Pinned down and unable to see Ardyn fully, it would be easy to miss how he had at some point shrugged off the heavy black coat, left only instead with a white undershirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway. Oddly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — the chill in the air doesn’t seem to bother him; there was not even the subtle crawl of goosebumps across the exposed flesh of his arms, not a single shiver. The burnt orange scarf he seems so fond of wearing still hung loosely around his neck, drooping slightly as he gazed down at the young man.

The vibrations shuddered across the table, finally waning into silence. But Ardyn soon replaced it with a long scrape of metal against metal, gliding the tip of the knife against the surface, just inches away from the contours of Prompto’s neck and shoulder. A grating, shrill noise that existed only as a prelude to sadism.

“I need you conscious and focused, Prompto. Say something.”