Vanilla Twilight

His eyes fluttered open blearily, flinching against the oppressive red glow of the alchemic arrays that surrounded him. The room—what little he could see—spun violently, melting into a crimson haze that burned itself into the back of his mind and painted itself onto the inside of his eyelids. He body felt heavy; lead bars comprised his bones, buckshot filled his lungs; stones gathered in his head until his skull strained and ached against their assault. His chest rose and fell with all the energy of a half-deflated helium balloon, the air whistling past razor teeth and coating his mouth with decades of dust and cotton. He could feel the ghost of a century-old memory on his skin, the phantom touch of a pallid hallucination dancing across his cheek before blinking away in the cold grasp of reality. A subdued sadness filled his glazed eyes as the emptiness of the chamber settled upon him, and he let his heavy eyelids sink shut with defeat, crushed by the weight of loneliness and deprivation. Unconsciousness swept him quickly, a bittersweet, ironic mercy to it's embrace.