Three Kinds of Dark - By Sabiha Atturkhan

Written By: Sabiha Atturkhan

Category: Fantasy & Science Fiction

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the enchanting realm of fantasy and science fiction, Sabiha Atturkhan presents "Three Kinds of Dark," a captivating narrative exploring the depths of identity, legacy, and love. Submitted to the esteemed Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, this work invites readers into a world where boundaries blur and histories intertwine. Atturkhan's story is a testament to the power of imagination and the timeless questions of what it means to belong and to love.

About the Work

"Three Kinds of Dark" weaves a rich tapestry of themes centered around the complexities of identity and the legacy of love. Atturkhan's narrative is marked by its evocative imagery and profound emotional depth, drawing readers into a world where past and present converge. The story's mood is both haunting and hopeful, offering a poignant reflection on the courage required to embrace one's true nature and the bonds that sustain us.

Three Kinds of Dark

Original Submission by Sabiha Atturkhan

-THREE KINDS OF DARK

Being the Love, the Prologue, the Grimoire, and the Essay

From

The Eclipse Heir of the Half-Blood Prince

by Sabiha Atturkhan

"The vampire is not a disease. It is not a curse in the way the Church understood curses. It is older than any name we have given it. What we are is a threshold creature. That is what we are. We are the edge."— The Marshall Grimoire

— ✶ —

PART ONE

Twenty Years of Almost

I

The First Time

The first time, they were nineteen.

In a corridor in the east wing of Malfoy Manor at two in the morning, they nearly collided at the turn. Lucius was in his dressing gown; Severus was still in his robes, having worked late enough to forget that other people slept. Lucius caught his arm to steady him. He held on a moment too long and let go a moment too late.

Neither of them mentioned it.

Neither of them forgot it.

— ✶ —

II

Eleven Minutes

The second time was at one of Lucius's parties, held for a political reason Severus had already forgotten and disguised with candlelight and expensive wine. Narcissa looked radiant in silver robes. Around her, the guests performed the elaborate theatre of pure-blood society. Severus took his usual place near a window and quietly measured the distance to the exit.

Lucius found him there.

They stood together without speaking for eleven minutes. Severus counted. It was the most comfortable eleven minutes he had spent in years.

At last Lucius made a dry, exact observation about the guest of honour's inexcusable taste in wine. Severus laughed before he could stop himself - a real laugh, unfamiliar enough to surprise him.

Lucius looked at him like he had done something extraordinary.

Neither of them mentioned that either.

— ✶ —

III

The Year of Silence

There was a year when they were in the same room and it felt like being alone.

They had not grown apart. The Dark Mark burned on Severus's arm, the Ministry was watching, and anything spoken aloud could be turned into a weapon. Neither man needed this explained; understanding without words had always been one of their habits.

Silence kept for someone's safety can look painfully like indifference. Anyone watching them would have seen the same distance either way. Some days, even Severus could not tell which silence he was living in.

Severus measured the distance between them in small things: whether Lucius took his usual chair at the workbench; whether a glance lasted a second longer than it should; whether a hand began to reach and thought better of it. He catalogued each detail as carefully as a potion ingredient. That year, precision was the only tenderness he could afford.

The war ended. The Dark Mark faded to a scar.

Neither of them mentioned the year.

The following week, without agreement or discussion, Lucius returned to his chair at the workbench. Severus said nothing. He did not need to.

— ✶ —

IV

The Night Hayley Came

The night Hayley Marshall came to the Manor, Lucius found Severus in the laboratory at midnight.

“She’s upstairs,” Lucius said. “Resting. The Healers say the baby will come before spring.”

Severus did not look up from his work. “I know.”

“She might not survive it.”

“I know.”

The silence between them seemed to acquire weight.

Lucius crossed the room and sat in the chair beside Severus’s workbench — the chair that had been his for twenty years, the chair no one else sat in, the chair that was his by some unspoken law neither of them had ever needed to write down.

He reached out and placed his hand over Severus’s.

They remained like that for a long time. The cauldron simmered and the Manor's wards hummed faintly in the walls. Somewhere in the guest wing, the young woman carrying an unprecedented child slept fitfully.

Lucius did not remove his hand.

Severus did not pull away.

After a while, Lucius said, “If the child survives, we raise her.”

“Yes,” Severus said. “We do.”

There was no discussion of whether it was sensible or possible. His answer was immediate, as their most important decisions always were.

“All of us,” Lucius added. “You and I and Narcissa.”

Lucius’s hand tightened over his. Severus turned his palm up to meet it.

Twenty years of almost, and neither of them had ever done this — this simple, enormous thing of one hand holding another in a room where no one was watching.

To Severus, the gesture felt less like a beginning than the end of a very long hesitation.

A door they had guarded for twenty years had finally moved.

— ✶ —

V

Heaven

The child survived.

Hayley Marshall did not.

Severus stood in the doorway of the room where she had died and held a girl who was four hours old and already strange — her eyes kept changing color, cycling through shades that had no business in a human face. She looked at him with a directness that newborns were not supposed to possess.

He looked back.

He had prepared himself for grief. He had not prepared for the fierce certainty that arrived when he looked at this small, furious person and knew he would do anything for her.

Lucius appeared at his shoulder.

They stood together in the doorway, looking at the child.

“She needs a name,” Lucius said quietly.

Yes.

Hayley had told Narcissa that, if the baby was a girl, she wanted to call her Heaven.

Severus looked at the baby. Heaven, he said.

Severus could not have explained why, but the name fit.

Heaven Marshall Snape opened her changing eyes and regarded both men with an expression of ancient, exhausted patience.

She looked less newly arrived than deeply inconvenienced by the journey.

Lucius laughed softly. Severus, despite himself, nearly did too.

— ✶ —

VI

Twenty Years

Seven years later, in the corridor outside his laboratory, Lucius said: You know I love you.

He spoke quickly and quietly, like a man who had rehearsed the sentence for twenty years and still feared it might vanish once it entered the air.

Severus stopped walking.

He turned. Lucius was watching him with the expression he only wore here, inside these walls, where the performance of Lucius Malfoy could be set aside for the length of a breath.

Severus thought about nineteen and the corridor and the hand that held on a moment too long. He thought about eleven minutes at a window. He thought about a year when they were in the same room and it felt like being alone, and the chair that appeared again the following week without either of them having to say so. He thought about a hand over his on a laboratory workbench while a child who would become theirs dreamed in a guest room above them.

Twenty years of almost.

I know, he said. You know I love you.

Lucius let out a slow breath. Severus wondered how many years he had been holding it.

Yes, he said. I know.

For a moment they simply stood in the corridor of their own house. Their family slept nearby; their child's laughter from earlier that evening seemed to linger in the rooms. After twenty careful years, the love they had protected was finally allowed its name.

Then Lucius reached out and took his hand.

Together they returned to the laboratory and to the work that had always given them a reason to share the same room.

Behind them, the door remained open.

Neither man reached back to close it.

— ✶ —

This was the love Heaven Marshall Snape grew up inside, the love that built the house that held her. She did not yet know about the corridor at nineteen, the eleven quiet minutes, or the year in which distance had been a form of protection. She knew only that the two men raising her loved one another with the steadiness of people who had practised for years before they were permitted to say the words.

Children rarely discover such truths all at once. For Heaven, it was simply part of the floor beneath her feet.

— ✶ —

PART TWO

Three Kinds of Dark

I

The House That Held Us

The first thing you should know about Malfoy Manor is that it breathes.

Not literally — but there is a rhythm to the old house, a pulse in the wards that wraps around you when you cross the threshold. I felt it the night I arrived, at four years old, with my shoes still dirty from the orphanage yard and no understanding of what I was being carried into.

The man carrying me wore black robes and held me carefully. His face revealed nothing. I did not know his name, only the warmth of the cloth beneath my cheek and his purposeful, unhurried stride. He walked as if bringing me home were the most ordinary decision in the world. At four, I needed to believe him.

Seven years later, I understood that he had been right. My life had taken shape in the laboratory where Severus brewed while I read in a worn leather chair, in the library alcove where Draco, Blaise and I had whispered promises since childhood, and in the corridors where Lucius and Severus had spent twenty years saying almost everything without speaking.

Almost, until the night my mother came, and then not almost anymore.

I did not need to be told this. I grew up inside it. Some truths don’t need words.

It was, I would later understand, the best education I could have had. Not in magic. In how to hold something precious without letting anyone see you hold it.

— ✶ —

II

Two Legacies

The summer before Hogwarts, Severus gave me my inheritance.

I was in my usual place — the worn leather chair in the corner of his laboratory, the one that had accumulated my presence over so many years that it had begun to hold the shape of me. He was at his cauldron. The work between us had always been companionable like this: him brewing, me reading or watching or simply existing in the same room, both of us finding it sufficient.

“You’re watching me,” he said, without turning.

“You’re being watched.”

“Astute.” He made three rotations counter-clockwise. “I have something for you.”

The locked cabinet against the far wall had been there for as long as I could remember. It was warded, sealed and so deliberately forbidden that even as a child I had known better than to test it. Now the wards loosened beneath Severus's hand, and he withdrew two books.

The first: ancient brown leather, worn to the softness of skin, marked along one edge with something dark that was probably both blood and ink. The second: black leather, silver clasps, its binding shimmering with protective enchantments that flickered when the light caught them.

He crossed the laboratory and placed both in my hands.

The brown volume was warmer than leather should have been. When I touched it, a faint pulse travelled into my palms.

“The brown one belonged to your mother,” Severus said. His voice was level — the voice he used when he had decided what he felt about something and had set it aside to be felt later, privately, where no one could see it cost him. “The Marshall grimoire. Wolf magic. Vampire magic. The creature knowledge her family accumulated for centuries.”

My mother. Hayley Marshall. I had her name and three facts: Crescent werewolf. Vampire hybrid. Died the night I was born.

Now I also had her handwriting, sealed for eleven years between the covers of a book.

“And the black one?”

“Mine.” He was quiet for a moment. “The Prince grimoire. The witch in you comes from me. You should have my family's knowledge as well as hers. I should have given it to you sooner.”

That last sentence cost him something. I recognized the sound of it.

I opened my mother’s grimoire first.

The unfamiliar handwriting looped warmly across the page, unlike Severus's compact script or Lucius's elegant hand. Before I had made sense of the words, I felt a shock of recognition that seemed to come from the blood rather than the mind.

To the daughter who reads this:

You carry the Crescent legacy — the wolf who runs beneath the moon, the vampire who walks in darkness. But you have something more, don’t you? Something from your father’s side. Something that makes you three instead of two.

I don’t know what it will ask of you. I don’t know what it will give. I only know that the women who came before us figured it out — found a way to hold what they were without breaking.

You will too. Use it. Use all of it. Be what none of us could be.

— Your mother, who loved you before she ever saw your face

I read it twice. My vision had gone blurred somewhere in the middle of the first pass. I let it.

Then I turned to the black grimoire.

The Prince Grimoire. Last updated: Severus Tobias Snape, Half-Blood Prince.

To my daughter: The witch in you is mine. Train it well. I have been building bridges between her magic and yours for eleven years. They are ready when you are.

The door is open.

— Your father

“You wrote this the night I was born.” It came out as a statement.

“Yes.”

“When you didn’t know if I’d survive.”

He took a moment before answering. “I wanted you to have something of mine, if you survived.”

The laboratory door opened. Lucius came in, glanced at my hands, and crossed to stand beside Severus without a word. Here, in the privacy of family, his hand found Severus’s openly — fingers interlacing the way they had on a laboratory workbench eleven years ago, on the night my mother came, except now there was no darkness to hide in and no reason to hide.

I looked from one to the other. Eleven years earlier, in this same room, they had chosen me without hesitation. Their joined hands made the old story visible.

“Thank you,” I said.

'Thank you' was too small, but it was what I had. They understood.

Lucius smiled — the real one, the one that only lived inside these walls.

“The door is always open,” he said. “For all of us.”

— ✶ —

III

What the Blood Remembers

Three days later, while rain traced grey lines down the east-wing windows, a sealed section of my mother's grimoire finally opened beneath my thumb.

The binding had resisted me before with the firm refusal of a lock meeting the wrong key. This time it yielded. The pages separated with a dry whisper.

Before we were what we are, we were afraid of what we are.

Six words in my mother's hand, and my chest answered with the clean vibration of a tuning fork. It was not quite thought or emotion. It was recognition.

I read on.

The first humans who encountered us did not call us vampires. They called us the night-walkers. The ones who return. Every civilization that ever buried its dead invented a word for the thing that might come back wearing the beloved’s face. The Mesopotamians feared Lilith, who haunted the dark and drank from sleeping men. The Greeks told stories of striges and lamiae who hunted beyond the fire’s edge. The Slavic peoples of the eastern plains buried their dead with stones in their mouths and stakes through their hearts.

They were not inventing superstition. They were responding to something real.

They were responding to us.

The fire in the grate popped. I sat completely still.

I had known what I was since I was seven — Severus had told me with the flat precision he used for important truths, the voice that did not soften things because softening would have been a kind of lying.

My mother was a Crescent werewolf, he had said. A vampire. I inherited both. Along with the witch. Three kinds of power. All in one body.

Three kinds of dark.

The grimoire was explaining what I had been carrying.

The dormancy is a cage of your own blood’s making. Not punishment — protection. The vampire in our line is older than the theology that condemned it, older than the priests who looked at blood-drinking and saw the Eucharist inverted, who built an architecture of fear around the image of the anti-communion. What they could not say — what they could not afford to say — was that the hunger was real before the condemnation was invented. The body wanted before the Church decided that wanting was the monster.

I had found a text like this once in Severus’s library — old, academic, his notes crowding the margins in his small tight hand. He had written beside one passage: The Church required a monster that inverted the sacred. The vampire was convenient. The vampire was already there.

I had not understood why he had been reading it.

Now I understood. He had been reading for me. Research was how Severus loved: quietly, thoroughly, and years in advance.

What we are is a threshold creature. Neither the living world nor the dead one. The peasants who buried their dead at crossroads were not being superstitious — they were being precise. They understood that the thing they feared lived in the liminal space, at the boundary, at the edge. That is what we are. We are the edge.

The rain had stopped. I hadn’t noticed.

I pressed my tongue to my upper teeth. Normal. Blunt. Human.

Something shifted behind my ribs - not hunger, not yet, but the outline of a place where hunger might one day live. It was like recognizing a language before understanding a single word.

In the margin beside my mother’s words, I wrote in my own hand: I felt it reading this. Just for a moment. Is that what waking feels like?

I did not know if I was asking her or myself.

At eleven, I could not decide whether the question was meant for my mother or for me.

— ✶ —

IV

The Women Who Carried It

Near the back of the unlocked pages, I found a list.

Not spells. Not history. Women.

Names, dates and brief descriptions filled the pages in a succession of hands. For four hundred years, Marshall women had recorded what they carried, what they learned and what it cost them.

Marguerite Marshall, 1623–1689. Kept her wolf caged for sixty-six years. Died refusing to turn. The blood remembers her restraint.

Cécile Marshall-Fontaine, 1744–1801. First of us to survive the vampire’s full emergence. Mapped its limits. Mapped its hungers. What she learned; we carry.

Rebekah Marshall, 1889–1942. Ran with the original pack for twelve years before the war scattered us. Understood that the wolf and the vampire are not enemies — they are two languages for the same body.

Hayley Marshall, 1994–2010. Mother of the first tribrid. What I couldn’t carry, I gave to her. What I couldn’t finish, she will.

I read my mother’s entry five times.

What I couldn’t carry, I gave to her.

The dormancy was not an accident or a failure. My mother had carried two natures for sixteen years. When she came to the Manor and made Severus, Lucius and Narcissa promise to protect me, she was passing on work she had begun too early to finish.

She had not abandoned me; she had entrusted me with the unfinished part of her life.

Once I understood the difference, I could not mistake it again.

I picked up my quill.

She had deliberately left a blank space beneath her entry. The gap after 'she will' was meant for another hand.

Heaven Marshall Snape, 1999 — present. First tribrid. Beginning. Continuing.

I set the quill down.

For a moment I held the closed grimoire between my palms: four centuries of women, followed by one new name.

Deep behind my ribs, the dormant presence turned once in its sleep.

It did not open its eyes.

Then it grew still again, as if reassured by the sound of its own history.

For the first time, that stillness felt like belonging.

— ✶ —

V.

Shadow and the First Circle

The snake found me in Narcissa’s garden three days later, while I was reading the section of the Marshall grimoire on bonded creatures.

It was black from nose to tail, its scales shining like oil on dark water. Coiled beneath the nearest rosebush, it watched me with unnerving patience. Its tongue flicked once, tasting the air, then me.

“You’re not afraid,” it said.

“You’re talking.”

“I'm not a snake.” The black scales rippled. For an instant I saw wings, fur, and the suggestion of something far larger; then the body resolved into a snake again. “I am what I choose to be.”

We regarded each other.

“Why are you here?”

“Because your blood called me.” It slid closer. “Wolf, vampire and witch: three notes sounding in one body. Nothing like you has existed within my memory, and my memory is very long.”

I looked at the grimoire in my lap. The Crescent wolves have always worked with serpents, the text read. The snake is our symbol, our guardian, our shadow.

“I knew of your mother,” it continued. “A Crescent alpha who loved a half-blood prince, who died birthing something unprecedented. I came to see if the child survived.”

“I survived.”

“You did more than survive.” Its head tilted. “Three bloodlines. Two sleeping, one awake. And what is awake is powerful.” A pause. “I am offering myself as your familiar. Your guardian.”

I thought about Hogwarts. About Dumbledore, who saw everything. A familiar who could shapeshift. Who could go unnoticed. Who was offering, without being asked, to help me hide.

“What do I call you?”

“What would you call me?”

I considered its nature: present but never fixed, hidden by choice rather than shame.

“Shadow,” I said.

“Will you bond with me, Heaven Marshall Snape?”

“Yes.”

Silver light flashed between us, quiet but unmistakable. I felt an inner boundary give way.

A second awareness settled beside my own. Only then did I recognize how empty that part of my mind had been.

Bonded, Shadow said, not aloud but somewhere inside the new connection. Finally.

She wound herself up my arm and rested across my shoulders. With four hundred years of women open in my lap and an ancient creature choosing to remain beside me, I felt the shape of my world grow larger.

— ✶ —

I told Draco and Blaise that evening.

The library alcove had been ours since we were small — seven years of whispered plans, of secrets held and released, of the three of us becoming whatever we were to each other. I set both grimoires on the rug between us.

Draco opened the Marshall grimoire with both hands, carefully. He read in silence. Blaise leaned over his shoulder, his notebook open, already writing.

“Pack bonds,” Draco said quietly. “Blood magic. Centuries of it.” He looked up. “Your mother was extraordinary.”

“All of them were,” I said. “The women in the list at the back. All of them figured it out.”

Blaise studied the Prince grimoire. “Your father built bridges between the two,” he said, more conclusion than question.

“Hogwarts in two months,” Draco said, after a long quiet. “Dumbledore’s castle. Dumbledore’s eyes.”

“I know.”

“You'll need us,” Blaise said. He was not offering help; he was reminding me that I already had it.

“I know that too.”

Draco closed the grimoire. Met my eyes.

“Whatever you need to learn, we learn with you,” he said. “Whatever you need to hide, we help you hide. We are Malfoy and Zabini and Snape. We have been training for this our entire lives.”

“Together, then,” I said.

“Together,” Draco agreed.

“Always,” said Blaise.

No ceremony marked it, yet all three of us understood that we had made a vow.

The first circle.

— ✶ —

PART THREE

We Made the Monster

Here is where I step out of Heaven’s story and into my own.

I am Sabiha Atturkhan. In 2025, I completed a Master's thesis at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 on the cultural history of the vampire myth. I also write fanfiction about supernatural creatures. Halfway through my research, I realised that the thesis and the fiction were not competing interests. They were two ways of asking the same questions.

The vampire myth reaches back thousands of years, and much of its earliest history is rooted in grief. Stories about Lilith gave ancient communities a way to approach questions that had no satisfying answer: Why do infants die? Why does a healthy body suddenly fail? A supernatural figure could give otherwise shapeless loss a name.

That is one of the oldest uses of a monster: it gives grief a face.

Medieval Christianity later recast the vampire through its own sacred language. Blood-drinking became an inversion of the Eucharist; crucifixes, holy water and consecrated ground became defences. The result was not the invention of the vampire, but a new moral framework around an older fear.

By the nineteenth century, fear had become entangled with attraction. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, published in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula, is shaped by intimacy as much as danger. Laura's attachment to Carmilla matters because it is real, even when the story insists that the beloved is also a threat. The loss hurts precisely because the love cannot be dismissed as unreal.

Vlad III of Wallachia and Erzsébet Báthory are often presented as the two great 'real' vampires, although neither was one. The label gives their violence a supernatural distance. Political killing and human cruelty are harder to contain because they belong to history, not folklore. Fangs make condemnation simpler.

Calling them monsters also lets us pretend that their violence came from somewhere outside humanity.

It did not. The vampire keeps leading us back to ourselves.

I created Heaven Marshall Snape around a question that followed me through the archive: what happens when one body carries several natures and refuses to choose among them? What does that refusal cost, and what might it make possible?

Heaven is wolf, vampire and witch - three kinds of dark. Her life unfolds at the threshold, the same symbolic boundary where some communities once buried suspected revenants at crossroads.

The boundary is personal to me. I move between languages and cultures, scholarship and fiction, the researcher who spent months tracing a myth through the archive and the fanfiction writer I have been since fifteen. Those parts of me are not identical, but neither are they enemies. Both use the vampire to explore what it means to contain more than one story at a time.

I defended my thesis online in June 2025. The committee asked thoughtful questions, the degree followed, and then the formal part of the project was over.

That evening, I opened my laptop and returned to Heaven.

In my imagination she is still in the east-wing study, pressing her thumb against a sealed spine until the pages yield. She reads her mother's grimoire, adds her name beneath the other women, and claims a place in a history that never had the right language for her.

The research helped me understand what I had put into her: old fears given bodies, desires disguised as danger, and the stubborn refusal to simplify oneself for other people's comfort. At the threshold she can say, “No. I will not choose. I will carry all of it.”

We continue to reinvent the vampire because each generation needs a figure for what it struggles to say directly: the unruly body, the forbidden love, the identity that will not fit an approved category.

For me, the vampire offers room to carry contradiction without resolving it too neatly.

I had been using that room, in scholarship and in fiction, long before I knew what to call it.

— ✶ —

Coda.

The Train Leaves at Eleven

The night before the Hogwarts Express, I found my father and Lucius in the laboratory.

They were standing at the workbench, their hands interlaced, not speaking. They did not spring apart when I entered. Here, in this room where they had first put one hand over another eleven years ago on the night my mother came, they had never needed to.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.

“Neither could we,” Lucius said. “Come. Sit.”

I took my chair while Shadow curled in my lap. The room smelled of old stone and potion ingredients, and the wards gave off their familiar low hum. Too many important conversations had happened here for any of us to pretend this was an ordinary night.

“At school,” Severus said, “we cannot acknowledge what we are to each other. I cannot be your father. Dumbledore watches me. If he sees attachment, he will reach for it.”

“I know.”

“It will be—” He stopped. Started again. “Difficult. Watching you face things I cannot protect you from.”

“I know.” I stood. Crossed to them. “But the door is always open. Even when you can’t say it. I will not forget.”

For an instant, Severus's expression gave him away. Lucius touched my cheek with the back of his hand, the familiar gesture that meant I was known and accounted for.

“You have everything you need,” Lucius said. “The grimoires. The familiar. Draco and Blaise.”

“And us,” Severus added. “Always. Even when we cannot show it.”

I hugged them both. Affection did not come easily to any of us, which made the awkwardness honest.

The train left King’s Cross at eleven o’clock the next morning.

I found our compartment - Draco at the window, Blaise beside the aisle, the middle seat saved for me - and settled in with Shadow wound around my wrist. The grimoires rested together in my trunk: my mother's broad, looping hand beside my father's tight script; four centuries of Marshall women beside one man's careful love for the daughter he nearly lost.

Beneath that history was an older foundation: two nineteen-year-old men in a corridor, a hand held one beat too long, and twenty years spent finding the courage to reach again.

“Are you scared?” Draco asked, as Scotland began outside the window.

“Yes. Are you?”

“Terrified.” He managed a shaky smile that was, despite everything, genuine. “But we’ll be in Slytherin. We’ll be together.”

“That’s everything,” Blaise said.

The train carried us north through fields, moors and the darkening Highlands, towards a castle where the Headmaster watched everything. Whatever we were going to become would begin there.

In the dark behind my ribs, the dormant things stirred.

Not yet.

But the cage that my mother had built out of love was no longer quite as solid as it had been.

The dormant presence knew where it was now. Patient and alert, it waited for the next boundary to give way.

— ✶ —

End

Category: Fantasy & Science Fiction

Author: Sabiha Atturkhan

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a celebration of literary creativity and artistic expression. It provides a platform for writers from around the world to showcase their talents and share their unique voices. This prestigious competition is dedicated to fostering a vibrant community of storytellers and poets, encouraging the exploration of diverse themes and innovative narratives.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Sabiha Atturkhan for sharing "Three Kinds of Dark" with us. Your contribution to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 enriches the tapestry of fantasy and science fiction, offering readers a journey into a world where love and identity form the core of human experience. We look forward to seeing where your creative journey takes you next.

About Hashtag Kalakar

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