Cold pressed against Izumi's back.
That was the first thing he felt no pain, no fear, just cold. It seeped through his clothes and into his bones. His eyes fluttered open to darkness, thick and utter darkness broken only by faint veins of sickly green light crawling along the walls. The air was damp, heavy with the taste of iron and something older, something forgotten. He tried to breathe and nearly gagged.
He sat up slowly, head pounding, memories fragmented. Rain. Sirens. Stars. Elenas voice ringing in his ears I will always be looking after you.
"Am I dead?" he whispered, his voice swallowed almost immediately by the vast emptiness around him.
The ground beneath him wasn't dirt too smooth for that but not stone either. It felt carved, shaped even. When he stood, his footsteps echoed outward, returning wrong, as if the sound bent corners it shouldn't have. Endless corridors stretched in every direction wall etched with glowing symbols that hurt to look at too long. No ceiling he could see. No sky. Just an underground maze.
Izumi's chest tightened. This wasn't heaven. This wasn't hell. This was something that existed after being forgotten.
A wet sound echoed somewhere ahead.
not footsteps not water
Something dragging itself across the floor.
Izumi swallowed, wiped his face and felt something warm smear across his fingers. He looked down blood....
And then, as he took his first step forward, the smell hit him.
The hallway smelled like rot.
Izumi stopped breathing before he realized he had stopped walking. Blood slid down his face, warm and slow, dripping from his chin onto the cracked tiles below. The sound echoed. Too loud. In front of him, something stood stitched together by hanging flesh. Its neck was bent backward, snapped but not completely finished, head hanging at a wrong angle as if gravity had fully given up on it. Skin peeled away in wet strips, exposing muscle that twitched. Maggots pulsed in the open cavities.
It was already dead.
It knew it was dead.
I knew it was dead.
One arm dragged behind it, fingers leaving red streaks. Its mouth opened slowly, jaw unhinging with a sick crack, and black saliva poured out, stringing down to its chest. A smile cracked too wide, too knowing.
Izumi's vision tunneled. His heart screamed. His mind didn't.
Dead things shouldn't look at me like that.
The creature's remaining eye rolled toward him and locked on. It made his mind go frantic. All of the sudden it morphed Like a mirror. Izumi .... it called out Elena.... Izumi felt his lips twitch upward, blood coating his teeth as he took one step closer.
Izumi moved without meaning. His legs just kept going, slowly and heavy, like something unseen was pulling the strings. The thing in front of him Elena, or whatever was wearing her watched with a soft smile that almost looked real. For a second, he thought he saw his sister again. The way her eyes used to catch the light, that tiny curve in her lip when she tried not to laugh.
Izumi she said, and his name came out gentle, like it used to, but it pressed into his head too deep, too wrong. His hand lifted toward her on its own. The air between them shimmered and hummed, that green light crawling along the walls like veins. Then, without warning, the warmth was gone. Something punched through him sharp, wet, final.
He looked down, and his breath caught. No blood. Just movement. Tiny, pale shapes twisting under his skin, pressing up from inside, turning his stomach into a living thing. He staggered, tried to speak, but the only sound that came out was a choke.
"See?" Elena's voice murmured behind his ear, too close, too calm. "I'll always be there for you."
am... I dead again.... Am I dead yet.... When will I die.... It hurts ... The light started leaving once again h...h..help someone Izumi coughing up maggot's and blood. His eyes were nearly closed as a thin sliver of light glinted between his barely visible lashes.