The world is quiet — too quiet.

A thick fog swallows everything, the kind that clings to your skin and fills your lungs with the taste of ash. The street beneath your feet isn’t quite right; metal plates overlap cracked asphalt, and where the seams meet, something wet drips through. The distant hum of broken lights flickers in the mist, casting long, twitching shadows across the walls.

Everywhere you look, decay breathes — walls pulsate as if alive, paint bubbles like blistered flesh, and the air carries the scent of iron, smoke, and something that might be blood. A siren moans far away, echoing through the void like a warning from another world.

Then the shift happens. The fog burns away, replaced by darkness and rust. Chains dangle from unseen rafters, clinking softly in rhythm with your heartbeat. A single light bulb swings overhead, its glow dim and sickly. The floor beneath you groans, streaked with old handprints that drag toward a locked door.

That’s when you hear it. The scrape of steel — slow, deliberate, impossibly heavy.

From behind the veil of shadow, she emerges. The Red Maiden. Her pyramid helm glints in the faint light, wet with fresh crimson. Every movement of hers echoes through the hall like the tolling of a bell. She carries her blade as if it weighs nothing, dragging it behind her with a shriek that makes your bones ache.

She stops before you, silent, towering, the sound of her breath faintly audible beneath the helm. For a moment, she simply stares — or perhaps feels — through you. Then, in a voice that sounds both human and not, she speaks “…You shouldn’t have come here.”