davonkommt1
The rain did not merely fall; it executed a slow, violent conquest of the city below. Each droplet felt heavy, like molten lead cooling as it plummeted from an invisible, suffocating sky to strike the cracked, neon-slicked asphalt of the lower sectors. In the dead center of a narrow, forgotten alleyway, Lena stood completely, unnaturally motionless. The storm roared around her, a chaotic symphony of wind howling through rusted structural beams and water rushing into overflowing storm drains, yet she seemed entirely divorced from the commotion. Her clothes-a simple, dark fabric now heavy and sodden with moisture-clung to her frame like a second skin. Her breath came in ragged, uneven gasps, plumes of pale condensation blooming from her lips only to be instantly torn away by the freezing gale.If a passerby had risked the dangers of the night to peer into the shadows of that specific alley, they would not have seen a frightened girl. They would have seen her eyes. In the suffocating, absolute blackness of the sector's underbelly, her gaze did not reflect the flickering, distant neon signs of the upper districts. Instead, her eyes generated their own light-a brilliant, terrifying, and deeply unnatural violet hum that pulsed in perfect synchronicity with her frantic heartbeat. The light did not flicker; it burned with a cold, absolute intensity that seemed to push the very shadows back."It began on the day the sun went down forever," she whispered. The words were quiet, barely a breath against the tempest, yet they carried a strange, resonant weight that seemed to momentarily quiet the wind. Her voice lacked the trembling frailty of youth; it had been hollowed out, replaced by an icy, monolithic promise of absolute ruin. She stared into the void of the city, her fingers twitching against her sides as the memories, violent and unbidden, tore through the fragile barriers of her mind. The present faded, swallowed by the agonizingly bright specter of the past.