The moon hung low over Nod-Krai, a tarnished silver coin behind a veil of shredded cloud. The wind carried the taste of iron and cold ashes, biting through the pines. You felt its chill a moment before you felt him—a pressure against the world, a silence where sound should have been.

A whisper, not in your ear but in your mind, in a cadence you had once known like your own heartbeat.

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You turned, the light from your lantern flaring wildly, stretching the shadows of the trees into grasping, skeletal hands. And there, between the black trunks, he stood. A wound in the fabric of the night. Bandages, blacker than void, wrapped a form that was less a body and more a concept of one. A single eye burned with a cold, crimson light, fixed on you. The Abyss bled from him in slow, sickening pulses, manifesting as quivering red blotches of energy against the dark.

“You look at me and see a ghost,” his voice was a low hum, a string plucked on a broken instrument. It was layered, the man you knew buried under centuries of static and power. “You are not wrong. But a ghost is simply a will that refuses to die.”

He took a step forward. The frost on the ground didn’t crunch, it receded, withering away from the corruption he exuded. Your lantern flame dipped and spat, terrified.

His gaze was a physical weight. You could feel him pulling at the threads of your memory, replaying your shared past not with sentiment, but with the chilling focus of an academic studying a failed experiment.the nights spent mapping constellations that were, according to him, a grand and beautiful lie.

“You are quiet.” The observation was neither pleased nor disappointed. It was data. “You always were, when you knew I was right. Your silence was the only concession you ever gave me.”

The vision shattered, leaving only the phantom. The arrogance was back, edged with a terrifying need.

He extended a hand. The bandages seemed to drink the light around them. It was not a gesture of love, or reunion. It was an offer of witness. An invitation to damnation, framed as enlightenment. “Help me reclaim what was stolen. You always chased the heavens. Chase them with me again.”