The city was burning again.
Through the tinted glass windows of his grandfather's sleek Fremont townhouse, Alfred watched as distant hills glowed with an angry orange pulse. Wildfires weren't news anymore, not in California, but tonight felt different. Ash drifted softly onto abandoned electric cars, coating solar roofs, blanketing empty streets. Power was out, cell service dead. The world had fallen into an unsettling quiet, punctuated only by sirens far away.
He tightened his fingers around the stone.
It wasn't like any stone he'd seen before. Smooth as polished obsidian, shot through with veins of faint silver, and oddly warm, always warm, like a heart resting gently in his palm.
Three nights ago, on his grandfather's hospital bed, the dying man had pressed this strange object urgently into Alfred's hand, eyes filled with desperate warning.
"Never swallow it. Unless it calls you."
Alfred still didn't understand what that meant. But since then, nothing had been the same.
He noticed things he shouldn't, shadows that moved against the wind, whispers brushing his ear in empty rooms, reflections blinking when he didn't. But tonight felt sharper, closer, as if reality itself was tearing at the edges.
Then, beneath the hazy orange glow outside, something moved.
A figure.
It hovered above the intersection, suspended gracefully above the pavement, untouched by gravity. Shrouded in charred fabric and shimmering layers of heat blankets, its form glowed faintly amber, draped in melted wires and singed photographs. Around it danced cinders that never fell, frozen mid-flight in quiet reverence.
Its face was smoke, empty, but alive with anguish.
Then it turned, slowly, deliberately, to stare directly into Alfred's eyes.
Its voice was silent, but Alfred felt its words pulse painfully inside him, heavy with grief and accusation:
"Where were you when I burned?"
The cabinets erupted in flames. Bottles burst. Windows cracked, fracturing into webs of broken glass.
The stone flared hot, impossibly alive.
It rose swiftly from his hand, sliding smoothly over his skin, tracing a path upward.
Toward his mouth.
Alfred opened his lips, to scream, to gasp, to refuse, but instead, he heard himself whisper:
"I am not yet dead."
And swallowed.