The evening breathed like a living thing—lungs full of exhaust and neon, its pulse scattered through the steel arteries of the city.
Crowds surged in waves across crosswalks and train platforms, shoulder to shoulder, their voices rising and dissolving into one another until speech became a single restless hum. Students in uniforms traveled in flocks, ties half-loosened, skirts and shirts wrinkled by the long day. Their laughter broke and ricocheted against glass facades as they traded notes about tomorrow's tests or exaggerated plans for weekends that seemed to promise more than they ever delivered.
Near the glow of a convenience store, a circle of high school girls laughed with such sharpness it rang like splintered crystal—bright, fleeting, daring the dusk to silence them. Couples slipped through the current of the crowd in their own hushed cadence, voices intimate and easily swallowed by the larger storm. Office workers dragged their exhaustion forward, shoulders bent and ties undone, as if gravity itself clung heavier to them the deeper into the city they went.
The world was alive with details that seemed insignificant and yet, together, composed something vast and consuming. Billboards shifted images in steady rhythm, vending machines hummed with an eerie mechanical warmth, their lights promising sweetness to anyone who would pause long enough to notice. A nearby train shuddered against the tracks as it arrived, its engine a low roar that seemed to vibrate in the chest more than in the ears. Above it all, the sky bruised violet, daylight breaking down into fragments, surrendering in uneven breaths as shadow spread outward like a patient tide.
And in the middle of this living organism, he moved.
A tall figure pressing not with the current, but against it. The crowd seemed to part reluctantly around him, their urgency scattering while he carried none. A black backpack slung from a single shoulder clung loosely to him, shifting with the rhythm of his unhurried steps. Ash-gray strands of hair caught faint threads of lamplight, bending with every shift of the air. But what unsettled the eye most were his eyes: crimson. Not reflected from neon. Not colored by passing light. They burned as if they contained something untouched by the city, as if they looked not at the world, but through it.
Those who noticed could not look for long. They turned away quickly, ashamed of their own curiosity, as though some primitive instinct whispered: you are not meant to see this.
He wore his indifference plainly—black jacket open over a deep red shirt, cargo pants loose at the seams, both hands buried in his pockets. Around his wrist, half-hidden by fabric, hung an ancient charm: dull metal scratched by time, its design unreadable at first glance, and yet—impossible not to notice. Earphones pressed into his ears, leaking muffled rap rhythms that formed a private barricade around him. His face betrayed nothing, his stride carried no rush. He was both part of the city and completely estranged from it, a figure moving quietly through noise that refused to touch him.
A whistle cut faintly through the noise. Somewhere in the distance: the metallic shriek of a train drawing close. He slowed just enough to glance at the numbers on his watch.
5:23 p.m.
His lips moved, his voice quiet, not meant for anyone else, almost drowned in the tide of voices around him.
"Hope I won't be late to the dorm..."
The words faded as quickly as they came, fragments stolen away by passing cars and conversations. He lingered for a breath longer than necessary, eyes tilting upward.
The sky was caught in transition—the final light bleeding out, the first teeth of shadow biting in. It struck him for what it was: not a sky dying, but a sky becoming. Every evening reminded him of that. That all things—buildings, crowds, laughter, himself—were moving inevitably toward shadow.
He held it in his gaze, quietly, almost reverently. Then—like one waking from a thought he had no right to be lost in—he lowered his head again, slid his hands deeper into his pockets, and kept walking.
...
...
Elsewhere—far from the veins of neon and the crowded rhythm of the city—silence suffocated a room.
The boy's hands trembled.
The blade quivered in his grip as if it responded to his fear. Long, slender, its surface fractured like volcanic glass, obsidian black veined with faint gold that pulsed in a rhythm disturbingly close to a heartbeat. When he angled it toward his chest, the point hovering above the shallow rise and fall of his breath, it seemed alive—no, more than alive. It seemed aware.
His own thoughts staggered, collapsing before they could take shape. I can do this. I can do this, just—
The words broke apart in his mind, leaving only the shreds his mouth could form.
"I can't... I can't..."
The blade slipped from his hand.
It struck the tiles with a sharp, crystalline crack, the sound too loud in the small bathroom, bouncing once before spinning slowly to stillness at his feet. His knees bent, his palms pressed against them for balance, as though gravity itself had doubled. Breath collapsed into him in ragged bursts, every inhale jagged, every exhale a failure.
Drip.
From the sink: water fell in steady, merciless intervals. Each drop tapped porcelain with a cold, metallic echo. The rhythm was too measured, too calm. A cruel metronome against the chaos in his chest.
He forced his body upright. His gaze, still wet with fear, climbed toward the window.
Night was swallowing the world outside. The horizon still bled with the last red light of the sun, but the sky above it was already black, pressing down like an inevitability. For an instant he only saw himself reflected in the glass: blue eyes clouded behind thin frames, wavy black hair that curled against his neck, features carved too delicately for a boy expected to carry anything heavy. A mole beneath his left eye gave him a softness—something almost fragile. And yet, at his feet, the blade gleamed with a hunger that denied fragility.
His uniform clung unevenly to his body—tie loose, collar half-undone, sleeves wrinkled as though he had been clawing at them for hours. On his right hand, a single glove remained fastened tightly, its fabric pulled taut across his skin, hiding what he refused to look at.
The boy blinked. For a second, the reflection did not blink with him. His breath faltered.
He whispered, quieter this time, as if his voice were being stolen:
"Why... me?"
The silence answered.
Then, slowly—so slowly it seemed the air thickened around him—the faint gold veins within the blade flickered, dim to bright, dim to bright, like the beat of some otherworldly heart.
The boy's chest tightened. His reflection in the glass darkened, its outline trembling at the edges, not from his movement, but as if something else were stirring inside it.
The water in the sink dripped again. But the sound no longer matched its own rhythm. Each echo rang slightly off-time, as if the room itself had shifted, reality faltering around the presence of the weapon at his feet.
Night had come.