I was not the same.
That much, at least, had become absolute.
And I don't mean the body—though the body had changed too. It wasn't the strength in my limbs, the way I could walk longer without tiring, or how my hands no longer trembled in cold wind. That wasn't it.
The real change was elsewhere. In the quiet part of the mind where purpose takes root.
It took only thirty days. A single month.
Was it the old man? The strange food? The black skies and the rust-colored rain?
No.
People don't change because someone tells them to. Not truly. No speech, no wisdom, no kindness can do that.
Change comes when something is broken—shattered and reshaped.
Or when something awakens.
And what awakens it... is the grail.
Every being, whether they realize it or not, bends toward a grail—some unreachable thing their soul latches onto. A goal. A hunger. A shape of meaning just beyond the horizon. When that grail shifts, the self follows. The thoughts bend. The manner shifts. Even the body listens to the new will. A man chasing survival walks differently from a man chasing truth. A man chasing power sees different colors in the same world.
That's what happened to me.
The hunger wasn't for food, or shelter, or safety anymore. It was for knowledge. For the unseen. For the truth behind the spire, the runes, the voices in the white hall.
The old man had taught me what he could. Not everything.
He had never thought I'd need to cross the river. The floods rarely reached his hilltop. He showed me how to patch wood, how to bind trunks with root-thread and sap. Just enough for repairs, or a quick raft to fetch something nearby.
But I had pressed him. Quietly, insistently, until he relented.
Now, days later, I had something that could float. Barely. But it would do.
The raft wasn't elegant. It creaked when I pressed on it, and the bindings looked too thin where the bark peeled. But it held.
I dragged it to the bank of Aedros.
The river was quiet tonight—its surface black and sluggish, as if waiting.
People don't walk into it. Not if they want to stay whole.
But I wasn't walking.
And I wasn't who I was thirty days ago.
I had changed.
Because the grail had.
The raft did float.
Barely, but enough to bear the weight of a single man. In this case—me.
I had spent the night checking every knot in the root-bindings, testing the balance with careful steps, waiting for the wood to speak. It creaked and groaned, but it held together like a reluctant companion.
Now I stood face to face with the river.
Aedros.
The Queen of Shadows. The Watcher of the Dead. The River Without Sleep.
She did not move quickly, but she moved with certainty. Her surface stretched wide, black as coal-oil, unbroken and soundless—until something beneath it stirred.
It was said that when a man looked too long into Aedros, he did not see his reflection—only the shape of what would destroy him. I didn't look for long.
A silent descent into her waters meant no clean death. No death at all.
The old man had warned me with half a smile and tired eyes. He'd told stories—not so much warnings, but recollections, quiet and grim. Tales of old companions.
Not men. Not anymore.
Monsters, he'd called them once. Undead things from a forgotten land.
Shadows who had once been people. Beings consumed by hunger, bound to no god or grave.
He never called them enemies. They were company—frightening, but loyal in their own way.
And more than once, they had heard the river whisper.
Not words.
A craving.
The man had never heard it himself, but his companions… they grew restless. They would stop whatever they were doing and stare at the water with something close to reverence. Then thirst would take them. Not for drink—but for the river itself. They would stumble forward, pulled by a longing they couldn't name. And if the old man didn't stop them, they'd vanish beneath the surface, never screaming. Just gone.
That was not just his tale. The same was etched into stone tablets, written in dying ink on brittle parchment, spoken in the half-breaths of old wanderers I'd met near broken altars. The settlements knew it too. Even the phantoms who roamed the ruins carried the fear of it, stitched into the way they avoided the riverbanks.
"Never approach the river. For thirst is death."
That was the saying. Passed on like gospel.
The wanderers told worse stories.
Of men dragged beneath the surface by hands that were not hands.
Of limbs that didn't rot but rippled.
Of voices that mimicked your own, calling you to step closer.
Some said the river gave breath back only to steal it again moments later—let its prey rise, gasp, and then pulled them down again.
A mercy feigned.
I had never seen it myself. But I believed it.
Because now, standing at its edge, I smelled nothing of rot.
Only death. Pure and unadorned.
This river had no scent of decay. It didn't need to rot what it consumed. It swallowed souls whole.
And on its surface, I would ride.
I pressed the raft gently into the water, felt it bob and shift, the wood trembling like it too knew where we were headed. I stepped on.
Aedros said nothing.
But I could feel her watching.
The raft dipped forward as I stepped on, and for a moment, I thought it would collapse beneath me. But it held.
I knelt low, keeping my weight balanced near the center, and pushed away from the shore with the broken oar I had carved from a beam of the old broken tree.
The current caught me at once—not strong, but steady, like a patient hand pressing at my back.
The river didn't roar or churn.
It only moved.
The raft creaked underfoot as I drifted away from the bank.
The hills behind me shrank.
The tree, far in the distance, remained still, as if watching.
And ahead—only the void of black water stretching to the other side, where the land curved low and shapeless under the sky.
I didn't look down.
Looking down into Aedros was a mistake. That was another thing the old man had said—quietly, almost absently, when he had been trimming roots near the hearth:
"It stares back. Just don't look too long. You'll think you're fine... until it smiles."
I hadn't understood what he meant then.
Now I did.
Even with my head turned upward, I felt it: the presence below.
A second depth beneath the water's surface, deeper than it should be.
Something ancient and listening. Something that never slept.
I forced my focus forward, gripping the oar tighter, paddling just enough to keep straight.
Every few seconds, the wood beneath me let out a sharp creak. Not loud—but enough to remind me how much of this was guesswork. How little held me from the depths.
The mist above the river was thin, but it clung low, trailing across the water like fingers.
Shapes moved beyond it—maybe trees, maybe ruins, maybe things that had learned to stand very still.
I passed a branch, half-submerged, twisted like a human limb.
I passed bones, tangled in riverweed and old rope.
I passed something else—floating and bloated, its face turned downward, its back torn open like cloth stretched too far.
But no sound. No wind. No birds. No screams.
Just the raft, and the river, and me.
And soon, I knew without needing to check—I had reached the center.
Not because of any mark or measurement, but because of the weight.
It felt different here.
Like the air had thickened.
Like the water just beneath had started to rise, just a little, like breath being held in.
The oar slipped from my hand.
It hit the water with barely a splash—and vanished.
Not sunk.
Taken.
I froze.
And the raft rocked slightly—just slightly—beneath me.
It wouldn't last long.
A few more meters and the raft would split beneath me. I could feel it already—how the wood warped and bent with every heave of the current. How the twine bindings slipped little by little, fibers soaked and half-decayed. It didn't creak like the trees did in the wind; it cracked, quietly, like something trying not to wake what slept beneath.
Crossing the river was no longer possible. That truth had settled in my chest well before the midpoint. The old man would have seen it from the shore and shaken his head. He'd have said I was a fool for gambling my life on a pile of splinters tied with rotting string. And he would've been right.
There were other routes. I had memorized most of them.
One passed through the rust fields, where the air stank of iron and sleep never came. Another wound between the broken hillscapes, narrow paths that still bore wagon ruts from his old caravan. One path—the longest—snaked past the weed forest at the base of the tree. That was the route he had taken to find me all those weeks ago, when I lay unconscious under the boughs with nothing but blood and breath in me.
With his caravan, that journey took hours.
On foot, it would take days.
But it was safe.
I could've taken that path. I should've. If survival was the only goal, that would've been my answer.
But it wasn't.
Even if I'd chosen to cross a river, there were others.
Vaelor, cruel and wide, but known.
Abeth, sickly but shallow—home to fading dreams, not death.
But I came to Aedros.
Why?
Why did I come here when even the old man never dared to cross her?
When the phantoms that wandered near her banks twitched and vanished like mist at her edge?
When the settlements spoke of her not as a river, but as a grave that sang?
My grail had shifted.
I no longer wanted safety.
I no longer wanted truth spoon-fed from the mouths of elders.
I wanted understanding. Power. Depth.
Not to control the world, but to grasp it. To see its bones. To touch what others flinched from.
And so, I came here.
I had heard it all.
And still, I came.
Not in defiance. Not in ignorance.
But because I needed to.
Because the grail led me here.
The current grew stronger now. The wind twisted sideways, tugging at the raft like a hand trying to pull the fabric off a corpse.
The ropes came undone on the left flank.
I shifted my weight slightly to balance. The wood sagged beneath my foot.
It wouldn't hold much longer.
Not another minute, maybe less.
But that was enough.
Because I hadn't come to cross her.
I came to meet her.
The Lady of Death.
And she was waiting.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She was once a woman. Not a queen, not a goddess—but something in between. Her name was Aedra, and long ago, during the great chaos that plagued the world, she wandered the battlefield as a healer. She carried no blade, only a sack of herbs, and her hands were always red with the blood of the dying. She was known across all warring factions not as a savior—but as a mourner. She didn't wear armor, only rags stained with rusted blood. Her face was veiled, not by cloth, but by silence.
Aedra did not save lives. She buried the dead.
She walked among the fallen and whispered their names into the earth. That was her rite, and they say the dead heard her. They followed her. Men who should have turned to rot rose and walked behind her, silent, headless, sometimes only bone. She led them away from the carnage. That was the part that changed everything.
They followed her. Slowly at first—those who had died unjustly, those denied burial, those forgotten in ditches or trampled into ash. They rose in forms that were not quite whole. Broken men. Hollow women. Screaming infants with no lungs. Her procession grew with each battlefield she crossed. Not an army. Something far older, something colder. An audience of the dead.
At first, the living watched her with awe. They called her Aedra of the Pale Hands. The soft shepherd of death. The Gentle Shadow. She passed freely across borders no soldier could cross. No one dared strike her, for every camp she visited reported the same: the wailing of the dying quieted in her presence. And yet, no one ever came back healed.
But awe is a fragile thing. And it doesn't survive fear.
Whispers began. What if she wasn't mourning the dead—but commanding them? What if she wasn't easing suffering—but feeding it? When the bodies of certain kings and generals began disappearing from their graves, the stories changed. They said she was building an army. That she was no longer a woman, but something else. A vessel. A gate.
The final betrayal came from the ones she had helped most.
A council of five warlords—men whose lands she had walked, whose sons she had buried—gathered and condemned her. They feared she might one day raise someone stronger than them. Someone who would not obey borders or titles or flags. So they sent men to find her. Not soldiers. Assassins.
They found her on a broken hill, tending to a fallen child. She did not run. When they surrounded her, she simply looked up, as if recognizing a truth she had always known would come. They stabbed her. Blades again and again into soft flesh. She fell, not screaming—but whispering.
The whisper turned into a hum. The hum into a tremor. And the ground broke.
From the place she died, a great wound split the earth, wider than any chasm the world had seen. It devoured the killers first, then the graves around them, then the plains beyond. From this wound poured a black tide. Cold. Thick. Endless.
It became a river.
They named it Aedros, in her memory—or perhaps in fear. The Queen of Shadows. The Watcher of the Dead. The river with no sleep.
They say she still lingers in its depths. Not alive. Not dead. A soul stretched thin across miles of cold current. Aedra remembers all the names she buried. She whispers them still. Not to honor them—but to keep them from rest. The dead drift toward her like moths to a flame, unable to escape her voice.
Some say the river calls to the living too. Especially the guilty. Especially the ones who betrayed.
If you listen, really listen to the wind near its banks, you don't just hear the water. You hear the ones you lost. You hear your own voice begging for forgiveness. And then—silence.
No one crosses Aedros unscarred. The deeper you carry your guilt, the deeper she pulls you in.
Some still worship her. Quiet cults that believe she waits not for revenge, but for one soul strong enough to carry her burden to the end. But none have returned from her heart. Not even bones.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The knots came off one by one.
I watched the cords loosen in the churned mist, strands fraying like veins torn loose from a dying limb. The logs shifted beneath me—timidly at first, then with finality. There was no sound of tearing, only the subtle creak of wet wood separating from its whole. My weight wobbled, unbalanced, until there was no longer a raft beneath my feet—just scraps of wood drifting apart like pieces of a broken thought.
The haze clung to my throat. It wasn't just hard to breathe—it was like trying to inhale through silk soaked in ash. Everything around me looked soft, distant. As though I wasn't here at all. As though I had already died and my body just hadn't caught up.
In a realistic situation—one rooted in common sense and survival—I would be preparing to accept death. Cold water, splintered lungs, the tightening of muscles that comes with fear. But instead, I found myself thinking of... other things.
I reminisced my life in a room. Not the one here, but the one from the world before.
The dim ceiling light. The dust gathering on unopened books. That blinking router that never worked properly no matter how many times I reset it. I remembered sitting on a mattress I never fixed, scrolling endlessly on a cracked screen, waiting for something—anything—to pull me out of myself. Entire days eaten by the glow of some meaningless feed. Entire nights passed with the dull ache of knowing I was wasting them.
The meals I skipped out of laziness. The projects I never finished. The messages I didn't reply to—not because I was cruel, but because I couldn't summon the will to say anything real. There was no tragedy in that life. No high or low. Just an ache that never screamed loud enough to change me.
I remembered how easy it was to call that survival. Just surviving.
Maybe I'm not who I was.
The thought came like a whisper, disjointed from all the others.
I am no longer R—
But I couldn't remember the rest. Not the full name. Not the voice I used to speak it with. It was gone—wiped clean by the cold, or by the river, or by whatever this world had carved into me.
The raft tilted. One final lurch. I didn't resist it.
I felt the water kiss my foot—just the toes at first, then the ankle. And then it welcomed me.
No hands. No voices. No rotting fingers dragging me down.
Just gravity. My own weight.
My own will.
I let it take me. Slowly, carefully—as if the river was not an enemy, but something old I had finally decided to greet.
The surface slipped above my head, and the world vanished.
There was no light beneath. No shimmer or flicker.
Only darkness—deep and absolute.
The cold was not the bite of winter, or the sting of ice. It was colder than that. It was dead. The kind of cold that forgets what warmth ever meant. The kind that touches not just skin but memory. As if it wanted to strip me of everything, molecule by molecule, until not even the idea of me remained.
My eyes opened.
Still nothing.
Just black. Thick as oil. Silent as stone.
And yet I kept sinking.
Not pulled. Not dragged.
I went willingly. Into her.
Aedros—the river with no sleep.
After a while, the descent halted.
I wasn't sure when exactly I stopped sinking, only that I had. I stayed suspended, floating in a place that didn't move, didn't breathe. I waited for the drag of current, or the pressure of a riverbed beneath my soles—but there was nothing. My feet met no bottom. My limbs hung weightless. And the river… the river was gone.
There was no sense of water anymore.
I tried to feel it—its flow, its temperature, its taste—but it had vanished. Like it had never been there to begin with. My skin didn't register wetness. My ears didn't hear the usual hum of depth or ripple. My nose didn't sting from the burn of submerged breath. My senses had dulled… or abandoned me.
As if I was no longer in the river.
Or no longer in my body.
I was dying. Of that I was sure. Whatever biological clock governed my existence was ticking its final pulses. But strangely, I didn't feel the panic I should have. No racing heart. No clawing fear. No desperate grasp for air. Only a stillness that had settled deep within the chest, where once there might've been protest.
I didn't close my eyes.
Not yet.
Despite how desperate the situation may seem—even now—I hadn't come here to die. That wasn't the point. Death wasn't the goal. It never was. This was... something else. A threshold. A meeting. A confrontation.
So I stared. Eyes locked in a single direction, choosing not to blink, not to waver. The dark mist ahead curled like breath from something old and asleep. And then—slowly, too slowly—things began to emerge.
Not shapes. Not figures. Something stranger.
First came the fish.
They appeared as silhouettes, flickering around the periphery of my vision—silver scales catching light that didn't exist. Thin, long-bodied, moving in rhythmic pulses as if obeying a current that passed right through me.
I turned to follow one. Its body swayed with grace, gliding toward me—and just as it neared, it rotted. Skin peeled off mid-stroke. Scales flaked. Its muscles withered. By the time its eye turned to meet mine, it was only a skull with teeth, swimming perfectly as though nothing had changed.
I flinched. But then there were more.
A school of them, forming from nowhere. Gleaming, darting. Laughing, perhaps? It sounded like laughter—faint and brittle, like glass being tapped with a fingernail. They circled me. For a moment, I even forgot where I was. I forgot the pain. The cold.
I reached for one. My fingers stretched into the darkness—and touched only bone. A spine floated across my palm. A ribcage curled like a question mark.
I turned again, and the fish were gone.
In their place floated objects: a pale child's toy, soft and threadbare, gently spinning in the black. A rusted blade with a cracked hilt and something crusted along its edge. A scroll unraveling in the water, the ink dissolving before I could read a word. A severed hand, fingers still twitching, clutching something I couldn't see.
I shut my eyes, if only for a moment. If I didn't, I would lose track of what was real and what wasn't. I had no anchor here—no breath, no sensation, no gravity. Just visions.
But as soon as my eyes closed—something brushed past my left ear.
I froze.
It wasn't water. It wasn't a fish or debris. It felt… intentional. Like a strand of hair gliding across the skin. Then came the voice.
A whisper—drawn out and fragile.
Ohhhhhhhh...
I snapped my eyes open.
The sound hadn't been human. It hadn't been animal either. It was cracked and smooth, like glass scraped across silk. And it had come from right beside me.
I turned toward the sound—and saw it.
At first, just a stone.
Small. Floating. Silver.
It hovered a few feet in front of me, motionless in the dark. It was shaped like a tooth—sharp and curved, gleaming faintly with a light it did not reflect but produced. A pearl-like shimmer pulsed inside it, alive but still. I couldn't breathe, but if I could, I would've held it.
The longer I looked, the more wrong it became.
It began to shift. The edges softened. The tooth stretched—lengthened like melting wax. The silver turned pale and veined, shifting from mineral to something more organic. More human.
Limbs formed, in slow, elegant gestures.
First a hand—fingers impossibly long, half-translucent. Then the outline of a jaw. Shoulders. A neck that arched with unnatural grace. She rose like a memory pulled from deep beneath a grave, one layer at a time.
Hair spilled down her back in strands of drowned silver. Her face was beautiful—but not kind. Her features were sculpted with precision, inhumanly symmetrical, the kind that makes your instincts recoil without knowing why. Her eyes held no pupils. Just endless mirrors, reflecting nothing but the void around her.
And she was tall.
Taller than she had any right to be.
Her body flowed like water made flesh, robed in strands of cloth that looked sewn from mist and bone. Where her feet would be, the dark rippled as though rejecting her form, unable to swallow her completely.
Her presence—her gravity—was undeniable.
She wasn't just in the river.
She was the river.
Aedros.
The lady of death.
And she had come to greet me.
For a moment, she only stared at me—if you could call it staring. Her eyes weren't eyes. They were open wounds in reality, quiet mirrors that swallowed my reflection before it could return.
I swallowed—or tried to, but my throat didn't work. I wasn't sure it still existed. Still, I willed myself to speak.
"Oh, Lady of Death," I said, unsure whether it was prayer or mockery. "Queen of the black river. I came to meet you."
She didn't answer.
Not with words.
Instead, she lifted a single arm—graceful and fluid, as if every bone and joint were born from water—and with a slow sway of her hand, the dark surrounding us began to shift. The ripples curved and twisted, like fabric caught in invisible tides.
Then came the visions.
They did not fade in like dreams. They surged. Like floods. Like grief.
Faces formed in the dark—lives pressed into the surface of water like stains that wouldn't lift.
A young woman holding a child close to her chest as smoke filled the air around them. A man screaming into the void as the earth cracked beneath his feet. A pair of lovers split by falling ash. A child, too small to understand war, stepping off a ledge with both hands covering her ears.
And then more.
People not just dying—but living first. Living in homes built from broken stone, with laughter carved into the walls. They danced around fire pits. They painted on ruin. They kissed under shattered towers. They whispered stories to one another while winds outside howled with the voices of those already gone.
Then—just like that—they were torn away.
Some by war. Others by betrayal. Some simply faded, like smoke too tired to hold its form.
I wanted to look away.
But I couldn't.
The Lady of Death had taken hold of my gaze. She didn't chain me—she didn't have to. I watched because I couldn't not watch. The sorrow of it all wasn't loud—it was quiet, relentless. The kind of sorrow that wraps around the ribs and refuses to let go.
More came.
I saw beasts—once majestic creatures, covered in strange runes—marching alongside humans. Then, chained in pits, starved, butchered. Betrayed by the very people they had once carried across these lands.
I saw phantoms as they once were—mothers, soldiers, scholars. They had names. Faces. Hopes. I saw them killed by those they tried to warn, dragged into the rivers, cursed to wander in fragmented memory. No vengeance. No voice. Only whispers.
I saw the dead who had begged her for rest.
And the dead who had cursed her name.
And in every one of them, she stood silent. The Lady didn't judge. Didn't punish. Didn't absolve. She only kept them.
The dead belong to her.
All of them.
And then something shifted.
The next vision was… different.
Less dramatic. Quieter.
It showed a boy, sitting alone in a small, messy room. The light of a screen flickering across his tired face. Crumpled paper on the floor. Empty bottles. Books he never read. Plans he never acted on.
He woke late. Slept later. Days passed without meaning.
He wasn't cruel. Or broken. Or wicked.
He was just… lost.
Each day he stared into the world with nothing burning behind his eyes. People asked him what he wanted to do. He shrugged. Time moved. He didn't.
I stared.
There was something familiar about the shape of his hands. The way he breathed. The tired way he sat. I couldn't quite place it—but it tugged at something.
More memories followed.
The boy walking past people without seeing them. Missing every chance he had. He said he'd change. He didn't. He said he'd start again. He didn't. The world called to him in a hundred different ways, but he answered none.
I felt myself leaning closer.
The Lady of Death was unmoving. Her arms lowered now, but the visions continued.
The boy grew older, slightly. Not much. Not meaningfully. He just… endured. Survived in the dullest sense. Not even grief clung to him. Just quiet.
A void.
Then I saw it.
A mirror.
He stood before it. He looked up.
And I saw my face.
Not how I looked now. But how I had looked—before. Before the old man. Before the tree. Before this cursed world.
My chest locked.
That was me.
I hadn't recognized myself.
I had watched my own life as if it were someone else's.
And I had almost missed it.
The realization came slow, crawling up my spine like a cold breath.
I'd started forgetting.
The life I came from. The body I once wore. The name I once said aloud. It was all slipping. Bit by bit. Fading from memory like everything else in this place.
I didn't know if that terrified me or not.
The Lady said nothing.
Only watched.
As if to ask, Do you see now?
Do you understand what you are to become?
And still, I didn't close my eyes.
I didn't speak.
Not this time.
The silence between us dragged on like a wound left open. The visions flickered out—one by one—like dying lanterns in a storm. Faces that had burned themselves into my memory were gone now, leaving only the void behind.
Nothing remained but the dark and her.
Even she had dimmed—her silhouette thinner, like smoke curling from the dying end of a wick.
No breath passed. No current stirred.
And then… she opened her mouth.
The sound wasn't a whisper. Whispers belong to things still part of the world. This was older. Softer. Below hearing—more feeling than sound.
"Oh… apostle of sloth," she said.
"Why have you sought me?"
The voice did not echo. It slid through the dark like a blade across silk. Not cruel—but piercing, direct, leaving no space for confusion. The words weren't spoken in a language I knew, but I understood them completely, as if they'd been woven into the marrow of my bones long ago.
"You do not seek to die," she said.
I remained still.
"You do not wish death upon others. You do not hunger, nor rage, nor suffer with great depth. And yet, here you are. In my river."
She moved forward—though the water did not ripple. As if her form displaced nothing, not even air.
"Your body remains above," she continued. "But your mind has fallen through."
Her head tilted—not like a human's, but like something studying a thing long forgotten, and only barely worth remembering.
"Do you remember your name?" she asked.
I didn't answer.
"What are you hoping to find in me?" she asked.
I didn't know.
"Do you think I will save you?"
I stayed silent.
Her face remained unreadable.
"You left your world behind without grieving it. You entered this one as if it were an accident. You wake and walk and survive—but not to live. Why then, apostle, have you swum into the river that gives no mercy?"
I looked up at her—but not to challenge. Not to answer.
Just to see.
And finally, I spoke.
"…I want to speak with the Queen of the Dead."
The words rang out more solid than I expected. And as they left me, something changed.
The figure before me froze.
The blackness around her began to crack, like a shell too long left in the cold. Her silhouette—once looming, once watchful—began to fracture. Thin lines of light split down her arms, her chest, her face. No blood. No sound.
Then—she shattered.
Like glass.
The pieces fell not down, but inward, sucked into the dark behind her.
And I stood alone.
For a moment I thought the river had reclaimed me. That it had all been a test—some phantom echo to distract me before drowning.
But then I felt it.
The sensation of water.
Real, solid, pressing against my legs and chest. Cold. Moving. Pulling.
Streams circled me—streams that hadn't been there before. Jets of black water, thin and sharp, began swirling around each other. They danced through the dark, converging, flowing upward into the shape of a body.
It was not human at first.
It was structure.
An architecture of water.
Streams twisting to form limbs, folding inward to shape ribs, spine, shoulder, neck. The center of the vortex held itself still—as if refusing to be moved—and then, with a final pulse of pressure through the current, the shape settled.
And she was there.
Truly.
The Lady.
She stood before me, no longer made of visions or trial. The water around us calmed as if in reverence, held in perfect stillness. The only movement was her hair—long, black, shifting in slow ribbons through the current. Her skin was pale, untouched by decay, her form regal and terrible and unmistakably real.
But it was her eyes that held me still.
Not white. Not even the illusion of light. They were voids—pure and black, yet impossibly deep. Staring into them felt like staring into the absence of time itself.
"I am Aedra," she said, her voice resonant and clear now.
"Aedra the Dead."
My breath caught without meaning to. My body didn't tremble. I wasn't afraid—not in the normal sense. There was no threat in her stance. But something far more unsettling pressed into me: the certainty that nothing I said, nothing I believed, could change what stood before me.
She had seen empires rot. Loved ones buried. Gods forget their names. And I was only a visitor.
A guest in her kingdom.
And now… I had asked for an audience.
Aedra stood before me, formed now in full shape—more than vision, more than trial. Her body was sculpted from water and something else… something colder than the river itself. A stillness that did not belong to this world or the last.
She took a step closer.
The water did not stir around her feet.
"So," she said, voice sharpened now, less ethereal and more… precise. "You've found what you were looking for. The Queen of the Dead."
Her gaze drifted over me—not curious, not impressed, not even contemptuous. Just weighing. Measuring. As if appraising not a man but a possibility, a question written in dying flesh.
"Ask what you came to ask," she said, "or die in silence."
I said nothing. Not yet.
"You're quiet. Too quiet," she said. "What is it? Did you think I would be different? Merciful? Perhaps gentle? Was that the fantasy?"
She tilted her head, then stepped closer still. Her voice dropped, not in warmth but in control.
"Or did you think you'd be spared? That your arrival here meant something? That you were… chosen?" Her lips curled—just slightly. Not a smile. A fault in the mask. "How arrogant."
Still, I stood unmoving. Her words did not pierce. I let them settle.
"You wear the face of defiance," she said. "But your body says otherwise. I've seen too many like you—heroes, pilgrims, lost sons and shattered prophets—each carrying questions as if the dead owe them answers."
Her fingers moved slowly, drifting like tendrils through the current.
"Let me save you the trouble. No one is owed anything here. Least of all you."
I met her eyes again—those voids, cold and unreadable. She took one more step, now only an arm's reach away.
"Still nothing?"
She extended a finger—long, pale, sharp at the tip—and pointed directly at my chest.
"This is it," she said. "You will die here. Forgotten. Like the rest."
I didn't flinch.
I didn't breathe.
Her finger remained outstretched, waiting—like a blade waiting for the wound it was meant to deliver.
But still I said nothing.
Just stared.
Into her.
Through her.
Not with anger. Not with fear. But with certainty.
After a long moment, something changed in her face.
It wasn't softness. That word had no place in her.
It was recognition.
A pause.
Her finger lowered, drifting back down into the water like a petal sinking on its surface.
"…You're not him," she whispered.
The stillness pressed closer. Not in malice, but in weight. As if the river itself leaned in to listen.
Then I finally spoke.
"I have a proposal."
The silence stretched, longer than before.
The water barely rippled.
I thought I might collapse right then—drown without struggle, disappear into the current. My legs were numb. My chest tight. Something in me had begun to give way, a dull pull from within. It wasn't pain. Just... inevitability.
I was going to die. That much was certain. And I was ready. The kind of ready that doesn't come from courage, but from exhaustion.
So when she said You've changed, something in that phrase lingered—not in hope, but confusion. Had I? She said it like an observation, like someone studying a patient already declared dead.
Was it because I'd found a goal? Because I'd stopped running? That I no longer flinched before power?
Maybe. Maybe not. I doubted she meant it the way I understood it.
But she didn't speak again.
She just stared. Studying. Measuring again.
So I went on.
Because silence could kill. And I wasn't ready for that yet.
"…I don't know what this world was before," I began, voice low, rasped by the weight in my lungs, "but I know what it is now."
Her eyes didn't flicker.
"A purgatory. That's all it feels like. Dust and ash, crawling with sorrow. Hatred in the soil. Rot in the rivers. The people who remain… they're not even people anymore. Just shells. The summoned? The newly brought? They don't last. The Tree devours them. That's all I've seen—bodies stitched into its roots like fuel."
A few droplets circled her hair like a halo of slow-moving silver.
I swallowed. "And those who aren't consumed become worse. Phantoms, beasts, fragments of what they once were. Drifting. Wandering. Screaming without voice. Everything's decaying. Everything hates."
She hadn't moved an inch.
But I saw it—the faintest parting of her lips, the downward drift of her eyelids. Not weakness. Not pity. Recognition.
Not of me. Of what I said.
And then—for the first time—she stepped back.
Water coiled around her feet and bent outward as if afraid to touch her.
She looked down at me from a distance no longer measured in feet but in roles.
"…What is it that you want?" she asked.
No anger. No threat. Just words.
And for the first time, I didn't need to rehearse them.
"I want to fix what I can," I said. "Or at least walk toward something better than this. I've seen what happens when you live without direction. I spent years like that—quiet, stubborn, waiting for something to fix me. Nothing ever came. That was my fault."
The haze around us thickened.
"But now—this time—I've chosen to change. Not for someone else. Not because of what happened before. But because I've found a reason to exist here. A grail. A weight. I want to carry it."
She tilted her head slowly.
I took a breath.
"And I know I can't go further without help. Without knowledge. Without power."
The river pulsed beneath us.
Then I said it.
"I know you've seen them—countless souls, beasts, fragments of lives. You've seen deaths beyond reckoning. You must have come across one who drowned in this river with something more than a body. A rune."
Her eyes narrowed, lashes wet, the black of her iris sharp as a blade.
"A single one," I said. "That's all I ask. Something left behind. Something you already own."
A pause.
Silence returned. But this time it was not dead silence. It was consideration.
Her voice, when it came, was like deep metal dragged across stone.
"…What will you give in return?"
No anger. No bargaining tone. Just the weight of judgment.
I didn't hesitate.
I straightened my spine, clenched the numb in my limbs, and stared into her. Not with defiance. But conviction.
"I will return the favor," I said. "To you. To this world. By any means necessary."
The water trembled.
She looked at me—really looked at me—as if seeing a pattern she hadn't noticed until now. Her expression remained unreadable, but her finger slowly rose again. This time not pointed at me—but at the water.
A single ripple surged outward.
The silence between us was long and weighted.
I stared at her, half-expecting something to appear, to descend from her hand, to bloom into my palm. A shape, a fragment, a rune—anything. But nothing came.
Her eyes—those cold, endless pits—remained locked on mine. They studied me, but not in awe or fear or recognition.
And that was when I realized—she didn't know who I was.
The moment struck harder than I expected. I had walked into death's own river expecting an audience, thinking I was different. Thinking I might be recognized.
Instead, her voice came down plain and direct:
"I have no command over the runes that fill my waters."
It crushed whatever remained of my breath.
"I do not guide the dead. I do not govern what they carry, or what they leave behind. I am no queen of power. I am a watcher."
She said it like a confession and a verdict. Her voice was too even to be mocking—but there was finality in it. No regret. No shame. Just truth.
I blinked. A watcher? My thoughts spiraled.
"…Then," I said, desperate now, "can you give me something? Anything that could help me. I can't go back empty-handed. I'm… I'm powerless out there. You've seen what this world is. I won't last."
She didn't reply. Her eyes, half-lidded, never left mine.
She was considering me.
And in that silence, I saw it—the mistake I had made.
The arrogance. The assumption.
All she had said was true. I had come here thinking I was owed something. That desperation was equal to worth. That resolve alone would grant me passage.
I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing the shame down.
When I looked back up, I bowed—not fully, not theatrically, but with sincerity that scraped from the hollow of my chest.
"…I apologize."
I steadied myself. "And thank you. For your words. For not killing me when you could have. I was foolish."
The words felt foreign, but right.
"May I ask just one thing," I said, quieter now. "Will you… at least allow me to leave on the other side of the river? To continue?"
Still, no answer.
My voice cracked.
"…And perhaps… bestow your blessings upon me?"
The moment dragged. Her eyes pierced through me, silent as the river, unmoving.
My heart beat slow, each thud a dull hammer in my ribs.
Then I heard it.
A soft exhale. Almost a breath.
She nodded.
But what came after sent a chill through the marrow of my bones.
"However—"
She paused. The water rose gently behind her. Her voice came soft, almost like a whisper into bone:
"I cannot bless you."
I froze.
Confusion overtook me again, but not desperation this time—just weight. Did I say something wrong again? My hands clenched at my sides.
I looked up. "Then… what—"
"I can curse you."
The words landed like stone.
I flinched, instinctively stepping back. But she didn't move. Her face hadn't changed. There was no hint of jest.
I swallowed hard. "…Curse me?"
She didn't nod. Didn't blink.
"Don't take curses lightly, oh apostle of sloth."
The title struck again—clearer this time. Not kind. Not cruel. Just accurate.
"Curses are stronger than blessings. They do not fade in the winds of time, nor crack with age. They stain. They remain. And they bind. Forever."
I stayed still, heart racing.
She stepped forward slightly.
"A blessing can be broken. Lost. Forgotten. A curse… a curse takes root. It teaches. It sharpens. And if you wield it rightly, it becomes your blade."
There was no joy in her voice. No pride in the words.
Only certainty.
I felt the weight of what she offered—if it could even be called that.
And yet, somehow, it felt like the first real thing in this broken world.
A choice.
A chain.
And maybe… a weapon.
I didn't argue.
I didn't flinch or protest.
A curse.
If that was what she had to offer, then so be it.
She rose above the river floor without a single motion of her limbs, her body unraveling into black, curling smoke, leaving streaks of liquid shadow behind her. Her presence blotted out what little sense I had of direction. It felt like the river itself bowed to her. The current stilled.
And then she spoke—no, she sang.
It wasn't a song for mortals.
Her voice threaded through me like a thin needle, pulling at nerves I hadn't known could ache. Each syllable a tolling bell, each sound layered in grief, in languages I had never heard. Voices cried alongside hers, dozens, hundreds—all wailing together in an echo that folded in on itself. My ears rang, and yet I couldn't cover them. I was pinned by her gaze, though she wasn't even looking at me.
"From soul to soul,
from ash to vein,
by river's grip and phantom's chain,
I bind thee.
Let pain be ink,
let wrath be bone,
let none who breathe walk this path alone.
By three who rotted,
now reborn,
with slothful flesh their fate is sworn—
awaken.
Ghosts of death's domain,
unclaimed, unheard—
walk again,
in man's own name."
My chest burned.
Not from fire.
From within.
It started in my sternum—a tug, a twist, like something gripping the cage of my ribs from inside. I dropped to my knees before I even realized it. My hands clawed at my shirt as if that would stop what was happening. But it had already begun.
Then came the pull.
Something inside me was shifting.
Not organs. Not muscle. Something else. My spine arched involuntarily. My breath hitched as if I were choking on cold air, though there was no air to draw. My mouth opened in a dry gasp, and I felt it: the presence of others.
Souls.
Foreign, clawing, ancient things writhing inside me—one raged in silence, one cried without sound, and one had gone still, too still, like waiting. My vision blurred. My body convulsed once, twice—and I hit the riverbed.
I was still conscious. But barely.
I lifted one hand, weakly. Then, with all the hate and confusion and pain I had—
I slammed my fist into the ground.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
My throat cracked with a scream. But even that began to fade, trailing into something softer. A whisper. A wail.
"What… have you done…"
The river held me like a grave. Cold and weightless. The pain became duller, then brighter, then distant. Like it had gone somewhere deeper. Somewhere I couldn't reach.
And then, she spoke again. But this time her tone had shifted. Not cruel. Not cold. Just final.
"Three souls, buried beyond the veils of this world, now rest inside you.
They will not leave.
They will not sleep.
If you can harness them, you may possess something far more dangerous than any rune I could have offered.
But they are not your power.
They are not your friends.
Survive them—if you can."
Her voice faded like smoke.
I didn't understand what she meant. Not truly. I was too far gone for that. But I knew I was no longer alone in my own body. Something had changed. Or maybe something had broken.
With a gentle wave of her hand, the world began to distort—
the haze returned, the river shuddered around me, and my body felt light.
Too light.
I was being pulled away. Disappearing.
And just before the darkness swallowed me whole, I looked up at her one last time. Hoping—foolishly—that she'd be watching. That there'd be something, some faint sign of approval or interest or regret.
But she wasn't looking at me.
Her eyes were raised.
Not toward me.
Not toward the river.
But toward something else—behind me.
Above me.
As if something greater had been standing there the entire time.
And just like that,
I vanished.
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He crossed.
Not by strength. Not by will. I carried him.
My waters bore his weight as if he were hollow—an empty shell wrapped in purpose, soaked in something older than memory. When he collapsed onto the far shore, my current curled around his limbs one last time, brushing his skin like a final farewell. Or a warning.
But I did not watch him fall.
My eyes remained where they had been from the moment I touched his chest.
It was there, just above him. Behind. Looming like a fracture in the world.
The Eye.
I had not summoned it.
He had not known of it.
And yet, it hovered, peering into me as though I were the one laid bare. I am not unfamiliar with the gaze of things beyond comprehension—gods who've died and been born again in agony, dead kings crawling across time with tongues like knives. But this? No. This was older. Quieter. Hungrier.
When I touched his heart, I felt it watching through him. Watching me. The curse I wove quivered in my mouth, not because it was weak—but because it knew. It knew what I was doing before I had spoken a word. And still, it remained, silent and unblinking.
Three souls I buried inside the boy. Each one carved from distant corners of the void—wrath, regret, and sorrow. Beings unfit to be named. Souls too ruined to move on, too twisted to be cleansed. I gave them to him not as a gift, but as a burden, a shackle meant to either break or elevate him.
But even as I cast them into his flesh, I could feel it.
He was not who he appeared to be.
The memories I showed him… the drifting scraps of failure, laziness, wasted years—they were real. They belonged to him. I saw no lies in them. No falsehoods.
And yet, the soul that stared back at me during those visions was not the same as the one that stood before me.
The boy in the memories lived soft, afraid of his own shadow. This boy... this thing… he stood before me and met my eyes when death touched his ribs.
No fear.
Not arrogance, either. Something deeper. Stranger. Like he had already seen what lay beyond death—and had returned. Or worse, like something else had crawled back inside his skin and was learning how to walk again.
When I blinked, the Eye remained. When I blinked again, it twitched. And then—gone.
As if it had never been there.
But I know what I saw. I have seen millions of souls sink through my waters, weeping, clawing, praying. I've seen princes drown beside paupers, angels beside beasts. But never that.
It chose him. Or it followed him. Or maybe—it was him, in part.
I do not know.
And that not knowing… it has not left me. Not even now.
He is on the other side of the river. Breathing. Cursed. But still alive. That alone defies every law etched into my bones.
And still I see it.
The soul in the memories…
The soul in the boy…
They are not the same.
I linger now, longer than I should. My waters are restless. The dead behind me are beginning to stir. They can feel it too. A shifting. A wrongness. I have cursed many. I have spared few. But I have never feared one.
Until now.
I wonder if what I did was right.
I wonder if I had a choice.
I wonder if that Eye will return.
And if it does…
Will it still speak through him?
Or will it speak to me?
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