Night lay over Memphis like black ink.
The daytime bustle had long faded. The streets were empty and silent; even the wind seemed suppressed by some invisible force, afraid to make a sound. Only the Nile River murmured low in the distance, like the pulse of the earth.
Yet amid that deathly stillness, the darkness was not still.
The shadows that had poured from the Temple of the Sun God were moving, hunting.
Before an abandoned shrine in the western part of the city, a boy of around ten trembled. His clothes were thin, his face caked with grime. He was clearly an abandoned orphan.
He had planned to hide beneath the shrine for the night and search for food at dawn.
But he did not know that he had already been targeted.
To conceal a family scandal, a merchant had deliberately abandoned the child on this remote path leading to the temple, thinking, People have been disappearing a lot lately. No one will investigate one more.
The night wind howled, and the brazier before the shrine had long gone out.
Suddenly, the shadows on the ground began to twist.
One, two, three... several dark shadows converged from all directions, like hyenas that had caught the scent of blood.
The boy curled into a terrified ball. He wanted to run, but his legs had gone weak.
"Don't... don't come closer!"
The shadows showed no mercy.
They pounced at once, surrounding the boy completely.
The light of life was forcibly drawn from his body, turning into thin streams that flowed into the shadows. The boy's cries grew weaker and weaker, eventually becoming a whimper before vanishing completely. The shadows merged together, forming an even larger silhouette. Like a mass of flowing ink, it swiftly drifted toward the temple.
The priests knelt