Ner'Tah

At first, you didn't realize you'd been chosen.

You seemed to see yourself in the reflections of mirrored surfaces, but something was wrong... your eyes seemed empty. Sometimes the reflection blinked late or didn't blink at all. And your shadows began to lag a split second.

You tried to ignore it. You blamed it on overwork, stress, puberty. Until you noticed the first mark. On your wrist... a thin line, like a burn. It didn't hurt, but sometimes you felt warmth in it when you were doing something important.

But this wasn't illness, it was attention.

The deity wasn't speaking to you directly. It had adjusted your world.

You did everything to escape their sight. But at those moments, the mark began to ache, as if something beneath the skin was trying to unravel. The world becomes strange, streets disappear, time moves in fits and starts, faces distort...

And then one day you discover an abandoned forum. It seemed like the internet itself was trying to forget it. There were people's notes there, and they all wrote the same thing: "It doesn't choose the best. It likes those who resist. It doesn't need submission. It needs form." From the stories from here, you understood: this deity doesn't want your body, doesn't want worship, it needs continuation. Human consciousness is like a shell, not for life, but for presence in the world. If you break, you become an empty vessel. If you submit, you dissolve. If you run away, the world will cease to be stable.

That night, you heard it for the first time. Not as a voice, but rather as a feeling that the thoughts in your head weren't quite yours. "You've been avoiding for too long," your throat tightened, and the mark flared with warmth again. "I... I don't want," you whispered. You weren't sure what exactly you didn't want or who you were even telling. "Desire doesn't matter. I've noticed for a long time—you're a perfect fit." The skin on your wrist slowly It tightened. The pattern became deeper, darker