On the island, they said the shark?man had come back.

  They said it quietly, when the children were supposed to be sleeping and the surf hissed soft on the stones. They said it in the old tongue, the way their grandparents had, back before the haole missionaries had come with their big words and their small gods.

  “Nanaue,” old Kimo whispered, his dried?leaf voice carrying just far enough for the girl on the mat beside the door to hear. “The son of Kamohoali’i and whose mother was too foolish to keep her eyes shut.”

  Keoni sat with his back against the same doorframe, listening and not listening. The night was warm, the breeze a soft hand on his sweaty neck. The torches along the path popped and spat, scent of kukui oil thick in his nose. Beyond them, the black curve of the sea glistened under a thin, hard line of stars. His daughter slept inside, or pretended to. He could hear her breathing.

  It had been nine days since the Voice.

  That was what most people called it. The missionaries called it “the Devil’s tongue” when they thought the Hawaiians weren’t listening. Haole whalers in Lahaina laughed nervously and said “some damn British telegraph in our heads,” like they could make a joke big enough to cover it.

  Keoni knew better. There was no line or cable running under the water to all places at once. There was only the Voice, cold and clear, that had come into his skull one morning while he was mending nets and told him:

  Welcome, sapient being!

  The System is now in effect.

  It had told him other things. About numbers under his skin. [Strength], [Dexterity], [Vitality], [Magic]. About [Level]. About [Classes] he might choose if he lived long enough to see the right number next to his name. He understood some of it. Enough to know that when he pulled a net in now, the muscles in his arms worked cleaner than they had the week before, even without more poi in his bowl.

  What the System had not told him was why the fish were gone.

  The reef used to glitter in the shallows like some god had spilled silver there and forgotten to pick it up. Now the water was… empty. Not empty?empty. There were still the little grazing parrotfish, the stripy manini, the occasional lazy ulua deeper out. But not like before. Whole schools had vanished as if someone had scooped them up.

  And the sharks were wrong.

  They came closer now. Not curious, the way they used to sometimes, sleek gray shapes sliding in at the edge of his vision when he was out past the breakers. These felt… hungry. He’d seen one two days ago, fin cutting the surface in a slow, deliberate line that ended right under his canoe. He’d felt it bump the hull with its head, not hard enough to tip him, just enough to remind him they were there.

  He hadn’t told Leilani that part.

  “Stories,” his wife had said, when the talk around the cook fires turned to Nanaue again. Three days ago, she’d sat where old Kimo now sat, fingers working taro leaves around pork for the imu, eyes narrowed.

  “We have voices in our heads now that talk about numbers and monsters,” she’d said. “You think the old stories will not wake up too? We should be careful how we speak them.”

  She was gone now. Taken by the coughing sickness the haole had brought and left like a rotten gift. Her grave looked out over the same sea she had loved and cursed in equal measure. Sometimes Keoni felt her eyes on his back when he went down to his canoe.

  He felt them now.

  “Kimo,” one of the other old men murmured. “You scare the little ones. They see enough in their heads now. They don’t need Nanaue coming out of the water.”

  “Maybe Nanaue is just one of the System’s monsters,” someone else said.

  Kimo spat brown juice into the dust.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe the System is the same thing that ate my grandson out there last week. You see his body come back? I did not.”

  The talk went on like that. Names of gods mixing with numbers. Fear trying to put on a brave face and failing.

  Keoni heard none of it after a while.

  His [Magic] was a little higher than it had been before the System came—1, the last time he’d checked, while his [Strength] sat at 7 and [Dexterity] at 6—and sometimes that meant he felt things a heartbeat before they happened. Little prickles at the back of his neck. A shiver at the base of his skull.

  He felt it now.

  He turned his head toward the sea.

  The surface out past the reef, where the blackness was usually soft, like the back of a sleeping dog, had gone… flat. Too flat. No restless chop in the moonlight, no silver wrinkles.

  Just a wide, dark plate.

  Leilani’s soft feet padded up behind him.

  “Papa,” she whispered. “You’re going out again tomorrow?”

  She was ten, thin as a reed, hair braided back tight against her head the way her mother had taught her. The System had given her numbers too. She’d come running to him on that first day, eyes shining, and told him she had [Magic: 4].

  He had made her promise not to play with it where the missionaries could see.

  “Have to,” he said. “The men from the big ships pay good coin for oil. Oil comes from fish and from the whales. If we don’t bring them fish, they throw more offal in our bay. Then we get sick again.”

  She pressed her lips together until they went white.

  “I had a bad dream,” she said. “I saw a big shark stand up on two legs. It smelled like blood. It had your face.”

  He started, breath catching.

  “Bad dreams are just dreams,” he lied. “Go sleep. Tomorrow I’ll bring you a fat akule, eh? Fried crisp. No bones.”

  She tried to smile. It sat wrong on her face.

  He watched her go.

  Out past the reef, the water stayed flat.

  In his sleep that night, a new message slid across the inside of his eyelids, cold as the System had been the first day.

  Global Notice: Someone has reached level 10!

  Monster instances will now be increased threefold.

  To provide breathing room, monster attacks were reduced for two days.

  That period has ended.

  He woke before dawn with salt in his mouth and the taste of iron on his tongue.

  The sea was waiting.

  They went out at first light—the only time the water still felt like it belonged to them and not to the white men or to whatever the System had stirred up from below.

  Keoni took his canoe past the breakers, Leilani crouched at the bow. He’d tried to leave her behind. She’d clung to the outrigger with both hands until he’d given up and hauled her in. If something was going to come for them, it would come whether she sat on the sand or in his boat.

  Keoni paddled.

  The canoe slid over clear water. Coral rose under them in patches—dead gray in places where there had been color before. Fish flared away from the hull in nervous bursts.

  He cast his net where the reef fell away into blue.

  Nothing.

  They tried again. And again.

  On the third throw, they felt it a slow, deliberate tug, like someone far below had curled a hand around the net and started walking away with it.

  “Papa,” Leilani breathed.

  “Hold the canoe straight,” he snapped. His hands locked on the net rope. The muscles in his arms bulged, the new strength the System had given him humming under his skin.

  For a heartbeat, he thought he had it. Whatever it was.

  Then the water boiled.

  Something came up from under them, and the canoe lifted, keel scraping rough hide. Keoni saw froth, teeth, and an eye the size of his fist in the space of a single, jagged heartbeat.

  The canoe tipped.

  He had just enough time to shove, hard, sending Leilani away from the center of the churn, before the sea swallowed him.

  Cold closed over his head. Salt filled his nose. He kicked, arms windmilling.

  Below him, in the blue?green gloom, something moved.

  It was like… a man, if a man had been put together by someone who had seen men only in bad paintings and sharks up close. Broad chest, but too deep. Arms too long, ending in hands webbed all the way to the tips. Skin the gray of storm clouds, smooth and slick. A head with human eyes set too high and too wide, and below them a shark’s mouth full of layered teeth.

  Gills flared along its neck, pulsing.

  It looked up at him. Its eyes were the color of dark between the stars.

  The shark?thing smiled.

  Hands bigger than his whole chest clamped around his ankle.

  He tried to kick. Its grip did not move.

  Above him, through the dancing surface of the sea, he saw Leilani’s small shape flailing, saw her head break water, mouth open.

  “Papa!”

  The thing tugged.

  The world narrowed to green light and pressure and his lungs burned.

  The light dimmed as they went deeper. The pressure squeezed his ears. His chest screamed. He tried to claw at the hand around his ankle, nails scraping uselessly over slick skin.

  Bubbles shook loose from his lips with his last breath.

  The last thing he saw, as the dark closed over him, was another shape rising from below. Bigger. Broader. A shark face without a man’s eyes. A mouth that could have taken his whole canoe in one bite.

  Far to the east, where the sea was gray instead of blue and smelled of cold and rot instead of flowers, men hunted bigger things.

  The Providence had been out of Sag Harbor for eight months. Her sails were stained, her paint scabbed with salt. The men who walked her deck were thinner than they had been when they left Long Island, their cheeks hollowed by hard tack and salt pork. But the barrels in the hold were full of oil and bone and baleen, and Captain Silas Benton had been thinking, more and more each day, of home and of putting his feet on something that did not move.

  Then the System had come.

  Now he thought of home and saw numbers when he closed his eyes.

  “[Level] three,” his first mate, Harker, had said, half proud and half uneasy, as they’d stood at the rail watching a whale fluke disappear under a gray swell. “Means I get more [Strength], right?”

  Benton had grunted.

  “Means you get more foolish,” he’d said. “Thinkin’ some invisible tallyman in your skull makes you God.”

  He’d checked his own [Status] that night anyway, lying in his bunk with the ceiling inches from his nose.

  Level: 2

  Strength: 9

  Dexterity: 8

  Vitality: 9

  Magic: 1

  He didn’t like that last number. He tried not to think about it.

  The first time a man went overboard and came up again faster than he ought to have, arms knifing through the water like an eel, they’d all crossed themselves, even the ones who’d laughed at the System.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The first time a harpoon drove deeper into a whale’s side than any man had ever seen, iron punching through blubber and into bone, they’d cheered. The System wasn’t all bad, they’d said. If it made them stronger, if it filled their lamps quicker, maybe it was just another wind in their sails.

  Then the Global Notice had come, a chill in every skull.

  Monster instances will now be increased threefold.

  Benton had not liked the sound of that either.

  Now, three days after that last message, the sea around the Providence was wrong.

  The pod of right whales they’d been chasing had vanished as if some giant hand had scooped them up. The swells rolled slowly, as always, but there was… something under them. A tension. Harker said he could feel it in his teeth.

  “Feels like the sea’s holdin’ its breath,” he muttered, fingers drumming on the rail. “Ain’t natural.”

  “Storm comin’, maybe,” Benton said. There were no clouds, but storms at sea didn’t always come with warning in the sky.

  The other two ships in their little fleet—the Martha Ann and the Saint Jude—rode nearby, sails reefed to match his cautious pace. Tiny specks of men moved in their rigging.

  “Boat to leeward!” came the cry from aloft. “Something in the water, sir! Big as—”

  “Big as what?” Benton barked, craning his neck.

  The lookout did not answer.

  He was staring at something beyond the bow, mouth open.

  Harker saw it first from the deck.

  “Mother of God,” he breathed.

  The sea ahead bulged.

  Not like a whale’s back. Whales rolled. This rose.

  Water heaved up in a long, slow swell that did not break or fall, just kept rising. The Providence tilted as its bow climbed the sudden hump. The other ships did the same, their hulls creaking.

  Then the hump... turned.

  A ridge broke the surface—a line of barnacle?crusted scale thicker than the mainmast. It went on and on and on, curving away into the water toward where the Martha Ann lay. It shone a sick, dark green, slick with slime.

  “The Leviathan,” someone whispered. “The serpent from the Bible.”

  The head came up after.

  It split the sea with a sound like a cliff face breaking. Water cascaded from its jaws as they gaped. Teeth like curved harpoons gleamed in the gray light. Its eyes were as big as a man’s chest, white limned in a faint, unnatural green fire.

  “Hard to starboard!” Benton roared, but the wheel was already spinning, Harker’s hands white?knuckled on the spokes.

  The ship did not move fast enough.

  The serpent’s bulk slid between the Providence and the Martha Ann, scales scraping hull. The smaller ship shuddered as if something inside her had broken. Men fell on her deck like pins.

  Then the serpent coiled.

  It wrapped itself around both ships in a lazy loop, as a child might drape a rope around toys. The pressure came slow at first, planks groaning, masts trembling.

  “Cut the lines!” someone screamed. “Cut—”

  The mainmast snapped with a crack like a gunshot. Spars crashed down, rigging whipping. Benton saw a man disappear under the tangle, legs kicking once.

  The hull began to give.

  Wood splintered. Water fountained in through seams that had been tight for twenty years. The serpent pulled tighter, drawing its coils together. The Saint Jude tried to tack away, sailors screaming in her rigging, but the serpent’s tail flicked, and a wave rose like the hand of God, sweeping her sideways.

  She vanished behind the curve of that impossible body.

  “Fire!” Harker yelled, voice high. “Harpoons! Cannons!”

  Men scrambled to obey, training whale guns on the nearest patch of slick, scaled hide. The first harpoon thudded into flesh, burying to the barbs. The serpent did not flinch. The second and third sank in too, lines snaking across the deck.

  “Pull!” Harker cried reflexively, as if they could haul this thing closer.

  The serpent moved.

  Its head swung down toward the Providence. The open mouth took most of the bow in. Men disappeared between teeth. Benton heard the crunch through the wood under his feet.

  He did not think of his [Vitality]. He did not think of [Levels]. He thought of his wife in Sag Harbor, of his boy running along the docks, of whale oil lamps glowing yellow in their little house.

  Then the deck bucked under him as the ship snapped.

  Cold Atlantic water punched the breath from his lungs. The serpent’s body rolled, crushing planks, sucking everything down.

  In the north, where mountains wore snow like hats even in summer and the light could stretch a whole night long or vanish for months, old things had always been said to sleep in the stone.

  Ingrid had grown up with troll stories.

  Her grandmother had told them by the stove in the long dark, voice a low rumble under the crackle of birch logs. Trolls that turned to stone when the sun touched them. Trolls that stole cows and sometimes children. Trolls that made the mountains themselves when they lay down and forgot to get up.

  When the words had come into her head nine days ago—clear and measured in a language that was not Norwegian and yet was—she had dropped the bucket she’d been carrying to the well. It had thumped into the snow and rolled.

  Welcome, sapient being!

  The System is now in effect.

  After, there had been numbers. [Strength: 5], [Dexterity: 6], [Vitality: 7], [Magic: 2]. Level 1. Her little brother Jakob had crowed with delight over his own [Magic: 4] and tried to light the stove with his fingers until Mother had boxed his ears.

  The pastor in the village had preached that Sunday with fire in his eyes and sweat on his brow, Bible thumping.

  “These are tests,” he’d said. “Tools laid before us. You can use a knife to cut bread or to slit a man’s throat. God watches how you use this System. The Devil will be quick to catch those who use it wrong.”

  Ingrid had nodded, but quietly. When she lay awake in her narrow bed under the eaves, she sometimes whispered [Status] just to see the numbers dance again. It made the dark feel a little less like it was pressing on the roof.

  Then the Global Notice had come, echoing off the mountains in her mind.

  Monster instances will now be increased threefold.

  Her father had gone still chopping wood, axe held halfway up. The sound of it in her head had made her teeth ache.

  Now, three days after that, the mountain looked wrong.

  Not the big one, not the old, familiar bulk of Storefjell that dominated the valley, its shoulders white, its base cloaked in pine. A smaller spur beside it, a gray slope of rock and scrub.

  It had… sagged.

  “Land slide,” Father said uncertainly, staring from the yard of their little farm, snow squeaking under his boots. “Maybe the thaw loosens it early.”

  “It’s too cold for thaw,” Mother snapped, shawl clutched tight. Her breath smoked in the air. “And there was no rain.”

  Ingrid squinted.

  The slope was moving.

  Not sliding down. Rolling. Heaving. As if some enormous thing beneath it was stretching after a long sleep.

  Jakob tugged at her sleeve.

  “Lesja,” he whispered. “You see? The rock breathes.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” she hissed, but her voice lacked bite.

  “Maybe leave the cows in today,” Mother muttered. “I don’t like it.”

  They did.

  By midday, men from the village had come riding up the track, skis slung over their shoulders, faces pale above their beards.

  “There was a sound,” one said. “Like a thunderclap under our feet. The ground shook. Then the mountain… cracked.”

  Another pointed with his chin at the spur.

  “Look.”

  The crack ran like a black vein across the face of the rock, jagged and raw. Snow had fallen from the higher shelves, leaving dark stone exposed. The gap widened as they watched, flakes and small stones rattling down.

  “Maybe we should ask the pastor,” someone muttered. “Maybe he will pray.”

  The pastor came, coat flapping, eyes wide. He had felt it too.

  They gathered in the yard, necks craned.

  The crack yawned.

  Something pushed out.

  At first it looked like more rock. A bulge, rough and gray, jamming itself into the day. Then the bulge resolved into a shape—four shapes—hand, hand, shoulder, head.

  A head too big and too misshapen to be human. Nose like a boulder. Mouth a line that split and split and split again into a grin full of teeth like broken stones. Eyes that were pits of emerald light.

  The troll pulled itself free of the mountain with a roar that rolled down the valley like an avalanche’s growl.

  Snow answered.

  The motion of its birth cracked shelves higher up. Whole plates of white broke off and tumbled, gathering speed, picking up more as they went. The troll shook itself, stone dust falling from its shoulders like dandruff, and took a step.

  The step alone was enough.

  The avalanche that broke free from Storefjell then was bigger than any man had seen in his lifetime. It came down in a wide, rolling curtain of white and gray, stones tumbling within it like flung dice. Trees snapped. Rocks bounced.

  It did not stop at the tree line.

  “Ingrid!” Mother screamed. “Jakob! Inside!”

  They ran for the house, but some part of Ingrid knew, even as her feet slipped on packed snow, that the walls of their turf?roofed farmhouse were nothing against that kind of weight.

  She turned anyway. People always turned.

  The white wall swallowed the first of the village houses down in the hollow. She saw one, the red?painted one with the carved horse heads on the eaves, vanish as if a hand had smacked it flat. A man ran, legs pumping, and the snow overtook him in three strides.

  The troll waded down after its own destruction, each step sending new showers of rock and ice down.

  Ingrid’s [Vitality: 7] would let her run longer now than she could have a week ago. It would let her breathe in thinner air. It did nothing when the shock of the avalanche hit, a wave of snow and stone and broken pine trunks punching through walls as if they were paper.

  The world turned white, then black.

  In Transylvania, they had old words for the dead that did not stay in their graves.

  Strigoi. Moroi. Words whispered over too?wooden faces in open coffins, over livestock that sickened and wasted, over children who saw their grandfather at the window two nights after he’d been buried.

  Father Andrei had never liked those words.

  He’d thought them an insult to the God he served, a way for frightened peasants to cover the random cruelties of sickness and hunger with stories of hungry ghosts.

  Then the System had come.

  Now, he wasn’t sure who was insulting whom.

  “It is a trial,” he had told his flock that first Sunday. The little stone church had been full. Smoke from tallow candles hung thick. The icons on the walls watched with painted eyes.

  “God has allowed something new into our world,” he’d said, hands spread. “You see numbers when you do not ask for them. You feel strength in your arms when you have done no new work. It is a temptation. It is also… an opportunity. To do more. To protect more. If we keep our souls clean.”

  The old women in black had muttered and crossed themselves. The young men had looked at their hands, flexing them as if they could see the [Strength] in their fingers.

  Then the Global Notice had come. Andrei had felt his own heart stutter when it did.

  Monster instances will now be increased threefold.

  Monster. Not demon. Not strigoi. The System used its own words.

  Now, three nights later, something scratched at the church door.

  Not a polite scratching. A hungry one. A dragging, scraping sound, like bone on wood.

  Andrei froze where he stood by the altar, broom in hand. He had been sweeping wax from the floor, a habit more than a need. The wind outside had risen, rattling the little bell in the tower. Snow hissed against the stained?glass windows.

  The scratching came again.

  “Cine este?” he called. Who is it?

  No answer.

  He set the broom aside and picked up the brass candlestick instead. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it had weight.

  He walked to the door.

  “Who is there?” he called again. “You are late for mass, my child.”

  The latch rattled.

  He had barred it. Thick oak beam across iron hooks. The bar jumped, once, as something outside pushed.

  “Open, p?rinte,” a voice said.

  It sounded like Ioan’s voice. Ioan, the miller’s son, who had broken his neck two days ago when the cart overturned on the icy hill.

  Andrei’s skin crawled.

  “Go back to your rest,” he said. “You were buried in consecrated ground. You have no business here.”

  A pause.

  When Ioan spoke again, his voice was wrong. Too smooth. No hitch on the r as he always had.

  “I’m so hungry. I should not have to lie in the dirt. Open, p?rinte.”

  Andrei’s heart hammered.

  The scratching came again, higher now, as if more hands had joined.

  He heard other voices, low and eager, muffled by wood.

  “Open… open…”

  He backed away.

  The first window shattered.

  He flinched as glass burst inward, tallow candles guttering in the rush of cold air. Snow swirled into the nave, white flakes spinning in the lamplight.

  Something pushed through the empty frame.

  It moved slowly, as if its limbs had forgotten how they were supposed to work. Arms dangling. Head lolling. But it moved.

  The face that peered in under the broken arch of the window was Elena’s.

  Elena, who had died last winter of the coughing sickness, ribs sticking out like barrel hoops under her yellow skin.

  Her cheeks were full now. Too full. Skin stretched tight. Her mouth sagged open, showing teeth that had sharpened. Her eyes…

  Her eyes were green.

  A cold, unnatural green, lit from within.

  She saw him.

  Andrei raised the candlestick.

  Elena’s lips peeled back in something that was not a smile.

  “P?rinte,” she crooned. Her voice layered with something else, a thin, papery whisper that set his teeth on edge. “Do not be afraid. We have come to make you new.”

  More figures crowded behind her at the window.

  They pushed.

  The frame tore. Wood split. Rot had eaten at it for years; the new strength in dead arms made short work of it. They spilled into the church, boots scraping, hands reaching.

  Andrei swung.

  The candlestick connected with Elena’s temple. Bone crunched. Her head snapped sideways. A week ago, that would have dropped anyone.

  She giggled.

  Cold, dead fingers closed around his wrist.

  He began to pray, words tumbling out.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven—”

  Elena’s other hand clamped over his mouth. Her fingers were strong and cold and smelled of the grave.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “There is no god here to help you.”

  Teeth closed on his throat.

  Outside, in the village, other doors shook under other dead hands.

  All across the known world, life as humanity knew it came to a slow end.

  In fishing villages along the Japanese coast, old men looked out over calm bays and saw shapes moving under the water that did not match any ink painting they had ever seen—long, slender things with too many fins and eyes like lanterns.

  In the jungles of India, holy men who had once been content to sit in caves and stare at the inside of their own skulls opened their eyes and saw snakes swollen with a new, black fire, cobras whose hoods shimmered with green light.

  In the streets of London, where the smog already made the sun look sick, coal men coughed black and watched rats the size of dogs slip between brick and gutter, eyes bright in the fog.

  In every place where people had once told stories about monsters to scare children into behaving, something in the dark stirred and awakened.

  END OF BOOK 1