Lufli
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- Jan 2, 2026
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Hello, kind souls.
As some of you know, I've been training my novel openings for quite some time now. I'm curious whether this story piques your interest and if you would continue reading it, based on the first chapter. Basically, how hooked are you, if at all?
The genre would probably be dark fantasy. Long story short, Ly tries to cure his sister from an illness, a tiny thing goes wrong, and suddenly his hometown is flooded by pitch-black waters that prey on the captivated, drowned souls. Eventually, Ly breaks out and sets his mind, due to the loss of memories, to find his sister. The one he killed, trying to save.
The first chapter plays right before this "catastrophe".
Edit: Gosh, I hate these spoiler tags.
As some of you know, I've been training my novel openings for quite some time now. I'm curious whether this story piques your interest and if you would continue reading it, based on the first chapter. Basically, how hooked are you, if at all?
The genre would probably be dark fantasy. Long story short, Ly tries to cure his sister from an illness, a tiny thing goes wrong, and suddenly his hometown is flooded by pitch-black waters that prey on the captivated, drowned souls. Eventually, Ly breaks out and sets his mind, due to the loss of memories, to find his sister. The one he killed, trying to save.
The first chapter plays right before this "catastrophe".
The broth had been on the stove for forty minutes, and it still smelled like nothing.
Ly added salt — the third time he'd added salt — which meant it was going to be terrible in a different way than yesterday. He stirred and listened to Nora breathing through the wall. The rhythm had been steady for the last hour. She was probably awake and pretending not to be.
Fair enough.
He tasted the broth. Salted water with ambitions. The root vegetables had dissolved into pale ghosts of themselves, which the woman at the market had promised meant they were "releasing their properties." Ly was starting to suspect their only property had been color.
He turned the heat down and wiped his hands on the cloth he'd slung over his shoulder four months ago and hadn't moved since. The kitchen was small enough that he could reach the stove, the counter, and the window without taking a step, which he'd initially considered a design flaw and now thought of as efficient. Everything he needed was within arm's reach — the cutting board, the dried herbs he'd bought when the fresh ones became too expensive, the notebook tucked behind the jar of cured tea with its spine facing the wall so the writing wasn't visible.
He didn't look at the notebook.
The city was doing its evening thing outside the window. Light shifted on the lower terraces, from work-white to the amber of people going home. Someone across the lane was cooking something that actually smelled like food, which Ly tried not to take personally. The market bells had rung an hour ago; the second set, for the night vendors, wouldn't ring for another two.
He poured the broth into the bowl he'd been using for months. The deep one with the chip in the rim that Nora had told him three times to throw out. He kept it because it held more than the others, and because she'd stopped eating from anything larger.
Her door was open. It was always open now, because she'd told him that closing it made her feel like she was being stored.
"If that's the broth," she said from somewhere in the blankets, "I want to state for the record that I could smell it from here. The record should also note that it doesn't smell like food."
"It's nutritious."
"Any other bad news for the patient?"
He brought her the bowl. She was sitting up, which was good. Her dark hair was pulled back in the knot she did with one hand when she didn't want to deal with it, and her eyes tracked him with the focus she used to reserve for problems she found interesting. Lately, that focus had narrowed to just him.
She took the bowl. Her hands shook once, briefly, and she steadied them against the ceramic before he could pretend he hadn't noticed. They had an understanding about this — she didn't mention the shaking, and he didn't reach out to help her hold things.
"You went to the market," she said.
"Yes."
"And bought more of those roots."
"They're supposed to—"
"Release their properties. Yes. What I'm asking is whether their properties include flavor."
She's in a good mood.
He sat on the floor next to her bed, his back against the wall, and watched her drink. She did it with both hands now, carefully, and he counted the swallows because he couldn't help it. Five. Six.
She set the bowl down on the seventh.
He decided seven was enough.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
"What thing?"
"The counting thing. Where you watch me eat, and I can see your mouth move."
"My mouth doesn't move."
"Your jaw does. Right here." She tapped her own jaw, just below the ear. "Every swallow. It's like watching someone coach from the sidelines of a meal."
He pressed his tongue against his teeth and said nothing.
Nora leaned back against the pillow. The light from the window caught the line of her jaw, sharp even now, sharper than three months ago because the weight she'd lost came from her face first.
"Something's different about you tonight," she said.
He'd practiced for this in the kitchen while stirring — relaxed shoulders, easy breathing, the particular nothing that his face did when he wanted to look unbothered.
"I'm tired," he said.
"You're always tired. That's not what's different."
"Long day."
She watched him. He let her. He sat with his back against the wall and looked at the chip in the bowl and waited.
"Okay," she said eventually.
"Finish the broth."
"It's terrible."
"You've had worse."
"I haven't. This is the worst broth in recorded history. Future civilizations will study this broth as a cautionary tale."
He picked up the bowl and held it out to her. She sighed through her nose, one sharp exhale.
She drank. He counted. She finished.
"Happy?" she asked.
"Thrilled, even."
She smiled. It was tired, starting in her eyes and running out somewhere around her cheekbones, but it was real. He held onto it. She still argued about broth. She still caught every twitch of his jaw. She still let him lie.
Just a little longer. Hold on a little longer, and I'll fix it.
He took the bowl back to the kitchen, washed it, and set it upside down next to the others. Then he stood listening as her breathing shifted from awake-and-pretending to genuinely asleep. It took about twenty minutes. She used to fall asleep faster than anyone he'd known — head down, gone, like she'd found a shortcut the rest of the world hadn't figured out. Now it took twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, and there was a catch in her breathing that hadn't been there six months ago.
When he was sure, he pulled the notebook from behind the tea jar.
The pages were dense, his handwriting smaller than usual because the notebook was the only one he had and he couldn't buy another without explaining why. Diagrams filled the margins — vein-maps, mostly, the branching patterns he'd copied from the restricted texts at the Hall of Records before the archivist had noticed him in the wrong section and asked questions he'd answered badly.
The procedure was simple.
That was what frightened him.
Complicated would have meant he'd misunderstood something, that there were steps he'd missed, safety mechanisms he hadn't accounted for. But the notes were clean. He'd checked them against two independent sources and the logic held every time. If the Ethos was failing — if the body was consuming itself because the core reservoir had collapsed — then the only intervention that mattered happened at the root, below the reservoir, in the channel itself.
Nobody did it because the risk had made institutions write rules instead of guidelines. He'd read the case files, the ones still accessible. Twelve attempts over the last sixty years. Four survivors. The other eight were described in language so clinical it took him a while to understand what "total structural dissolution" meant for a person who'd been alive that morning.
But four survived. He turned the page. Four is not zero.
The vial sat in his coat pocket, hanging on the hook by the door. He didn't take it out — he'd checked the seal that morning — but he pressed his fingers against the glass through the fabric. Still cool, still sealed, still there.
He'd made the decision three weeks ago. The morning Nora's hands had started shaking during breakfast and she'd set her cup down with so much careful focus that he'd had to leave the room.
He closed the notebook and put it back behind the tea. He checked the coat pocket one more time, fingers against glass.
Tonight. While she sleeps.
He sat in the kitchen and listened to her breathe and waited for it to get late enough that what he was about to do would look like nothing at all.
At some point in the early hours he stopped waiting.
His hands knew the steps. The vial was warm from his pocket by the time he uncapped it, the seal cracking with a sound like a fingernail on glass. The liquid inside was dark. Darker than the texts described, but the texts had been vague about what "stably dark" meant versus "critically dark," and he'd decided weeks ago to accept the ambiguity because the alternative was accepting the shaking in her hands getting worse until there were no hands left to shake.
She was asleep. Her breathing had the catch but it was steady. When he knelt beside her bed she didn't stir. He pulled the blanket back from her arm and placed his left hand flat against the inside of her wrist, where the pulse lived, where the channel ran closest to the surface.
His own pulse was louder than hers.
Four survived. I checked the notes. I checked them again. The logic holds.
He tipped the vial.
The liquid met her skin, and for a moment, nothing happened. It sat there, dark against the pale of her inner arm, and he thought — briefly, viciously — that he'd been wrong about all of it, that the months of research had delivered him to a puddle of nothing on his sister's wrist.
Then it sank through.
The room got cold. Her pulse under his hand stuttered, caught, skipped — and her eyes opened. She looked at him, looked at the empty vial in his hand, and knew. He could see it cross her face. She understood what he'd done before he could explain it. She always did.
"Ly—"
"It's working. Nora, hold still—"
Something black bloomed under her skin. It spread from the wrist up toward her elbow in a branching pattern that matched the diagrams in his notebook exactly, except the diagrams hadn't included the color. And the color was wrong. It was too dark, darker than pigment, darker than anything that should exist inside a person, and it moved with intent.
Nora made a sound. He grabbed her arm with both hands as if he could hold it in, and she seized his forearm with her free hand, nails through his sleeve. Her eyes were wide, locked on his. She was trying to say something but the black had reached her shoulder and her voice cut off mid-breath like a door shutting.
"Nora. Nora—"
It came through her skin. Out through the pores of her arm, between his fingers, cold and wet and heavier than anything he'd touched. It pooled on the bed and soaked through the sheets and where it touched his hands it didn't wash off. It went in. The same way it had gone into her, it went into him, and the cold hit his bloodstream like a fist closing around the base of his spine.
He couldn't let go.
His hands wouldn't open.
The black was in his wrists now, climbing, and Nora's grip on his forearm tightened once — hard — then loosened.
Her eyes were still on him. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, the face he knew better than his own. He knew that look. She was letting him have this. She knew what he'd done, and she was going to let him live with it.
"I'm sorry," he said, or tried to.
The black swallowed his hands first, then his arms, then his chest.
The last thing in the room was her face, her face, her—
Nora.
Ly added salt — the third time he'd added salt — which meant it was going to be terrible in a different way than yesterday. He stirred and listened to Nora breathing through the wall. The rhythm had been steady for the last hour. She was probably awake and pretending not to be.
Fair enough.
He tasted the broth. Salted water with ambitions. The root vegetables had dissolved into pale ghosts of themselves, which the woman at the market had promised meant they were "releasing their properties." Ly was starting to suspect their only property had been color.
He turned the heat down and wiped his hands on the cloth he'd slung over his shoulder four months ago and hadn't moved since. The kitchen was small enough that he could reach the stove, the counter, and the window without taking a step, which he'd initially considered a design flaw and now thought of as efficient. Everything he needed was within arm's reach — the cutting board, the dried herbs he'd bought when the fresh ones became too expensive, the notebook tucked behind the jar of cured tea with its spine facing the wall so the writing wasn't visible.
He didn't look at the notebook.
The city was doing its evening thing outside the window. Light shifted on the lower terraces, from work-white to the amber of people going home. Someone across the lane was cooking something that actually smelled like food, which Ly tried not to take personally. The market bells had rung an hour ago; the second set, for the night vendors, wouldn't ring for another two.
He poured the broth into the bowl he'd been using for months. The deep one with the chip in the rim that Nora had told him three times to throw out. He kept it because it held more than the others, and because she'd stopped eating from anything larger.
Her door was open. It was always open now, because she'd told him that closing it made her feel like she was being stored.
"If that's the broth," she said from somewhere in the blankets, "I want to state for the record that I could smell it from here. The record should also note that it doesn't smell like food."
"It's nutritious."
"Any other bad news for the patient?"
He brought her the bowl. She was sitting up, which was good. Her dark hair was pulled back in the knot she did with one hand when she didn't want to deal with it, and her eyes tracked him with the focus she used to reserve for problems she found interesting. Lately, that focus had narrowed to just him.
She took the bowl. Her hands shook once, briefly, and she steadied them against the ceramic before he could pretend he hadn't noticed. They had an understanding about this — she didn't mention the shaking, and he didn't reach out to help her hold things.
"You went to the market," she said.
"Yes."
"And bought more of those roots."
"They're supposed to—"
"Release their properties. Yes. What I'm asking is whether their properties include flavor."
She's in a good mood.
He sat on the floor next to her bed, his back against the wall, and watched her drink. She did it with both hands now, carefully, and he counted the swallows because he couldn't help it. Five. Six.
She set the bowl down on the seventh.
He decided seven was enough.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
"What thing?"
"The counting thing. Where you watch me eat, and I can see your mouth move."
"My mouth doesn't move."
"Your jaw does. Right here." She tapped her own jaw, just below the ear. "Every swallow. It's like watching someone coach from the sidelines of a meal."
He pressed his tongue against his teeth and said nothing.
Nora leaned back against the pillow. The light from the window caught the line of her jaw, sharp even now, sharper than three months ago because the weight she'd lost came from her face first.
"Something's different about you tonight," she said.
He'd practiced for this in the kitchen while stirring — relaxed shoulders, easy breathing, the particular nothing that his face did when he wanted to look unbothered.
"I'm tired," he said.
"You're always tired. That's not what's different."
"Long day."
She watched him. He let her. He sat with his back against the wall and looked at the chip in the bowl and waited.
"Okay," she said eventually.
"Finish the broth."
"It's terrible."
"You've had worse."
"I haven't. This is the worst broth in recorded history. Future civilizations will study this broth as a cautionary tale."
He picked up the bowl and held it out to her. She sighed through her nose, one sharp exhale.
She drank. He counted. She finished.
"Happy?" she asked.
"Thrilled, even."
She smiled. It was tired, starting in her eyes and running out somewhere around her cheekbones, but it was real. He held onto it. She still argued about broth. She still caught every twitch of his jaw. She still let him lie.
Just a little longer. Hold on a little longer, and I'll fix it.
He took the bowl back to the kitchen, washed it, and set it upside down next to the others. Then he stood listening as her breathing shifted from awake-and-pretending to genuinely asleep. It took about twenty minutes. She used to fall asleep faster than anyone he'd known — head down, gone, like she'd found a shortcut the rest of the world hadn't figured out. Now it took twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, and there was a catch in her breathing that hadn't been there six months ago.
When he was sure, he pulled the notebook from behind the tea jar.
The pages were dense, his handwriting smaller than usual because the notebook was the only one he had and he couldn't buy another without explaining why. Diagrams filled the margins — vein-maps, mostly, the branching patterns he'd copied from the restricted texts at the Hall of Records before the archivist had noticed him in the wrong section and asked questions he'd answered badly.
The procedure was simple.
That was what frightened him.
Complicated would have meant he'd misunderstood something, that there were steps he'd missed, safety mechanisms he hadn't accounted for. But the notes were clean. He'd checked them against two independent sources and the logic held every time. If the Ethos was failing — if the body was consuming itself because the core reservoir had collapsed — then the only intervention that mattered happened at the root, below the reservoir, in the channel itself.
Nobody did it because the risk had made institutions write rules instead of guidelines. He'd read the case files, the ones still accessible. Twelve attempts over the last sixty years. Four survivors. The other eight were described in language so clinical it took him a while to understand what "total structural dissolution" meant for a person who'd been alive that morning.
But four survived. He turned the page. Four is not zero.
The vial sat in his coat pocket, hanging on the hook by the door. He didn't take it out — he'd checked the seal that morning — but he pressed his fingers against the glass through the fabric. Still cool, still sealed, still there.
He'd made the decision three weeks ago. The morning Nora's hands had started shaking during breakfast and she'd set her cup down with so much careful focus that he'd had to leave the room.
He closed the notebook and put it back behind the tea. He checked the coat pocket one more time, fingers against glass.
Tonight. While she sleeps.
He sat in the kitchen and listened to her breathe and waited for it to get late enough that what he was about to do would look like nothing at all.
At some point in the early hours he stopped waiting.
His hands knew the steps. The vial was warm from his pocket by the time he uncapped it, the seal cracking with a sound like a fingernail on glass. The liquid inside was dark. Darker than the texts described, but the texts had been vague about what "stably dark" meant versus "critically dark," and he'd decided weeks ago to accept the ambiguity because the alternative was accepting the shaking in her hands getting worse until there were no hands left to shake.
She was asleep. Her breathing had the catch but it was steady. When he knelt beside her bed she didn't stir. He pulled the blanket back from her arm and placed his left hand flat against the inside of her wrist, where the pulse lived, where the channel ran closest to the surface.
His own pulse was louder than hers.
Four survived. I checked the notes. I checked them again. The logic holds.
He tipped the vial.
The liquid met her skin, and for a moment, nothing happened. It sat there, dark against the pale of her inner arm, and he thought — briefly, viciously — that he'd been wrong about all of it, that the months of research had delivered him to a puddle of nothing on his sister's wrist.
Then it sank through.
The room got cold. Her pulse under his hand stuttered, caught, skipped — and her eyes opened. She looked at him, looked at the empty vial in his hand, and knew. He could see it cross her face. She understood what he'd done before he could explain it. She always did.
"Ly—"
"It's working. Nora, hold still—"
Something black bloomed under her skin. It spread from the wrist up toward her elbow in a branching pattern that matched the diagrams in his notebook exactly, except the diagrams hadn't included the color. And the color was wrong. It was too dark, darker than pigment, darker than anything that should exist inside a person, and it moved with intent.
Nora made a sound. He grabbed her arm with both hands as if he could hold it in, and she seized his forearm with her free hand, nails through his sleeve. Her eyes were wide, locked on his. She was trying to say something but the black had reached her shoulder and her voice cut off mid-breath like a door shutting.
"Nora. Nora—"
It came through her skin. Out through the pores of her arm, between his fingers, cold and wet and heavier than anything he'd touched. It pooled on the bed and soaked through the sheets and where it touched his hands it didn't wash off. It went in. The same way it had gone into her, it went into him, and the cold hit his bloodstream like a fist closing around the base of his spine.
He couldn't let go.
His hands wouldn't open.
The black was in his wrists now, climbing, and Nora's grip on his forearm tightened once — hard — then loosened.
Her eyes were still on him. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, the face he knew better than his own. He knew that look. She was letting him have this. She knew what he'd done, and she was going to let him live with it.
"I'm sorry," he said, or tried to.
The black swallowed his hands first, then his arms, then his chest.
The last thing in the room was her face, her face, her—
Nora.
Edit: Gosh, I hate these spoiler tags.
Last edited:
