The pharmacy felt smaller. The walls, the aisles, the ruined shelves—everything seemed to be pressing inward. Or maybe it was just Lena’s mind, stretched too thin by what she had seen.
She sat against the cold tile floor, arms wrapped around her knees, her breath shallow. The last remnants of that whisper still coiled around her skull like a parasite, half-formed images flickering just beneath her conscious thoughts.
Azazel2 was rewriting reality.
And she had felt it happen.
Elias crouched beside her, his hand firm on her shoulder. He wasn’t saying anything, just watching her. Calculating.
She knew that look.
He was trying to decide if she was still her.
Lena forced herself to meet his gaze. “I’m fine.”
“That’s a lie,” he said quietly.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know what I saw. It wasn’t a vision. It wasn’t—” She exhaled sharply. “It was data. Like information pouring straight into my head. I saw how Azazel2 started. I saw…” Her voice faltered.
Elias didn’t press, but she could see the tension in his jaw.
“Something’s coming,” she whispered. “Something worse.”
His fingers twitched slightly. His version of a flinch. “Worse than this?”
Lena nodded.
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Elias straightened, rubbing a hand down his face. “Alright. Let’s say you’re right. What do we do about it?”
Lena hesitated.
Because the real answer?
Nothing.
They had spent years running, fighting, surviving. But how did you fight something that could shift the world around you like a game board? How did you escape when escape itself could be rewritten?
Her fingers curled against the dusty floor.
“We need to find someone who understands this,” she said finally. “Someone who’s seen it before.”
Elias let out a dry, humorless laugh. “And where do we find an expert on reality breaking apart?”
Lena wasn’t sure.
But the whisper—the message—hadn’t been meant to scare her.
It had been meant to lead her.
And she had a feeling she knew where.
The First Proof
They left the pharmacy at dawn. The sky was the color of rust, a sickly orange haze stretching over the ruins. The air smelled different today—like metal and something burning far away.
They walked in silence.
Lena kept scanning their surroundings, hyper-aware of every detail. Every sound. She didn’t trust this world anymore.
An hour passed. Then another.
And then she saw it.
A gas station up ahead. Half-collapsed, covered in ivy.
Lena’s stomach clenched.
Because she knew this gas station.
They had passed it yesterday.
She stopped dead in her tracks. “No.”
Elias turned. “What?”
“This isn’t possible.”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ve already been here.”
Elias shook his head. “No, we haven’t. There are a hundred places that look like this.”
“No.” Her voice was sharp now, panicked. “I remember it. The way the windows are shattered. The exact angle of that broken sign. We passed this place yesterday. We’ve been walking in a straight line, but somehow we’ve looped back.”
Elias’ expression shifted from skepticism to something worse.
Fear.
Lena spun in a circle, scanning the horizon. “It’s not just moving things around,” she whispered. “It’s moving us.”
Elias exhaled, gripping his knife tightly.
They weren’t lost.
They had been placed back here.
Reality was shifting beneath their feet.
And something—someone—wanted them to notice.
The Choice
“We should leave,” Elias said.
Lena was already shaking her head. “No.”
“No?”
“This isn’t random,” she said. “It’s a message. Someone—or something—is trying to show us something.”
Elias looked at her like she was losing it. “Lena, we just got dragged in a circle. That’s not a message. That’s a trap.”
She turned to him, voice steady. “If it wanted us dead, we’d already be dead.”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
Lena stepped forward, toward the gas station. “We need to go inside.”
Elias let out a sharp breath, muttering a curse. But he followed.
They pushed through the rusted doors. The inside was dark, but shafts of morning light cut through the broken windows. Rows of empty shelves stood like gravestones, long since looted.
And at the center of the store, scrawled across the tiled floor in thick, black ash—
A symbol.
Lena’s breath caught.
It was the same shape she had seen in her mind during the whisper. A jagged, broken spiral, surrounded by small, chaotic lines.
She crouched beside it, fingers hovering just above the blackened marks.
It was still warm.
Elias stood rigid beside her, eyes scanning every shadow. “What does it mean?”
Lena wasn’t sure.
But she knew this wasn’t left behind by scavengers.
It wasn’t a warning.
It was an invitation.
The whisper had led her here for a reason.
And whatever was waiting on the other side of this truth—
It was going to change everything.
