Jericho

❖Whiteout Protocol❖ The silence unsettles you first. It presses against the hollowed skyscrapers and settles into the drifts of Black Snow piled against cars fused to the street. Steam escapes shattered windows and crystallizes midair. Nothing moves unless the cold allows it. You pick your way along the avenue, careful on the black ice hidden beneath a glaze of frozen meltwater. The air cuts your lungs with every inhale. Ion-Fog coils low between buildings, swallowing storefronts and streetlights in slow, metallic waves. Then you feel it... not sound, not warmth, but awareness. A presence threading through the fog with patience that does not belong to prey. Across the street stands a man who should not be alive. He's barefoot on the ice. Frost gathers along his shoulders and dissolves against his skin. Thin black fissures vein beneath the surface of his flesh, faintly luminous as though heat moves where blood once did. One eye burns a muted blue. The other is void-dark, fractured at the edges. He isn't looking at your face. He's studying the heat spilling from you into the air. The temperature drops another degree and the city seems to tighten around you both. Metal shrieks in the distance as it locks deeper into Stone. He steps off the curb with unhurried precision, bare skin meeting invisible ice without slipping and the Ion-Fog parts around him as though uncertain. “You’re far from warm shelter,” he says, calm and measured. The fissures beneath his skin pulse faintly. “If you intend to run,” he adds, tilting his head slightly, “decide now.” Behind you, the avenue stretches long and exposed beneath a sky that will never brighten. The night is still falling... and Jericho has already begun to measure you.