thriller

Rise Beyond: The Journey to a Life of True Success
In a competitive, expectation-driven, noise-driven world, the word success has a thousand faces. It's money to some, prestige or power to others. But look beneath the surface of what the world counts as success, and you'll find that genuine success is a whole lot more personal—and a whole lot deeper.
By Muhammad Sohailabout a year ago in Fiction
The Silence Between Screams. AI-Generated.
The house on Wren Hollow Road had been empty for twenty-three years—long enough for the town to forget the truth, but not the fear. When Claire Ramsey inherited the old two-story home from her grandmother, she almost didn’t take it. The house had a past, and in a small town like Ashbridge, people whispered. They remembered the Ramsey tragedy: a fire that claimed her aunt and two cousins. No cause was ever confirmed. No bodies were ever found. Now, Claire stood at the doorway, key in hand, the October wind tugging at her coat like a child begging her not to go inside. She went in anyway. The air was thick with dust and something else—faint, like burned sugar and old paint. The hallway was narrow and dim, lit only by the gray light leaking through the boarded windows. Floorboards groaned like the house itself resented her presence. She explored cautiously, eyes scanning old portraits where faces faded like memories. In the upstairs hallway, she found three doors: one ajar, one closed, and one sealed shut with rusty nails. She didn’t need to ask which one had been her cousins' room. That night, Claire didn’t sleep. Around 2 a.m., she woke to a soft creaking noise, like footsteps circling her bed. She held her breath. The air was cold, too cold for October. The sound stopped—but something else started. A whisper. Faint, not in her ears but in her bones. Help me. She sat up, heart racing. No one was there. The room was still. But the voice... it had been real. She was sure of it. The next morning, Claire visited the Ashbridge library. The fire was barely mentioned in the archives—just a short article about a "tragic loss," a "structural fire of unknown cause." No obituaries. No funeral records. She found Mrs. Dalloway, the librarian who'd been around since before Claire was born. "Funny thing about that fire," Mrs. Dalloway said, voice low. "They never found the kids, did they? But I remember hearing screams that night. More than just pain. It was like… something was being silenced." Claire’s skin prickled. That night, she returned to the house with a flashlight and a hammer. She stood before the nailed-shut door. One by one, she pulled the nails free. Each groan of the wood felt like a protest. Inside, the room was untouched by time. Toys scattered on the floor. A small bed with a pink canopy. A closet door cracked open. She stepped inside. A sudden thud behind her—she spun. The door had slammed shut. Then the silence came. Not normal silence. It was too quiet. Her own breath seemed muffled. Even her heartbeat felt distant. And then she heard it again. Help me. Please... it's still here. Claire turned her flashlight toward the closet. Inside, a small pair of eyes blinked. She gasped, stumbled back. The flashlight flickered. From the shadows of the closet, a child stepped forward. A girl. Maybe eight years old. Pale. Eyes hollow. Mouth trembling. "It's in the walls," the girl whispered. "It watches through the cracks. We screamed... but then it took the sound. It took our voices." The flashlight died. Claire froze. Total blackness wrapped around her like a wet shroud. Then came the noise. Not a scream. The absence of a scream. A void, sucking sound—like a vacuum pulling sound from the air. Claire tried to scream but nothing came out. Her mouth moved. Her throat strained. But silence swallowed everything. She backed up blindly, hands out, feeling the walls close in. Then—light. The flashlight buzzed back on. The girl was gone. So was the closet. She was standing in an empty, rotted room. No toys. No bed. Just a mirror on the wall, cracked straight through the center. And in the mirror, she saw herself. But not just herself. A tall figure stood behind her—faceless, stretching impossibly long, its arms reaching forward like ropes made of shadows. She spun around. Nothing. But her reflection still showed it. Closer now. She ran. Down the stairs. Through the hall. Out into the cold night air, heart pounding, breath short. Claire didn’t go back the next day. Or the day after. She moved into a motel and called a priest from out of town. But when they returned to the house, the door wouldn’t open. It was like the house had sealed itself shut. They broke a window to get inside. Everything was gone. Empty. Not abandoned—erased. As if no one had ever lived there. No one but Claire. And the silence. --- Weeks later, Claire sits in a psychiatric ward, eyes wide and mouth stitched shut by memory. No one believes her. Not about the house. Not about the girl. Not about the thing in the walls that feeds on screams, and leaves only silence. But sometimes, in the quietest hours of the night, the nurses swear they hear something echo from her room. A single, blood-chilling whisper: Help me.
By M.SUDAIS about a year ago in Fiction
Faceless Night [Part 4-ending].. Content Warning.
*** (At three-thirty in the morning). The conversation between two bodies was still ongoing among their peacefully sleeping children. It was about longing, "all because of your spell, oh female fish, that the sea water doesn't taste salty!", "you stupid male cat, you might never realize it, if you keep curling up in the corner of the suffocating alleys of your hometown, if you never cross the blue ocean. That your pearl-like eyes hold the wonders of the sky during the full moon...(the man flinched as he touched his blind eyes)...Yes, because of your eyes reflecting the full moon, my underwater kingdom that night became strange, no longer salty, but like a swimming pool owned by city people. So, I emerged to the surface, searching for you, finding you stranded, hungry and thirsty. Until you fell in love with my half-human body and flesh...(the two naked bodies rubbed against each other more tightly)...Only then did I darken the full moon with my cloudy magic. Making it sink before its time. You roared to wake up your wild side wanting to pounce on me, but what could you do, you were just a stranded black cat and already blind. And I am the princess of the blue ocean, because the foams of the waves are my urine. Until you wait for the return of another full moon in hunger, loneliness, darkness... The sky remained true to its promise. The girl and Gilang were getting deeper into their sleep, sheltered by the light of the full moon hanging in a quarter of the sky in the east. Both were still lying on their wet t-shirts and pants...you were so loyal to wait until the full moon returns. But you never knew what you were actually waiting for and what was waiting for you. That night, the second full moon of our encounter, with all the blessings of my blue sea, I transformed into a virgin girl. For the first time, my lungs breathed the air just like you did, my feet stepped on the grains of sand just like you did. Thus, that night I received my curse. Then, you tore apart every curve of my body in the form of a black cat, just like you tore apart a flopping fresh fish on the beach. You licked every pore of my body that was no longer scaly. I allowed it for the sake of the sea that was no longer salty because of your eyes. Eyes that would soon be blind, blinded by the lust that claimed to be love. Until I truly began to love you that night. The love of a fish for a black cat. A love that was actually just an escape from my fear of the ocean water that you turned into freshwater... (At four o'clock in the morning) Gilang woke up after being bitten by a mosquito, only to be startled by two naked bodies piled up next to his younger sibling, his mother and a blind man he didn't know. Gilang closed his eyes again, pretending to still be asleep... Then you are cursed to be my husband's human... "Gilang (in his mind): Father...?" ...after I cursed myself first to become a woman... "Gilang (sobbing in his mind): They are demons, my sibling and I are demon offspring.!!!" The child was startled by the reality, crying and screaming when suddenly the world turned dark. But he didn't recognize his own screams
By Shafa Ichwanusabout a year ago in Fiction
Drift black. Content Warning.
The Argonaut V drifted at the edge of the Charybdis Void, a black slit in the universe where stars went to die. No comms. No telemetry. Just static and silence.Drift Black
By E. hasanabout a year ago in Fiction
She Lit a Candle, and the Shadows Answered
When Emily first returned to the crumbling house at the edge of Pine Hollow, she hadn’t planned to stay the night. It was supposed to be a quick visit—a final look at the place that haunted her dreams, the place she had avoided for fourteen long years. But fate, as always, had its own cruel sense of timing.
By M Aliabout a year ago in Fiction
Love Chooses You
Love Chooses You There's no need to punish yourself if you fall for someone who doesn't fall for you. You are not flawed for them, love just doesn't reside there.
By Rohitha Lankaabout a year ago in Fiction
The Boy, the King, and the Spoon of Oil
A little boy wanted to find out what his life was all about. He went to ask an old king who was supposed to have the answer to every question.
By Rohitha Lankaabout a year ago in Fiction
The Inbox That Paid Rent
Adeel’s inbox used to be his enemy. Every morning at 9:00 a.m., it launched digital grenades—deadlines, “quick calls,” and “just circling back” emails that slowly drained the joy from his job as a corporate analyst.
By Aima Charleabout a year ago in Fiction
Shake It Off and Step Up
Since obstacles are something to shake off, step on. Once upon a time, there was a farmer who had a donkey. It was very old. Once the farmer took out the old donkey. So idiotic, it recently fell into a pond. It groaned for a long time. The farmer attempted to find a way to help it. At last, the farmer saw that the donkey was too old. Plus, the pond needed to be hidden. It was stupid to help the donkey. So the farmer told the villagers to help cover the pond. They all gathered with shovels to dump dirt into the pond. When the mud first landed on the donkey's back, it was surprised, but it soon came to understand its situation. It howled immediately. At one point, everyone looked and was amazed to see that the donkey was silent. When the farmer had thrown a few shovels of soil into the pond, he looked inside the pond and was astounded to discover that when everyone threw soil on the donkey's back, the donkey would shake the soil off its back and step on that soil. The more everybody tried to throw dirt, the better it rose to the challenge.
By Rohitha Lankaabout a year ago in Fiction
The Bone Collector's Daughter - IV: The Original Sin
Don't forget to read the first three! The Bone Collector’s Daughter – I: The Inheritance of Shadows The Bone Collector’s Daughter – II: Whispers from the Crypt
By The Lost Books - "Libri Perditi"about a year ago in Fiction
"Atoms of Power". AI-Generated.
In the heart of what was once the Republic of Virelia, a lone reactor still pulsed beneath layers of concrete and steel. The world above had changed — forests crept through crumbling cities, vines tangled with satellite dishes, and dust-laden roads led to nowhere. But underground, deep in the Earth’s forgotten chambers, power still hummed. Silent. Eternal. They called it Astra Core — once the pinnacle of nuclear innovation. It had promised clean energy, unshackled progress, and freedom from fossil dependence. And for a time, it delivered. Cities lit up like constellations. Machines hummed in perfect synchronicity. Every home was warmed by invisible atoms breaking apart in carefully calibrated reactions. Then came the Divide. It wasn’t a war in the traditional sense. No bomb dropped. No siren screamed. But economies collapsed, governments fractured, and scientific truth fractured with them. What began as political unrest spiraled into civil schism. Some claimed Astra Core was a godsend. Others, a deathtrap. In the end, no one won. Fear spread faster than radiation. And so, the last great reactor was sealed. Not destroyed — no one dared. Instead, it was buried beneath titanium vaults and cryptographic seals, its existence scrubbed from official records, its guardians dispersed. Nature resumed its quiet dominion, and Astra Core became myth. But myths have a way of calling out. A drone — spider-like, silent, and solar-powered — scuttled over moss and rubble. Its directive came not from a human hand but from code written decades ago, instructions buried in the algorithm of an old university server that had recently come back online during a rare solar flare. The drone had received a signal: a pulse, faint but clear, from beneath the earth. A call from Astra Core. It descended through the remnants of a fractured elevator shaft, past murals of scientists, atoms, and children holding hands beneath a glowing sun. Deeper still, until it reached the control nexus. Panels lit up as if they had been waiting. Power surged into sensors. The drone transmitted a single packet of data. Far away, in an abandoned observatory reclaimed by wind and ivy, a terminal flickered on. It belonged to a woman named Keira Lang. Keira was a legacy — the granddaughter of one of Astra Core’s chief engineers. She had grown up listening to bedtime stories about the reactor, told like fairy tales: how it could power a continent, how it ran cleaner than any energy before it, how it had nearly bridged the gap between science and magic. But her parents had taught her the other stories too — about the Divide, about fear, about the day everything fell quiet. The data stream was brief. Coordinates. Access codes. A temperature reading far too stable for something supposedly dormant. Keira stared at the screen, the pulse of the reactor echoing in her chest like a heartbeat. Why now? she wondered. What woke it up? Driven by curiosity and an unspoken duty, she set out with only her tools, a solar battery, and her grandfather’s old tablet — its cracked screen still etched with the symbol of a glowing atom. It took her three days to reach the site. The entrance had collapsed decades ago, but erosion and time had opened a new path, as if the Earth itself had grown tired of secrecy. She descended alone. Inside, the air was dry and still. Lights flickered on as she passed, recognizing her biometric signature through embedded DNA authentication — another gift from her grandfather, whose code lived in her very cells. She reached the core chamber. The reactor stood tall — an angular monolith surrounded by containment rings, humming with restrained energy. Screens blinked to life, showing environmental metrics, core stability, reserve output. It hadn’t degraded. It hadn’t slept. It had waited. A message displayed across the main screen: "PROTOCOL: GUARDIAN INITIATED." "STATUS: NOMINAL." "REQUEST: HUMAN OVERRIDE REQUIRED TO RESUME PRIMARY FUNCTION." Keira felt the weight of the decision before her. The world above had moved on. Tribes, communes, nomadic science guilds — people had adapted to a post-energy world. They feared what came before, revered it as both salvation and curse. Restarting Astra Core would change everything. Cities could rise again. Technology could thrive. But so could division. Control of such power had sparked collapse once. Could it be different this time? She touched the terminal. The override code appeared, encrypted but familiar — her grandfather’s favorite equation. She decrypted it with shaking fingers. Another message appeared: "CONFIRM ACTIVATION: Y/N" Keira paused. The silence was complete. No voices, no guidance, no one to say if this was right or wrong. She thought of the stories. Of promises. Of warnings. Then she closed her eyes and pressed Y. The reactor responded instantly. Rings of energy shimmered to life. Heat diffused through superconductive panels. Power surged outward — not in destruction, but in renewal. Above ground, long-dormant sensors pinged online. A weather satellite adjusted its trajectory. A beacon lit up on the old international relay network — a signal not of conquest, but of return. And far across the planet, others saw it. Scientists in hiding. Children born in the quiet world. Dreamers. Skeptics. Survivors. They all saw the light. --- Atoms of Power had awakened. Not as a weapon. But as a second chance.
By "TaleAlchemy"about a year ago in Fiction
Ties That Never Break
The first time Maya met Rhea, she was crying in the school hallway. Maya, shy but curious, approached her with a piece of candy from her lunchbox and asked, “Are you okay?” That small gesture, at just nine years old, became the first thread in a bond that would last decades.
By k zarmalabout a year ago in Fiction