Thunglung Dungma was locked inside the darkest room of the house.
The space was no bigger than a small toilet. It was narrow, suffocating, and had almost no air — the kind of stillness that pressed against the chest, thick and unmoving, as though the room itself had long since given up on breathing. Even if he screamed until his throat tore apart, no one outside would ever hear him. The walls swallowed every sound, thick concrete slick with old damp, cracked in places where his fingernails had once tried, uselessly, to find purchase. Nothing escaped that place.
Not voices, not cries, not hope.
His life was filled with pain, sorrow, loneliness, and silence. He was never allowed to step outside. He had never seen the open sky or felt sunlight on his skin, not even the faintest touch of warmth — only the thin, grey light that sometimes crept beneath the door, and even that felt like a stranger's kindness, offered by accident rather than intention.
His father was a serial killer whose mind had completely fallen into madness. To him, Thunglung was not a son. He was just an object that happened to be alive, something to be maintained rather than loved, the way one might keep a tool from rusting simply because it still had use. He was fed only twice a day, just enough to keep him from dying too soon — cold rice, sometimes nothing at all, pushed beneath the door without a word.
As time passed, Thunglung's body grew thin and weak. He looked like a dried leaf, fragile and lifeless, skin stretched tight and papery over bone. His bones pushed against his skin, and his veins stood out clearly, blue-green beneath translucent flesh, mapping pathways that seemed too fragile to still be carrying blood.
He was always close to death. Still, during sudden fits of rage, his father would beat him with a stick, the sound of it cracking sharp against the narrow walls, swallowed the same way everything else was swallowed. Each strike drained more of the little strength he had left, until even flinching became something his body could no longer manage.
"I was only five years old.
I lived like something that had been thrown away, like a broken object tossed out with the trash.
I could not speak. I could not move. I could not scream. I felt like a stone.
When I cried, no one heard me.
There was no one to comfort me, no one to understand me, no one to make me smile.
That was my life.
I could do nothing, say nothing, feel nothing, or see anything clearly.
My life has completely become hell.
I lived in darkness and loneliness, unable to talk to anyone, unable to look outside, unable to see the sky, not even a single drop of light."
Thunglung's story was like a stone, silent, unmoving, and forgotten beneath the weight of time — the kind of story that never makes it into conversation, never earns a headline, simply exists in the dark until the dark decides, on its own schedule, to let it out.
No one knew what was happening to him. No one even knew if anything was happening at all.
Then one day, people living nearby began to notice a terrible smell coming from the house — faint at first, easy to mistake for rotting garbage or a dead animal beneath a porch. At first they ignored it, the way people ignore most unpleasant things, hoping it would resolve itself. But the smell grew stronger each day, thick and sour, clinging to clothes and lingering in memory long after they'd walked past, until it became impossible to bear.
Suspicion slowly replaced indifference, and they finally decided to go inside and find the source, gathering in small, uneasy clusters at the gate, none of them quite willing to be the first to knock.
Thunglung's father was not home at the time. He had gone out again, driven by his own darkness, the kind that never seemed to rest for long.
Inside, the house was horrifying. Trash covered the floors in uneven drifts, old newspaper and rotted food pressed into corners. The walls were stained, dark patches creeping up from the baseboards like something spreading from beneath the house itself. The air felt heavy and rotten, thick enough to taste.
Someone noticed that the toilet door was locked from the outside — a detail that struck them as wrong before they even understood why. When they tried to open it, it would not move, the latch rusted stiff with disuse. Alarmed, he called the others, voice tight with something between confusion and dread.
"Why is the toilet locked from the outside?" he asked.
"And why is that awful smell coming from here?"
Everyone gathered around, the small group pressing closer together instinctively. Fear spread among them, quiet and contagious. Then they started hitting the door, first with open palms, then with shoulders, the old wood groaning under each impact.
After several blows, the door finally broke open, splintering inward with a crack that echoed through the ruined house. What they saw made them freeze.
Inside lay a child who was barely alive, curled small against the concrete, limbs folded at angles that suggested he'd stopped being able to choose his own position long ago. His body was weak, his condition too painful to look at directly — ribs visible beneath skin gone grey, lips cracked, eyes half-open and unfocused. Blood stained his skin in places, some old, some new. For a moment, no one spoke, the silence in the room heavier than the stench that had drawn them there. Then panic took over, and they called an ambulance, someone finally moving, finally shouting, finally doing something after years of collective, unknowing silence.
Fifteen years passed.
News spread that Thunglung's father had finally been arrested. He was in police custody for questioning — a small paragraph buried in a local paper, easy to miss unless you already knew to look for it. When Thunglung heard this, something inside him snapped, a wire pulled taut for fifteen years finally giving way all at once. Without thinking, he ran.
He fled from the ashram where he had been living and rushed into the streets, sandals slapping hard against pavement still warm from the afternoon sun. People stared as he passed, his expression too raw, too open, for anyone to look away easily. Some shouted. Some looked disturbed. Others were angry, muttering about the disruption. Thunglung did not care. None of it reached him.
His eyes burned with revenge, a fire that had been waiting for fifteen long years, banked low but never once extinguished. He reached the police station and walked straight inside, chest heaving, sweat cutting clean lines through the dust on his face.
A policeman stopped him at the door, hand raised. "What are you doing here, kid? What do you want?" Thunglung did not answer. His eyes moved past the officer as he slowly walked toward the interrogation room, footsteps unhurried now, almost deliberate, as though the years of waiting had taught him, finally, a kind of patience.
He opened the door.
Inside, his father sat calmly while the police questioned him, hands folded on the table, posture relaxed in a way that made the hair on the back of Thunglung's neck rise. In one sudden movement, Thunglung grabbed a gun from an officer's holster and pointed it at his father, arms shaking, breath coming in short, uneven bursts.
His father remained calm. He neither panicked nor begged for mercy, and there was not a trace of fear in his eyes. Instead, a faint smile appeared on his face — the same smile Thunglung remembered from behind that locked door, patient and utterly untouched by what stood in front of him now.
At once, every officer in the room aimed their weapons at Thunglung, the sound of safety catches clicking off in near-unison. The police captain, a middle-aged man with years of experience etched into the lines of his face, stepped forward slowly, palms open.
"Kid," he said carefully, "what are you trying to do? Please give me the gun. You are not a bad person. Put it down."
Thunglung said nothing, his hands trembling around the grip. His father kept smiling. A gunshot rang out. Time seemed to stop, the sound swallowing every other sound in the room. The officers were ready to fire, but the captain raised his hand sharply and stopped them, his own heart hammering against his ribs.
Shocked and furious, he demanded, "What do you think you've done, kid?" For the first time, Thunglung spoke, voice cracking apart mid-sentence. "He is my father," he said, his voice trembling. "But he is a devil. He destroyed my life from the time I was five years old. I waited fifteen years for this moment, and now it finally came."
Tears streamed down his face, tears he had held back for fifteen years, finally breaking loose all at once, hot against his cold skin.
"Did I do anything wrong," he asked, voice barely a whisper now, "after he ruined my entire life?"
The captain looked at him and asked one cold question. "Do you have evidence?" That question broke him more thoroughly than the gunshot had. "No," Thunglung whispered, the word barely audible.
The captain's frustration burst out, his voice rising despite himself. "Without evidence, how can I tell anyone what he did to you? Do you understand what this will do to me? Do you want to disgrace me?"
He paused, then spoke more quietly, some of the anger draining from his voice, replaced by something closer to exhaustion. "If that is not what you want, then leave." Fear spread through Thunglung's body, cold and immediate. He turned and ran, the gun clattering somewhere behind him, forgotten.
Some officers tried to stop him, hands grabbing at his sleeve, but the captain let him go, waving them back with a tired gesture. The exits were guarded, so Thunglung ran upstairs instead, toward the higher floors, feet pounding against each step two at a time.
The captain ordered the others to follow, his voice sharp again now. Thunglung pushed past anyone in his way, breath tearing at his throat. Finally, he was surrounded, officers converging from both ends of the narrow hallway.
"Stop!" the officers shouted. "There is nowhere left to run. Surrender now!"
Thunglung tried to explain. He tried to speak, mouth opening, throat working, but nothing came out that made any sense even to himself.
"...."
Moments later, in despair and confusion, he made a tragic choice that ended his escape — the hallway falling suddenly, permanently quiet.
"This is my story, full of foolishness. I laugh at my past self. Why was I still trying to reason with people who would never listen? How stupid."
"Shree Yan… this is the moment. I am looking into your past life memories. Were you a demon from the beginning? Or did you, like me, live in darkness and slowly become something even darker?"