"I'm no longer sinking"
There was no sky above him. No horizon. Only an endless, shivering dark that felt thinner now—emptier, quieter. And yet, the silence pressed harder. It wasn't freedom. It wasn't peace. It was something else. The weight of a secret waiting to be spoken.
That was when he saw it.
A flicker in the air. A shimmer. Like light projected onto fog—but there was no source. It simply appeared, in front of him, floating in the dark like a tear in the void.
And then it spoke—not in voice, but in numbers:
19 JUNE 2035
The symbols hung above him, burning in silver, radiant and cold.
Adrian stared. Time didn't exist here. Time was a rumor. A shattered clock without hands. But he knew that date.
It had been ten years since he died.
Ten years since fire devoured his body and darkness swallowed what was left.
He whisper, "What the fuck?"
The words felt foreign. Sharp in his throat. But he could speak again—at least here. At least now.
Ten years.
He'd been in this place for ten whole years. Not dreaming. Not sleeping. Burning. Crawling. Losing himself. And now, something—some force—had marked that time for him.
Why?
Why now?
The number lingered, as if it wanted to be memorized. Branded into his mind.
Then, slowly, it faded into the black like a sigh. And the silence that returned was not absence.
It was attention.
Something had noticed him.
He didn't hear it. Didn't see it. But he felt it.
A cold ran down his spine—not physical, not emotional. It was like gravity, but backward. Like being watched by something that existed behind meaning. Something that had always been here. Waiting.
Something was calling.
Something was begging.
Something was commanding.
It came from behind him—below, above, it didn't matter. It had no direction. It simply was. A pull inside his bones. A whisper in his nerves.
He froze.
And then, he turned.
There was no reference point. No true direction. But he turned all the same. And he began to crawl.
Not because he wanted to.
Because he had to.
"That way lies understanding""That way lies the reason why nothing moves on""Why there is no hell""Why there is no heaven""Why every soul still screams"
And maybe—just maybe—why Adrian was the only one who still remembered what it meant to be human.
The Longer Adrian crawled, the stranger the Ocean became.
It was no longer just an abyss of souls. It began to warp—distort itself in ways that made him question whether the place had ever obeyed logic at all.
The current under him reversed without moving. Souls twisted into spirals that screamed like flutes. One passed him by with the torso of a man and the head of a clock, ticking backward, its arms locked in a crucified pose as it turned to ash with each second.
In the distance—if such a thing could be said to exist here—he saw arches.
Massive, bone-white curves rising from the Ocean like ribs from a buried god. Between them drifted veils of shadow, thin as gauze but pulsing with patterns—faces that came and went. Some screamed. Some wept. Some looked directly at him and mouthed words he couldn't hear.
He didn't know if he was hallucinating again. But it felt different now.
The visions no longer clawed at him. They beckoned.
And underneath everything—under the crawling, the pressure, the strange ripples of perception—Adrian began to sense something deeper. A law, fractured but still pulsing with divine echo.
"Nothing ends."
That truth rang inside him like a bell. Not a prophecy. A memory. Something that had always been true, even before death.
No end. No rebirth. No judgment.
Just... drift.
That's why the Ocean existed. That's why the dead piled upon the dead. That's why he had burned for ten years while the world forgot his name.
The Law of Death was broken.
He felt it like an absence—a god-shaped hole where a divine will should have been. And in its place, the Ocean, this endless basin of unprocessed grief, had become default. A consequence of vacancy.
And something inside it had begun to wake.
He crawled past a tree made of open mouths, each repeating a single word in different languages: "Staa." "Bleiben." "Rester." "Khal." He didn't know if it was a warning or a command. He didn't stop to find out.
The arches grew larger. The air grew... structured. That was the only word he had for it. It stopped being chaos and became intent.
The Ocean began to curve.
Not physically. Spiritually.
Like he was crawling not through space, but through a decision made by something vast.
The faces in the shadows turned upward.
The cold in his spine deepened.
He was being watched.
And then he saw it.
Rising in the black fog like a fortress carved from the bones of extinct gods—a structure. Not quite a castle. Not quite a ruin. It shimmered at the edges, like it didn't fully believe it was real. Towers that bled shadow. Windows that blinked shut.
At its center, a gate.
Closed.
He stopped crawling.
A name—no, a truth—pressed against his thoughts like a brand:
The Death Sovereign Temple
He didn't know how he knew.
He simply did.
This was where the call had come from.
This was what remained when Death vacated its throne.
He pushed forward again, his limbs numb from eternity, his nerves still aching with the phantom fire of his old death.
And as he neared, the silence changed.
It became expectant.
Then it happened.
A new shimmer.
A new projection, vast and final, appeared in the sky above the temple:
19 JUNE 2135
Adrian stopped, breathless in spirit.
One hundred years.
He had crawled for a hundred years since first awakening.
From the date of his death to now—a hundred and ten years had passed.
The Ocean had known.
It had marked every second. Every scream. Every motion of will. And now the numbers hung above the Temple not as prophecy, but as invitation.
A threshold had been crossed.
He felt it.
And somewhere inside the ruined towers of the Death Sovereign Temple, something shifted in response.