Chapter 1
THE TRAIN
He died disappointed.
The wine spread across his tongue with the confidence of something that had never failed him before—rich, deliberate, proud of itself. It carried his years of refinement inside it: countless adjustments, silent tastings and refined into elegance. This was the taste that had ended lives, with urgency, without mercy. He held it in his mouth longer than necessary, waiting for the familiar delay, the pause before the aftertaste, the calm before the body sooths into the richness of the wine.
That aftertaste never came.
Instead, a sharp and metallic flavour like blood against copper, like something that should not have been there at all. He had never tasted this before but was familiar with it. It was his recipe.
The darkness followed without ceremony, without struggle, without resistance.
There was no pain.
No tightening of the chest, no desperate pull for oxygen, no instinctive rebellion from organs that understood what was happening and fought it. His heart did not stutter or race. It did not even hesitate. It simply stopped—as if death had arrived politely and been invited inside.
That was the insult.
He had imagined death many times. He had rehearsed it privately, carefully, in his mind, the way one prepares for an important meeting. He had imagined suffering that matched the scale of his crimes. Agony that acknowledged effort. Pain that counted. He had imagined nerves igniting, breath tearing itself apart, muscles betraying him in terror.
Instead, death left him untouched.
When he opened his eyes, the first thing he felt was absence.
Not darkness. Not fear. Absence.
He was sitting upright, perfectly aligned, hands resting on his legs as though placed there deliberately. The seat beneath him vibrated faintly, continuously, a low mechanical hum that did not belong to any known machine. It felt ancient and endless, like something that had been moving long before he arrived and would continue long after he left.
The air felt wrong. Hollow. Thin. As though sound itself had been drained out of it.
Outside the wide window beside him, light rushed past at a speed too violent to be measured, streaks of white and gold folding into one another without form or destination. There was no horizon. No sky. No ground. Only motion.
A train.
It did not sway. It did not slow. It felt eternal.
The emptiness pressed inward, filling him with something unfamiliar—not panic. He does not panic. But the sensation that something essential had been removed and never replaced.
“Someone poisoned me,” he said finally, his voice sounding flatter when it returned to him, thinner, less certain. “I want their name.”
Across from him stood a figure clothed entirely in white.
It did not glow.It did not radiate warmth.It simply existed, as indifferent as a law of nature.
“You drank what you made,” it replied.
The words settled slowly, seeping inward the way poison did when it was patient.
The hum of the train deepened, vibrating faintly through bone.
He exhaled slowly. “Why it didn’t hurt.”
The figure turned its head slightly, not curious, not interested.
“You want pain,” it said with a scoff.
Something shifted.
“You carry more pain in your name than most souls encounter in eternity. What you experienced was mercy. It does not continue.”
The world changed.
There was no sound. That was the first cruelty.
His mouth opened instinctive. He screamed.
Everyone screamed.
But nothing reached his ears.
The screaming existed only as pressure, as knowledge, as violence without volume. It crushed inward, folding into his skull, into his chest, until pain had nowhere to escape and nowhere to echo. He felt his skin ignite, not from fire, not from heat, but from memory—every toxin he had ever administered returning at once, tearing through him internally.
His flesh burned as though it were being rewritten.
His head felt like it was exploding outward and collapsing inward simultaneously, thought shattering without the relief of unconsciousness. There was no fading. No darkness to hide in. He dropped to the gound and had no way of getting back up. He tried to give his body relief by holding himself togeter but hands had no effect of the torture that was coming from inside. He would do anything to get out of this heap of bodies rotting but still alive. All moving. All dancing like a fish wihtout water like leech with salt. Like a man with poison.
Hands tore at him.
Pulling. Dragging.
Feeding. But there were no hands at all.
Only bodies.
Endless bodies.
His victims. Or maybe other too.
Stacked beneath him, around him, above him, their weight crushing as he was dragged downward through their remains. everybody fighting for being at the top of the mountain of bodies, no body knows how deep. Faces he recognized instantly. Faces he had watched carefully as poison spread politely through bloodstreams. Men who had laughed confidently moments before dying. Women laughing. Couples celebrating. Partners meeting.
They did recogise him.
They dragged him deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
He was torn back violently.
Sound returned all at once.
His scream ripped through the train, raw and hoarse, echoing endlessly before collapsing into his ears.
He gasped, lungs burning with a scream that had nowhere to go.
What was that? he didn't ask, his eyes did it for him.
The guy stood unchanged.
“Your destination,” it said. “You go deeper. And deeper. And deeper.”
“What's down there?” he demanded.
“There is no down,” the figure replied. “There is no end. There is only forever.”
The words did not threaten, it felt disgusitng. He is back in the silent train, this of cource is not just fun. He is not going back there.
“Then why am I here?” he asked. He hated to sound pathetic. He hated to be clueless. He hated to be dead.
The guy turned slightly, as if acknowledging a distant exception.
“You get a year,” it said. “Beg her for mercy. God owes a lot to her. Her wish cannot be ignored.”
A sharp pain ignited in his arm.
“If she wishes for your forgivness,” it continued, “your sins will be gone.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
The train fastened, the hum deepened.
“You return. To where you belong”
The next question was why. He has done nothing but crimes all his life so why will he get a chance to be forgivenn? Did all those inside the heap rotting also got the chance?
But the world collapsed inward before he collected the courage to sound pathetic again.
He woke in the same seat.
Same counter. Same glass. The after taste he missed finally coating his tongue the way it was meant to.
Pain flared along his arm forcing him to remove any clothing above from it. It was getting wierder and weirder. The moment he thought it all might have been his imagination. He got evidence to proof this madness.
A name burned into his skin—not carved, not bleeding, but branded deeply enough to feel permanent.
JANNAH
“Where are you lost?” John asked from across the counter when he met his puzzled eyes.
But he closed his fist slowly around the burning mark, feeling it pulse beneath his skin, alive and unforgiving.
“No,” he said.
“I need to find someone.”
