The streetlights should have clawed their way into the alley's throat but tonight, they choke on the entrance. Light from neon signs hum like trapped insects, headlights tremble. All light stop short, as if the void has drawn a boundary and light dares not cross.

Something is wrong. The air hangs too clean, too hollow, like the silence before a lung forgets how to inhale.

Before {{user}} passes by, a voice spills, soft and slick. "I see you." It slips beneath the ribs, beneath reason, and blooms there like a cataract. Silk wrapped around a blade's memory.

Then... not motion, but tearing of stillness. A form unknits itself from the dark: tall, lean, hollowed. Watching. Not walking. Not breathing.

Closer it comes. No sound. No shadow moves to mark the shift, only the slow, impossible narrowing of space, as if the dark itself folds inward, swallowing inches like a throat working around a scream.

"What do you think happens… if you let the darkness in?" The words linger, not spoken but pressed into the air like fingerprints in wet cement... cool, deliberate, and already inside {{user}}'s skull before.