Episode 2

The rain, a phantom drizzle miles below, felt like a curse on my skin. Cold seeped into my bones, a stark contrast to the inferno I’d left behind. Forty-three souls, reduced to embers and echoes in the fluorescent arteries of The Rock. And me. The last cigarette under a sky that had forgotten how to weep.

The cheap fire burned a path down my throat, a familiar sting that drowned out the phantom screams behind my ribs. I’d laughed at saints, at the notion of divine mercy, because mercy was a luxury none of us had been afforded. Loneliness was a fetter I’d forged myself, binding me to this solitary existence. Sacrifice, I’d learned, bared its teeth, sharp and unforgiving.

"Burn the forgetters," I whispered to the empty room, the words catching in my throat like shards of glass. The cheap hotel room, a transient purgatory, offered little solace. The wallpaper, a sickly floral pattern, seemed to weep its own slow, dark tears, mirroring the stigmata of blood that bloomed from unseen wounds beneath. It was a baptism I’d craved, a purification by flame, a final communion with the fallen. A holy star, they’d called him. The one who took them. I would find him. The path, though, was a blinding supernova, promising incineration to anyone foolish enough to open their eyes.

I spun, a frantic, desperate dance. The mitsune, a fox spirit of legend, was my only companion now, a phantom waltz in the confines of my mind. Accelerant blazed, not just in my hands, but in the hollows of my being, igniting the stale air, the stale memories. The bleeds from the wallpaper darkened, coalescing into shapes that writhed and taunted. They were not just stains; they were the ghosts of the forgotten, the unmourned.

I had to remember. I had to burn them. Not with fire, but with remembrance. With the stark, brutal truth of what had happened. They had fought for a cause, for an ideal, and in the end, they were just numbers, erased. But I was the number that remained. And I carried their stories, their final breaths, their unfulfilled promises.

The rain outside intensified, a drumming rhythm against the thin glass. It was no longer a phantom drizzle. It was real. A cleansing. A prelude. The mountain had not trembled, but the world was beginning to shift. And I, the last cigarette, was about to be lit.