We walked a bit past the vendor and turned onto what would be the main street of the town. What we saw left me speechless and terrified. The sight that met our eyes was a street flooded with people, all similar to the vendor we had just passed—looking as if they were frozen in place. People stood mid-stride, children were suspended in the middle of play, and vendors held their hands outstretched, offering food to customers who would never receive it. They were all completely motionless, as though time itself had stopped for everyone but us.
Maya broke the silence first, her voice trembling. "W-what's going on here, Kai?"
I stared blankly at the unnatural scene before us, my mind struggling to process what my eyes were witnessing. "I-I don't know," I managed to whisper, the words feeling inadequate against the weight of the mystery surrounding us.
Rowan was the first to move, cautiously taking steps deeper into the road. After a moment of hesitation, I gulped down my nervousness and followed. We couldn't just leave—we were completely out of supplies, and what if there was something we could do to help these people? With that thought strengthening my resolve, we ventured deeper into the town.
From there, every street we turned onto presented the same eerie tableau. Every building and home we entered revealed the same inexplicable phenomenon—not a single body was unaffected by whatever had happened here. A woman frozen while pouring tea, the liquid poured all over the cup and table around it. An old man caught mid-sneeze, his face contorted in an eternal expression of discomfort. A pair of lovers leaning in for a kiss they would never complete.
"It's like someone pressed pause on the entire town," Maya whispered, running her fingers over a frozen shopkeeper's outstretched arm. She pulled back quickly, shuddering. "They're still warm, Kai. They feel... alive."
Rowan knelt beside a small boy frozen mid-laugh, his ball suspended slightly above the ground. "I've never heard of anything like this."
While walking around, I felt a horribly dark sensation growing within me, intensifying the closer we got to the center of town. The feeling was like a compass, drawing me inward. I didn't know why, but somehow I felt certain the answer to whatever was happening here lay at the town's heart.
"Do you feel that?" I asked, my voice barely audible.
Maya nodded, her face pale. "Something's pulling us toward the center."
"I don't like it," Rowan replied, his hand moving instinctively to the hilt of his sword. "But I don't see that we have much choice."
We inched closer to the center of town, and with every step, the tension in the air became more palpable. The silent streets seemed to watch us, the only moving things in a world of stillness. My skin prickled with goosebumps despite the warm afternoon sun.
We were just one turn away from what I hoped would be the key to this mystery. Every bone in my body started to quake, screaming at me to run in the opposite direction. My instincts had never led me astray before, and they were now shrieking warnings I could barely contain.
But I did not falter. Curiosity and determination drove me forward even as fear threatened to paralyze me just like the townspeople. Slowly but surely, we made our way to this final turn until...
Out of nowhere, a loud screeching sound pierced our ears, so intense that dribbles of blood started to trickle down from them. We cupped our ears, wincing from the excruciating pain of the screaming noise.
"Make it stop!" Maya cried, dropping to her knees.
This sound was horrible—it was like the epitome of despair and fear condensed into an auditory assault. It filled me with such terror that my legs began to shake uncontrollably. I'd faced many dangers in our travels, but nothing had ever affected me so deeply, so primitively.
"We need to leave!" Rowan shouted over the noise, his face contorted in pain. "Kai! We need to leave now!"
But I couldn't move. Despite my terror, I remained transfixed, my eyes locked on the corner ahead of us—the corner we had been about to turn.
While we quivered and held our ears, something else unexpected happened. A green, smoking mist started to float around the corner at an alarming rate. It moved almost intelligently, like a predator seeking prey, tendrils reaching out as if tasting the air. The mist glowed with an unnatural luminescence, casting sickly shadows that seemed to writhe and twist with a life of their own.
Soon it was passing over our feet and rising by the second until we were completely submerged. The mist had an acrid taste, bitter and ancient, carrying whispers of something I couldn't quite understand. Words in a language never meant for human ears slithered through my consciousness, leaving trails of dread in their wake.
I heard Maya and Rowan begin to cough, the sound jarring against the background screech that still assaulted our senses. When I turned to them, they were done struggling. They didn't look like they were in any pain any longer.
In fact, they looked completely fine—eerily so. Still and unmoving, just like the townspeople we had been investigating.This mist had transformed them in seconds, and fear gripped my heart as I realized I was next.
I looked back around, and the mist filled my lungs, making me start to cough uncontrollably. I tried to call out to my friends, but no sound emerged. My limbs grew heavy, and a strange lethargy overtook me. I tried to run, to move, to do anything to escape the fate that had claimed my companions and an entire town, but my body refused to respond.
Before I could take another step, darkness overwhelmed me, along with an insatiable feeling of... fear. Not just any fear—this was primal, ancient, as though I was experiencing the very first fear that had ever existed in the universe. It crawled through my veins, nested in my heart, and clouded my thoughts until nothing else remained.
As consciousness slipped away, I heard a voice—whether real or imagined, I couldn't tell. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, resonating not in my ears but directly in my mind.
"Sleep now"
Then, nothing but the endless dark and the echoing remnants of that terrible scream.