Dan woke up with a violently throbbing, bloody headache that felt like a rusted spike being driven straight through his temples.
He sat upright with a gasp, but his vision was instantly cut off by a heavy, suffocating weight pressing down on his face. Panic surged through his veins. Frightened and completely disoriented, he thrashed and fought blindly against the fabric for a few agonizing seconds before his mind finally registered the texture. It was just the traveling cloak.
He threw it off his head, shaking, and was immediately greeted by an oppressive, freezing silence.
He was completely alone.
Dan slowly folded the heavy material, his hands trembling as he forced his eyes to survey the area. The apocalyptic storm from before had completely altered the landscape, rendering the desolate terrain even more wretched, scarred, and alien than it was before. The earth was a cracked, blackened crust of mud, and the air smelled heavily of ozone, sulfur, and stagnant water.
"Areia?" he called out. His voice sounded thin, instantly swallowed by the vast, dead expanse.
He stood up, his boots sinking slightly into the cold mire. "Areia! Where did you go?!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, spinning around. No response came. Not a whisper. Not a footprint.
*Did she... did she go back to check on the refugees?* Dan pondered, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. *Yeah. That has to be it. I'm sure she'll be back soon. She always comes back. She promised.* He swallowed the bitter lump of rising panic in his throat and looked up at the bruising, violet-black sky. *I should just stay put and assert our current location for the time being.* But she never returned.
The dark clouds threatened to wreak havoc on the shattered earth once more, and they delivered. Dan huddled under the heavy cloak as relentless, freezing rains and violent hailstorms battered the desolate plains. Days slowly bled into agonizing weeks, but Dan didn't move an inch. He sat there like a stone statue, braving the elements, refusing to shift even a single meter so as not to get lost when she finally came back for him.
Then, right after a brutal downpour had subsided into a thick, low-hanging fog, the silence was broken. Dan heard the distinct, rhythmic crunch of footsteps approaching through the wet gravel.
"Areia?!" he yelled, violently throwing off the cloak as he scrambled to his feet.
His heart sank instantly into a bottomless, freezing void.
Dan hadn't actually been present to see the celestial beings of the upper sphere—the entities that had mercilessly slaughtered his parents and wiped his entire kingdom off the face of the earth. He didn't truly know what they looked like. But standing right there in front of him, emerging from the mist, were two figures. The moment Dan's eyes locked onto them, he was hit by an overwhelming, paralyzing wave of primal fear. It was the crushing, suffocating dread that only comes when facing one's absolute natural enemy.
"It's all your fault, you know," the man Dan assumed was the leader spoke.
His voice was entirely devoid of human cadence, sounding like grinding stones. His hair was white, almost like Areia's, but it possessed a foul, dull, washed-out quality that made it look more like a rotting grey than a pure, lunar white.
"All of this... I honestly despise you," the grey-haired man continued, his pale eyes staring blankly at the boy. "The sheer, agonizing existential weight we have to endure just because you exist is infuriating. Being created for the sole, singular purpose of killing you is a pure horror."
Forcefully overcoming a fraction of his paralyzing terror, Dan bared his teeth, his red hair flaring slightly as he took a step forward. "What... What did you do to Areia?!"
The man paused, his hollow, milky-white eyes boring into Dan's soul. "Ah. So *that* is the name of the stray cat that bore a hole straight through our sphere and managed to kill Megania, Mandevor and Chaos," the man's voice remained entirely emotionless, as if he were reciting a grocery list. "A profound shame. She actually possessed severe promise, had she been allowed to grow into adulthood."
"What did you do to Areia?!" Dan growled, his voice rising into a feral, desperate screech. He felt an unchecked, monstrous anger rise from the depths of his stomach, burning his throat like raw acid.
The man smiled. It was a terrifying, unnatural movement, his mouth splitting open far too wide, stretching past his cheeks in a grotesque, unhinged display. "Do you really, truly want to know?"
The fog suddenly rolled back, completely clearing the view behind the two celestial beings.
Dan's brain completely short-circuited. He couldn't process the visual information his eyes were feeding him. Knowing his parents were dead without actually seeing their corpses was one thing... but *this* was a completely different level of psychological execution.
Areia was there.
"Dan saw Areia. She was pinned to a slab of stone, her body twisted into something barely recognizable as human. He couldn't tell where one wound ended and another began. The only part of her that still looked like her were her eyes — wide, blank, and long since dead."
"Ah, yes," the grey-haired man smiled cruelly, his voice echoing in the dead silence. "That over there... that was her final message left just for you."
Dan's trembling, bloodshot eyes trailed slowly up the stone slab, just above her lifeless head.
There, written entirely in her own smeared blood, were three jagged, desperate words:
**DAN I'M SORRY.**