Neno’s breath came shallow, his pulse thrumming in his ears like a distant drum.

The chapel was silent again—too silent. The air no longer carried echoes of his own movement. As if the space around him had paused, waiting for something unseen to respond.

His fingers tightened around the page. The ink was still moving, shifting in slow, deliberate motions, reforming words that whispered without sound.

"Do not run. It is already listening."

A tremor crawled down his spine.

The Mouth of Saranja.

He didn’t understand what it was. He didn’t know why the words warned him against running. But every instinct in his body screamed that he should not be here.

With a final glance at the empty space where the man had dissolved, Neno forced himself toward the chapel doors.

They loomed before him—towering slabs of wood and tarnished iron. He hesitated, pressing a hand to the surface. It was warm. As if something behind them had just breathed against the wood.

Pushing aside the unease coiling in his gut, he shoved the doors open.

The city of Saranja stretched before him, and for the first time, he understood:

Something was terribly wrong.

The streets twisted beneath a sky of neither night nor day.

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The sun was gone, swallowed by an expanse of shifting gray, tinged with faint, pulsing veins of ink. No wind stirred. No voices called. The city breathed in eerie stillness, its spires standing like the ribs of a great carcass, long picked clean.

Buildings leaned unnaturally, their structures seeming to bend toward him. The stone of the streets was etched with faint symbols, worn away by time—or by something that wanted them erased.

Neno swallowed hard.

The silence was suffocating.

Yet, as he took a step forward, the ground beneath his boots creaked, like old parchment bending under weight.

He kept moving.

Every street he turned onto felt off, as though it had just shifted into place before he arrived. Windows were hollow and dark, but when he wasn’t looking, he swore he could feel something behind the glass.

He passed a statue—a towering figure wrapped in stone robes. Its face had been chiseled away, leaving only the vague impression of a mouth, a whispering hush of lips against smooth marble. Beneath its feet, an inscription:

“Do not speak its name.”

Neno felt a pressure behind his eyes.

The city was watching him.

He reached a small courtyard where a fountain stood, its waters dark and unmoving. A mirror of ink.

As he approached, something shifted in the reflection.

Neno froze.

It wasn’t his own face looking back at him.

It was… another version of himself.

Pale. Hollow-eyed. A black stain creeping from his mouth.

And then—

It spoke.

The words did not match the movement of its lips. Instead, they appeared in his mind, crawling over his thoughts like ink bleeding through paper:

"You will forget this street the moment you leave it."

A sharp pain stabbed through his skull.

He stumbled back, gripping his head, and when he blinked—

The reflection was gone.

And so was the street behind him.

Neno’s breath caught. He turned sharply.

There had been a path. He had come from somewhere—hadn’t he?

But when he looked now, all he saw was a solid wall of stone.

The city had changed.

Panic coiled in his chest. He reached into his pocket, his fingers brushing the crumpled page.

The ink had shifted again.

New words had formed.

"Saranja does not remember. It does not want you to leave."

The walls creaked. The buildings around him seemed to lean closer.

The city was awake.

And it had noticed him.