But that's the thing about the future—it doesn't give a damn about what you've been through. Doesn't stop, doesn't flinch, doesn't wait for you to catch your breath or care if you're dragging years of scars and shattered pieces behind you. It just keeps coming—relentless, brutal—like a freight train hauling ass down the tracks, and you either jump on or get flattened. No second chances. No do-overs. Just impact.
I stand in the doorway, fingertips digging into the battered frame. The wood's rough, splintered in places—every gouge a scar from something that came before. Like me. Scratched up, barely holding together. It grounds me for half a second—until it doesn't. Behind me, the room buzzes with tension, thick enough to choke on. Feels like the way your stomach knots up when you hear the Unsolved Mysteries theme song echoing through the living room at midnight. Unspoken words clog the air, conversations boiled down to glances and clenched jaws. Faces blur together in the dim light—tired eyes, set jaws, barely-held-together fragments of resolve. We're not strangers anymore. Not after what we've been through. Bleed beside someone, and it changes you. Binds you. Raw. Messy. Fucking real.
I should say something. Hell, anything. A word to slice through this suffocating stillness, to fill the space stretching taut between heartbeats. But my throat locks up, and all I manage is a breath—shaky, uneven. My chest tightens, caught between the comfort of staying rooted and the gut-twisting pull of what waits beyond the door. Moving forward feels like stepping off a cliff blindfolded, like something straight out of a Twilight Zone rerun. But staying still? That's its own kind of death—slow, creeping, inevitable.
Behind me, murmurs rise—voices bleeding together into a low hum like a jammed cassette tape grinding against the player's heads. Hope flickers somewhere deep, fragile and stupid. The bitter voice inside hisses back: Hope gets you killed. Both claw at me, digging in with dirty nails. I'm suspended in that razor-thin in-between—one wrong move from shattering.
Rain streaks down the window across the room, blurring the world outside into a mess of bleeding colors and twisted shapes. Like one of those cheap watercolor screensavers on a Windows 3.1 machine. My reflection shimmers back at me—half-formed, half-lost. Who the fuck are you? The thought hits sharp. I don't have an answer. Not one that matters.
Breathe. The air tastes like rain and electricity, like the sky's holding its breath before it splits open. It coils tight in my chest, cold and sharp. Feels like diving into a pool at night with the water too cold and your lungs burning. And maybe... maybe you don't care if you surface or sink. Not anymore.
The moment I try to breathe, my lungs tighten like they've been cinched with a vice. The air is thick—clotted with something electric, something humming just beneath the surface of reality. It crackles against my skin, a storm trapped inside my ribs, clawing, hungry, wanting out. My chest contracts, ribs locking tight as if my own bones are strangling me from the inside.
Wrong. Everything is wrong. The kind of wrong that doesn't announce itself with sirens or flashing lights but slithers in quiet, unnoticed, until it's already coiled around your throat. My hands tremble—no, they convulse, shaking like live wires sparking in the rain. My fingers curl into fists, nails biting into my palms, but that only makes it worse. There's no anchor, no grip strong enough to hold me steady. I am a marionette with snapped strings, a radio stuck between stations, drowning in the—
Static.
It's in my head, in my skin, burrowing deep, deeper, threading itself through muscle and marrow, replacing everything human with something fractured, something corrupted. Crawling like a million fire ants burning tunnels through my veins. My pulse stutters, skips, races—then stops, as if the wires inside me have short-circuited, as if my body can't decide whether to keep going or just shut down completely.
The world is too bright, too sharp, too much. The fluorescent lights above aren't just lights anymore—they're searchlights, interrogation lamps peeling back my skin, exposing raw nerve and bone beneath. My breath stutters, my vision blurs at the edges, as if the world itself is being erased, piece by piece.
A siren wails somewhere outside, but it doesn't sound right. It warps, bends, stretches into something metallic, something unnatural, twisting into a scream that isn't a scream at all. The walls vibrate with it, the floor tilts beneath me, and suddenly I don't know which way is up. My own heartbeat pounds, a runaway drumline thundering in my ears, too fast, too erratic, like it's trying to escape my chest.
Too fast.
I can't catch it. Can't slow it down. My throat locks up, the pressure swelling, swelling, crushing, until every breath is a battle. It's like drowning on dry land, lungs filling with nothing, the weight pressing down like I'm sinking, like something is pulling me under and I can't fight back. My muscles lock, every nerve caught in a snare of fire and ice.
I try to move, to run, to get out—
But my limbs don't listen.
My body is a puppet, my strings cut. The space around me tunnels, the edges collapsing inward, vision dimming like an old film reel burning at the edges. My knees buckle, and I drop, my hands scraping against the cold, unyielding floor. My fingers twitch, spasming against the tile like they're trying to wake up, but there's no waking up from this.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but that only makes it worse.
The static surges, fills the darkness behind my lids with warped flashes of things I don't want to see. A doorway yawning open into nothingness. A shadow too thick to be real. Blood pooling on linoleum, thick and black in the dim light. A shape flickering in and out of focus, like a skipped frame in a corrupted VHS tape.
No, no, no—
A rush of vertigo slams into me, violent, unrelenting. My stomach flips inside out, gravity twisting, pulling in directions that don't exist. I stumble back, but there's no ground, no balance, no sense of what's real anymore. The world is spinning, warping, bending like funhouse mirrors stacked on top of each other, stretching into infinity. The floor isn't where it should be. My feet aren't where they should be. Nothing is where it should be.
I am unraveling.
Falling. Floating. Both. Neither.
Trapped in some horrible in-between where time isn't time and space isn't space. My fingers claw at the floor, desperate for something, anything to hold onto, but there's nothing. Just cold, just static, just the sensation of my own body shutting down, piece by piece, cell by cell. The air is thick, pressing against my skin like invisible hands, smothering, suffocating.
And then—
A voice.
Distant. Warped. Barely cutting through the screeching noise in my skull. It calls my name.
Ignis—
My mouth won't move to answer back.
The weight in my chest explodes outward, a detonation of electricity ripping through my limbs. My back arches, muscles seizing so violently I feel them tear. My jaw clenches, teeth grinding together until pain spears through my skull, white-hot and endless.
I think I scream, but I can't hear it.
All I hear is the low frequency of nothing.
This is it.
I shove off the doorframe. One step. Then another. Floorboards groan under my weight, echoing like the sound of a dial-up modem—long, drawn out, and grating. The hallway stretches ahead, too long, shadows licking up the walls like the Tales from the Crypt intro—dark and alive. Watching. Waiting. I keep moving. Not because it feels right—nothing about this feels right—but because standing still isn't an option anymore. Regret claws at my back, whispering turn around, just fucking stop. But the future pulls just as hard. A tug-of-war with me in the middle, frayed and unraveling.
I pass a crooked picture frame. The glass is cracked, a jagged line slicing through the middle of some family's grinning faces. Happy moment, frozen and broken. Someone else's memory. Or mine. Hard to tell when everything's smearing together like wet paint in the rain. The shadows seem to shift when I'm not looking, curling at the edges of my vision like they're alive. Like they know something I don't. Or worse—like they are me.
Then—
It hits.
Vertigo.
At first, it's subtle. A momentary lurch, like when you step onto a treadmill that isn't moving and your body still thinks it should be. Then it rolls through me in waves, dragging my stomach up into my throat, flipping my sense of direction inside out. The hallway before me distorts, elongates, the walls bending in like a funhouse mirror, shifting in and out of focus. My breath stutters, my pulse rabbit-fast.
Something's wrong.
My feet scrape against the floor, trying to ground myself, trying to find something solid. But the texture under my soles ripples. The wood isn't wood anymore. It's soft, pliable, like wet paper, like skin stretched too thin. My pulse skyrockets.
The static grows louder. At first, it's just a buzz, that background hum of an old CRT television, something you can almost tune out. Then it surges, filling my skull with a crackling roar, an avalanche of sound that presses against the inside of my head until it feels like my brain might burst. It worms into my ears, into the spaces between my ribs, into the gaps between my thoughts. I squeeze my eyes shut, but it's there, too. Behind my eyelids, the static shapes itself into flashes of things I don't want to see—
Blood pooling on linoleum, thick and glossy, reflecting sickly yellow light.
A door left ajar in the dark, its edges lined with something wet, something red.
A shadow too thick, too solid, standing just beyond its threshold, shifting with the weight of something unseen, something waiting.
Click.
The sound guts through the noise. A mechanical clunk. VHS rewind.
The walls around me shudder. The world lurches backward, dragging me with it. The hallway stretches impossibly long, twisting like something alive. The overhead lights flicker, every flash a jagged afterimage burned into my retinas. Faces flicker in and out of view—grinning, grimacing, mouths opening too wide, stretching too long, vanishing when I try to focus on them. The walls breathe, in, out, closer, tighter. The voices layer over each other, whispers turning into shouts, laughter that isn't right, isn't human.
Something moves behind me.
Not footsteps. Not whispers.
Something deeper. A shift in the air, a pressure change, a presence that wasn't there before and shouldn't be now.
The breath locks in my throat. It feels like a hand clenched around my neck, invisible fingers tightening, pressing. My chest heaves, but the air doesn't come. My heart slams against my ribs like a trapped bird, frantic, desperate, out of rhythm. I need to move. I need to run.
A whisper brushes against my ear, too close, too intimate.
"You shouldn't be here."
Cold. So cold it burns. My skin prickles. The static swells, higher, sharper. The walls, the floor, the ceiling—nothing is steady. It all shifts, undulating like it's breathing, like I'm inside something alive. The wood beneath my feet pulses, flesh-warm.
The air thickens, pressing against me, pushing back as I try to step forward. I lift my foot and it feels like moving through tar, like the weight of my own limbs is too much to bear. My muscles tremble with the effort, my breath breaking in ragged gasps, but I can't stop. I have to keep going.
The scent comes next. At first, faint, teasing the edges of my awareness—then overwhelming, suffocating. Metallic and sour, like rusting iron and spoiled meat. It seeps into my nostrils, coats my tongue, clings to the back of my throat. I gag. My stomach twists violently, bile rising, hot and acidic. I press a shaking hand to my mouth, swallowing hard against the nausea.
The static is no longer just sound. It moves. It pulses. It's in my veins now, under my skin, a writhing current that tingles and burns and spreads. My vision doubles. No, triples. Everything fractures. I see myself ahead, running but not moving. I see myself behind, standing frozen, too late. I see the walls splitting apart, faces pushing through the cracks, grinning with teeth too sharp, too many.
A door appears ahead. Flickering. Half-there. The brass handle glints weakly under the sputtering fluorescent lights. My heart pounds against my ribs, urging me forward, run, run, run, but my limbs feel sluggish, trapped in syrup-thick air. The static climbs to a shriek, pressing against my skull. It wants inside. It wants in.
Behind me, the shadows shift. They unfurl, stretching long fingers across the walls, reaching, curling, wrapping toward me. I don't dare look back, don't dare give them form. But I can feel them. Closer. Pressing in. Surrounding me.
The ground beneath me undulates, softens. I sink. My knees hit the floor, but there's no floor. My fingers stretch out, desperate to find purchase, but everything gives, everything shifts. My breath comes fast and uneven. The air presses against me from all sides, closing in, suffocating. The static is screaming now, high and jagged, piercing through every thought, dissolving them, erasing me.
I reach for the handle.
The breath behind me isn't mine. It's too loud, too close. The thing in the dark exhales, slow and rattling, like lungs filled with broken glass. My fingers curl around the brass. It's ice against my palm. The static spikes.
Something brushes my ankle. Claws? Fingers? Something smooth and cold, wrapping around my skin.
I yank, kick, but it holds. The shadows move. They don't just reach anymore—they grasp, they pull, they claim.
The air trembles with something ancient, something hungry.
I twist the handle, shove the door open—
The static explodes.
And then—
Play.