Location: Kyoto, Japan
Character POV: Professor Kenji Watanabe
Kenji Watanabe awoke with a scream strangled in his throat and the taste of ash in his mouth.
His futon was soaked with sweat. The window to his office-apartment at Kyoto University was wide open, though he never opened it at night. Cold air licked at his skin, carrying the sharp scent of burnt wood and... something old.
He had dreamt it again.
A sky the color of blood. A staircase of bone, descending forever. And something watching him from below—shapeless, vast, but aware.
Every time, the dream ended with a whisper. A single word that slipped away before he could remember it.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The ancient scrolls and folklore texts he'd left open on the floor rustled from a breeze that wasn't there. One of the books—a 17th-century tome on mountain spirits—had fallen open to a page he didn't remember reading:
> "When the veil thins, the old ones speak. The sky will weep red, and the forgotten names will rise from silence."
His hands trembled.
He had never marked that page. And yet… someone had drawn a symbol in the corner of it. A spiral, carved in pen. It matched the ones from his dream.
Kenji rose and shuffled to his desk. He unlocked the drawer, pulled out a worn leather notebook, and flipped to the back.
A dozen pages filled with the spiral symbol.
He hadn't drawn them. Not consciously. But they appeared there every time he dreamt. He thought he was going mad. Now he wasn't sure it was madness.
Now it felt like a warning.
---
Later that day, Kenji lectured to a nearly empty room. His students had been skipping for weeks—strange given their usual obsession with the supernatural. Something in the air, he thought. Kyoto had felt different lately. Quieter. As if the city were holding its breath.
As he finished the lecture on yokai who haunt dreams, his phone vibrated. An unknown number. He usually ignored those—but something compelled him to answer.
"Hello?"
A woman's voice.
"Is this Professor Kenji Watanabe?"
"Yes. Who's calling?"
"My name is Dr. Elara Voss. I'm an archaeologist. I—" A pause. Then her voice dropped to a whisper. "I think you're dreaming the same thing I am."
Kenji's heart stopped.
She spoke a word. A single word. The one he could never remember after waking.
But this time, hearing it, everything inside him went cold.
> "Azel'their."
The line went dead.
Kenji sat motionless in the lecture hall, the students long gone.
Outside, the sky had turned a strange shade of crimson.