Nasarith always groaned before it bled.
The sound rolled low through the broken city, like thunder trapped in concrete lungs. Kael stood barefoot on the cracked tiles of a forgotten market square in Sector C, one hand shielding his eyes from the flickering sky. The clouds, if they could still be called that, warped and coiled like oil in boiling water. Greys, blacks, the occasional strip of sickly green light. Beautiful, in a kind of dying way.
"Another surge," he muttered.
His breath came shallow. Not because he was tired, but because the air itself was thicker today. Breathing felt like drinking lukewarm soup through torn lungs. The sky was heavier. Or maybe it was just him.
He knelt beside a collapsed stall. A vendor's cart long abandoned. The sign read:
"YAVIN'S BLOODPEARS — 2 FOR A DREG."
Below it lay a few glass jars, cracked but intact. He lifted one and tilted it. Something pink twitched inside, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. Still alive, somehow. He frowned.
"Yeah, no thanks."
He set the jar down gently, backing away. That thing had eyes. He was sure of it.
Behind him, a distant chime rang out - hollow and slow, followed by static laughter. A child's laugh, echoing. It always came in threes. Always at random.
Kael turned, tense. But nothing. Just shadows and dust and the shifting blur of memory.
"Not real," he whispered to himself. "Not today."
He stepped over a fallen streetlamp, rusted and bent at impossible angles, and pulled his scarf tighter around his face. The city was colder now. The kind of cold that didn't care about fire. The kind that bit down on bone.
He moved quickly through the ruins, avoiding the open streets where the sky could see him too clearly. Every few blocks he paused, listening. The groan was louder now, closer. Nasarith was waking up again.
At the Shelter - Six Levels Down
It took fifteen minutes to descend into the half-buried train station where the sector's survivors kept themselves from unraveling. The walls were scorched with old glyphs, wards against "the wrong kind of memories," someone once said. Kael didn't know who'd painted them, or what exactly they did, but he passed them every day just the same.
The bunker wasn't quiet, it never was. A dozen or so survivors huddled in corners, whispering, bartering, sometimes screaming in their sleep. One guy, Rask, kept scratching runes into his own arms, claiming he was trying to "remember before the city forgot him."
Kael didn't talk much down here. He wasn't liked.
But he kept to the edges, slid into his claimed corner behind a shattered pillar, and tried to ignore the flickering fluorescent bulb above. He opened his satchel and removed the cracked canteen he'd scavenged earlier.
Still half-full.
He took a sip. Gritty. Tasted like rust and smoke.
As he leaned back, his eyes drifted toward the only remaining mirror in the shelter, a broken shard bolted to the wall above the sink. Its frame was dented metal, the word "Believe" faintly stenciled along the top, almost entirely peeled away.
He stared.
And then frowned.
That… wasn't his face.
It looked like him; same sharp jawline, same shadowed eyes, same wild black hair. But the reflection had no pupils. Just endless spirals.
And it was smiling.
Kael blinked.
The reflection raised its hand. He hadn't moved.
He flinched backward instinctively, hitting the wall behind him just as the mirror shattered.
No sound. Just sudden, razor-edged silence.
The glass didn't fall.
It dusted itself away, pixelating in midair, like an image being deleted.
Kael scrambled to his feet. "Shit!"
No one else noticed. No one reacted. Not even Rask, who sat rocking across the hall, tracing his runes with a bone shard.
Kael turned in a slow, horrified circle.
The shelter was still.
Still real.
But he felt like he wasn't.
Outside Again - A Few Hours Later
He ran. Past the sigil-marked gate. Past the corpse-ridden stairwell. Back to the surface, to the cold air and wrong sky. Something in him screamed to get away. That wasn't a hallucination. That wasn't a dream. That reflection…
"Why did it smile?" he muttered to himself, shaking. "Why the fuck did it smile?"
As he passed into the upper ruins of Sector C, near the old transit hub, the ground beneath his feet rippled.
Not physically. Visually.
Like water.
He froze.
"No no no!"
CRACK.
The sky split open in a vertical line, directly above the old clocktower. Time slowed. Sound vanished. All light turned grey.
And then the sky peeled, revealing something behind it.
Not clouds.
Not stars.
Pages.
Pages with moving symbols that pulsed like open wounds, bleeding downward.
And then it came.
"You should not be."
It wasn't spoken.
It wasn't even heard.
It was understood. Felt in the chest. In the teeth. In the marrow.
Kael collapsed. The air vibrated with pure rejection.
His shirt burned. A black, spiraling sigil branded itself into his chest. Hooked lines curled outward, shifting slightly, almost imperceptibly - like a breathing tattoo.
He screamed. No sound came out.
Then - darkness.
When Kael woke, hours later, the sky was whole again. Or at least pretending.
The sigil was still there.
And it pulsed.
With something alive.