He awoke to silence.
Not the silence of rest, nor the hush of sleep's comfort, but the smothering absence that exists before time. It was a void made of velvet and iron, a stillness too heavy to breathe, and he did not breathe. He had no lungs. No body. No eyes to see, no mouth to cry. But he felt.
And what he felt was pain.
It came not as fire or ice but as existence itself, unbearable and endless. It rippled through a soul that had been shattered and stitched, raw and ancient and alien all at once. He did not know his name. He did not know if he had ever had one. There were only sensations—a chain coiled tight around something that might have once been a heart, a dark whisper crawling beneath his thoughts, and a lightless sky pressing down on his mind.
He floated.
No, not floated—he drifted, not forward or backward, but through memory that was not memory. He was a wound. A tear in the fabric of the world, suspended beneath the bones of a cursed island. Above him, the stones of Azkaban moaned in the sea wind, a citadel of madness that had forgotten it was ever anything else. But he remembered, dimly. Or the part of him that was other did.
That fragment stirred.
It was a whisper in the stillness, a language that did not belong. Crosswalk… train… she said wait… then the lights… Words not native to magic, not born of wands or runes, but of concrete, neon, and rain. A child's memory—no, a young man's—surfacing like a drowned body. That soul—the one torn from another world—ached. It remembered cities that scraped the sky, the cold warmth of metal in winter, the humming logic of electricity, and the ache of stories not bound by prophecy. It had not believed in magic.
And yet here it was, entombed in it.
He tried to scream. Or would have, if he had any mouth, any lungs, any sound. Instead, his pain echoed across the tether that bound him to what remained of flesh. It resonated through the link—a vessel of silver, buried in his wrist like an anchor, a prison forged to contain him.
It responded.
A pulse of sensation, cold and bright, like lightning behind closed eyes. And with it, another memory returned—this time, not from the foreign soul, but from the other half. The native one. The one birthed in agony beneath storm and spell.
There was a woman.
She did not speak. Her hair was moonlight, her skin kissed by fire. She reached for him, her fingers trembling, her mouth shaping something beautiful—but the word never reached him. A thunderclap split the vision, and she vanished in a spray of scarlet and shadow. The memory fractured into screams. One of them was his.
He felt it, then—not just as memory, but as experience.
His own body, long dormant, twitched beneath the stone.
It did not move. It could not move. But he felt the twitch. Somewhere deep in the marrow—if he still had any—it stirred. Like lightning crawling through a corpse.
"Sleep," a voice whispered. "You are not ready."
He did not know if the voice came from without or within. It was cold and soft, cruelly kind, and ancient beyond words. He wanted to answer it. He wanted to beg. But his thoughts were still not whole. They fractured upon themselves, like waves breaking on jagged rocks. The foreign soul burned with questions: What is this place? Why am I still here? Who did this to me?
There were no answers. Only more echoes.
Wires in walls…
A city that never slept…
A brother's laughter fading behind glass doors…
And yet the other part of him—the half born of magic and madness—did not want to remember. It recoiled. It burned. Because it knew what had happened. It had witnessed the rituals.
It had endured.
He drifted backward, or downward, or perhaps simply inward—into the place where memory bled into dream. And there, he saw it:
A man with eyes like dead stars stood over an altar carved from obsidian and bone. His hands trembled, not from age or fear, but from too much power held too long. Blood ran in thin rivers across the runes at his feet. Around him, goblins screamed as they worked molten silver into impossible shapes. Their chains clinked in time with their suffering. A cradle sat at the center of the room, empty and waiting.
And on the floor, his own body lay—small, broken, breathless.
He wanted to look away, but he had no eyes. He wanted to cry, but he had no tears. He could only watch as the man approached, hands slick with blood and grief. His mouth moved, forming names, spells, curses, prayers—he could not tell which. But when the man touched the lifeless child, the soul within him howled.
It remembered.
The fusion had not been gentle. The tethering had not been clean. One soul, born in a world without magic, had been ripped from its dying shell and forced into this hollow thing—this corpse carved from sorcery and sorrow. It had resisted. It had screamed. And it had lost.
The pain of it returned now in full.
He felt the stitching of soul to soul, like wire dragged through thought, like flame pressed into memory. He felt the cold embrace of the silver vessel, binding him to flesh like a shackle to the wrist of the condemned. He felt both deaths—the one in the other world, and the one in this one.
And through it all, the whisper returned:
"You are not ready. Sleep."
No.
No, he would not.
Something stirred in the deep.
A storm rolled through the ruins of his consciousness, and a name emerged—not given, not remembered, but claimed.
Samael.
He did not know what it meant yet, only that it was his. Not because it had been spoken over his crib like a blessing, but because it had been carved into him, etched into the very shape of his soul. A name not born but branded. It hummed with finality. Samael.
The pain lessened. Not because it left him, but because he understood now that it belonged. The ache, the silence, the screaming fractures—all were his inheritance. They had been written into the code of his being. He was not meant to wake. He was not meant to exist. And yet he did.
And now, something was changing.
He felt the outside world, faint and distorted as through black glass. A boy's voice, far above, shrieking in terror. The screech of a Dementor. The muttering of guards. Wind. Rain. Screams. Then… silence again.
But the silence had changed.
It was waiting.
As was he.
He curled inward, soul folding upon itself, drawing breath that did not come through lungs. He remembered metal and light, rain-slick streets, and a name not his own. He remembered fire, runes, silver eyes, and the man who had torn him from peace.
"I was," he thought.
"I am."
"But what am I becoming?"
No answer came. Only the slow, steady tightening of a chain around his soul, and the pulse of silver beneath his unseen wrist.