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DATE:24th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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The elevator door opened and I stood there motionless, staring into the empty compartment and gazing at the dim fluorescent lighting.
I was absolutely furious. I kept asking myself the same question over and over—why was I even going back to that backstabbing bitch? Why would I continue staying at her place after what she'd pulled?
It was crystal clear that she had betrayed me. There was no excuse that could justify it to me, no matter what her supposed reasoning might have been. I'd wasted a perfect opportunity to run away from all this endless fighting for a treacherous scoundrel like her?
Who exactly did these assholes think they were dealing with? After everything I'd done for them? "Oh! Suddenly he's become untrustworthy." "No! How could you act recklessly like that?"
I hadn't felt this level of raw anger coursing through me in a very long time.
'I'll prepare the apartment' my ass. She didn't trust me worth a damn. Whatever secret conversation she'd had with John and whatever plan they'd cooked up together, I clearly wasn't considered part of it.
So why the hell should I trust her in return? Because my money was currently upstairs and I didn't have access to teleportation anymore to take it?
Because I was physically weak and supposedly defenseless right now? As if being disadvantaged had ever stopped me from taking action before.
Fuck her completely.
I stepped away from the elevator and headed back down to street level.
I didn't really have any specific destination in mind. I was still in the business sector, so it wasn't like I was going to stumble across some budget hostel or cheap motel.
I walked for at least an hour, only stopping periodically to rest and prevent myself from collapsing due to my weakened legs, until I finally reached a more run-down area of the business district. It bordered the former worker ghettos that had been repurposed and rebranded as "accessible housing" for the city's poor.
My goal was perfectly clear: find some quick cash.
What other immediate source of money was there in a neighborhood like this?
I made my way into the darker back alleys and started making systematic circles around the crumbling apartment blocks.
Eventually I found exactly what I was looking for: a scene of assault tucked away in the shadows of the alleys.
A rough, disheveled man in his forties was forcing himself on some stray, terrified woman who must have wandered into the wrong street.
I went cold and focused.
Pressing myself against the filthy wall to keep steady, I looked around on the cracked pavement for something useful. My chest still ached from exhaustion, every breath jagged, but preparation mattered more. Finally, I spotted it—a rock. Rounded, not too sharp, heavy enough that I could feel its weight properly. From the sensation alone I guessed around 300 grams. Perfect.
The bastard had already shoved the woman to the ground and was crawling over her when I moved.
I whistled sharply to lead his gaze away.
He turned his head with irritation. "Screw off," he barked. When I didn't budge, his annoyance grew into hostility. He grumbled something about a "businessman," pushing up from the woman and starting toward me.
I never gave him the chance to get close. I braced my stance, cocked my arm, and hurled the rock with every shred of force remaining in me.
It connected exactly where I aimed—his throat. The sound of cartilage cracking was unmistakable. His eyes went wide as he collapsed to the ground, clutching desperately at his crushed trachea, air rasping uselessly from his crushed windpipe.
But I didn't stop there.
I staggered forward, forcing my weakened body to obey, and then began stomping on his neck. Again and again. Each dull thud echoed in the alley, mixed with the woman's rising screams.
I hadn't exactly come here to kill. But if death was the outcome, I couldn't bring myself to care.
Eventually, as his body went slack and he passed into what I presumed was unconsciousness, I crouched over his form and rifled through his pockets. His wallet was stuffed with dirty, rumpled bills and his trousers jingled with a few coins.
When I totaled it all, the sum came to about 37 Zols.
Pathetic.
Not nearly enough.
Then I turned to the woman, still trembling and barely able to push herself upright onto her hands and knees. Fear, exhaustion, and shock had stripped her down to something fragile, like a broken bird.
I leaned heavily against the wall, lungs burning, each breath jagged. "Look," I rasped out between huffs, "I fought with my… roommate. I don't have a place to sleep tonight. Can I… crash at your home? Just for one night. I'll sleep on the floor if that's what it takes."
Her eyes widened at the absurdity of the request, but after a pause she nodded silently, as though too drained to resist or argue.
"I… haah… I'm not a criminal. These scars…" I gestured sluggishly at my ruined face, "...I was caught in an accident." My chest heaved. My lungs weren't cooperating, and I hated how weak my voice sounded. I needed to explain, to frame myself as more than the monster I knew I looked like.
We sat there together in silence for a few agonizing moments—her still collecting herself, me trying desperately not to black out. The bastard on the ground never stirred. Fine by me. At least Emily wasn't here to lecture me about it.
At some point, her hand—surprisingly steady—reached for mine. She tugged gently, trying to guide me, then slid an arm under mine to support part of my collapsing weight. My vision was already slipping into fog, so I had no choice but to let her.
So much for regeneration. Dumas was full of shit. I wasn't special. This wasn't recovery—it was punishment. Just my own private hell.
She started speaking softly. I caught the tone but not the words. My ears barely registered her voice anymore. Whatever. I let myself stumble along, letting her lead.
It must have been at least ten minutes of shuffling through the labyrinth of backstreets before we reached a stairwell. Each step was its own trial. My leg muscles screamed weakness. By the second flight she was practically carrying all my weight.
Finally, she stopped and pressed me against the cool plaster wall. I heard the rustling sound of keys and the rummaging of a purse. My internal clock insisted it was only around five in the evening, but outside it already felt like a dark midnight pressing down. My body's perception was warped, drowning in exhaustion.
A click rang out. Then the faint scent of pinewood as a door opened. She came back to me, grabbed hold again, and carefully led me inside.
She eased me down onto something soft—a sofa by the feel of it. The cushions sank against my side.
That was it. Whatever tenuous grip I had left slipped away, and unconsciousness swallowed me whole.
___________
I was suspended in a void, endlessly falling through blackness.
At least, that's what it felt like—an infinite tumble with no horizon, no ground, no air rushing past to prove motion. Just emptiness and descent. It must have been hours, if my sense of time still held any value here, and still there was no destination in sight.
Worst of all, I was naked. Somehow that small detail made the nightmare more suffocating, more humiliating, stripped bare of every last defense.
Usually, when trapped in dreams like this, I tried to keep a count. Tally the seconds in my head. It was the only way to keep from losing myself to the abyss.
But this time... I kept thinking instead. Why was I even falling again? I killed my father—he couldn't summon me back anymore. And I wasn't even in Ventia, so there was no way that accursed avatar of Light had dragged me here.
So why the void?
And where the hell was Emily? Was this happening because we were separated, because the bond between us was severed for too long?
The more I questioned, the heavier the weight in my chest became. Around what felt like the tenth hour, faint specks of light began to materialize below. Small at first, but growing, pulling closer as though they were ascending to meet me.
Then realization struck. Not stars. Not fireflies.
Ground.
I was falling toward the ground.
I forced myself into stillness, waiting for the inevitable impact, and briefly wondered what would happen when I struck stone at what had to be hundreds of kilometers an hour.
Pulverization? Splatter? Maybe that would be the end.
But when I hit—
It wasn't half as bad as my imagination painted it.
I slammed against the surface with force enough to rattle my bones, but no real damage followed. No crater spread beneath me. No shattered limbs, no wounds. My momentum had been arrested, but not by me. Something had stopped it mid-descent.
I staggered to my feet and glanced around. Stone. Cracked rock underfoot. Wooden posts set into the ground with tattered lanterns hung upon them, their dim flames spreading ragged circles of light across the walls.
The place was a ruin.
Ragged walls bent inward at odd angles, shapes of collapsed beams and rotting support, as if the entire cavernous hall was a corpse of something ancient. A fortress—or what was left of one.
I reached for the nearest lantern and tore it from its post, carrying it in hand. The metal handle burned faintly warm against my skin. Light was better than wandering the dark, no matter how faint.
There was a path extending forward from where I'd fallen, scarcely wide enough for two shoulders side by side. Rubble littered the floor, and collapsed stones formed archways without ceilings.
I realized then—I'd fallen within the remains of some massive hall. A gathering place, maybe. The exposed iron hinge on the stone wall suggested it had once been sealed by great doors. Now all that lingered was a threshold opening into deeper darkness.
Beyond that doorframe, no lanterns. Just a passage swallowed by black.
I considered extinguishing the meager flame in my hand, conserving the fuel for when I truly needed it. But I had nothing to reignite it with. No flint, no cloth, nothing.
So I carried the tiny flame onward, knowing hesitation was meaningless.
_________
I walked that dark, serpentine path for what must have been an hour before the lantern sputtered and finally died. Its dim flame winked out like a last heartbeat, leaving me swallowed by perfect black.
Still, I didn't drop it. Even dead, the lantern was worth keeping—if only as an improvised weapon.
And strangely, even in the all-encompassing darkness, I wasn't lost. I could sense where I was going. My bare feet felt… linked to the ground, as if some hidden thread ran through me and the stone beneath. I could feel the subtle bends of the tunnel, the narrowing and widening of the serpentine path—just a few meters ahead and behind me, like an echo pulsing in the rock.
Was this happening because it was all inside my mind? In dreams like this, had I begun learning to seize some sort of control?
I tried to force another lantern into existence, imagining the glow in my hand the way Emily had done with weapons in my other dreams. But nothing came. No spark, no flame. I guess I wasn't that powerful after all.
That was when I heard it: screaming.
High-pitched. Sharp. A young girl's scream, carried through the twisting path loud enough to pierce the void.
I followed the sound, each step pulling me deeper. The cries grew louder, cracking with pain, desperate and childlike.
Then I felt it: another threshold. The edge of what must have once been a door.
But there were no lanterns here. Only rocks and jagged shadows.
The cries were so close now. So close I felt they should be right in front of me—yet the darkness made everything disappear.
I stepped closer. Closer. And then I saw her.
A young girl emerged faintly in the black, writhing, crying into emptiness. Her form was somehow even darker than the surrounding nothingness. Her small frame twisted with pain, her cries shattering against the walls like glass.
I tried to call out to her, but my mouth wouldn't open. My throat strained, but no sound came.
I tried to reach out with my hand—nothing. My legs moved, each step deliberate, pulling me forward, but no matter how far I walked, the distance never shortened. An invisible barrier, some unseen wall, kept us apart.
How could I make her notice me?
I raised the lantern in desperation and flung it forward—but instead of flying outward toward her, it dropped straight at my feet, as though I had somehow been pushed back.
Options thinned.
Go back? Try to find another lantern, preserve another spark?
Or… create something myself?
I crouched down, snatched up two rough rocks, and began to strike them together. Hoping. Begging. Just one tiny crack of light.
Just enough to break through the black.
Come on! I have to put my mind to it. I should be able to make a meager light. At least this much!
Then they flickered—those rocks I struck—except it wasn't the clean crack of flint and steel I expected. No faint ember. No delicate glow.
Instead, it was like oil catching fire.
A violent flash of brightness tore through the void, smothering my vision in searing, unnatural light.
And for the first time, I saw her.
Just for the briefest heartbeat.
She was… horrid. Beyond horrid. So grotesque that even the word "girl" felt like a lie. Not a person at all, but a warped, malformed bundle of flesh given shape. The ugliest thing my eyes had ever endured. A mockery of a human.
And when it noticed me—when she saw me—
It screamed.
It screamed louder and louder, shredding the air.
The sound stabbed through my skull. I convulsed and fell to the ground, clutching my head, desperate to crush the noise out of existence.
But it didn't stop.
The girl—no, the abomination—began screaming in many voices. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, all spilling from the same warped mouth, rising together like a grotesque choir.
Yet this wasn't song.
Not harmony.
It was anguish. Cries of pain and shame, stacked layer upon layer, until my entire mind trembled beneath the pressure of their agony.
A thousand voices compressed into a single cursed being.
They spoke in languages and accents I couldn't even begin to categorize, words from tongues both familiar and alien.
But two words rang clear, stabbing into me through the madness:
One was "death," spoken in ancient Ventian.
The other was "love," uttered in the universal script of the Unified Alphabet.
The realization clawed at the inside of my chest—this wasn't a child, wasn't even a nightmare trying to trick me.
It was a demon.
A legion.
The pain cut deeper than anything my body had ever known. Worse than the burns, worse than the radiation, worse than any blade or bullet.
This wasn't the faint echo of pain I'd felt in other dreams. Those were nothing compared to it. This was primal.
No.
This time, I felt it for real.
Like my skull was being torn apart, synapse by synapse, because this creature's existence itself was killing me.
The ground beneath me gave way as if my mind did, cracking like shattered glass underfoot, and I plunged again into the void.
Falling, falling… always falling.
And in that endless descent the questions gnawed at me.
Where was Emily? Was she that thing I had just seen in the ruin? Or was that thing someone—or something—else entirely?
Her form in the other dreams… green hair, shirt frame like Alice's, those storage eyes… had she crafted it for herself? Or had I given it to her, unconsciously, shaping her image inside my mind?
Could a machine—one that had never so much as seen the outside world—truly sculpt an identity, a body, within my thoughts alone?
How did she even get linked to me at all?
Just being cursed didn't explain it. No… it was more. It had to be so much more.
I fell silently, numbly, through a dark that had no wind, no air, no resistance. Like my body had already given in to the ride.
And in that emptiness, bitter thoughts surfaced.
What was I even trying to prove by running away from Alice? It wasn't like I had the energy or the conviction to seek out Sophie again. We both knew that story was rotting in the past.
So why was I so angry?
Why did it matter whether Alice trusted me or not?
I was tired of chasing questions that gave me no answers.
A bitter chuckle escaped, hollow, shaking only me as the fall pressed on.
No matter.
How long has it been since I truly felt pain? Real pain—not the phantom stings, not the clean detachment of a body that healed faster than it broke?
I mocked Emily because her body only existed inside my mind—but wasn't the same true of me now? My feelings, my pain, my anger… weren't they cages I fashioned in my head, then called "reality"?
What kind of joke was it that the only place I could feel pain anymore was in these dreams?
Even now, drifting within the perfect emptiness that should have stirred countless thoughts, the best chance to untangle all the recent chaos—my anger, my betrayals, my failures—I couldn't even muster a subject to think about.
I only had those questions.
Just spiraling further into silence.
Further into nothing.
I felt empty.
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