My panic surged, brutal, immediate, like a monster curled inside my ribs that, without warning, shattered its cage and climbed in a single leap up my throat, spreading its claws into my temples.
My heart raced, not in a surge of life, but in a disordered spasm, too fast, too out of sync, as if it beat against the rhythm of the world, as if it rejected the slow pace of this frozen place.
I could feel my fingers tremble, my phalanges tighten without logic, my arms stiffen in a defensive reflex I no longer controlled. My jaw had already locked — too hard, too fast — as if my entire skull was trying to stop what was rising from the center, from the core of something far older than fear.
My chest was closing in. Not gently. Not cautiously. But like a trapdoor slammed shut from the inside, a brutal compression of vital space, a clamp of flesh tightening around a breath that could no longer pass.
