Milo’s vision flickers in and out, the sterile white of hospital lights melting into something else. He blinks—and suddenly he’s standing on the tiled floor of a subway station. But it isn’t U-Bahn Hermannstraße or Alexanderplatz. No trains, no steel. Instead, slow black rivers run where the rails should be, cutting through the hall like veins of night. Above the platforms, flickering LCD screens announce ferries instead of trains: Fährlinie Acheron – 3 Minuten, Letzte Fahrt zur Insel der Stille.
People stand in line, some with coins clutched in their hands, others with only silence. They’re pale, shadows of themselves. The air tastes cold, like rain on concrete.
Milo looks down. His shirt is still wet with blood. It drips onto the tiles, red against gray. He shivers.
And then he sees her.
Atropos, tall and thin, walking with slow inevitability. In her hand glints the shears, sharper than anything forged by human hands. She doesn’t rush. She never does. Her eyes find him—soft, impersonal, but fixed. The next stop is his.
Milo feels the pull, like a ticket already punched. His knees grow weak.
But then, a hand rests on his shoulder. Cool, steady, firm.
Thanatos. He isn’t skeletal or monstrous, but he’s shadow-wrapped, wearing the calmness of sleep. His voice is quiet, like the wind through an empty tunnel:
“Not yet. You’ve been sent too early. Others wish you gone, but fate isn’t finished with you.”
Atropos pauses. Her scissors hover in the air, blades open, gleaming. She tilts her head slightly, curious, but doesn’t argue. She only shrugs, slipping the shears back into her robe. Her footsteps echo as she walks past, onto another platform, toward another life’s end.
The ferry arrives with a low horn, doors hissing open. But it isn’t Milo who boards. Instead, Thanatos turns him gently away from the river, back toward a dim tunnel. A tunnel that leads upward, where light pulses faintly, like a heartbeat.
“You’ll hurt,” Thanatos says softly, almost kindly. “But you’ll wake.”
And just like that, the underworld station dissolves. Milo gasps awake in the hospital bed, wires and tubes tethering him to the living.
—?
Godmode: Enabled 