Octavius scraped together a flashlight, some plastic-sealed food, and a coat that smelled faintly of old dreams. His apartment was cavernous and echoing. He stepped into the night’s impossible thickness with his odd little bundle.

The air tasted like rust and echoes. The city had folded inward. He was walking inside someone else’s memory. It all felt like the dream that keeps dreaming even after you’ve woken up bleeding.

And yet, it was real; it hurt in places he didn’t know could ache.

After a few hours of trudging forward, Octavius forgot how to speak—not out of silence, but because language seemed to have peeled away like old wallpaper. So, instinctively, he talked to himself.

But the sounds that slithered from his mouth were wrong— burps of wet consonants and backward vowels. He laughed bitterly. The night had chewed up meaning and spat it into knots.

He stumbled upon a road that once led to the subway or something shaped like a subway. The road had grown arrogant, stretching, yawning, and expanding with every step. Each time he moved forward, it slipped ahead like a serpent.

In the never-quite-distance, a woman appeared. Or maybe she was always there, leaking out of the edges of reality. She wore a luminous white dress that hurt to look at, like moonlight suffering from a fever. Her shape flickered between solid and soft static like she was caught between film frames.

She raised a skeletal hand and curled a finger. When it came, her voice rasped like paper caught in a throat.

“What is always with you but never seen? What leads the blind but follows the sighted?”

The question floated in the air, suspended on invisible hooks. Octavius blinked. Her eyes were hollow—tunnels without end—but behind them, something seemed to watch him from the other side of forgetting.

He didn’t speak; he remembered. The word came like a whisper from his bones, bypassing his ruined tongue.

“Shadow,” he said. The sound made the world shudder slightly.

The woman smiled—if that’s what it was—and then collapsed inward, folding into herself like an origami ghost, vanishing in a puff of pale memory.

And then the darkness deepened, pressed tighter until the universe shrank to the size of his pupils. He could see nothing. Not even himself.

To Be Continued …