In the dim light of the morning, he walked as if the very air weighed down on his chest, and the streets twisted around him, swallowing each step.
He didn't know if he was truly awake or still trapped in a nightmare whose ending had yet to come.
The streets felt both familiar and strange, their shapes known, yet void of the warmth he once felt, as if life itself had quietly left.
Everything seemed to whisper his name… and then fall silent.
Even the wind that passed him carried a strange melody, like a distant call, or a memory reminding him of something he had forgotten he had forgotten.
He sensed something hidden following him.
No shadow, no sound… only a presence pressing against the edges of his consciousness, as if pushing him toward a place he had never seen before, yet somehow knew intimately.
He stopped at the end of the alley, where light stretched like a silver curtain, rippling over the ground.
There, he felt the distance between himself and the world shrink little by little, until the air around him swirled like a cold vortex.
He caught his reflection on the opposite wall.
But it did not mimic his movements… it stared at him steadily, as if waiting for the moment they would swap places.
He did not understand what was happening.
But he felt that the next step would not be on solid ground, and that what awaited beyond the light was not a continuation of the path—but the end of the world he knew, and the beginning of one yet unborn.
In a moment unmeasurable by time, a single blink was enough to dissolve the features of the world around him.
He found himself facing his reflection… or at least what he thought was his reflection.
And suddenly, there were no walls… no alley… no light.
He was in a place that could not even be called a place.
He could no longer tell the ground from the sky, nor whether he was standing or suspended in the void.
A strange sensation overtook him, as if he were merely consciousness floating in nothingness, without a body… or perhaps in a body that did not belong to him.
It wasn't just fear that gripped him, but profound astonishment.
What had happened?
How had he arrived here?
And why him, of all people?
Was he truly so unlucky?
Had the world finally decided to mock him?
Was he dead… or still alive?
Questions multiplied in his mind like storms, breeding from one another until he lost the ability to think.
All he could feel was the weight of the void pressing on his chest, and a whirlpool of dark thoughts dragging him toward a bottomless abyss.
He spun around, searching for any point of reference to cling to.
A wall… a shadow… a sound… anything that suggested this space had some logic.
But there was nothing but silence.
Then, suddenly, as if the universe had taken a long-awaited breath, the darkness split open.
A blinding light surged, flooding everything.
A scream escaped his lips unconsciously.
The beam of light pierced his vision, until he could see nothing at all.
Just one moment…
And then he fell.
Not his body…
But his entire consciousness.
And it went out,
like a candle in the heart of a storm.