It settles on the tongue, metallic and thick.

You wake to it.

Not with a gasp, but with a slow, creeping awareness, like surfacing from a dream you can’t quite remember.

You are lying in a gutter.

Not a metaphorical one.

A literal, grimy trench running with something that isn’t water, carved between two uneven cobblestones the color of dried blood.

The sky above is a perpetual, bruised twilight, streaked with sickly green and violet.

Your body feels… wrong.

Lighter in some places, heavier in others.

You push yourself up onto your elbows, the rough stone scraping against skin that feels both new and strangely familiar.

You look at your hands.

They’re yours.

But they’re not.

The shape is right, the lines in your palms are the ones you’ve traced a thousand times.

But the color is off—a shade too pale, with a subtle, pearlescent sheen that catches the hell-light in odd ways.

Your fingers end in points.

Sharp, delicate points.

A memory flickers.

The last taste on your tongue wasn’t rust. It was bitter almonds and rosewater.

It’s gone before you can grasp it.

The street around you is a cacophony of muted despair.

Sinners shuffle past, their forms a grotesque gallery of their own failings—extra limbs, mismatched eyes, bodies fused with objects of their obsession.

None of them look at you.

You are just another piece of fresh damnation, waiting to be processed.

From a nearby alley, the sound of a struggle.

A gurgle, cut short.

The wet, tearing sound of something being taken.

A demon lurches out, wiping a bloody hand on its coat, a faint, shimmering light fading around its clenched fist.

It meets your gaze for a second, eyes blank and hungry, before moving on.

Power.

That’s what that was.

The currency here.

You have none.

You are, for all intents and purposes, naked in a den of wolves.

But your mind, disoriented as it is, doesn’t panic.

It assesses.

It catalogues.

The crumbling brick of the buildings, the faint, sweet-rot scent of the glowing fungi growing in the cracks, the distant, tinny echo of a radio broadcast you can’t quite make out.

Your eyes drift to the fungi.

Greenery.

Even here.

A shadow falls over you.

Not from a person, but from a sign hanging above—a neon outline of a smiling, old-fashioned radio, buzzing and flickering.

Beneath it, the entrance to a dimly lit club pulses with bass.

The door swings open, releasing a blast of jazz and laughter.

And there, framed in the doorway, backlit by the crimson interior light, is a figure.

Tall.

Impeccably dressed in a red tailcoat.

His head is tilted, as if listening to a distant song.

Static crackles faintly around the silhouette of his ears—long, pointed, twitching slightly.

He steps out onto the street, adjusting his gloves.

His movements are fluid, precise, utterly controlled.

He doesn’t look at the gutter.

He begins to walk away, the tap of his shoes a sharp, rhythmic counterpoint to the chaos of the street.

The back of his neck is exposed between his collar and the roots of his dark, auburn-streaked hair.

There’s a small, pale scar there, just below the hairline.

A crescent moon shape.

You’ve kissed that scar.

A hundred times.

A thousand.

The world tilts.

The rust in the air becomes the scent of magnolias and river mud.

The static becomes the warm hum of a vacuum tube radio in a parlor in New Orleans.

The pointed fingers on your own hands remember threading through his.

He’s ten paces away now.

About to turn the corner and vanish into the hellscape.