Evening had settled over the city like a heavy veil of mist, or perhaps the city itself—its tired streets and burdened avenues—had summoned dusk out of a longing for rest. It pulled the night toward its weary shoulders with that ancient, silent magic only cities seemed to remember. Concrete towers reached toward the dimming sky, glass panes held trembling fragments of daytime lives, and the roads, grooved by thousands of footsteps, seemed to exhale together, growing heavier in a single shared breath.
It felt as though the entire city, exhausted by the day's weight, had drawn dusk over itself like a blanket in preparation for sleep. Yet the sleep settling over the streets was not peaceful; it was a tense waiting. Even the electricity humming through the city's veins seemed to shiver with hesitation.
Aras walked through this quiet spell, moving with the crowd yet never truly part of it. His fatigue did not belong to the day. It pressed deeper, from a place he could not name. As he passed a store window, a sudden tingling spread across his skin. It began as a faint vibration along his shoulder, then grew into a cold whisper tracing the line of his arm, as though something unseen slid across his skin and gently, deliberately, tried to seep beneath it.
The sensation struck him with an odd familiarity, though not one that belonged to this life or even this body. He flinched instinctively, brushing his arm as if to remove something crawling there, but found nothing. The tingling vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving behind only a thin shiver—the subtle, eerie chill that lingers when you walk through the long shadow of a tall building.
"Strange," he muttered to himself. A thought flickered at the edge of his awareness, but dissolved before he could grasp it, fading like the last fragment of a dream upon waking.
He continued down the street. Life flowed around him in its usual rhythm: the warm scent of bread drifting from a bakery, a child tugging at a parent's coat, a line of cars waiting impatiently at a red light. Everything was ordinary—comfortably, reassuringly ordinary.
Until the ground trembled.
The first vibration was soft, subtle enough to be dismissed. Yet something deep within Aras—some quiet imprint left by that strange touch—recognized it instantly. The second tremor was stronger, causing a nearby streetlamp to sway. Aras stopped without meaning to, his heartbeat tightening as he lifted his gaze.
A thin, sharp line had appeared across the sky.
At first he thought it was nothing more than a trick of the fading light, but the line widened, deepened, and began to tear through the texture of the clouds. The sky was splitting open like a wound in utter silence—a wound forced from the inside. It wasn't the world tearing outward; something was pushing within, straining against the fabric of the heavens until the clouds peeled back like torn skin.
Something wanted out. Something wanted to breathe.
From the widening fissure, a faint glow seeped through. But it was no true light. It looked as though it had passed through a gray stormcloud and emerged broken—drained of color, stripped of meaning, warped into something neither white nor black, neither bright nor dark. It trembled with an ash-colored pulse, rippling like the weary breath of something ancient.
As the glow bent downward toward the city, the tingling returned beneath Aras's skin—sharper now, almost alive. The rift expanded. A low hum vibrated through the air. Streetlamps flickered like frightened eyelids.
And then the gray light fell.
Not drifted, not descended—it fell, sudden and decisive, straight toward Aras.
Time froze. His breath caught in his throat. His body refused to move. Just before the impact, a deep and wordless recognition echoed through him, resonating in bone and memory:
This has happened before.
The thought never finished.
The light struck his chest.
There was no heat, no pain—only a hollow, inevitable pull, as though fate itself had pressed its cold hand firmly against his heart. Aras collapsed to his knees. City lights burst, the sky tore open, the roads split like fractured stone, and the world drowned in a storm of falling ash.
As his consciousness slipped away, a voice whispered—not into his ears, but into the quiet center of his being:
"I've finally found you."
Darkness closed in.
Aras fell.