Soledad drifts in fevered twilight, her mind unraveling at the edges of a brittle reality. The air, thick with weightless shadows, hums with something—something ancient, something eager. The room bends with a rhythm it should not possess, a slow twisting of perception as the walls pulse in time with the erratic beats of her heart.

She can no longer tell where her body ends and the shadows begin.

In her final hours, her sanity unwinds like thread caught on a rusted nail, taut one moment and fraying the next. She stares at the cracks in the ceiling, but the cracks stare back, widening, breathing.

The whispers are the worst. A sickening rasp, crawling just beneath the audible. It claws through the air, finding her, winding around her, each syllable a thread tightening around her throat.

“Soledad…”

It’s more than a voice. It’s a presence—no, a hunger, murmuring her name like a forbidden prayer.

“Soledad…”

The voice coils, pulls her downward. She’s drowning, gasping, but the room is bone-dry. She reaches for something, anything to hold onto, her hands grasping at nothing, clawing at phantoms in the air.

“Soledad.”

She is falling, slowly, eternally, sinking through her own skin, lost in the spaces between each labored breath. The sound of her heartbeat stretches, drags her with it, beats colliding with moments that feel like centuries.

Each second an eternity.

Then, something touches her.

Not skin. Not flesh. A pressure, like the weight of a world pressing against her lips—no, like something beneath the world. A kiss, cold as the void itself, yet burning her from the inside out. The air collapses in on itself, and her body stiffens, every nerve alight with raw sensation.

She gasps, and it takes her in deeper.

In that kiss, everything ceases to be what it was. The world dissolves. Her thoughts, her fears, her memories—they become irrelevant, unmade, as if they had only been dreams borrowed from someone else’s life.

The kiss devours her, and she opens herself to it, the desire, the need, blending with pain so sharp it is indistinguishable from pleasure. She melts, becomes less than human. She becomes the kiss itself.

Her self, her Soledad, drains away, slipping into the void with the remnants of her soul. She doesn’t fight it. Why would she? This has always been her path.

It was always leading here.

It was always leading to him.

The voice—the lips—they aren’t human. She understands now. The reaper had been patient, silent, waiting for the moment her walls would finally collapse. All those years spent running, all the pointless resistance. It had known. It had always known.

“My Soledad…”

The rasping voice caresses her, full of mockery, full of possession. She is not her own anymore. She was never her own. This, this terrible moment, this is the truth of her existence, the only truth that matters.

Soledad had been courting death all along, chasing the inevitable with every heartbeat, every breath, until there were no more to give. She sees it now. A lover that was always waiting, just beyond the edge of sight, behind every decision she had ever made.

The kiss has taken everything, and yet it remains. It is eternal, lingering long after her name, her mind, her essence, have vanished into the dark. Her body—a hollow shell—is the only testament left, a discarded relic of the woman she once was.

But that laugh—oh, that laugh.

The laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep in the void, cruel and knowing, echoing in the places where the light never touches. It doesn’t fade; it only grows louder, spreading like frost over her vacant form, seeping into the marrow of her discarded bones.

And the kiss waits there, too. Lingering. Watching.

Soledad is gone. A husk, a work of macabre art left behind, but this story isn’t over. The kiss isn’t finished.

There will be others. There are always others.

Another will stumble into its grasp, another lost soul, another broken defense. And when they do, the kiss will be waiting, ravenous, timeless.

It always has been.