"I'm not sinking anymore."
The words left his lips with slow reluctance, like machinery that had lain dormant grinding back into action.
He had not heard his own voice in what felt like centuries.
It was strange in the dark not bouncing off walls, but slithering between pleats of silence like something forbidden had spoken.
There was no sky above. No ground below. Just endless dark that vibrated faintly, thinner now barer.
And yet the silence was not soft. It pressed in on all sides, heavier than before.
Not like gravity, but like a question searching for its answer.
He drifted. Alone. Vertical, or maybe horizontal it was impossible to tell. Movement here had no reference point.
The only thing he was conscious of was himself.
And even that was changing.
Somewhere between the final crawl and this immobility, something had returned.
Limbs.
Weight.
Shape.
He looked down.
He had a body again.
His hands—whole, pale, a little charred at the edges hung in front of him, trembling.
He was dressed in the same attire he had been dressed in on the day of his death.
A black dress shirt. Tailored trousers.
A billowy gray material his overcoat draped across one shoulder and down his back like a mourning banner.
The edges were scorched. There were areas that still smelled faintly of ash.
He clenched his fist. They spasmed. The pain was gone. The searing was only memory, not flame.
A breath caught in his throat.
He had a throat again.
He did not know whether the Ocean had given this to him or whether he had torn it by force.
He did not even know whether it mattered.
A quiver trembled in front of him soft and gray, like light falling on mist, though there was no light here.
Then it spoke, in numbers instead of words.
19 JUNE 2035
The glimmering letters suspended in the dark. Cold. Clean.
Branded into the empty air like a grave marker with no grave to lay claim to.
Ren stared.
He knew that date.
The moment struck him like the drop of breath.
Ten years.
Ten years since he died.
Ten years since he tried to save her.
Since fire took his life and the Ocean claimed what was left.
He whispered, "What the fuck… …
The words were dry, rusty. But they came out.
He had no clue what the number was for. Why now? Why here?
But it wasn't random.
It was a marking.
A timestamp. Not for him but for something else watching.
The date hung for a few seconds longer. Then it dissolved, eaten by the black.
And in its place, silence returned.
But not the same silence.
This one was intent. Tight. Watching"
Ren felt it. Not eyes. Not presence. But pressure like something behind the fabric of space had moved closer to him.
Something had noticed.
The silence held him like a breath poised to exhale.
Ren didn't move.
Not yet.
Something in the air around him had changed. Not physically there was no wind, no noise, no shift of light.
But the silence now was taut. Like something unseen had stopped pacing and was watching.
He felt it.
Not behind him.
Not in front of him.
Not anywhere.
And everywhere.
It wasn't a presence.
It was attention.
There was no sound. But somehow, Ren heard it anyway:
"Why there is no hell.
Why there is no heaven.
Why every soul still screams"
The words didn't echo. They settled. Not in his ears, but in his bones.
He turned.
There was no orientation in this place no compass, no gravity. And still he turned, nevertheless, summoned by instinct instead of choice. Something in him responded before his mind could debate.
He moved.
He crawled not because he decided to, but because his very being understood there was only one direction now.
Forward.
And as he moved, the Ocean responded.
The darkness trembled. Not violently just enough to let him know it was awake again.
The pressure that had lifted now returned in short bursts, brushing his shoulders like fingers probing for weakness.
He ignored it.
And crawled.
The texture of the Ocean beneath him shifted. No longer smooth or fluid.
It churned beneath his hands in irregular bumps like roots or scars below the surface.
He passed by a soul curled up on itself, weeping silently.
Its face had no eyes, but it looked up at him and tried to speak with a mouth sewn shut.
Black threads circled around its jawbone like chains. The message never made it out.
Ren moved on.
In the distance or what passed for "distance" here a ripple formed.
Not a light.
A distortion.
As though the air in front of him had changed its mind and wanted to be somewhere else.
Things moved through it too fast, too distorted to make out. Faces. Curves of motion. Something reaching.
The pull in his chest grew stronger.
Not hunger.
Not curiosity.
It was calling.
He realized: this wasn't a path he'd chosen. This wasn't something he'd strived for.
It was a calling.
He wasn't the one seeking answers.
He was the one who was being summoned to hear them.
That scared him in a way the fire never could.
Still he didn't stop.
He dragged himself over a stretch of ground that wasn't ground.
It pulsed beneath his hands like old muscle, trembling gently as he crawled.
Far off, he heard the sound of the bell not tolling, but gasping. Like metal trying to remember music.
He passed by a soul built as a tower of mouths, whispering various names. One was his. It called it clearly. Peacefully.
"Ren Ashvale"
He didn't respond.
He didn't look back.
He didn't ask how it knew.
Because something else began to take shape ahead of him.
A sensation that enveloped his spine not pain, not pressure.
Invitation.
The Ocean began to break its own rules.
Ren felt it first in the water beneath him. It shifted direction but didn't flow.
Like a tide that moved backward but didn't shift.
His body, now fully returned to him, perceived the change as a tightening in his chest.
Not from lack of air. From pressure. Like the Ocean didn't want him moving ahead but couldn't stop him either.
Then there were the distortions.
The first soul he crawled past was the shape of a man, but where the torso should have been was a coil of swirling ribs.
Where its head would have been was a clock face cleaved, ticking backward.
Its arms were stretched out, nailed to some unseen frame. Ash drifted from its fingers with every tick of the second hand.
It looked at him with eyes it didn't have.
Ren crawled past it without hesitation.
The Ocean was not happy about that.
It tried again.
A clot of organs, fused into a single pulsing node, moved past on a trail of wet red.
Little faces flickered across its surface children, elderly persons, a version of Ren himself.
All of them chattering at once, too low to be intelligible.
Then it dissolved and was nothing.
The Ocean grew more surreal.
Color returned but only to die. Shapes glowed pale green, then rotted before his eyes.
Souls passed that were shaped like flutes, and as they drifted, they screamed music made of pain.
A screaming chorus of windpipes without lungs.
One screamed in his mother's voice. Another used Callie's.
Ren flinched but didn't stop.
Before him, the darkness shimmered like heat.
A wall passed in front of him transparent, but thick.
Behind it: a huge tree made of open mouths. No bark. No leaves.
Just teeth and tongues and lips, all speaking the same word in different voices.
"Staa"
"Bleiben"
"Rester"
"Khal"
Stay. Stay. Stay. Stay.
He didn't stop to listen.
Warning or threat was beside the point.
He went on.
The Ocean began to change shape entirely.
What had appeared infinite now bent.
Not physically but spiritually.
It curved in around him, as though he was crawling through someone's memory of a place, instead of the place itself.
As though the Ocean was beginning to remember what it used to be. Or what it was meant to guard.
He felt the curve of his body. His knees ached differently. The air, or what had been air, had mass now.
A rhythm. He could hear himself breathe.
The static around him resolved into something more steady like a heartbeat in the walls.
Then the faces began.
Dozens, at first. Then hundreds.
They dangled in the gauzy shrouds that billowed between pillars. Human, almost but not quite. Some twisted in agony.
Others wept. A few simply stared at him, eyes open and serene, saying things he could not hear.
One looked like his father.
Another like himself.
He did not stop.
The arches grew larger. Massive, bone-white curves rising from the Ocean like the ribs of some ancient and long-forgotten thing. They soared above in silent forms, pulsing softly with inner light.
Veins of ink-black shadow ran within them like slow blood.
Each step he took caused the Ocean to creak under his weight not like water, but like old wood groaning against time.
And then at last the current stopped.
No more push.
No more pull.
He had crossed some invisible threshold.
The Ocean, for the first time, relinquished its hold.
But something else took its place.
The air around him changed not colder, not thicker. Just. more patterned.
As if this area had intent. As if something had decided what this part of the Ocean was to be.
The pain in his back pulsed. Not from harm. From proximity.
Something was near.
Something living.
Something conscious.
He went on.
The silence wasn't empty anymore. It was dense. Like it had shape. Like it had rules now none human.
The Ocean enveloped him with silent purpose, no longer infinite but designed.
It wasn't a place anymore. It was a map. A fractured one.
And at its center was something that should be there but wasn't.
Ren didn't know how he knew.
He just knew it like one knows when a note is missing from a song.
When a door opens in a room that shouldn't have any.
That annoying scratch in the brain where a name should be and isn't.
Something that should have anchored this place was gone.
And without it, everything had collapsed in on itself.
He passed another soul. This one was a thin membrane of skin over a flickering flame.
It whispered constantly, but each word it whispered replaced the last. Its mouth frothed with forgotten prayers.
Ren whispered nothing back.
For the moment, he finally understood.
He hadn't been sent into a punishment. Not into a purgatory. This wasn't judgment. This wasn't hell.
It was what occurred when a god was missing.
Not a dead god. Not locked away. Not vanquished.
Simply… absent.
And without that presence without a divine gravity to lend meaning to death the world had returned to this.
This Ocean.
This silence.
This endless striving.
The Law of Death was dead.
Not just broken.
Dead.
A hole in the universe that nothing had filled.
And in its place, this… process had evolved. Not clever. Not sadistic. Just implacable.
Ren felt it the way one feels the presence of something that lurks behind closed eyelids.
No heaven.
No hell.
No judgment.
No peace.
Only drift.
Only accumulation.
Only pain that went nowhere.
The dead piled upon the dead. Century after century. Their minds slowly unraveled. Their memories became screams. Not because anyone had ordained it. But because no one had stopped it.
He stopped crawling.
He had to.
His arms trembled not with fatigue, but with realization.
He had burned for ten years. And he had not been fighting against a prison.
He had not been fighting against a god.
He had been clawing through what was left.
And something in that system had begun to pay attention to him.
He looked around though there were no directions to follow.
In every shadow, he saw visions of absence. Echoes of something that had imposed order on death.
But now there were shrouds. Frayed memories stitched together from broken faith and recalled rituals.
A face drifted by, stitched shut at the mouth. Its eyes were wide and full of knowledge it couldn't utter.
He turned away.
The Ocean whispered again not in sound, but in shape.
"Nothing ends."
He felt it resonate through him like a bell. Not a prophecy.
A memory.
Not something he was told but something he had always known.
It explained everything.
The dreams. The madness. The hallucinations.
This place hadn't failed.
It had lived.
It had tried to fill the void that was left behind.
And the result… was this.
An Ocean that remembered how death once felt, but not what it was for.
And somehow, even now, it was learning.
For it had never encountered anyone like him before.
Someone who remembered.
Someone who would not forget.
And as that realization sank in deeper, he felt it again that presence behind the veil. Not the absence.
But the new attention.
Not divine.
Not pure.
But awake.
And watching.