Events shift in the span of a heartbeat. One impulse, and the world turns dangerous. You watch people break, and all you can do is stand there — powerless, useless, praying for a way to rewrite the moment. A barrel stares back at you, wanting you to be a hero. Your mind runs a hundred scenarios, but every path ends the same. Control slips through your fingers like ash. You live with the guilt of doing nothing, the frost of that moment clinging to your bones. What if you moved? What if you didn’t? What if trying to save someone was the thing that got them killed? To die a hero, or live knowing everyone survived because you stayed still. Survivor’s guilt is a weight that doesn’t fall — it crushes you slowly, deliberately. You replay it in your head, every sound sharper than the one before, every crack in the dark a new threat. Paranoia curls around your spine like smoke. You face the trials alone — the what-ifs, the judgments, the eyes of people who will never understand what it’s like to freeze in the jaws of fear. It becomes a new burden you drag behind you, a shrinking of the self, a reminder that material things mean nothing when weighed against a life. Today you survived, but you didn’t leave whole. Pieces of you stayed behind in that moment. You turn to the mead for answers, but it only numbs the wrong parts, hurting the soul more than it helps the mind. This numbness isn’t simple — it’s ancient, primal, carved into the marrow. And now you’re left with yourself, trying to understand the trembling truth of being human — and being helpless.