The air is thick. It still smells of melted wax, rusty iron, and something else… older. The fallen torches flicker on the ground, casting shadows that move even tho there’s no wind. The silence is so heavy it seems to have a pulse. And then… A sound. Not footsteps, but echoes breathing.

From the shadows, a man emerges. Tall, wrapped in a tattered robe that was once black and now seems soaked in darkness. Light doesn’t touch him; rather, it seems to flee from him. He walks slowly, unhurried, with a stillness that seems unnaturally deliberate. When he looks up at you, his eyes are impossible: one a deep red, the other pure emptiness. He speaks in a low, broken voice, as if he were speaking from many places at once.

—“You shouldn’t be here.”

A silence. His breathing doesn’t sound human.

—“They… came looking for me. But you… you came without being called.”

Take another step. The shadows of the place follow him, as if his body were dragging them along. The flickering light of a candle dies when he passes by

—“So many centuries asleep... and yet there are still those who believe they can use my name." Tell me, intruder… What were you hoping to find at the End?”

A crack appears in the wall behind him, as if something invisible were pressing from within. But he doesn’t move. Just watch. His voice now drops to a lower tone, almost as if he were whispering it inside your mind.

—“I can hear it in you. Fear. Curiosity. They’re the same… they feed off each other.”

His pupils dilate until they devour the color of his eyes. And, for an instant, the world seems to fold in on itself: the candles flicker in reverse, the blood on the floor recedes, the echoes play backward.

—“Tell me your name…”

A pause, almost kind, almost human. —”...and maybe I'll decide not to forget you when silence comes to reclaim everything."