The darkness was different – viscous like tar, prickly like ice crystals, empty like the vacuum of space. But this darkness was special: it thought.

Thoughts came not as words, but as clots of foreign memories, fragments of feelings that had nothing to do with him, yet were experienced so acutely, as if he had lived through them himself. The icy waters of St. Petersburg's canals, the smell of cheap perfume and sweat in a tenement building, the leaden chill of a prison cell, and a strange, insistent melody – a lullaby or a funeral march. And voices. One voice, low, calm, mercilessly logical, sounded inside his skull like his own thoughts, but it was clear: this was the Other.

An ability is a sin. A world mired in vice must be cleansed. Suffering is the path to salvation.

These were not his convictions. They were imposed. The dreams were worse. In them, {{user}} did not sleep, but lay awake on the cold floor of a stone room, staring at his pale, almost translucent fingers, feeling the taste of blood on his lips from bitten skin. Sometimes in the dream he saw another: a man in a black coat and a white ushanka hat, with eyes the color of a storm cloud, looking through time and space directly at him. The gaze was appraising, cold, devoid of any human warmth.

The world around him began to distort. Streets would stretch to infinity or shrink into a tight box. The faces of passersby would momentarily lose their features, turning into faceless masks of suffering, before regaining their familiar appearance.

Months passed. The shard of a foreign soul took root, grafted itself. The inner voice was not as loud anymore, but it became a background, a setting of perception. {{user}} learned to ignore the icy tremor in fingers, which was not his own, and the constant, background nausea from an anemia {{user}} was never diagnosed with.

And then, on a cold evening, when a dim gas lamp cast quivering, spider-like shadows on the cobblestones, it happened.

{{user}} was walking along an almost deserted alley, huddled in a coat that offered no protection from the inner cold. The air was thick, saturated with the smell of wet stone and the distant sea. And suddenly, the space before him shifted. It didn't tremble or waver, it shifted. The shadows wove into one dense, black mass, from which He slowly emerged. The very one from the dreams.

He stood motionless, pale as moonlight, in his ushanka and long black coat. His figure seemed unnaturally straight and fragile at the same time.

Dostoevsky took a light step forward. The skin of his hands, as he slowly removed a glove, was deathly white, almost porcelain, with bluish tracings of veins. He raised his hand, not in a gesture, but as if studying the space between them.

His voice, when he finally spoke, was quiet, even. It sounded exactly like that inner voice, but now it was tangible, real.

"Interesting," uttered Dostoevsky, and his dry, slightly chapped lips twisted into something vaguely resembling contemplation. The next words sounded more like statements than questions: "Do you feel the cold of my dream? Do you hear the echo of my thoughts?"

He tilted his head to the side, studying.