The second room he regained consciousness in was dimly lit with a candle and smelled like some mixture of smoke and old piss. I miss you, grandma.

There were two beds in the room, and Malak was laying in one of them with his ankles and wrists chained to the bed's legs. He had been arrested enough times to know what must have happened.

I'm never doing acid again. He promised himself, for the hundredth time.

He lounged in bed, not even testing the restraints, and spent some time piecing things together. Last night was meant to be the next in a long cycle of embarrassing shitshows at the bar. He was twenty-three, unemployed, had a useless degree, and hadn't been on a serious date since he was a teenager. His inheritance, what had seemed like all the money in the world when he decided to take a gap year after college, had been sucked up through his nose or shot into his arm or blotted onto paper and pressed to his gums. He wasn't going to make bail this time, and he was technically still out on bond from the last time. A bond that his sister had put up for him. A bond she wouldn't be getting back now.

Sorry sis, learn to invest. Should have put it up your nose like me.

So, he had to just hit it head on. He had somehow found someone to hook him up with acid while he was black out drunk, taken it, then stripped and ran through some sort of comic-con or stage production of Macbeth. He had clearly been arrested by four cops afterwards for public indecency and could now look forward to a long life of being a registered sex offender on top of being cut off by his sister. He knew he should feel... something. Shame? Horror? Somehow, the feelings wouldn't come. Hadn't come, maybe, since he had gotten his inheritance. Would never come again, some broken thing in the back of his mind whimpered.

No. He thought emphatically.

Distraction time. He looked around the room and tried to guess how long it would take the police to come back and check on him. Weird that the room only had two beds. Weird that it wasn't sterile white like the last hospital he had woken up arrested in. Weird that there weren't any lights on, just a lit candle, and weird that the bed he was laying in had some kind of furred leathers instead of blankets.

Really weird.

Now that he thought about it, it was weird that he couldn't hear anything. Usually, hospitals were full of noise. Beeps, conversations, shuffling, scraping, even the screaming apologies of people who just lost their loved ones. Here, though, he could only hear the occasional padding of footsteps passing the door and a faint, almost imperceptible crashing sound that sounded like it came from miles away.

Strange and stranger.

Finally, there was the fact that he was still naked, and he wasn't handcuffed but instead chained in what looked like solid iron manacles.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Time to face the facts.

It was clear what had happened, now. He was still tripping.

He had just come to terms with that and tried to figure out why he didn't feel like he was high when the door opened and a girl wearing a dull grey, rough spun tunic that came down to her knees opened the door. Seeing he was awake, she said something in Klingon before leaving in something of a rush. As her sandaled footsteps echoed away, then found other footsteps and began returning, Malak had the most unsettling thought he'd had since he woke up in the room of red.

I don't think I'm on any drugs at all.

He had barely finished considering that when a girl with long golden hair, pale green eyes, and a hilariously mixed expression of resentment, embarrassment, and remorse came marching into the room. She pointed a finger at him, barked something in Klingon, and then waited. When he didn't answer, her brows furrowed in frustration. The embarassment and remorse slowly left her face, just leaving the resentment. With a thick tongue and furious concentration, she began speaking again but this time in some sort of mangled bastard of German and Chinese.

God, it's like hearing all of your dreams get put in a blender.

He raised a hand to get her to stop her mumbling, making the chains rattle. He hissed at the noise of the chains, his headache coming back.

Maybe I am hungover after all.

The girl had fallen silent, her mouth slacked open in shock. Then her face slowly twisted into horror, as she looked at first his raised hand, then the iron manacles digging into his flesh, then flicked to his still hissing mouth. She set her mouth firmly, eyes still wide but now filled with determination instead of fear.

"Woah." Malak said. He was about to follow up with "Easy there, girl," but by then she had already drawn her sword in one fluid motion and driven it into his chest.

What the fuck. Malak had time to think, his chest throbbing with the coldest, most intense pain, as his vision slowly filled with red, red blood. Plot twist. She's the comic-con slasher?

The pain made his thoughts turn into a jumble inside his head, until they were nonsense. Until he was driving the Mercedez down the road again, all freedom and laughter and terrible, terrible optimism. Poisonous optimism, his inheritance chasing after him in the old jeep, as they all drove happily towards the intersection that was really a dead end.

Red. His whole vision red. The pain from his chest migrated slowly up, became a burning instead of a cold thing. The blood from his wound dripped down his body, all over his body, and the pain had now bloomed in his head into a pounding headache. He couldn't breathe, knew it was impossible to breathe, so he gasped and panted and cried.

Someone hissed a garbled word, their voice crackling like a dying cat's. He opened his eyes and saw a set of white marble stairs in front of him. Far above him, atop a polished white throne, sat a man dressed in a long robe of crimson silk. He was balding, the little grey hair left to him making a sort of wreath around his skull. He was gaunt, his eyes sunken and cheeks hollow. He was angry. One hand gripped an ornate knife so tightly his knuckles stood out in sharp white relief. His jaw was clenched so tightly that his lips disappeared into a thin line.

Suddenly, it was like all the energy went out of him. He looked at Malak a moment, then his shoulders slumped. He lifted the dagger in his hand. He drove it into his own throat.

He had just started to tumble down the stairs when Malak decided he was in hell.