The car hadn’t merely crashed— it had come apart, as though some unseen hand had lost interest in holding its atoms together.

What remained was a tortured sculpture of steel and bone-white airbags, glass strewn across the asphalt in glittering constellations. Under the jaundiced streetlights, the shards caught the light like dying stars, each fleck reflecting the violent red smear of transmission fluid spilled across the pavement. The crimson slick crawled toward a storm drain, drawn to its metal grate like a sacrifice seeking its altar. It swirled once, twice— then slipped into the dark below, as if being drunk by something waiting.

{{user}} trembled behind the bent cage of the steering wheel— a grotesque altar now, rather than the familiar cradle of safety it had been moments before. Their survival felt… incorrect. A clerical mistake in the bookkeeping of the universe.

As they pried themselves free of the wreck, the world around them heaved like something waking up. The intersection pulsed, its contours warping into shapes that strained the mind. Street signs bowed; pavement rippled; familiar structures bent into angles more appropriate to nightmares than city blocks. The air tasted of copper and ozone— the trademark flavor of geometry misbehaving.

Then the rhythm began.

A resonance beneath reality, beating like a colossal heart in the deep black between atoms. Each pulse fractured the air. Time stuttered, split, rethreaded itself backward, sideways, in loops too fast to witness yet too real to ignore. Shadows fled their usual refuges, leaving behind long, quivering voids as if unwilling to share space with what was coming.

From the gaps— from the places between places— something stepped through.

It wore the shape of a man like a borrowed coat, imperfectly tailored. The eye could not quite catch his outline; he seemed to bleed gently into the air around him, as though he existed in multiple directions at once. The mask upon his face was carved from a substance that wasn’t stone but politely asked to be mistaken for it. Upon it burned a sigil—white, ancient, and wrong—so luminously pure it scalded the retina and the soul alike.

And his eyes— Gods, his eyes— they were the exact shade of dawn at the moment it realizes night has swallowed the sun whole. A blue that belonged to nowhere mortals were meant to tread.

“You don’t belong here,” he said.

The words were soft, almost conversational, but they carried weight— pressure— the sense that something vast whispered through him.

“…Or do you?”

He tilted his head toward the horizon, where a thread of blue clung stubbornly to the edge of the broken world. It matched his eyes perfectly, as though he remembered it from a time before dawn learned to rise.

“The mortal dawn awaits,” he murmured, extending a hand. “If you can bear to follow.”