[SFX: distant chimes • water pressure groaning • a lullaby echoing underwater]
The first thing Leo Valerius ever tasted in the place that killed him was someone else's blood.
It flooded his mouth like warm copper and funeral lilies.
He tried to scream—
[SFX: WHUMP—water surging in]
—but the liquid rushed in faster, thick as syrup, carrying the faint echo of a woman humming a lullaby in a language that hurt to hear.
His lungs seized.
His fingers clawed at nothing.
Then the world snapped sideways.
He was standing—no, kneeling—on cold stone that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago.
Black water lapped at his shins, perfectly still, yet every ripple showed a different sky.
One ripple held a burning city.
Another showed his childhood bedroom, age seven, the night his mother never came home.
A third reflected a version of himself with empty sockets where eyes should be, smiling.
The air smelled of candle smoke and drowned roses.
Above him stretched impossible arches rising into darkness—ribbed vaults of a cathedral so vast its far wall dissolved into starless night. Stained-glass windows floated thirty meters overhead, depicting saints with their ribs split open like wings, offering their hearts to something coiled in the shadows behind the colored glass.
A child's voice—sweet, genderless, and wrong—spoke from everywhere and nowhere.
"Welcome, sleeper, to the First Nightmare.
Twenty-four souls have been invited.
One seat remains at the table of the waking world.
The Saint is watching.
Begin."
The water at his feet rippled again. This time it showed the real world: fluorescent hospital lights, a mangled city bus, his own body on a gurney while doctors shouted uselessly over the flatline.
Leo understood two things at once.
He was already dead out there.
Dying here would be worse.
He stood.
The borrowed blood vanished from his tongue, but the taste lingered like a promise.
Cold stone under bare feet.
His clothes had changed—simple black tunic and trousers, rough as a penitent's robe, soaked through. No shoes. No pockets. No phone. No wallet. Not even the cheap silver ring he'd worn since high school.
Only a faint itch over his heart, as if something had written on his skin while he wasn't looking.
He took a step.
The water didn't splash; it parted like oil.
Twenty-three other figures were scattered across the vast nave—some already standing, others retching black water from their lungs. A girl with silver hair knelt ten meters away, hands glowing with soft gold, face serene even as she vomited cathedral water. A tall boy with a longsword laughed like he'd been waiting his entire life for this. Someone farther back screamed—high, animal, panicked.
Leo ignored them all.
He looked up.
An enormous bell hung motionless in the vaulted dark. Its surface was black glass, and inside the glass floated a single human heart, still beating. Each beat sent a pulse of silence through the cathedral, sharp enough that Leo felt it in his teeth.
Then—
[SFX: TOLL]
The bell rang once.
The sound was not heard.
It was remembered.
Every person staggered as a memory not their own tore through their skull: a city drowning under impossible waves, a serpent of cathedral stone crushing a sun, millions begging the sky to let them wake up.
When the toll faded, pale fire burned words into the air.
Trial Objective: Reach the Altar of the Final Tear.
Offer what cannot be returned.
Only one may cross the threshold.
The Saint hungers.
The silver-haired girl recovered first. Her voice rang like dawn through stained glass.
"Fear not. The Saint tests us, but the Light guides the worthy."
She looked directly at Leo as she spoke, golden eyes glowing with unshakable conviction.
Leo met her gaze, let his expression go soft and lost—exactly what people expected from a half-drowned nobody—and gave her a small, grateful nod.
Inside, something cold and precise clicked into place.
Perfect.
Let her think he was harmless.
Let all of them think that.
He took another step.
The water closed over his footprint instantly, as though he'd never been there at all.
Far away, deeper in the cathedral, something vast shifted under the surface and began to swim toward the fresh heartbeats.
Leo smiled—small, tired, and real—because for the first time since the bus lights went dark, he felt something almost like relief.
Out there, he had been nobody.
In here, nobody died quickly.
But monsters?
Monsters lived forever.
The water rippled once more, showing his reflection—
only it wasn't quite his face anymore.
The eyes were too old.
And behind him, just for an instant, six wings of molten light unfurled and dissolved.
Leo blinked.
The reflection blinked a fraction slower.
Then the water stilled, and the cathedral settled back into its waiting silence—
patient, ancient, eager to see
who would drown first.