*WAT — 07:15 AM — Lagos, Nigeria**
Beep beep beep beep
Beep beep beep beep
The alarm screamed like a dying animal. Justin's eyes snapped open to the sound of his own shallow breathing, sweat already beading on his forehead despite the morning chill. The studio apartment felt smaller today—walls pressing in like the inside of a coffin. Sunlight crawled through the grimy window, illuminating dust motes that danced like ash from a crematorium.
He sat up, bones creaking like an old man's though he was only twenty-three. The familiar arrangement of his life surrounded him: dog-eared programming books with broken spines, earbuds knotted like intestines, a coffee mug growing something green and fuzzy. The whiteboard across from his bed was covered in wireframes that looked more like autopsy diagrams than user interfaces.
*This is my life,* he thought, and the words tasted like bile. *I know this.* But underneath that hollow certainty, something else stirred—visions of flesh melting from bone, of screams echoing through stone corridors, of blood pooling in old gutters. He pressed his palms against his temples until white spots danced in his vision.
The city's morning symphony began: car horns like the wails of the damned, vendors shouting their wares like carnival barkers in hell, the grinding of metal on metal as Lagos came alive to feast on another day.
---
**07:45 AM — Ojuelegba Junction**
Traffic was a river of rust and rage. Justin stood at the bus stop, watching the city devour itself. Okada riders wove between cars like vultures, their passengers clinging on with the desperation of people who knew this might be their last ride. Exhaust fumes hung in the air like funeral incense.
He opened his ride-share app with trembling fingers. The screen showed tiny cars crawling across the map like beetles on roadkill. "Tech Hive Startup, Ikoyi," he typed, each letter feeling like a small surrender.
A dented Toyota pulled up, its driver staring at him through sunglasses that reflected Justin's hollow face. As they lurched into traffic, Justin closed his eyes and saw fire—always fire—and heard screaming. Not the screams of Lagos traffic, but something deeper, more primal. The screams of a man watching his world burn.
"Oga, hope nothing?" the driver asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
Justin forced his eyes open. "Omo, this Lagos stress, I'm just tired oo." The lie sat heavy on his tongue.
---
**08:30 AM — Tech Hive, Victoria Island**
The office smelled like defeat dressed up as ambition. Young faces hunched over glowing screens, their eyes already dead at twenty-five. The open-plan layout felt like a battery farm for human misery, all of them trapped in their little cubicles of code and coffee.
Justin's desk was a shrine to mediocrity—an upcycled crate that probably held fruit before it held his dreams. He booted up his laptop and watched the loading screen spin like a prayer wheel in a godless world.
"Morning, Justin!" Tobiloba's voice cut through the morning stupor. She held her cappuccino like a crucifix, steam rising from it like the souls of the innocent. "Ready for the UI revamp workshop?"
"Yeah," he said, surprised by how dead his own voice sounded. "Ready."
But he wasn't ready. He'd never be ready. As he opened his calendar, each appointment looked like a death sentence: client demo at 10, sprint planning at 2. No mention of the visions that were eating him alive from the inside.
The meeting began, and Justin shared his screen. He walked them through mockups that looked like blueprints for digital purgatory. Colors that hurt to look at, buttons that begged to be clicked by fingers already stained with compromise.
"Tighten the padding here," someone said.
"Simplify the color palette," said another.
He nodded and made notes, each suggestion another nail in the coffin of whatever he used to be.
---
**12:00 PM — Lagos Beachside Food Truck**
Lunch was plantain that tasted like cardboard and fish that died badly. Justin sat at a picnic table overlooking the lagoon, watching the water lap against the shore like tongues licking at wounds. The city skyline rose behind him like tombstones against a gray sky.
A child chased a deflated soccer ball across sand that crunched underfoot like ground bone. Fishermen hauled nets full of nothing, their faces carved with the resignation of men who knew the ocean had already taken everything worth taking.
The memory hit him like a punch to the gut—not this world, not this gray existence, but something else. Fire and stone and the taste of blood in his mouth. A name echoed in his skull: *R-ra--Raggh.* He saw a demon standing over corpses, saw its hands red with someone else's ending.
He pressed his palms against his eyes until tears leaked through his fingers.
"Wetin do you, uncle?" the vendor's daughter asked in the lingua franca pidgin, her small face creased with concern that children shouldn't have to carry.
"Yeah, baby," he lied, fist-bumping her with hands that shook. "Just tired."
But tired wasn't the word. Haunted, maybe. Hollowed out. Like something had reached inside him and scooped out everything that mattered, leaving only this shell walking around Lagos pretending to be alive.
---
**03:00 PM — Sprint Planning, Tech Hive**
Back in the office, the whiteboard squeaked like fingernails on a chalkboard. Justin took a sticky note—yellow like jaundice—and wrote "Refactor auth middleware" in handwriting that looked like a suicide note. He placed it under "This Sprint" like he was planning his own execution.
"Risk assessment?" someone asked.
"We'll need an extra half day on integration tests," he heard himself say. "Or we might break payments." The words came from somewhere else, some automated part of him that knew how to perform humanity.
The team nodded, and he watched their faces—young, eager, already beginning to rot from the inside. In ten years, they'd be him. In twenty, they'd probably be dead inside and not even know it.
The vision came again, stronger this time. He saw himself in robes the color of dried blood, saw a blade in his hand that sang with the voices of the dead. For a moment—just a moment—he felt powerful instead of empty.
Then it was gone, and he was back in the fluorescent-lit tomb they called an office.
---
**06:30 PM — Home, Studio Flat**
Evening fell on Lagos like a shroud. Justin climbed the stairs to his apartment, each step heavier than the last. The building smelled like piss and broken dreams. Someone was cooking somewhere, the smell of palm oil and desperation wafting through thin walls.
In his flat, he poured water from a pitcher that had seen better decades and scrolled through his phone. Photos smiled back at him—graduation day, colleagues at company parties, selfies that captured nothing but the death of his soul. Evidence that he belonged here, in this gray half-life.
He opened his dream journal app. One entry from this morning:
> "Woke from a dream of fire and stone. Felt ancient. Felt real. Felt like I was someone else—someone who mattered."
He stared at the words until they blurred. Then he deleted them, watching each letter disappear like hope dying.
The apartment felt smaller now, walls pressing in like the sides of a grave. Outside, Lagos ground on—a machine that ate people and shat out hollow copies of what they used to be.
---
**07:30 PM — Kitchen**
Dinner was instant noodles that tasted like cardboard soaked in salt water. He ate standing at the counter, staring out the window at a city that had already forgotten his name. Somewhere out there, people were living, loving, dying. He was just existing, a ghost haunting his own life.
His reflection in the window showed a man already half-dead. Dark circles under his eyes like bruises, skin gray as ash, mouth turned down in a permanent expression of defeat. This was what twenty-three looked like when your soul had been scooped out with a spoon.
The visions came in flashes now—blood on stone, screams echoing through corridors, fire dancing between his fingers like it belonged there. For those brief moments, he felt alive. Felt like himself. Felt like *Raghoul*.
Then reality crashed back, and he was just Justin again. Just another casualty of Lagos, another young man slowly dissolving in the acid rain of everyday life.
---
**10:00 PM — Bed, Studio Flat**
He lay on his back staring at the ceiling fan, its blades slicing the air like scythe blades harvesting whatever was left of his sanity. The city hummed outside—a lullaby of car horns and human misery, the sound of millions of people slowly dying inside their own lives.
The visions came stronger now in the darkness. He saw himself as he really was—not this hollow shell, but something magnificent and terrible. A man who walked through fire and came out stronger. A man whose hands could end lives or save them. A man whose name meant something.
*Raghoul.*
The name tasted like blood and power and everything he'd lost. He reached for the memory, but it slipped away like smoke, leaving him with nothing but the crushing weight of ordinary existence.
Tomorrow would be another day of slow death. Another day of pretending to be human while something inside him screamed for remembrance. Another day of drowning in the gray water of a life that wasn't his.
He closed his eyes and whispered the name again, tasting its power on his tongue:
"Raghoul..."
And as sleep finally claimed him, he dreamed of fire and blood and a world where he had been someone who mattered. Someone who was feared. Someone who was real.
But morning would come, as it always did, and with it the return to this walking death they called living.
The city would wake up hungry, and Justin would feed himself to it, one gray day at a time.