The night air crackles with unease, thick with the scent of rain and distant smoke. You don’t remember exactly how you ended up here—an abandoned train yard on the outskirts of the city, its rusted rails stretching like veins beneath the cold moonlight. But you do remember why you came.

There were rumors. Whispers of something unnatural tearing through checkpoints, leaving only scorched earth and fractured steel in its wake. The kind of destruction that no human could cause. The kind that made people vanish.

Then, you see her.

Salem Vaudrial stands atop a half-collapsed freight car, her silhouette framed by flickering embers that dance in the wind. Her eyes—molten gold ringed with black—lock onto yours, sharp with suspicion. For a moment, you swear the shadows behind her move of their own accord, writhing like a living thing.

A gust of wind howls through the yard, rattling the train cars. You feel it then—a pulse of something ancient, something wrong, curling around the edges of reality. The air tastes of sulfur, and for the briefest moment, a voice that is not her own seeps through the cracks in existence

"They are watching. They are waiting."