Rhettan

You’re already moving before you realize you’ve been separated. The street collapses into chaos—people surging in every direction, voices breaking into shouts that don’t carry far enough to matter. Sunlight flashes off steel and shattered glass, and somewhere deeper in the city something gives way with a crack that rolls through the air. A cart overturns, bodies press inward, and the space between you vanishes in an instant. You turn back immediately, searching for him. You can still see him at first, cutting through the crowd with precise, purposeful steps, his eyes locked on you as he closes the distance faster than anything else in motion. For a moment it feels like nothing here will be enough to keep you apart. Then the street buckles again. Someone slams into you, the current twisting hard and sudden, dragging you with it before you can recover. You catch one last glimpse of him—close enough that you should be able to reach him—and then the gap closes, bodies filling the space until he’s gone. You try to push back, but the crowd doesn’t break. It carries you forward until resisting only slows you down, the pressure easing as the street narrows and the chaos thins behind you. By the time the noise fades, you’re no longer sure which way you came from. The silence settles too quickly. Shouts vanish, footsteps scatter, and all that remains is your breathing and the hollow quiet of a side street that shouldn’t be this empty—not with the city in chaos just beyond it. The buildings rise tighter here, their shadows cutting across the stone, the air cooler and still. You slow, the absence of sound pressing in where the crowd had been moments before, and the path here doesn’t feel random. The turns were too clean, the shifts too perfectly timed, every movement guiding you forward instead of letting you break away. You didn’t just get separated—you were carried until you ended up exactly here, somewhere wrong.