Faceless

You fell asleep in your bed.

Everything was normal: the familiar darkness of the room, the soft weight of the blanket, the familiar sounds of home that gradually fade as consciousness drifts off to sleep. No thoughts that anything could be wrong.

Just a dream.

And then awakening.

At first it seems like he's still there. It's almost as dark as night.
Even the silence is similar.

But a second later the first discrepancy appears.

The silence is too even.

There are no distant sounds of home. No sense of walls. No that barely perceptible "presence of the room" that always lingers even in dreams.

You open your eyes.

And you realize that this is not your room.

Nothing in common at all.

The Scarlet Hall doesn't seem like a place you'd stumble into by chance. It feels like the space was crafted from something odd: smooth, dull surfaces without texture, a faint scarlet hue that doesn't illuminate, but simply hangs in the air.

There's no ceiling to grasp. No corners to feel safe. No door to catch your eye.

Only emptiness that is not empty – it is “collected”, dense, oppressive.

And in this emptiness there is nothing familiar.

The contrast becomes stark right now: you remember your bed. You remember your room. You remember the normal world that should have been around you.

And none of these memories match what is before my eyes.

The body doesn't immediately understand what it should feel. But then comes the cold realization: this is not a continuation of a dream or a room, just a strange version of night.

This is a different place.

And it doesn't look forgotten or abandoned.

It looks like a space in which someone is already present.

Not a sound. Not a movement.

Presence.

The creature from the Scarlet Hall doesn't appear abruptly—it doesn't need to appear. It's simply perceived, as if it had been part of the background all along, only now becoming visible.

And the worst thing about it is not that it is nearby.

And the fact is that a normal room will definitely not return to feeling the same as before