The hallucinations didn't return.
Not like before.
They watched from the edges now like shadows pressed behind a sheet of smoke. Silent. Waiting.
The Ocean didn't speak anymore.
It listened.
Ren floated in a space that didn't allow rest. It didn't push him, but it didn't let go either. It waited for him to stop.
To accept that stillness was easier than pain. That forgetting was easier than remembering.
But he didn't stop.
He started to move.
He had no arms, no muscles. No lungs to breathe with. No bones to anchor effort. But something in him something deeper than the soul, if such a thing existed began to crawl.
There was no direction here. No map. No up. No light. Just depth and pressure and endless drift. But he picked one way and clawed toward it.
Not swimming. Not flying. Just dragging himself forward.
At first, nothing changed.
The dark remained.
The pain remained.
But he kept going.
Each movement was like dragging nerve endings across broken glass. He felt everything. Every inch of motion stretched the old pain into new shapes.
His entire soul felt flayed, exposed, raw. But he moved.
And with movement came resistance.
The Ocean pushed back.
It didn't shove. It thickened. Grew heavier. The current curled around him like hands gripping a drowning man's ankles.
He clawed harder.
Shapes passed him in the dark. Fragments of the lost.
Some cried out, faintly. Others were just floating limbs, no longer whole enough to scream.
One reached for him.
It didn't have fingers just long cords of flesh, wrapped in strips of what might've once been memories.
The thing latched onto him, whispering words in Callie's voice. It said,
"You could stay. Just for a little while."
He pulled away.
Another soul drifted beside him. It had a face, but no eyes. Its skin peeled open slowly, exposing a mouth that ran from jaw to chest.
It opened that mouth and laughed.
Ren moved on.
The more he crawled, the more the Ocean changed.
The noise faded. The pressure thinned. The screams became murmurs. The crowd of drifting souls became sparser.
He was leaving the worst of it behind.
Or maybe climbing out of it.
He couldn't be sure.
There was no sense of height, only a feeling a subtle change in how the Ocean pulled.
And then it tried again.
Not with visions.
With truths.
Memories he hadn't asked to relive. Mistakes. Guilt.
Callie's face when he hesitated that day. The second it took him to react. The moment he thought about saving the files on his desk before running to the back.
That moment lasted forever in here.
It whispered: You hesitated. You let her die.
He didn't argue.
He let the guilt burn.
But he didn't stop.
He moved.
The Ocean flooded him with more—versions of himself that never opened the clinic, that called the authorities the moment Martha spoke of fire, that walked away from therapy and let someone else deal with it.
Every version smiled.
Every version lived.
"You could've been safe," they told him.
He clawed forward anyway.
His hands, if they could be called that, were strips of will now. Red-hot and soaked in agony. Each motion left trails of light behind him threads of something real in a place built to erase.
And then
Space.
The souls weren't crowding him anymore. The Ocean felt… thinner. Not gone. Not retreating. But it wasn't pressing down the way it had.
There was room to breathe.
Or something like breathing.
Ren stopped crawling.
He floated.
And for the first time in eternity, he didn't feel like he was drowning.
He didn't feel free, either.
But something had changed.
He was not falling anymore.
He was rising.
Ren didn't know what he had passed through.
There was no wall. No edge. No final scream.
Only a shift.
One moment, the Ocean pressed in from every side. The next it didn't.
He didn't break through anything solid. There was no barrier, no splash. Just a quiet, almost imperceptible change in the space around him.
The pressure lightened. The weight dropped.
Below him, the Ocean still churned.
He couldn't see it, but he felt it. It hadn't disappeared. It hadn't given up. It still pulled—quietly, endlessly, the way gravity waits for everything to fall.
But Ren no longer sank.
He floated in something quieter than water. Something less cruel.
It wasn't light. The dark was still here. But it was thinner. No longer endless. No longer filled with screams and whispers and things clawing at his thoughts.
For the first time since he had died, he felt alone.
Not watched. Not tormented.
Just alone.
He drifted for a long while, letting the silence wrap around him like a loose coat. He didn't move. Didn't need to. There was no pain anymore not in the same way.
The fire had settled into his core like old coals. Still hot. But steady.
And he could think again.
Not just react. Not just survive. Think.
His name was Ren Ashvale.
He had died in a fire.
He had watched a patient set his clinic ablaze. He had tried to save Callie. He had failed.
He had suffered.
And he was still here.
He looked down not with eyes, but with whatever part of him could still perceive.
The Ocean roared beneath him. No color. No shape. Just movement.
It waited. It always would.
It didn't punish. It didn't judge. It just was.
And if he ever stopped moving, it would welcome him back.
But Ren wouldn't go back.
He wasn't healed. He wasn't whole.
But he had endured.
And in this place, that was the only thing that mattered.
He had not forgotten who he was.
He had not let the pain erase him.
He had not joined the formless.
Not yet.
Somewhere beyond the dark, something was changing.
Something was watching.
He couldn't see it. Not fully.
But he could feel the shape of its attention slow and heavy, like a gate creaking open in the dark.
Something had noticed him.
Something outside the Ocean.
Ren didn't know if it was salvation.
But it wasn't the Ocean.
And that was enough.