Nathan

Having entered the empty house, Nathan was relieved and slightly unnerved by the lingering emptiness within. As he quickly ascended the stairs, glancing wearily at his two roommates doors that remaining shut. A small coating of dust on their handles.

Nathan pushed open the door to his room and was immediately struck by the comforting familiarity of the space he had made his own over the past months. The walls were adorned with his favourite literary posters, the desk cluttered with dog-eared novels and notebooks filled with half-finished verses, and the bed still unmade from his last restless night.

Everything was as he had left it, yet there was a strange stillness in the air, a subtle charge that prickled at the back of his neck. Shaking off the feeling as mere exhaustion, Nathan dropped his bag by the door and sat on the edge of his mattress, allowing himself a moment of quiet relief that he had returned to a sanctuary untouched by the chaos spreading through the world beyond these walls.

He did not yet know that the silence in the house was not emptiness, but anticipation.