Elitshen

Hi Hi! I am the author, this book is a passion project more than anything. But please do try to stick with me to the end! I am not a native English speaker, despite being exposed to English since a very young age, so please do keep that in my mind. Overall I am just a total mess and klutz.

A crescent moon lights the night.

This was to be a very bloody night for her.

"Mom! Dad! You're back!" Denapne rushes to her parents, with her arms wide opened.

They tried to move away from her, given they were still in their uniforms from work, and their work was far from sanitary. 

"Hey sweetie! Sorry but can you please try not to touch us right now? We are still all icky from work, we don't want you dirty too.", her Mom, Dea Alice Shen said in a warm voice. 

Denapne was an especially understanding and bright child for her age, she quickly understood and halted her dash. Her parents quickly moved into their home to get themselves cleaned up, a nice cozy 1LDK apartment in the middle residential sector of the Fafner dominion, this is a small, trade country that's pretty much surrounded by other territories on all of its borders. As one could imagine, the living cost in such a small country is very high, with its residents always competing with each other over the ever limited jobs. 

Denapne's family is the perfect model of a middle-class family, they were not rich but they got by, with just a little surplus for minor luxuries. *Plop*, the clothes went as they were chugged into the incinerator, where the beige hazmat suits will slowly be eaten away by the flames, it gave the living room a temporary cabin-like feeling, with the incinerator acting as a pseudo-fireplace. 

"Mom! Look here, today in school I learned how to fold a möbius strip!" Denapne cradled in her hands the construct, made out of aluminium, bent into elegance. The strip represents in its "impossible" shape infinity. Dea smiles and takes the construct gently from her daughter's hands as if it is a curator's egg, her father, Thomas Shen smiled warmly from his armchair across the room. 

It was a Sunday night, and in the family this meant a feast for dinner. Most of the food has been automatically prepared by the smart kitchen appliances, meats have been marinated, vegetable chopped, doughs kneaded, and filled. After making some simple swipes and presses on the smart kitchen console, all of the materials are subjected to heat in state of the art cookers allowing the Maillard reaction quickly took place. In mere minutes, dishes were served onto the dining table through an elevator and conveyor belt system that elevates the food onto and arranges them on the table. Such are the conveniences allowed by the advancements in technology.

Freeze this image and you would get the very definition of a wholesome family.

Unfreeze and oh how quickly does the scene changes.

*Crash!* the windows of the living room overlooking the city's landscape caved in as two large shadows barrels into the room. Shadows they are for as the same time that they infiltrated, the lights in the room all immediately shutdown. A bird-eye's view would show that the whole city of Magnir, Fafner had gone dark. Denapne was a statue, too frightened to move, too scared to breathe, too shocked to blink. Her parents on the other hand reacted much more appropriately, with slick and swift movements akin to a cat, they slunk towards their daughter, grabbing her and taking cover under the kitchen table. All the noise made by the movements did not go unnoticed by the shadows, they start to saunter towards the kitchen, each step sounding labored and heavy, accompanied with two sets of rhythmic heavy breathing. They're looking for something, a scent in the air. And they got it.

Suddenly, the two shadows' heads snapped towards the kitchen table, and they rushed forward. Barreling forward, they knocked over the table, uprooting all of the electronics, machinery and shouldering that made up the table as well as rooting it to the ground. Now the three were exposed. Thomas then made a mad dash for the kitchen knife held up against the wall across the room. The shadows were faster, both perfectly synchronised with each other, they sent a tentacle equipped with a metallic claw at its end out towards him. Two slices, and Thomas Shen was no more. The first severed his head from his shoulders and the next divided it into perfect equal halves. Dea stifled her sorrow and shock, instead chanelling it into hatred, as she pulls out a gun from a secret compartment hidden as just another tile on the kitchen floor. She points the barrel at one of the creature's head and she pulled the trigger, but the hammer never clicked, the bullet never flew. As before her finger finished its motion, her hand was unceremoniously severed off at her wrist. 

*Slip*

As it slid off like water running down a slope. She wanted to scream, but she had no throat. Once again the tentacles came, this time puncturing Dea's throat, crushing her windpipe and severing her aorta. What was once Dea Alice Shen slumped and sagged against the floor. The two shadows then turned their attention towards Denapne, and once again the tentacles came. But this time, they did not strike, instead they felt, they sniffed, they saw. Confusion. This was what they felt. Familiar yet different. Similar but strange. Unlike humans, they fear not the unknown, they found her intriguing and nothing more. They left quietly, through the windows they came in from, and in their wake, they left a griefing girl, a sad girl, a cursed girl.