Chapter 139 - Lullaby of a Beating Abyss

I stood up with a jolt, without thinking, without trying to understand, driven by something deeper than fear, an animal urgency that crushed all my questions in a single heartbeat. My legs obeyed before my mind even had time to give an order, and I turned on my heels with such violence that the air seemed to split around me. I ran. No, I fled. It was pure flight, total, a desertion of everything I believed myself to be, an immediate abdication in the face of something my body had already recognized as unacceptable.