He had lived in darkness for twelve years, and no one suspected the terrifying secret hidden inside his eyes.
Ricardo, a technology tycoon, had tried everything—top specialists in Switzerland, experimental treatments, even jungle healers. Nothing worked for Mateo.
His son, the heir to his entire empire, lived in complete darkness. The diagnosis was always the same: unexplained, incurable blindness. Ricardo eventually resigned himself to watching his child stumble through life, surrounded by luxuries he could never truly enjoy.
Then one day, while Mateo was playing the piano in the garden, a little girl slipped onto the property.
She wore worn-out clothes and had enormous, watchful eyes. Her name was Sofía, a girl known for begging for coins on the street corner. The security guards were about to chase her away, but Mateo stopped them with a single gesture. He sensed something different about her—an unsettling presence that broke the silence of his world.
She didn’t ask for money.
Instead, she stepped closer and said with the blunt honesty of a street child,
“Your eyes aren’t damaged. There’s something inside them that’s stopping you from seeing.”
Ricardo was offended.
Was a poor little girl supposed to know more than Harvard neurosurgeons? Absurd.
But Mateo reached for Sofía’s hand and guided it to his face. She placed her small, dirty fingers on his cheeks. With a calmness that sent chills down Ricardo’s spine, she slid her fingernail beneath Mateo’s eyelid.
“Get your hands off him right now!” Ricardo shouted.
But Sofía was faster.
With one swift movement, she pulled something from Mateo’s eye socket…
It wasn’t a tear.
It wasn’t dirt.
It was something alive—dark, glossy, and moving in her palm.
Ricardo went pale.
You have to see what that thing was, how it got there, and why no doctor ever noticed it. The truth is horrifying and will leave you breathless.
The object Sofía held was no ordinary creature.
It was the size of a fingernail, with a black shell that reflected light like oil on water. It resembled a tick—but its shape was too perfect, too geometric.
It writhed.
Mateo couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Not in his eye, but behind his forehead—as if an emotional plug he’d carried since childhood had suddenly been removed.
Ricardo, meanwhile, stood frozen in fear and disbelief.
“Security! Grab that girl!” he finally shouted.
Sofía didn’t even blink. Calmly, she opened her palm.
The tiny dark creature, already drying in the sunlight, let out a high, almost inaudible screech.
Then it jumped.
Not toward Ricardo—but straight onto the marble floor.
“Don’t step on it,” Sofía warned sharply. “If you crush it here, the spores will activate. It’ll burst.”
Ricardo stopped instantly. The guards froze several meters away.
The creature began moving with unnatural speed, sliding toward the shadow cast by the grand piano—seeking darkness.
“What the hell is that?” Ricardo gasped.
“A Nocturne,” Sofía replied, watching the dark trail it left behind. “They live where light has been forcibly shut off.”
Mateo spoke then—the blind boy was the only one thinking clearly.
“It’s not the only one,” he said hoarsely. “My other eye burns. Like a ghost of light.”
The realization hit Ricardo like a shock. If there was one parasite… then there had to be another.
Sofía ran to the piano and knelt, staring at a small opening near the base.
“There’s a nest,” she whispered. “That one was just a scout. And its job wasn’t to steal your sight.”
Ricardo felt a deep, icy chill.
“Then what was its job?”
“To protect what you didn’t want to see,” Sofía replied, pointing into the wall cavity. “And now they know. We’re going to wake them all.”
Ricardo didn’t hesitate. The girl might be a witch—or something worse—but she was the only one who understood what was happening.
“Remove the other one,” Mateo said calmly, extending his hand. “I trust you.”
This time, Ricardo didn’t stop her.
Sofía repeated the same precise, horrifying motion.
From Mateo’s left eye, she pulled out another Nocturne—larger, darker, gleaming.
This one didn’t jump. It lay still in her palm, as if waiting for orders.
Suddenly, Sofía screamed—not in fear, but in pain.
“They’re guarding something,” she cried. “Something much bigger than fear of the light.”
From deep inside the wall behind the piano came a sound—wet, multiplying, dozens of movements.
Then the smell hit them: metallic, rotten, like burnt electricity and damp stone.
Ricardo pressed his hand against the piano’s wood. He felt a rhythmic vibration, like a heartbeat inside the wall.
“They’re in there,” he whispered.
The truth behind Mateo’s twelve years of blindness was hidden just beyond that wall.
At that moment, the garden lights went out—not from a power failure, but because a massive shadow fell over the mansion. Day turned into night.
The Nocturnes were home.
The Nest of Darkness
Ricardo ordered his guards to bring demolition tools.
“Break that wall. Now!”
The inner wall of the music room collapsed within minutes.
The stench was unbearable—ancient mold mixed with that same metallic odor.
Inside the narrow cavity, they saw them.
Dozens of Nocturnes. Some crawling slowly along insulation. Others clustered together in a pulsing black mass.
Ricardo’s flashlight made the mass convulse. A chorus of shrill screeches filled the room.
“Look closely,” Sofía said. “They don’t feed only on flesh.”
They fed on the twilight created by Mateo’s blindness—symbionts of trauma, thriving where memory had been suppressed.
The Secret in the Wall
At the center of the nest was something that didn’t belong.
Not organic. Artificial.
Sofía reached in without fear and pulled it free.
A small, dark wooden music box—covered in dust and webs.
Ricardo recognized it instantly.
It had belonged to Mateo’s mother.
She had died twelve years earlier in a car accident—the same day Mateo went blind.
Ricardo had claimed the box was lost during the move.
But here it was.
Hidden in the wall.
Inside was not a dancer—but a photograph. Mateo at seven, smiling beside his mother. On the back was frantic handwriting.
“I don’t know how to hide it. The boy saw everything. I can’t let Ricardo find out. This would destroy everything.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Mateo hadn’t gone blind from shock.
He had gone blind because his mother had tried to hide something—from him, and from Ricardo.
“What did I see?” Mateo whispered.
“The memory is returning,” Sofía said. “The connection is back.”
Mateo clutched his head.
“The car… it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “I saw it before Dad came home. She wasn’t alone.”
A shadow shifted.
From behind a hidden service panel stepped a man—Daniel, a former engineer Ricardo had fired years ago.
He aimed a gun at Sofía.
“The girl has to die,” he hissed. “She ruined everything.”
Chaos erupted.
Sofía hurled the Nocturne at Daniel’s face. Drawn to terror, it latched onto his skin.
Ricardo tackled him.
Daniel confessed everything: embezzlement, threats, the chase that caused the crash. Mateo had witnessed it all.
The Nocturnes weren’t the disease.
They were the cure—engineered to block traumatic memory with darkness.
The End of the Night
Police arrived. Daniel was arrested.
Mateo’s vision returned slowly—first blurred, then clear.
The first thing he saw was Sofía.
“Why did you help me?” he asked, tears streaming.
She shrugged.
“I had one too,” she said. “Mine didn’t blind me. It let me see darkness in others.”
She left at dawn, refusing money. Only one promise.
That Mateo would face the truth.
Because the worst blindness isn’t physical.
It’s the one we choose when we’re afraid to look at pain.
And that’s a vision no billionaire can buy.
