Chapter Six — Creeping Dread
His eyes opened.
His palm was pressed against cold wood — not the chamber's inner ribs, but the bark of the colossal Tree itself. The texture was slick with rain, ridged with ancient grooves. He blinked, and the silence of the chamber was gone. In its place: wind, wild and whispering. Lightning rumbled across the sky like distant drums. Rain fell in torrents, each drop a baptism.
He was outside.
Transversed in an instant — not walked, not climbed, but delivered. As though the Tree itself had expelled him, cast him out like a rejected prayer.
He staggered back, breath catching. The air was sharp, alive. The flames that licked the city's bones roared in the distance. The sky was blood-red, torn by veins of lightning. The wind carried ash and memory.
And yet — in that chaos, he felt something he had not felt in hours.
Freedom.
The breeze kissed his face. The rain soaked his skin. The mud beneath him was real, cold, grounding. He collapsed, knees buckling, body folding into the earth. He lay there, laughing — not with joy, but with the raw, broken relief of a man who had escaped a sentence he did not understand.
He had survived.
He had seen the hand. He had witnessed the halos claimed. He had felt his soul tremble at the edge of dissolution. And yet he breathed. He moved. He was.
To recall the memory was to invite madness. To name what he saw was to summon it. He knew this now. Some truths are not meant to be held. Some visions are not meant to be remembered.
He had to leave.
He rose, slow and trembling. A lone figure beneath the storm, his pale face lit by the occasional strike of lightning. His clothes clung to him. His eyes, wide and hollow, scanned the burning city.
He took a step.
Then he heard it.
A whisper — shrill, broken, rising from the lips of the soulless forms suspended in the air. Not speech, but invocation.
"Eden… Eden…"
The word struck him like a blade.
Nausea surged. His chest tightened. The cold returned — not of rain, but of dread. The kind that crawls beneath the skin and whispers of things undone.
He turned.
He ran.
The city blurred around him. The Tree loomed behind, silent and watching. The whispers followed, echoing through the storm.
"Eden… Eden…"
He did not look back.
He could not.
To look was to remember.
To remember was to fall.
And he had no strength left to fall again.