Ashfall didn't know how long he had been lying there in the snow. Time had slipped away, as if the world above and around him no longer cared to move forward. His body felt weightless, almost detached from itself, and yet his eyes remained locked on the fractured sky. The Stars of Madness burned overhead, faint even in the pale daylight filtering through the broken tunnel, and though he should have turned away, he didn't.
He found himself enjoying the sight.
The longer he stared, the less his own thoughts belonged to him. His laughter—the strange, broken laugh that had slipped from his mouth earlier—echoed again. It started small, almost hesitant, then grew louder, sharper, until it filled the hollow subway tunnel around him. The sound felt wrong in his throat, but he couldn't stop it. The laugh repeated again and again, twisting into something more disturbing each time, as though it no longer came from him at all.
His eyes began to sting, and tears blurred his vision, but he didn't blink. He welcomed the burn, even leaned into it, as if pain meant proof that he was still alive.
And then, without warning, memories clawed their way up from the depths of his mind.
Erat. His name came first, like a whisper. His only friend. The one constant in a life filled with death and fear.
Ashfall saw himself as a boy again, running through the narrow, garbage-strewn alleys of Sector 4 of Aethra Prime with Erat by his side. Both were laughing, out of breath, stumbling over cracked pavement, a stolen pistol clutched in Ashfall's hand. The sound of their laughter should have been innocent, but it wasn't. It echoed strangely, offbeat, too sharp, like something forcing its way out of them.
They burst out of the alleys onto an empty basketball court. Rusted hoops stood against crumbling backboards, their chains long stolen. Erat grinned as he picked up broken bottles and lined them along a rusted bench. "Let's see if you can actually hit one this time," he teased.
Ashfall smirked, raised the gun, and fired. The bottle shattered, shards scattering across the cracked ground. They both laughed again, but even in the memory, Ashfall felt a shiver. There was something wrong with that laughter.
Suddenly, Erat's hand shot out, gripping the pistol with a force that wasn't human. Ashfall's eyes widened as his friend ripped the weapon from him like it was nothing. "Erat…?"
The grin faded from Erat's face, his eyes sinking low, his features shadowed. And then, just as suddenly, the memory shifted. Ashfall blinked, and Erat was no longer the boy he had grown up with.
He was the Erat Ashfall had last seen at the day the Clock of Apocalypse had marked him. Blood covered him, dripping down his face, soaking through his shirt, staining his arms until the red seemed endless. The blood spread outward, pouring across the basketball court, drowning the cracked ground until everything was drowned in crimson light.
"Stop," Ashfall whispered, though his voice trembled. "This isn't real."
But it was real. It was too real.
Erat began to laugh, the same twisted laugh that had been echoing out of Ashfall's own mouth moments before. His body staggered forward in unnatural, jerking steps, each one pulling him closer until he stood directly in front of Ashfall. For the first time, Erat raised his head. Ashfall froze.
A wide, red grin stretched across his face, grotesque and sharp. Two eyes bled with endless red tears, spilling down his cheeks like rivers, merging with the smile until it seemed the grin itself was carved into him with blood.
The sight burned itself into Ashfall's mind like fire. He tried to turn away, tried to close his eyes, but he couldn't. He was forced to look, forced to remember, forced to endure.
"It's your fault," voices whispered, though they came from his own head. "You failed him. You failed everyone. You always fail."
Ashfall staggered backward, clutching at his temples. "Shut up," he growled, but the voices only grew louder. They weren't wrong. He had failed. He had always failed. He had survived, but survival wasn't the same as living. It was cowardice dressed as endurance.
Erat stepped closer. His face melted, slowly, grotesquely, as if his skin had become wax under a fire. Half his body dissolved into a writhing black flesh, grotesque and twisting, like the Mythbornes they had fought before. His other half remained human, his blood-stained hand raising the pistol.
The black and the human clashed together, an impossible figure, half-monster, half-boyhood friend.
Ashfall's breath caught as the barrel leveled at his chest.
Blood tears dripped onto the grin, smearing it, stretching it wider. Erat's voice came distorted, deeper, but still carrying the echo of the boy he once knew.
"Tick-tock."
The gun fired.
Ashfall jolted awake with a choked gasp, snow scattering as his hands clawed at his own chest. He sat up, trembling, his breath sharp and ragged. His eyes darted to his hands, to his arms, searching for blood, searching for the wound he had felt in the dream. There was nothing. No bullet hole. No blood. But his hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He curled them into fists, pressed them into the snow, and tried to breathe. His body trembled with every exhale. The vision clung to him, burned into his mind, impossible to shake. The grin. The eyes. The blood.
"That wasn't him," he whispered to himself, voice hoarse, almost breaking. "That wasn't Erat. That was… it was just the Madness. Just the stars playing with me." But even as he said it, he didn't believe it.
The Stars of Madness had taken his memories, his pain, and twisted them until he couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. Erat had been the only person he'd ever trusted, the only friend he'd ever had, and now even that memory was poisoned.
He cursed under his breath and wiped his face with trembling hands. He hated how weak he felt. He hated the way fear gripped his chest. He hated the Stars most of all.
Then he froze. Voices, but they were faint at first, just whispers carried down the length of the ruined tunnel. But they grew louder, clearer, echoing off the broken walls. Ashfall stiffened, his heart pounding against his ribs.
Were they human voices? Or something else? He couldn't tell. The sound wavered between laughter and speech, words slipping into nonsense, then back into something almost understandable.
Ashfall moved instinctively. Survival first. Always survival. He forced his unsteady body onto his feet and searched the shadows desperately for a place to hide. His gaze darted between collapsed rubble and piles of snow. He needed somewhere, anywhere, before the voices reached him.
His hands still shook, but he clenched them hard, forcing his body to move.
I'm not dying here. Not like this. Not after all of that.
He ducked into the darkness, pressing himself into a narrow gap between fallen concrete slabs, his breath ragged and shallow. The voices grew nearer, echoing louder with every step.
Ashfall's fingers twitched toward his weapon, but his mind screamed in protest. If they weren't Mythbornes, if they were people, shooting would damn him. But if they were monsters… hesitation would mean death.
His jaw clenched. "Tick-tock," he muttered bitterly, staring through the shadows at the approaching figures.