An alarm, sharp enough to split a skull in two, shrieked through the stale air of Litla-Hraun—
not so much a prison, more like a mirage wrapped in bureaucracy, sold as a therapeutic retreat for high-value minds too dangerous to roam free.
The sound didn't feel mechanical. It felt… organic. As if the building itself had finally begun screaming the joy of existing.
Boots—black, shining, obedient—marched in rhythm down the endless, sterile halls. Their owners wore military garb, but not quite. Not government-issued. Their patches changed symbols when you stared too long. Some said nothing at all.
The walls pulsed, just slightly, like they were breathing in. And then there was the mess hall.
Today, it lived up to its name.
At the center of the tiled floor, beneath flickering lights that refused to stay dead or alive, sat a man—Elias Marrow, although even he had stopped calling himself that. Names became useless once the mirrors started talking back.
He sat in a pool of red, thick and deliberate, shaped into a perfect pentagram. Around him: five bodies, ex-colleagues, perhaps friends once. They were frozen mid-expression, mouths agape, as if the alarm had exploded from their lungs. Their eyes? Still processing.
Elias just sat there, cross-legged and barefoot, his uniform soaked and clinging to him like afterbirth.
He looked like a monk caught at the exact moment of revelation or madness, smiling as though something profound had just whispered from the floor.
His fingers were twitching in rhythmic patterns—not random, no. Some guards believed he was still typing. That even in death, his thoughts could log into something greater.
The room filled with gunmetal breath and trembling hands. The guards didn't know whether to open fire or applaud. They had heard things about him. Read fragments of interviews he never gave. Some had grown up with the myth of the man who could collapse thought systems like sandcastles with a single sentence.
Now he had staged a masterpiece. Not a murder. Not a suicide. This was a symbolic detonation.
One guard began crying softly. Another whispered, "...I think I loved him."
In the control room, the warden watched through a cracked monitor, cigarette shaking between his fingers. He didn't call for cleanup. He just muttered:
"He's escaped again."
Because he knew the truth, the one no file would dare hold: Elias never planned to walk out of the prison. He planned to stay in everyone's head.
And now he had. The moment was irreversible. The alarm stopped. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe it was just inside them now.