I clenched my fists, my nails digging into the half-formed grass of this impossible place, and the words slid off my tongue before I could stop them:
"This will be the beginning of my revenge."
The declaration rang hollow, trembling, but it was all I had. Hatred had been the only constant in my life. Hatred and loss. Hatred and failure.
The figure—the silhouette in the sky, wrapped in light and shadow alike—tilted his head as though considering a joke too small for his attention. His voice came like steel dragged over stone, not sharp, but grinding, inevitable.
"Revenge?"
He didn't laugh. He didn't rage. He only spoke it as if the word itself were a mistake. As though I had confessed the wrong sin in the presence of a god.
My chest tightened. My stomach dropped. For one fragile instant I almost believed I had misheard him, but then his tone shifted, his presence pressing into me like the weight of galaxies.
"You think this is a gift? A second life? That I am a gatekeeper to grant you freedom, to paint your hate across the sky? Fool."
The air shivered. I couldn't breathe. My body convulsed like it was trying to spit me out of existence.
"No," he continued, each syllable a hammer against the inside of my skull. "I am not giving you a chance to avenge yourself. I am sentencing you to the only truth that matches your heart. You are not here to rise—you are here to suffer."
The words crashed into me like a tide, and my chest tore open. I screamed, though the sound never left my lips.
"I—" My voice cracked, jagged. "I don't care! Let me suffer. As long as I can return and destroy them, as long as I can take back—"
"Your mother?" His question was merciless. "Your dignity? The scraps of belonging you thought the world owed you?"
My lips shut tight. The silence between us was worse than torture.
Then came his voice again, softer, sharper, a knife drawn slow:
"You misunderstand. Suffering will not be the price you pay to get your revenge. It will be your revenge. You will learn to wear agony as a second skin until even vengeance tastes like ash. You are not being reborn. You are being buried."
I couldn't contain it anymore. I exploded.
"Then bury me!" I roared. "Make me suffer! Make me nothing! I don't care anymore. If I can't change it, if I can't save anyone—then I'll become the thing that destroys everything!"
My voice echoed through the skyless horizon, bouncing against the endless Expanse like broken glass rattling in a coffin.
The silhouette leaned forward—or maybe reality bent backward. His presence dropped over me like a cloak, heavy and suffocating.
"Then you will have a name."
My eyes snapped to him. For the first time, I realized how nameless I truly was. A ghost without identity. A shadow waiting to be erased.
"You have not seen your own face. You have not felt your own depth. You have not realized the sickness in your soul. So I will name you. I will brand you with what you are. What you will become."
A pause. Then a single word:
"Noir."
It wasn't just sound. It wasn't just a label. The syllables split me open and rewrote me. Blackness bled into my veins, threading with my hatred, weaving into the marrow of my bones.
"Noir," he repeated, and the air quaked. "Darkness without shape. A hunger without end. A silence that consumes. This is what you are. And this is what you will become."
My breath stuttered. The name sank into me, each letter like a chain tightening around my soul. Yet, at the same time, it felt… inevitable. As if it had always been mine, waiting in the dark until someone with the power to speak it forced it into existence.
He wasn't wrong. Noir. It was me.
But why did it feel so heavy?
The figure's presence grew sharper, less like a cloak and more like a spear.
"You have chosen suffering. Then suffer. You will not endure one world, but one hundred. Each more merciless than the last. A century in every realm, until your body rots and your spirit withers. You will claw at the walls of your own despair, and you will call it strength."
His words twisted, not a curse but a decree.
"One hundred years for one hundred worlds. That is the weight of your oath. That is the debt of your hatred. Tell me, Noir—" His tone broke, shifting into something almost tender. "Will you still walk forward when you know eternity will not give you your revenge, only your reflection?"
Something in me snapped.
I laughed. Broken, ragged, choking laughter.
"What else is there?" I spat. "I've lost everything. My hate is all I have left. If all I can do is drag it with me through your hells, then let me burn. Call me Noir. Make me suffer. I'll endure it all until I destroy every world I touch!"
The silhouette didn't answer.
Instead, the ground beneath me cracked. The Expanse itself shuddered, its false sky splintering like glass struck by a hammer. Fragments of reality peeled away, tumbling into void.
Above me, the figure stood unmoving, a monument of duality. Light haloed him like a saint; shadows curled around him like a demon's wings. He wasn't half of either—he was all of both, and I knew then that I would never understand him.
The ground beneath me fell away, and I plummeted, shards of the Expanse raining with me, cutting through me as if to carve the name Noir deeper into my soul.
I kept my eyes open. I looked up at him—at the god who had cursed me, named me, sentenced me.
And for the first time, I smiled.
Darkness swallowed me whole.