The sky was not red any more; it burnt like an open wound across the heavens. Swirls of fiery orange, blood-scarlet and bruised purple bled together, casting an unnatural glare over the dark waters of the fjord below.
Tolo stood frozen on the wooden boardwalk, his mind fracturing under the weight of the sky. His name had always meant sense and reason, a quiet anchor in a steady world, yet all logic was dissolving before his eyes.
Behind him, two figures strolled along the pier without a care in the world, anchored in their sanity. Their shadows stretched out long and thin, completely oblivious to the deafening roar that had suddenly consumed the landscape. It was not a noise one heard with the ear, but a shuddering vibration that rattled through the marrow of his bones, stripping away every ounce of Tolo’s composure. Nature itself was shrieking, a relentless pitch of existential terror that tore through the evening air.
Tolo clapped his pale hands over his ears, desperate to hold on to the last fragments of his mind and block out the sound. He pressed down until his knuckles turned white, but the shuddering vibration only grew louder. The dark landscape seemed to melt around him, the swirling curves of the coastline and the heavy water rippling as his reason slipped away entirely.
His eyes widened in sheer disbelief as the world abandoned all sense. He opened his mouth into a hollow circle, mirroring the very shape of his name, to release a cry of his own. Yet no sound escaped his lips. The man named for reason was left utterly senseless, trapped in the centre of the noise while the world twisted, burnt and bled around him.
