THE SHAPE OF YOUR SORROW - masterlist
Warnings: suicide mention, depression, grief
Summary: after witnessing a tragedy that leaves a wound deeper than time can heal, you unknowingly become a beacon for curses drawn to your overwhelming grief
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋅⋆ ── PROLOGUE ── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋅⋆ ──
The city had stopped making sense three nights ago.
At first, you blamed exhaustion, because exhaustion was easier to explain than the way your reflection had begun lingering in shop windows a fraction of a second longer than you did, or the way strangers occasionally glanced over your shoulder with knitted brows before quickly looking away again, pretending they had seen nothing at all. Sleep had become an unfamiliar luxury ever since that afternoon when the world, without asking for your permission, forced itself open right in front of you. One ordinary day. One ordinary crossing. One ordinary stranger climbing over the railing of a parking structure while everyone else was too busy staring at glowing screens to notice that his trembling hands had already made the decision his mind could no longer argue against.
You had looked up at precisely the wrong moment.
Some memories faded with time. That one had settled inside your skull like a parasite.
You remembered the silence before the scream far more vividly than the scream itself. The strange peace on his face. The impossible stillness afterward. The way people suddenly remembered they possessed voices only after everything was already over. Ambulance sirens had arrived eventually, but they sounded less like rescue and more like confirmation that nothing could be undone.
Ever since then, something had been wrong with you. The heaviness refused to leave your chest, no matter how many mornings you forced yourself out of bed or how convincingly you smiled when coworkers asked whether you were doing alright. Food had begun tasting like paper. Music had become noise. Your apartment felt too large despite barely fitting a single bed, because silence occupied more space than furniture ever could. Some nights you caught yourself staring at the ceiling for hours, wondering whether living and merely existing had always been separated by such a painfully thin line.
You simply couldn't remember what life was supposed to feel like anymore.
Perhaps that difference mattered to humans. To something else though, it somehow smelled exactly the same.
You noticed the first signs a week later. Dogs refused to walk past you, flattening their ears and pulling violently against their owners' leashes. Infants burst into tears whenever your shadow crossed their strollers. Birds abandoned rooftops moments before you passed beneath them, taking flight all at once as though escaping an approaching storm that only they could perceive. Even the air itself seemed heavier around you, thick enough that every breath scraped against your lungs.
You tried convincing yourself grief simply sharpened the imagination. That trauma made patterns where none existed.
Until the whispers began. It never were words you could understand. Only breathing or some shifts within atmosphere around you nor within your flat. Sometimes behind your bedroom door. Sometimes underneath your bed. Sometimes so close to your ear that you instinctively turned your head, expecting to find another person standing inches away, only to be greeted by an empty room and your own pulse hammering against your ribs.
The shadows changed too. Streetlights no longer illuminated them correctly. They stretched in impossible directions, climbed walls without owners, gathered in corners where light should have driven them away. Whenever you glanced directly at them, they remained perfectly still, but the instant your eyes drifted elsewhere, you felt movement nibbling at the edge of your vision like insects beneath your skin.
You could have sworn something had begun following you. And it seemed to not be a one thing but many.
You couldn't see them, of course. But every instinct insisted you were no longer walking through the city alone.
Tonight, the feeling became unbearable.
Rain soaked through your coat within minutes, plastering cold fabric against your skin while puddles reflected fractured neon signs that painted the pavement in sickly reds and blues. The streets should have been busy at this hour, yet they felt abandoned, as though the city itself had quietly emptied while you weren't paying attention. Every footstep echoed too loudly. Every passing gust of wind carried the faint smell of damp concrete mixed with something metallic that reminded you unpleasantly of the ambulance, of flashing lights reflected in rainwater, of blood you had never intended to see or smell.
Your chest tightened. Without understanding why, you stopped walking.
The sensation arrived all at once, as though invisible eyes had suddenly opened in every direction. Your breathing became shallow, each inhale catching somewhere beneath your ribs. The rain no longer sounded like rain. It sounded like hundreds of sharp claws tapping against glass.
You turned your head instinctively. To your left, a young couple hurried beneath a shared umbrella, laughing at something neither of them seemed capable of remembering five seconds later. Across the street, an elderly man tugged impatiently at his dog's leash while a cyclist splashed through a puddle without so much as glancing in your direction. Cars continued to pass, headlights cutting through the rain before disappearing into the darkness ahead. Everything appeared painfully ordinary.
And yet the feeling refused to leave. Someone was watching you. Or something.
You looked over your shoulder once more, lingering a little longer this time, searching the mouths of alleyways and the rooftops hidden behind the veil of rain. There was nothing. Nothing your human eyes could recognize, at least. The sidewalks remained rafher empty, the windows dark, the city carrying on with complete indifference to the dread steadily blooming inside your chest.
You had no way of knowing that you were surrounded. That beyond the limits of ordinary human perception, the air itself had begun to stir.
Your grief did not simply exist; it bled into the world as cursed energy, thick with despair and stained by the memory you relived every waking hour.
To curses, it was irresistible. It spread through the district like the scent of fresh blood carried on the wind, drawing hungry attention from every direction.
The smallest were the first to answer. Pitiful little things, scarcely intelligent enough to think, born from fleeting hatred, petty jealousy and forgotten fears. They slipped from cracks in the pavement where stagnant rainwater collected, unfolded themselves from the shadows beneath abandoned cars and clung to the sides of buildings with too many crooked limbs. Their eyeless faces tilted toward you in silent fascination as they followed from rooftops and gutters, skittering over brick and concrete like insects gathering around something already half dead.
You remained blissfully unaware. Every glance over your shoulder found only passing strangers and mostly empty streets. Every shiver you blamed on the cold.
By the time the weaker curses had gathered in dozens, others had begun to notice.
Larger ones. Older ones. Curses swollen by years of accumulated hatred slowly raised their grotesque heads from forgotten buildings and underground tunnels, their distorted bodies turning toward the invisible beacon your sorrow had become. They did not approach immediately. They watched. Waited. Measured one another in complete silence, as scavengers might circle a dying animal before deciding who would claim the first bite.
And then something stronger noticed you.
Far beneath layers of concrete and forgotten tunnels where sunlight had never reached, another presence slowly lifted its head. It did not rush. Predators at the top of the food chain never did.
He had felt you for the first time what felt like hours ago. Your sorrow. It flowed through the city with such unbearable weight that even someone accustomed to cursed energy found himself stopping mid-step. It was unlike ordinary fear or grief. It had depth and layers. It carried the echo of another person's final moments, etched so deeply into your soul that the memory had become part of your very existence.
Choso closed his hazel eyes. When he left his hiding place, the rain landed quietly upon his shoulders, rolling down strands of dark hair tied into thick sections before disappearing into the folds of his clothing.
He inhaled once, and the scent reached him immediately, flooding his lungs with an aroma unlike any he had encountered in a long time. It was sorrow, dense, heavy, almost tangible. Fresh enough to draw an army of lesser curses, yet aged by days of quiet suffering until it had settled deep within a human soul. To a curse, it was intoxicating. Rich. Layered. The lingering aftertaste of trauma clung to it, making it almost delicious.
His expression, unreadable to most, shifted by the smallest degree. Curiosity came first. Then pity. Then something he could not yet name.
A human capable of producing cursed energy this dense without becoming a sorcerer was rare enough to deserve attention. One carrying despair so profound that it called curses from across the city was something else entirely.
He needed to find its source. The thought settled in his mind. He closed his eyes once more, allowing every other scent to disappear beneath the steady rhythm of the rain. Wet asphalt. Rust. Exhaust fumes. Cigarette smoke drifting from a nearby balcony. They all dissolved until only that overwhelming fragrance remained; a melancholy so deep it seemed to seep through the streets themselves, weaving between buildings like invisible threads.
His nose followed it effortlessly. With slow, measured steps, Choso moved through the city, letting the scent guide him wherever it wished. He never questioned the direction.
Every street he crossed strengthened the aroma, every corner brought another layer of grief into focus until it became impossible to mistake. It lingered on walls, drifted through narrow alleyways, settled in the rain itself as though the weather had absorbed the pain of whoever carried it.
Step by step, breath by breath, the scent grew warmer.
Until, through the curtain of rain, he finally saw the solitary figure walking alone beneath the dim glow of the streetlights, completely unaware that every monster in the district had been following the trail of her sorrow, and that the strongest among them had just found her.
The countless lesser curses scattered almost instinctively, shrinking back into cracks and shadows as though a king had entered the forest. Their excitement transformed into anxious silence, leaving only the rain to fill the empty streets. They understood what humans never could: something stronger had claimed the trail.
