Friday the 13th: The Nocturnis Arc – First Glimmers into the City

Friday the 13th: The Nocturnis Arc – First Glimmers into the City

Friday, February 13, 1970: First Glimmers into the City (Expanded)

In 1970, Nocturnis was already a city steeped in shadow, its grandeur decaying, its neon lights painting a fragile veneer over something ancient and unsettling. The perpetual twilight hung heavier, and the rain, as always, was a constant, mournful companion. It was on this particular Friday the 13th in February that the city's inherent dissonance began to manifest not just in its crumbling architecture, but in the very airwaves.

Radios, those ubiquitous boxes of polished wood and gleaming chrome, were the lifeblood of Nocturnis. They brought the outside world in – the blare of distant jazz clubs, the clipped urgency of police dispatches, the droning reports of a world far brighter and less perpetually damp. Yet, on this ill-omened night, these familiar sounds began to fray at the edges. It wasn't just the occasional pop or crackle of interference; this was something altogether different. Between stations, in the dead air that stretched between news bulletins, a new sound bled through: a structured, almost melodic static. It was a rising and falling pitch, a rhythmic pulse that seemed to carry an immense, chilling pressure behind it.

If one pressed an ear close to the speaker, if one listened with a mind even slightly open to the impossible, the true horror unveiled itself. Within that digital hiss, fragmented whispers began to coalesce. Faint, desperate pleas, undeniably non-human, yet laced with a raw, familiar agony. Low, guttural wails that suggested something vast and primordial, echoing from unimaginable distances. They were fractured communications, attempting to form words, perhaps, or merely expressing an unbearable suffering from across dimensions. The veil, that gossamer-thin membrane separating our reality from the myriad others, felt porous, actively weeping these unearthly sounds into Nocturnis’s constrained atmosphere. It was as if the sheer weight of sorrow and chaotic energy from other places was simply seeping through the cracks in existence.

At the diner counters, shrouded in the sickly glow of flickering neon, weary citizens sipped lukewarm synth-coffee. They muttered nervously, trying to rationalize the phenomenon: faulty equipment, old wiring, the city finally falling apart. But in their eyes, beneath the veneer of cynical dismissal, lay a dawning, collective dread. They knew. Deep down, they recognized that this wasn't just static. It was a direct line, a psychic bleed from something that hungered or suffered beyond comprehension. This auditory invasion was an early symptom, the initial tremor that signaled the growing illness within Nocturnis. It hinted at forces stirring in the greater multiverse—forces like the ether dragons, whose vast domains stretched across realities, and even the subtle, insidious influence of Archdemons like Mammon, whose tendrils of avarice were perhaps already taking root. It was the first, chilling echo of the "whispers on the wind" that would one day become a deafening, sanity-shattering chorus, a prelude to the true cosmic horror awaiting the city.

Yours for Now Captain Hedges