Dream.
I saw her.
My mother.
Wheeling herself beside me on the neon-lit streets of Neo-Tokyo.
She was laughing. Her voice was soft—clearer than I remembered.
The air shimmered. City lights danced in her eyes.
I ran toward her.
Reached for her hand—
And the world changed.
The warmth drained. Colors dimmed. Everything slowed.
She stopped in the middle of the empty street.
Her head turned, stiffly—too stiffly.
Then I saw her face.
Her eyes leaked rivers of blood.
Her lips trembled into a twisted smile.
"Why did you leave me?"
A rumble cracked the sky.
The clouds tore open.
Rain fell.
Not water.
Blood.
Thick. Warm. Metallic.
It soaked the streets. Covered the lights. Drenched everything.
And it didn't stop.
It rose.
To my knees.
To my waist.
To my chest.
My mother's wheelchair tipped.
She vanished beneath the surface.
I screamed.
And sank.
The blood pulled me down—
deeper, colder, heavier.
I couldn't breathe.
Couldn't think.
The light disappeared.
All that remained—
was the abyss.
And at the very bottom… something waited.
It watched.
Its mouth opened.
Too wide.
Teeth like jagged bone.
Eyes bloomed behind it like stars folding inward.
So many eyes.
And then—black.
Silence.
---
I screamed—
And woke.
---
My body felt wrong.
Too small.
Eyes still shut, but I felt it.
Heat.
Smoke.
Screams.
Fire?
I could hear everything.
The cries of dying villagers.
Steel tearing through flesh.
A hut collapsing in flame.
And over it all—my own breathing.
Weak. Shaky. Newborn.
Tears fell onto my cheeks.
Not mine.
Someone held me—arms trembling.
A woman's voice, cracked and desperate, whispered through the smoke:
"I'm sorry… for bringing you into this sin-stained world…"
'Sin…?'
'Where… am I?'
We were hiding.
I could feel it—wood pressing in from all sides.
She had crammed herself and me into something—a cupboard.
Barely large enough to breathe.
Firelight pierced through a jagged hole in the door.
Then—footsteps.
Ash cracking under boots.
They stopped.
A shadow moved.
An eye peered through the hole.
Round. Red. Grinning.
"There you are."
The voice rasped like rusted iron and rot.
The woman didn't scream.
She just sobbed—quiet, broken—clutching the bundle in her arms.
Me.
And then—black.
Again.
---
But far beyond that burning village…
Something smiled.
A voice echoed through void and flame alike:
"One year. That's all he gets."
A mouth appeared in the dark—grinning wide enough to tear.
Only the lips visible, curled into something between prophecy and punishment.
Behind it: a sea of glowing eyes—
red, gold, green, violet—watching. Pulsing. Endless.
The Warden's gaze, from across all things, shimmered golden-red.
Final.
Unforgiving.
Eternal.
"The descent has already begun."