I was dying on the marble floor. I could feel it. Feel my body failing, feel the water in my lungs, feel death closing in for the second time.
But I was also somewhere else.
The moment my eyes closed on the chamber ceiling, they opened on something different. Somewhere different. A space that existed between one heartbeat and the next, between breath and drowning, between life and death.
Everything was red.
The sky above me was crimson. The ground beneath me was crimson. The air itself seemed saturated with the color of blood, thick and heavy and wrong.
I stood in what looked like an empty plain stretching infinitely in all directions. No features. No landmarks. Just red emptiness and the distant sound of water.
The Pool had pulled me here. Not my body. Something deeper. Something the crimson water wanted to show me.
"Hello?" My voice echoed strangely, bouncing back from surfaces that didn't exist.
Movement at the edge of my vision.
I spun around and my breath caught.
