Navir tried to shake the thought, but it clung to him, the man from the café, Tarefin, and that unsettling familiarity. The way he'd watched. The way his eyes had lingered, as if Navir were a problem already half-solved. The memory followed him down the street, tightening with every step.
Then the ground seemed to tilt.
Navir slowed, pressing a hand to his temple. "Not now," he muttered.
His pulse thundered, uneven, and the air around him grew thick, heavy, as though the world were holding its breath.
The sky dimmed.
Not suddenly, deliberately.
Gray bled into crimson, the clouds parted to reveal a raw, violent red sky, tense and suffocating.
The temperature spiked, slamming into him in suffocating waves. Navir looked up, breath snagging.
Silhouettes drifted across the wasteland, humanoid forms barely tethered to the ground, their outlines flickering in the oppressive red sky. Heat licked their shapes, setting them ablaze as they moved without purpose, twisting and writhing.
No screams escaped them, only low, animalistic moans and guttural snarls that seemed to vibrate through the air as they collapsed.
"They're…" Navir's breath hitched "burning," he whispered, terror hollowing his chest.
Pain exploded beneath his skin, and his body set ablaze.
"Arghh…" he screamed in agony as a crescent mark flared on his copper skin.
White-hot.
The heat vanished as abruptly as it had come.
Navir blinked hard, pain throbbing behind his eyes, and the pressure in his chest eased. The heat vanished.
The red sky fractured, peeling away until it was gone. Reality snapped back into place, the familiar street of his neighborhood stretching out before him, dust drifting lazily, vendors calling out, people walking past as if nothing had happened.
The vision had ended. He stood there breathing unevenly, surrounded by ordinary life, the echoes of what he'd seen fading while the world carried on, unaware.
He straightened slowly.
Eyes were on him.
A woman paused mid-step, whispering to the man beside her. Someone laughed nervously, the sound cutting short when Navir looked their way. A few people stared openly now, brows knit, mouths tight, as if he were the strange thing out of place.
Navir swallowed. His skin still tingled beneath his left bicep where the crescent mark had burned, but there was nothing to show for it. No proof. No echo. The horror had sealed itself inside him alone.
You imagined it, the silence seemed to say.
Then the air shifted.
Not sound. Not movement. A pressure, wrong, deliberate.
Navir's spine stiffened.
Someone was coming.
Whoever it was didn't feel like a passerby, or a curious onlooker.
Navir drew a slow breath, then another, willing his pulse to steady. Easy. Breathe. The noise of the street pressed in, voices overlapping, footsteps passing, but his thoughts refused to follow. The red sky lingered behind his eyes, vivid despite its absence.
"What was that?" he murmured under his breath. "A warning?"
He flexed his fingers, then curled them into fists. "Don't spiral. Think."
"The heat, those mindless wanderers. No," Navir told himself, jaw tightening, "that was too precise to be nothing, too cruel to be chance."
"Was it a prophecy?" he whispered, testing the word. It tasted false. He shook his head. "Or some sort of manipulation. I think someone's threatening me."
He straightened, feeling the grit beneath his boots, the weight of his own body. "Who could it be?" he whispered, voice low, searching the empty street.
Still, as he started forward, a prickle crawled along his neck, an awareness he couldn't shake, like a shadow keeping time with his heartbeat, drawing closer.
Navir clenched his fists, grounding himself. Fear lingered, but he stepped forward, alert and ready for whoever watched him.
The thought steadied him.
Almost.
At the edge of his vision, something moved where no one should be. Dark, deliberate, and silent.