The wind had died.
No farewell. No trailing whisper. It simply... ceased.
And with its vanishing, something ancient seemed to exhale.
Kylo stood still beneath a sky that looked half-erased — an unfinished thought of a god who lost interest mid-creation. The clouds weren't clouds. They were strokes. Swaths of soot and bruised violet, scraped across a canvas too large to name. The horizon itself bled — slow and methodical, as if leaking time instead of light.
A thick fog curled around him, dense as sleep. It clung to his boots, his breath, his bones. But now — slowly, almost reverently — it began to retreat. Not like weather, but like something watching him from the edge of memory, pulling back to reveal what it had hidden. Buildings materialized first: warped silhouettes, hunched like old regrets. Then streets. Then signs. Then the jagged sprawl of what had once been a mall, rotting and vast and waiting.
Shadows moved without origin.
They slipped under his boots, coiling around him like forgotten guilt, dragging across his shoulders like wet ash that remembered rain.
Above him — broken and twitching — a billboard tried to speak.
Its screen was fractured, flickering in spasms, caught between three frozen images like a glitching memory it no longer had the strength to hide:
A warzone painted in fire.
A child, blurred. Lost. Arms outstretched.
A pile of weapons, gleaming like polished regrets.
They did not change. They did not fade.
A triptych of something lost. Something prophetic. Something cruel.
Kylo didn't understand them — and yet something in his stomach turned as though his bones did. The images struck a chord beneath language. A memory without source. Like grief before birth.
He looked away.
The revolver in his hand had grown heavier. Not physically — no. Existentially.
It had weight the way certain silences do. The kind that settles between people who once loved each other but no longer speak.
He looked at it. Not with fear. Not reverence. But fatigue.
His fingers closed around the grip — practiced, inevitable — as if the motion had been carved into the marrow of his bones long before this moment.
Not a choice. A ritual repeated in the quiet spaces between lives.
The cold metal pressed into his palm like a ghost's confession, familiar and unforgiving, humming with the residue of forgotten deaths and whispered bargains.
The cylinder hung open, suspended in time.
Six chambers — four bearing silent echoes of past reckonings, two left empty, like breathing spaces carved into fate's unyielding cycle.
They waited.
Not as weapons, but as tokens of the threshold — vessels of consequence, carriers of memory and loss.
A roulette spun by shadows, a pause held by unseen eyes.
He had opened it before,
Not with thought, but with something older — an uncleared imprint buried deep, a dance with oblivion etched faintly beneath his skin, familiar though forgotten.
A long, cold breath escaped his mouth — the kind you don't notice until it's halfway gone.
Then: click — the cylinder spun and locked with a deft flick of his wrist.
Not with flair. Not even intention. But with the precision of someone who has witnessed enough of this world's fractures and no longer indulges in dramatics.
He lowered the gun.
And turned toward the structure that waited.
The mall.
If it could even be called that.
It loomed — a brutalist carcass of concrete and silence. Towering, grey, skinless. Windowless. It stretched toward the fractured heavens like it had grown there, not been built — birthed from some architectural grief no city planner could name.
There was no signage. No lights. No echoes of commerce.
Only an entrance. One. Centered. Utterly black.
A wound. A question. A void.
A doorway that didn't want to be walked through — but needed to be.
He stared at it.
Then, half to himself, half to something listening:
"Let's see what this place is waiting for me."
And then he walked.
The parking lot greeted him like a forgotten temple ground.
The lines — pale, cracked — marked ancient sigils of utility. Places once reserved for the living. Movement. Ordinary chaos. Now they lay empty, sunken, abandoned by time and intention.
No birds circled.
No insects buzzed.
Even the wind had remained absent — as if afraid of waking something.
Each footstep echoed too loudly. Too cleanly.
Like sound had been amplified in a vacuum.
He passed a collapsed trolley. Its wheels groaned, slow and mocking — as though they turned on memory, not momentum.
Then — sound broke everything.
BOOM.
The billboard behind him screamed.
Not just light. Not just glitch.
But something ancient pretending to be modern — snapping its spine.
Sparks erupted like startled fireflies. The structure twisted, metal shearing like bone. The screen rippled once. Froze. Then—
Explosion.
Not stylized. Not distant.
Real.
Immediate.
A brutal bloom of heat and force.
Kylo flinched, instinct unspooling.
Arm thrown up.
Head turned.
A heartbeat too late.
A white burst punched into the atmosphere like a detonation of presence — something announcing itself by destruction. The pressure hit his lungs like a second set of ribs. A concussion of sound followed, guttural and divine, folding the air inward.
Then — silence collapsed.
A ringing, high and sharp, swallowed all things.
It didn't fade. It deepened.
A metallic resonance, like a cathedral bell buried in a cave full of teeth.
DINGGGGGGGGGGGGG.
His knees gave. One hand to his skull. The other to nothing.
He staggered.
Sound had become shape.
Light had become pain.
And somewhere inside him, something began to open.
Not a memory. Not a door.
A warning.
He couldn't tell if he was still breathing.
Couldn't feel his own voice.
And then — as the world held its breath —
They came.
And in that stunned, echoing silence — something began to crawl.
Wet.
Dripping.
Like ink sliding up a wall.
He blinked.
The asphalt beneath his boots was bubbling. Sick. Pulsing.
Then — they came.
They emerged like secrets.
Not from the air.
Not from portals.
From the ground.
From the cracked asphalt of a world that had given up on being real.
Souls — or what bitter echoes remained of them — began to claw their way into existence.
One by one.
Then by dozens.
Then all at once — like rot blooming from the carcass of memory.
They did not rise — they peeled.
Wet. Sluggish. Wrong.
Eyeless.
Grinning.
Their grins weren't expressions. They were incisions.
Cruel, sewn-open rips that mimicked joy but screamed agony.
Limbs too long.
Spines bent like marionettes strung by earthquakes.
Their skin looked like soaked parchment — veined, translucent, twitching with a hunger that wasn't for flesh, but for witness.
They weren't human.
They weren't even creatures.
They were grief with legs.
Residuals.
The emotional detritus of lives unlived.
Fossils of trauma carved into mockery.
Kylo stood frozen, revolver limp at his side.
A single breath left him.
Cold. Measured. Final.
"The explosion…"
"It called them."
He knew it. Not in his head, but in his blood.
They weren't walking.
They weren't chasing.
They were smelling him.
His memory. His guilt. His entropy.
And they liked it.
He stepped back.
Once.
Twice.
Then the instinct hit like thunder:
Run.
One.
Then five.
Then twenty of them, dragging their joyless frames across the pavement like broken laughter.
He turned.
Ran.
The wind did not guide him.
It opposed him — violently, intimately.
It clawed at his fitted jacket like a jealous memory, something that once held him and refused to let go. The fabric strained. The zipper tore halfway down, splitting like a wound.
His boots struck pavement — not rhythmically, but like weapons.
His breath came in bursts. Not gasps, but signals.
A drumbeat of survival.
But the world twisted.
The mall — it wasn't closer.
It was retreating.
No. Not retreating.
Withdrawing.
As if reality itself was recoiling.
As if the mall — this structure of void and silence — had seen what was coming and changed its mind.
Behind him, the screams began.
Not voices.
Not throats.
Emotions.
Screams that didn't sound — they unmade.
Howls of unraveling identity. The sound of someone forgetting their own name forever.
Kylo didn't look back.
He didn't have to.
The dread was tactile.
It slithered up his spine like mercury.
Every cell in him vibrated with ancestral terror.
Then — a voice.
Not outside. Not behind.
Inside.
"Run."
"Run faster."
"Get inside."
A woman's voice.
Her voice.
The one from before.
With unseen touch, with impossible timing.
He darted his eyes to either side. Nothing.
No figures. No shadows.
Just the flickering dusk, and the war-drum rhythm of his own flight.
"WHOEVER YOU ARE — AT LEAST F***ING SHOW YOURSELF!"
His scream tore the air like a blade.
But there was no answer.
Only the howling behind him.
Only the dragging, gurgling surge that gained without sound.
He ran harder.
Muscles screamed.
Lungs cracked.
Reality began to bend like heat in a dream — or a memory mid-erasure.
"Why the hell does it feel like the closer I get—" "—the further this f***ing place becomes?"
He could see it now.
The mall — a monolith of forgetting.
A mouth carved into the concrete of some godless sky.
Closer.
Closer.
He looked back—
And saw it:
A tide of grief.
A flood of limbs and teeth and stitched smiles.
A tsunami of sorrow too stubborn to die quietly.
It moved like a sermon.
And he was its final verse.
Kylo's feet pounded forward — wild, desperate.
He screamed into the silence.
Into the wind.
Into the hallucination of salvation that loomed ahead.
The doorway was there. A hole in the world.
He reached.
His arms swung like broken pistons.
His fingers extended.
One last step.
Then—
Slipped.
But not from misstep.
Not from stone.
From will.
Something took him.
Not a hand.
Not a creature.
A command.
An idea made manifest.
It dragged.
It unstitched his momentum.
His chest slammed into the asphalt — but no pain followed.
Only weightlessness.
Only surrender.
Only darkness.
Floating.
Not like drifting in water. Not like hovering.
More like being exhaled by reality itself. Expelled from the lungs of existence — and left to spiral, thoughtless, across the silence between moments.
When Kylo opened his eyes, there was no world.
Only distance. Only the hush of unbeing. A theater of forgotten stars, scattered across a sky that no longer cared to shine. Galaxies spun in slow, dying circles — like clocks carved by madmen, counting down to no hour at all. There was no gravity. No wind. Even sound had abandoned this place.
And at the center of it all —
A temple.
Not built of stone. But of memory.
It didn't exist in any traditional sense. It was remembered into form — a structure forged from loss, echo, and myth. Towering and unnatural, ancient but untouched by time. Its steps did not descend — they remembered descending. Its walls shimmered with contradiction — etched in a language no eye had read, and yet every eye feared to.
At its heart, nestled within the collapsing stars, was a throne.
Not golden. Not marble. Not built.
Something older.
A monument to decision. A seat for things that chose fate itself.
And upon it — a figure.
A man. Perhaps. But only in silhouette. In impression. In outline that memory clung to.
His left elbow rested upon the armrest, long fingers cradling his head, like he had been trapped in thought for entire epochs. His right fist lay clenched against his knee — a gesture that felt less like frustration and more like an oath too long upheld.
He wasn't seated like a king.
He was seated like a consequence.
Hair fell around him in smoky, liquid coils — impossibly long, suspended like strands in deep water. There were stars caught in the strands. Nebulas. Dying comets. Light swallowed and slowly bleeding out.
His garments were not made from thread. They were woven from memory itself — layered tapestries of ash, of voice, of fossilized lightning. Echoes stitched into silk. Dust of forgotten cities folded into every seam. And over them — glyphs, dancing. Shifting. Refusing comprehension. Symbols that bent away whenever Kylo's gaze tried to hold them.
There was no aura.
Because he was the aura.
He radiated stillness. Not peace — but finality.
And around him — swords.
Hundreds.
Piercing the floor around the throne like offerings at the altar of a god who had already answered too many prayers. Some ancient, rusted, half-shattered. Others divine and burning, forged in myth. Their blades hummed with the memory of lives they'd ended. Their hilts shimmered with mourning.
They did not vibrate.
They remembered vibrating.
Kylo stood frozen. The breath in his chest had become ornamental — a thing he had once known how to use, now forgotten.
He didn't know what this being was.
But he knew, in every nerve, he wasn't meant to be here.
Then — the eyes.
They opened.
Not suddenly. Not with threat.
They simply existed now. Present. As if they had always been open and Kylo had merely arrived late to their attention.
Red.
Not the red of blood.
But of collapse.
Of things burning at the end of time.
Eyes that had seen empires drown, names unspoken, gods die, and said nothing — because witnessing was never the same as caring.
Kylo could not breathe.
Could not scream.
Could not move.
He had been seen.
The figure moved. Barely.
The elbow slipped from the throne. The spine straightened. The chin lifted.
The silence changed flavor. Became personal.
And then — a voice.
Not loud. Not echoing. Just total.
A voice that didn't speak — it completed.
"ᛁᚾᛏᛁᚱ ᚷᛖᚱᚾᛖᚷ — Goes back."
Ancient. Not of any human tongue. Carved into history's first scream. Spoken in a dialect older than time — and yet, somehow, Kylo understood it.
Not with mind.
But with blood.
The words unfolded inside him like an instinct — as if they had always been waiting there, coiled behind his ribs, afraid to speak themselves until now.
"Return."
And then — force.
No wind. No push. Just command.
Like gravity reasserting itself. Like the concept of Kylo being here had finally been rejected by whatever law wrote existence.
He flew backwards.
Through the temple. Through light. Through memory.
Through meaning.
Until there was nothing.
No sky.
No stars.
No temple.
Just black.
And then — impact.
A gasp.
Concrete.
He was back.
And he remembered the throne.