Darkness swallowed him whole.
Leo hung in a void that was both endless and tight, as if the ruin had folded inward and left him at its hollow center. He felt weightless and rooted at the same time. Limbs would not answer. Breath did not move. He might have been dead if not for the presence there, something coiled at the edge of his sight.
A shimmer uncoiled like a thinking thing. Not flame, not quite light, but a shard of stone that floated and throbbed with a faint inner luminescence. It drifted before him, jagged and beautiful, veins of color running through it like frozen fire.
It pulsed once.
The world bent around that pulse.
You bled on the seal, the shard spoke, and the voice was older than any language Leo had learned. It vibrated like a bell struck in a cathedral, each syllable dragging over cracked temple walls.
You have stirred what was bound. You are mine to test.
Leo tried to move his lips. Nothing came. His hands clenched at air. Images crashed into him uninvited: legions in rusted armor collapsing under a sky lit with unnatural fire, towers poured into flame, rivers choking on black water. In each picture hands bore a small glowing shard, and the bearers screamed as the world buckled and fell around them.
They failed, the shard said, contempt curling in that cold voice. Thousands failed. You will fail too.
Then the tone shifted. It drew close, intimate and dark. Unless you accept.
Heat licked his skin. The black softened into a dim chamber whose walls were carved with glyphs that thrummed like trapped insects. He understood the patterns at once, as though memory had lodged shapes behind his eyes. His heart did not pound inside him; its beats seemed to ring from the shard itself, every thump syncing to the stone's slow drum.
Shadows gathered and knit into the rough outline of a man. Not a man fully, more an idea given bulk: broad shoulders, a stance of someone who had never known surrender, a place where a face should be blurred as if seen through moving water. It rested a hand on a phantom blade and leaned into the space beside Leo as if claiming it.
You are not me, Leo forced, a sound that felt like a stone dropped under thin ice. His voice was dry, but it existed.
The figure tilted as if to listen. The shard's whisper became a low hum that settled into Leo's bones. I am what you could be, it said. Strength. Will. Survival. Or ruin.
Do you want power, boy? Do you want to live?
Outside the vision, the world contracted and bent. Leo's body convulsed; his back arched when Evelyn, hands trembling, pressed him down and shouted his name. The boy at his side screamed until his voice broke, fingers burying in Leo's wrist as if to anchor him to flesh.
Sofia did not look away from the raiders prowling the edges of the circle. Her sword was leveled, every line of her body taut with command and raw fatigue. The air in the ruin crackled, not with esoteric glyphs now, but with human violence, the kind that could be quick-bucketed into the small, available decisions that decided survival.
The raider captain, face streaked with ash and fury, pointed at Leo and spat. "Look at him," she snarled. "That thing is eating him alive. Hand him over and end this before we all drown in what he carries."
Owen made a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh; charcoal flaked from his fingers as if even he could not keep the ink of his maps steady. "You think killing him ends it?" he barked. "You will be the next to drown." The words had the bluntness of a man who had seen too many patterns fold into ruin.
The circle of steel tightened. Spears turned, boots scraped. The ruin groaned, a tired animal shifting in its sleep.
And Leo, trapped between two worlds, heard the whisper again, but this time it thrummed inside his bones and not only in his ears.
Choose, it said, an ultimatum laid like a blade at the throat of his will.
The idea of choosing made his chest flare. Power promised answers, the end of smallness, protection against hunger and scorn. Power promised the voices who had ignored him would bow and the nights of empty bowls would be gone. The shard fed memories like a hand feeding embers, coaxing the need that lived beneath loneliness into fever.
But other things lived in Leo too: the taste of bread Mira handed him once, the knot of fear in the boy's sleep sunken face, the steady firmness of Sofia's orders when everything else fell apart, Owen's breathless, ridiculous joy when a map connected and made sense. Those small, human things thrummed under the shard's roar like a counter melody.
He saw a flash ,a life where he accepted: the shard burning bright in his palm, roads unrolled under his command, enemies broken and kneeling.
He saw a darker flash too: the same power turned inward, his own hardness glass over the boy's face, the caravan bound in iron and silence.
The figure leaned closer, the outline of its grin sending a cold through his spine. You were nothing, it said. You were forgotten. With me you will be remembered. Eternal.
Leo's hands closed so tight his fingernails bit the skin. I do not want eternity, he thought, this time with the clarity that made the shard flinch.
The figure's whisper turned sharp. You will not refuse forever.
Light fractured at the edge of the darkness. Someone far on the ridge sounded a bell, crisp and thin, and the tone cut through the pressure of the chamber. For a slice of a breath, everything seemed less inevitable.
Sofia's voice drilled into that thin opening, hers and not the shard's. "Hear me," she said. "Hear me and do not sell yourself to the ruins." She moved as if she might step inside his dream and strike.
Leo found his mouth moving. Not to plead, not to promise, but to charge himself with a human vow. I am not yours, he muttered, barely a thread of sound. I am not you.
The shard howled like metal under stress. The vision convulsed. The warrior form recoiled with something like surprise, then anger. You are mine whether you will or no, it hissed.
Outside the dream, Evelyn wrenched Leo's shoulders until his eyes flicked open, burning with that molten amber for one terrifyingly bright second before fogging into the storm fog of a frightened boy who had seen too much. He coughed, a sound like someone surfacing, and tasted dust and iron and the sharp, undeniable ache of choice still unmade.
The raider captain took one step forward. The ruin felt ready to answer either way.
Choose, the whisper breathed again, patient and terrible.
Leo found his jaw. He met the shard inside his chest with something raw and very, very human: the memory of small hands and a voice that had said he mattered. He thought of being nothing, and then he thought of what being someone had cost him already, and he gathered the two into a defiant, stubborn little knot.
Not yet, he thought, and the thought was small but it was his.
The shard did not die. It did not forgive. It only waited with a patient, terrible hunger.