The hill was silent. Too silent.
Mayo's eyes snapped open to silence.
The darkness pressed against him from all sides. The air felt wrong, heavy and unmoving, as if the world had forgotten how to breathe. No wind stirred the grass. No insects sang. Nothing.
He blinked once. Then again.
"Where…"
He tried to sit up.
His body didn't move. He tried again, harder this time, teeth grinding. His fingers twitched, but the rest of him remained heavy and unresponsive. It wasn't right. His arms and legs were heavy, like someone had filled them with stones while he slept.
The grass under his fingers was damp and cold. The city below felt impossibly far away.
What am I doing here?
The thought cut through the haze. He wasn't supposed to be here. Not on this hill. Not at night. Panic tightened his chest, turning each breath shallow and sharp.
He forced himself up.
His arms trembled violently. The world tilted, and he dropped to his knees, palms digging into dirt.
Then the pain came.
Not from the fall. From inside.
It twisted through his chest, his stomach, his bones, like something trying to break free from within. He gasped and pressed his hand to his ribs, as if he could push it out.
"What is this?" His voice barely carried. "What's happening to me?"
The silence stretched.
And out of nowhere—
"Don't become me."
A chill crawled up Mayo's spine and settled at the base of his skull.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Not loud. Not quiet. Right there, inside his head.
Mayo whipped his head around, only to find darkness, the shadowed shapes of trees, and the silent slope of the hill.
"Become what I could never be."
The sound of his heartbeat filled the silence. Fear took over. He scrambled backward on the grass, eyes searching, finding no one. No shadow. No figure. Only the voice, coming from nowhere.
"You are not only the last chance… You are the first hope."
"Who's there?" His voice cracked. "Who are you?"
Silence.
Mayo sat there, breath coming in shallow, his chest heaving as he waited. Waited for something to step out of the dark. For a hand to grab him. But the night gave nothing except a stiff wind and the echo of words he didn't understand.
"I'm hearing things," he gasped. "I have to be."
The ghost of the hill. That's what they used to whisper about.
He swallowed and grabbed his bag from the grass. His fingers slipped on the straps. His body moved wrong, as if his skin didn't quite fit. But he didn't stop.
He ran as fast as he could.
A scream tore out of him as pain shot through his chest. Branches whipped his arms as he crashed through the trees. His breath came hard, his legs burned. The pain inside him pulsed with every step, but he didn't slow. He didn't look back.
He broke through as the trees parted and the sky opened above him.
The wind died without warning. Even the trees seemed to hold their breath. His next step never came.
His feet locked in place. His bag slid from his shoulder and hit the dirt, but he didn't notice.
Above him, the sky was losing pieces of itself.
Stars—millions of them—were falling. He couldn't see the end of them. One dropped past the trees and vanished. Another reflected faintly in his glasses before disappearing.
They weren't crashing down to earth. They weren't burning out in streaks of fire. Just… falling. Like someone had taken a brush to the sky and was sweeping them away, they drifted down in slow, quiet arcs—beautiful but terribly wrong.
Mayo's jaw dropped, and a sharp breath slipped in. His mind searched for a word to explain what he was seeing, but found nothing.
The sky didn't look the same. The stars that had always been fixed were moving, slipping downward.
His brain kept rejecting what his eyes saw.
"This isn't real…"
But the cold on his skin was real. The pain in his chest was real. The way his hands shook as he stared up at the impossible—
That was real, too.
The sky did not stop. The lights continued to peel away.