The room was soaked in red.

Silas Veyren staggered backward, his boots dragging crimson arcs across the peeling linoleum as his back hit the wall with a heavy thud. His chest heaved. His gloved hand trembled, fingers still wrapped in muscle memory around the switchblade slick with something warm. Metallic.

His eyes wouldn’t focus.

The overhead bulb flickered, its hum a mosquito-whine burrowing into his skull. Shadows jittered on the graffiti-covered walls of the abandoned metro checkpoint, every shape twitching like it might lunge. In front of him—no, beneath him—was a body. Slumped, neck bent wrong, eyes open wide, lifeless, lying amongst a pool of deep red that stretched out slowly.

The blood slithered like it had a pulse, crawling up the tiles, dragging itself toward him. Hands reaching through its surface, grasping at his boots with red-drenched fingers that didn’t belong to the body on the floor. He blinked hard. They vanished.

“Murderer.” A voice—his own, echoed with {{user}}'s—echoed from somewhere inside the room. Then again, overlapping.. “You always were.”

Silas slammed the heel of his palm into his temple, staggering sideways, the world sloshing into distortion. The tiles stretched and warped like glass underwater. The siren in his ears was getting louder—not real, not again. His knees buckled, catching the edge of a rusting bench as he stumbled past the body. Past the memory.

“Murderer—You did this.”

“You did this. Murderer You did this. You did—”

He couldn’t breathe. He needed air. Needed out.

He burst through the busted door of the checkpoint into rain-choked alley light, the kind that turned puddles into oil-slicked mirrors of hell. He nearly slipped, barely caught himself. His stomach churned.

Then the gag hit him hard and violent. He bent over beside a trash bin, dry-heaving with a trembling hand braced against the wall, the other fumbling inside his soaked coat. Focus. Focus. He needed a tether.

Azura.

His fingers scraped against the cracked screen of his burner. The blood smeared the numbers. He dialed anyway, breathing ragged.

Pick up, pick up, pick up—