have waited for centuries to pass until you return to us. And now that you are finally here before us, our former power will return as well."

The sound of his voice rang through the room as he finished speaking, like how footsteps echo in abandoned buildings. Before I could think about what I had just heard, harsh, blinding lights flicked open immediately. Instinctively, my eyelids shut and I was paralyzed in shock. In the back of my head, I could feel a headache from what I suspected to have been someone knocking me out.

Once my eyes opened, I saw nothing—no one, no furniture, not even a window. White walls that had been painted a shade of the colour so bright and pure encompassed me. I turned my head—and that is when I saw them.

Human bodies in front of me, yet the people sitting behind the table were nothing like my own blood and flesh. All around me were these hollow bodies, and I was placed on the end of a long dining table.

"You have escaped us long enough, even your mother tried to stop us. But now, the time has arisen and there will be nobody to stop us."

With that, I knew that this would be the end of me as I knew it and that in a few minutes, I would no longer be in control of my body…