The fog lingered — a whisper-thin veil, barely more than the faintest exhalation of breath from some slumbering leviathan. It clung to the earth like a secret, diffusing light until the road beneath him unraveled, slipping out from under the world's feet until it was no more than an echo of itself.
Kylo sat cross-legged in that fragile grey, limbs loose, heart still humming with a ghostly adrenaline that refused to settle. His fingers twitched with the rhythm of his pulse as his gaze fixed — not on any object, not on the fractured world, but simply forward. Into the abyss of indistinct shapes.
The street, once tangible, was now devoured by the mist, leaving behind only the skeletons of broken lampposts bowed under the weight of forgotten years, dead street signs sagging like aged bones, and shuttered windows blinking their final, flickering breaths of electricity. And beyond all that, emerging from the trembling horizon like a crumbling monument to lost faith, loomed the name:
RUEL.
A monolith of despair and decay, a cathedral erected to gods who had long since been abandoned by memory.
Kylo's dry eyes blinked once, twice — his voice emerging rough and mechanical, as if forced from a machine that had forgotten its purpose:
"The mall."
It was vast. Immense. Absurdly out of place.
And it should not have existed here.
Nor should he.
He clawed at his black hair with desperate fingers, tangled as his thoughts, as if pulling at strands might unravel the confusion that knotted inside his mind. His name — the one thread he still clutched — slipped through his grasp like smoke.
"None of this makes sense anymore. None of it."
The bridge. The void between worlds. The woman's blade, slicing shadows. The Dice. The revolver. The hallway.
Now, here he was, swallowed by streets hollowed out by time and silence, buildings bowing under the weight of their own memories, waiting to forget.
Then, a sound — subtle, metallic, rhythmic — like chains dragging through the marrow of fog.
Kylo froze, senses narrowing to a razor's edge.
His head turned slowly.
There. Beyond the mist, suspended like a relic torn from a nightmare, was the bridge — fractured, half-drowned in fog. But now, something beneath it caught his eye.
Chains.
Hundreds of them.
Swaying like wind chimes hung from the ribs of a dead god, their links forged not from steel but from memory and sorrow. They held the bridge aloft, anchoring it not to earth or stone but to something more fragile — the thin air itself, as if the world conspired to keep it suspended.
And they bled.
Thick droplets of darkness, heavier than blood, fell silently, thudding into the void below with muffled finality — an ancient, endless bleeding.
"Bloody as hell…" Kylo whispered, his voice swallowed by the wind's mournful whistle.
In his mind, voices echoed like fractured glass, shards of memory rearranging themselves into words:
"LIMINA."
"Beloved."
"Truth."
"Kylo."
The woman's voice from the phone call, the flicker of the Dice, the cold weight of the revolver, the breathing corridor.
His name — fragile, borrowed, a suit ill-fitting on his tongue.
"Kylo…"
What was this place? LIMINA — a name sewn into the fabric of everything, yet so elusive. A hell? A dream? A punishment?
Questions rained down where answers had long since fled.
He rose, fists clenched, eyes fixed on the mall like it might flinch under his gaze.
"I can't stay here, waiting for ghosts."
So he walked.
Each step softened, muffled — the world cradling his footsteps as if wary to wake the sleeping shadows beneath the fog.
The city stretched out before him like the afterimage of a scream — fractured, silent, trying desperately not to remember what it used to be.
Skyscrapers leaned against one another like drunk prophets mourning gods that never came. Some had collapsed mid-confession, their twisted spines locked in a lover's embrace of steel and failure. The air held its breath. Asphalt roads cracked like dried tongues. No cars, no voices — just the windless weight of absence.
Shops lined the streets like mausoleums pretending to be mundane. Their glass windows were fogged from the inside out, iced over by something that wasn't cold. As if memory itself had curdled inside them.
Streetlights sagged like wilted stems, their bulbs long dead but still hanging on — tragic ornaments strung across a world too tired to shine.
Kylo walked.
And with each step, the temperature fell.
But it wasn't weather. Not wind, not ice.
It was history. The kind that seeps under your nails and makes you forget your name in pieces.
It crawled beneath his skin — that other cold — the kind that wears a thousand faces but no body. The kind that lingers after trauma and whispers like an old friend you shouldn't trust.
Then: fog.
Thick. Heavy. Rolling in like a sentient tide made of smothered dreams.
It didn't drift.
It claimed.
It poured across the city with the inevitability of guilt — swallowing streets, sky, sound. Everything. A blind tidal wave that didn't need eyes to see him.
It knew him.
He stopped walking.
Heart coiled.
Muscles tight.
Then — too late — the mist broke over him like breath against the soul.
And Ruel vanished.
No horizon.
No up, no down.
Just smoke and hush, and a strange heaviness in the bones, like gravity had been rewritten by a memory too tired to stay buried.
Kylo blinked.
Lifted a hand.
His fingers were ghosts — pale, unfinished sketches against the gray.
And then—
"Forward."
A voice. Feminine.
It wasn't heard — it was felt. Like someone whispering directly against the skin of his mind.
Soft. Patient. Warm. Too warm.
He spun around.
Nothing. Just fog.
A blind cathedral of silence.
"Who's there?"
His voice cracked like old vinyl.
Nothing answered.
"Hello?"
The sound of it came back to him wrong — warped, glitched, like the air itself was trying to understand what a voice was supposed to be.
"…Who are you?"
Silence.
Thicker now.
Tense. Like the pause before an executioner's swing.
He stood there, unsure how long. Time moved strange here — like it had been bartered away and bought back at a worse price.
And then — without logic or decision — he moved forward.
A ritual more than a choice.
And there, through the colorless flood of mist, something blinked.
A flicker.
A pulse.
Not light — resistance.
Weak. Glitching. Alive.
He approached.
It revealed itself slowly, emerging from the haze like a cathedral made from forgotten intention.
A billboard.
Massive. Splintered. Towering.
The steel frame groaned under some invisible weight — maybe gravity, maybe memory — but it still stood.
It buzzed softly, humming like the throat of an old machine trying to sing a song no one had asked it to remember.
It loomed above the mall.
A monument.
A grave-marker.
A sentinel from an age where meaning still had currency.
Then — it came to life.
Not in voice.
But in imagery.
The panels stuttered awake, one by one, struggling to stabilize — each a fractured revelation barely clinging to cohesion.
Panel One: The War Never Ended
A soldier, rust-stiffened and grotesquely still, locked mid-salute —
A fossil of forgotten violence.
Gas mask half-shattered, glass eyes spiderwebbed.
The coat sagged heavy with moss and coagulated time.
Helmet dented as if gnawed by the metal teeth of centuries.
Behind his sockets: nothing.
No light.
No soul.
Only void that remembered too much.
Below him, the screen coughed type in trembling grayscale —
A sentence like a curse carved into wet bone:
"THE WAR NEVER ENDED.
IT JUST FORGOT ITS NAME."
Beside him: a digital counter spun in circles —
Erratic, recursive, mad with purpose long since buried.
0038-REDEPLOY
It meant nothing.
It meant everything.
Panel Two: The Unnamed Child
The static screamed — then softened.
An image emerged, flickering like a nightmare refusing to resolve.
A child.
A silhouette stitched in silence.
Face blurred by time or trauma —
a smear of memory, mouth open wide in a scream that had never been heard.
Arms outstretched.
Was she pleading?
Or pushing something away?
The ambiguity was a wound you could fall into.
Her eyes had not been blacked out.
They had been devoured — consumed by something older than guilt.
Below her, pulsing crimson bled into the screen like a heartbeat on life support:
DO NOT NAME WHAT YOU CANNOT SHELTER.
And beneath that —
a whisper so faint it sounded stolen:
PROPERTY OF THE LIMINA ARCHIVE.
ACCESS: DENIED.
Panel Three: Arm Yourself
Weapons.
Laid out like relics on a shrine.
Rifles with weeping barrels.
Bayonets curved in pain.
Blades split down the middle, as if cleaved by their own regrets.
Their edges trembled, subtle but constant — as if haunted by the hands that once held them.
A speaker above wheezed a lullaby drowned in rust —
a melody that tried and failed to comfort.
"Arm Yourself. Forget Kindly. Die Quiet."
Then — one final message slithered across the base of the panel, glitching with too much sentience:
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
BY THOSE WHO NEVER LEFT.
Kylo didn't flinch.
Didn't look away.
His gaze passed over the soldier. The child. The altar of blades.
And settled into something far worse —
The silence between them.
The space untouched by image or word.
A gap in memory too deliberate to be accident.
It was not just blank.
It was breathing.
That space had presence —
Ancient.
Aware.
Hungry.
The fog pulled back slightly, as if bowing before revelation.
And above it all, etched in decayed steel serif —
a message too cheerful to be anything but monstrous:
RUEL: THE LAST MALL
Welcome back, shopper.
Please ignore the dust and screams.
Kylo's gaze clung to the void between the billboard's fractured panels — those ruptured seams where imagery should have lived, but didn't. Instead, there was static. Silence sculpted into shape. A breathless abyss pretending to be advertisement. The kind of emptiness that wasn't accidental.
It whispered louder than anything legible.
Behind the advertisement's gloss, there were deeper messages: symbols that refused to die, promises soaked in old blood, a child's face burned out at the edges as if memory itself had chosen to forget.
His breath hitched.
A tremor threaded through his shoulder.
He reached beneath his jacket.
The holster clung to him like a parasite with purpose, leather aged and curled from heat and history. His fingers touched the grip — cold metal breathing like a heartbeat trapped in brass.
Not just a weapon. A ritual.
His hand curled around it.
Drew it out slow, reverent, as though summoning an old god from sleep.
The revolver sighed in his grasp — that uncanny exhale of machinery long used, long watching. The kind of sound that belonged not in steel, but in the lungs of something that remembered too much.
Click.
He thumbed the cylinder open.
Spun.
Watched it rotate like a dying star.
Four bullets. Two hollows.
The gaps stared back at him.
"Yeah..." he murmured, eyes trailing distant memories, "one in the hallway."
The words scraped out, half-ash, half-admission.
But the other?
That chamber wasn't just empty.
It was missing.
Not forgotten — consumed. Like something had fed on it. Eaten the memory whole and left only the metallic taste of guilt behind.
He blinked.
Something far behind his eyes — deep in the folds of his soul — remembered.
But it didn't speak.
Not yet.
With a quiet snap, he closed the cylinder and slid the revolver back into its home — the shrine carved against his ribs. There was a weight in it now. Not just steel, but something ritualistic. Burdened. Holy.
He exhaled.
Lifted his eyes again to the void.
A single word curled at the edge of his lips, peeled from some ancient page he didn't remember reading — a word too small for its gravity, too casual for the myth it carried:
"Shopper…"
A title? A curse? A warning disguised as marketing?
It didn't matter.
The word fell like a lit match.
And the world listened.
Behind him — soft, steady:
Chains.
Not metallic — not anymore.
Breathing.
Not human.
Like the dragging pulse of a forgotten animal still pretending it had lungs. The rhythm of something enormous, blind and dreaming — half-alive, half-waiting.
He didn't turn.
Didn't breathe.
Just stood there, the revolver's weight pressing against him like a confession. A heartbeat in brass. A sigil with a trigger.
In the dark, something exhaled.
And the mall whispered its welcome.