Fear.
An intense, primal emotion born from human instinct when faced with "danger."
It might begin as direct sensory input, then extend through imagination and memory into the subjective realm of the mind.
What did Terry William see—or rather, feel?
It was a cold, ancient pressure, filled with pure malice.
Every strand of air around him seemed to turn into solid blocks of lead, pressing down on every inch of his skin.
It did not come from the thunder rumbling at the edge of the sky, nor was it the bone-deep chill of the falling rain.
It came with the rising and falling Wolf Howl and the swaying mane—a darker, deeper terror.
"Total annihilation." The alarm in his heart, tied to survival and the struggle to live, had already been pulled to the highest level.
His half-long golden hair was soaked by the rain, clinging messily to his cheeks. His pale, bloodless lips were slightly parted, and a faint burning mist seemed to seep from between them like breath.
His nostrils flared and contracted uncontrollably, and the pupils of his eyes were fixed like those of a dead man.
Terry William stared straight ahead.
At that moment, the black-haired youth's dark, cold eyes seemed to gradually overlap with the pair of ferocious wolf eyes looming behind him in the curtain of rain.
They became two bottomless, purely dark voids that seemed capable of devouring everything, dragging his body, will, and soul into them with merciless cruelty.
The tide of death spread in silence, turning into an icy hand that seized his heart in an instant.
In a daze, those blurry memories buried deep in his heart gradually surfaced under the scouring tide of fear.
It was the terrifying fairy tale told on a silent late night not long after he