Around him, the air didn't merely move — it vibrated, quivered, twisted like a living fabric wrung from the inside. It wasn't wind. Nor a magical gust like those one feels stirring from incantations. It was something else. Something more precise, more cutting, more intimate. Like a hungry presence made of blades and whispers. A crimson tide, fluid and organic, rose around him in an inverted spiral, as if blood itself had learned to dance. A moving armor, drunken, throbbing. Sharpened.
Hundreds of red needles, thin as hair but hard as the desire of a god at war, levitated in unison around him. They pulsed. They lived. Each fragment, each shard vibrated with its own consciousness, as if their thirst no longer needed a master to strike. They did not float. They did not fall. They circled. In orbit. In trance. In waiting. Ready to pierce anything daring to breathe without his permission.
