This isn't a voice.
It's a sensation—as if my memory itself had begun to bleed from within.
The city around me was no longer a place, but a shattered mirror.
Every corner reflected a piece of a sin... I wasn't sure if it was mine, or upon me.
But I kept walking.
My feet led me—my will, irrelevant.
I didn't know if I was running from something… or being drawn toward it.
The narrow street I entered felt familiar in a painful way.
Like a path I had walked in a dream I couldn't forget… or a nightmare I had tried to.
The doors hung open, the windows stared like lidless eyes.
Everything here resembled a question never asked.
Then I saw him.
A man sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the road.
A faded gray suit, an old hat covering his face, hands resting over a black cane.
The world seemed to orbit his silence.
I stopped.
He spoke without lifting his head:
"You're late."
The words struck me in the chest, like a truth I had known since birth.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He raised his head slowly… but there was no face.
No eyes, no mouth, no skin.
Just a smooth surface where light shifted like water over flesh.
"I'm not a who, but a when."
"I'm what you would've become—had you not betrayed yourself."
His words sent a tremor through my bones.
I tried to reply, to speak, but the air froze in my throat.
"Do you want the truth?" he asked, like a blade being sharpened.
"Or do you prefer to remain a prisoner of the question?"
I answered, in a voice that barely sounded like mine:
"The question was my weapon."
He nodded, then pointed his cane at the building behind him.
A half-open wooden door, beyond it—darkness.
Not like any darkness I'd seen before.
"The shadow that haunts you is not your enemy," he said.
"It's a door. And every door... needs a key."
"And what is the key?"
"The name."
"Your true name. Not the one you were given... but the one you forgot just to survive."
...
Something inside me curled in on itself.
The name.
That thing I refused to say in the beginning.
Because I thought it didn't matter… or because it hurt.
But now it was returning.
Creeping into my mind like a cold blade.
And suddenly, I understood:
I wasn't just running from death...
I was running from myself.
And like one walking toward his own abyss,
I stepped toward the door.
Without turning back, I whispered:
"If I don't return..."
He interrupted:
"You won't."
And then he smiled.
Or maybe… I only imagined the smile on a face that didn't exist.