Tony Walker

"'He had the vague sense that his friend was relaying information.'

a way to do something, but he knew not what.

He was sometimes woken in the morning by strange screaming, usually from a nightmare.

As he looked in the mirror, his face had contorted again before returning to normal.

Nobody knew what was happening to him save for his father, who had read his scribblings but was none the wiser, instead feeling that this was a phase he was going through.

To Matthew, the winged thing was real and he grew accustomed to its presence.

Over time, he felt the cloaked man was a separate creature, somehow linked to the other, but with more maniacal purposes that he could not guess.

over time some sense of this purpose began to form as nightmares now took on a different shape he saw the cloaked man and the winged thing as they strove in a painted scene movements slow but gradual he heard them talk the roaring of monsters and dark things in the night as the game they played was drawing to a close

Many years ago, a boy from a local family had attacked one of Matthew's friends quite viciously.

Matthew had come to his aid, leading to a physical altercation.

He had never forgotten the injury nor his emotion towards the boy, something which now returned to him in a dream.

Matthew had always feared death.

His mother had died in her sleep when he was younger in mysterious circumstances leading to visions of his own mortality, which were now played to him over continual nights as both the cloaked man and the boy consumed him and his mother.

He shuddered at such visions, feeling both anger and grief, but his friend promised him life beyond death and the ability to change his shape at will whenever he pleased.

to kill the boy and his family those who according to his friend the cloaked man also desired would be to strike a blow against him and grant matthew the immortality he desired so too other families lay in wait whom matthew must reach first to starve the cloaked man of his conquest such was the price of immortality

and defeating that which had taken his mother many years ago the night before his fourteenth birthday the moon was now full in the sky and he saw the familiar shape hanging like a bat it barely moved an inch he closed his eyes as the cloaked man now revealed himself again

Matthew felt a desperate urge for it to go away, to leave him be, but he knew somehow this wouldn't happen.

Instead, his friends Henrietta, then Henry, and Martin gathered on either side of the cloaked man, who beckoned them together like a family.

He shivered, the figures melding into the black form whose eyes seemed to glow red.

He felt sucked into a dreamscape, only the cloaked man now visible on a distant rise against the horizon, a bleak sky beyond, seen through a thin sliver of light as all else was black.