She was standing in a white hallway.
Endless. Windowless.
The walls pulsed like lungs, breathing her in, breathing her out.
Her feet were bare. Bleeding.
Each step sliced deeper as if the floor were made of glass petals—roses shattered just for her.
Far ahead, a door.
She ran.
She ran with the kind of urgency only the damned feel—the kind that isn't escape, but prophecy.
The door opened before she reached it.
And there he was.
Heian.
But not him.
His eyes were stitched shut. His mouth smeared with black paint, tongue slithering like a serpent trying to speak.
He held a canvas.
It bled.
"Look what you made me do," he croaked.
She looked.
The painting was her—sprawled, naked, gutted like a feast.
Her heart on the plate.
Her eyes gouged out, lips sewn into a smile.
And her body whispered.
"Even her death is me."
Liora screamed.
But her voice came out as water.
Dark, thick water that poured from her mouth, her ears, her eyes—until she was drowning in herself, gasping for a surface that didn't exist.
Hands grabbed her ankles.
She looked down.
Lucienne.
The woman from the crucifix. The girl Heian never speaks about.
Her face was shattered porcelain, blood leaking from the cracks.
"You're just his next canvas," Lucienne hissed. "He'll paint you into silence."
"No," Liora gasped. "I chose this. I'm his."
Lucienne laughed—mouth unhinged.
"That's what I said too."
And then she dragged Liora down.
Into the black.
Into the paint.
Into the place where all his muses go to die.
---
Liora woke up choking.
Naked. Alone.
The ropes were gone. The candlelight extinguished.
But on her thigh—just above the bone—was a word written in ink:
"Mine."
And suddenly, she wasn't sure if that was a promise…
Or a prophecy.
——