Episode 4

The rain, when it finally found me, was a baptism of a different sort. Not the purifying deluge I’d half-expected, half-feared, but a cold, insistent weeping from a sky that seemed to have forgotten how to rage. Seven miles below, the star I’d ignited still pulsed, a wound in the earth’s flesh, a promise of a hellish dawn. Up here, though, it was just damp. And cold. And the silence was a weight, heavier than any rock.

I’d walked out of the inferno, or rather, tumbled out, a broken thing shedding its skin. The climb had been a blur of scraped knees and burning lungs, each upward yard a victory against the crushing dark. And then, the sky. Not the sky I remembered, but a bruised, indifferent canvas. They’d promised me weather. They’d lied. Or perhaps this was it – the bleak, meteorological aftermath of world-ending fire.

The hotel room was a monument to despair. Cheap linoleum, a bed that sagged like a guilt-ridden conscience, and wallpaper peeling in long, leprous strips. The bleeds, though. That’s what caught my eye. Dark, viscous rivulets seeping from beneath the floral pattern, like veins bursting under pressure. I sat for a while, the cheap fire of the whiskey burning a path down my throat, and watched them. Watched them spread, a slow-motion bloom of something unnameable.