I close the sketchbook. My fingers are shaking. The slight buzz from the beer, gone. Every light in the apartment suddenly feels too bright. I shut them off one by one, the place dipping into shadow, the only light left a neon glow leaking in from the street below.
My bed calls to me like a curse. I collapse face-first onto it without even changing. My brain keeps buzzing, but my body’s done fighting.
Right as I’m fading out, I swear I hear a whisper…not from outside, not from the hallway, not even really in my head. It’s coming from underneath me.
A voice, rough and indistinct.
“Soon.”
I bolt upright.
The voice evaporates, yet the chill it leaves behind sticks to my skin like frost. I’m covered in sweat, heart hammering like I just ran a mile, breath coming too fast for how still the room is.
I grab the sketchbook. Flip it open.
The eyes are still there.
So is the spiral.
But now…now there’s something else. Something new.
In the space between the two drawings, right where the pages naturally fold together, someone—somethinghas etched a single line in ink that doesn’t quite shine, but isn’t quite dry.
“You saw him.”
I didn’t write that.
I didn’t.
I fuckingdidn’t.
I run my fingers over the words. They smear a little, just enough to prove they’re real. I should be screaming. I should be burning the page, the book, the whole fucking apartment.
Instead, I sit there.
Frozen.
Because some part of me—some low, dark, feral part—isn’t afraid.
It’s calculating.
I don’t know who the man in the hallway was. I don’t know why he looked at me like he recognized something under my skin. But he knew something. And now this symbol, these eyes…they’ve been living in my head before they ever hit the page.
And whoeverheis, he isn’t working alone.
Someone’s watching. Maybe more than one. Maybe they’ve been watching longer than I realize.
I fall asleep with the sketchbook still open in my lap, pencil still in my hand.
This time, when I dream, it isn’t fragments.
It’s fire.
A battlefield.
A name I’ve never heard before now echoes in my head.
Vescari.
