I blinked as a faint ding echoed in my skull. A translucent prompt shimmered into existence in front of me, words etched across it in an elegant script.
My throat went dry. "Bastard… are you seeing this?"
{Seeing what?}
"The system screen, this thing floating in front of me."
{You forget, Sebastian. We share a body, not a mind. Whatever you're staring at, I can't. If it's only in your head, then it's yours alone.}
I barely registered his words. My focus was nailed to the message in front of me, its glow almost daring me to blink.
[Goddess of Life and Death requests an audience. Do you accept?]
The letters pulsed faintly, like the beat of a heart.
I let out a shaky laugh, though my hands trembled as I clenched the sheets beneath me. My body still ached from the beating Belle had given me, every muscle stiff, my ribs sore with each breath. Yet beneath the pain was something else, an anticipation that made my chest feel tight.
It was ridiculous. My pulse hammered in my ears, part fear, part exhilaration. I'd been knocked around, humiliated, and now… a goddess wanted to meet me?
{Sebastian? You've gone quiet. What's on that screen?}
But I didn't answer. For the first time since I'd arrived in this world, Bastard's voice was nothing but static at the edge of my mind.
All that existed was me, the trembling in my hands, and that single question hanging in front of me.
[Goddess of Life and Death requests an audience. Do you accept?]
My eyes lingered on the prompt, my pulse quickening with every flicker of its glow.
"Yes," I whispered, the word slipping out before I even realized I'd spoken.
The moment I did, the screen vanished, shattering like glass, a thousand shards of light that dissolved into the air.
Then it hit me.
A force yanked at my core, not my body but something deeper. My soul. It was the same suffocating pull I'd felt when I first awoke in this world, that impossible sensation of being unstitched from flesh and reality.
The infirmary blurred away, walls and ceiling melting into formless dark. My limbs turned weightless, useless, as if I'd been stripped of all substance. My chest constricted, every instinct screaming that I was being dragged somewhere I had no right to go.
{Sebastian, what's happening?!} Bastard's voice was distant, distorted, like it was echoing across a vast canyon. He couldn't follow. I was alone here.
The pull grew stronger, relentless, until all sense of body vanished. My soul was no longer mine.
I was being taken.
The pull ended as abruptly as it had begun.
When my senses returned, I wasn't in the infirmary anymore. I wasn't anywhere that could be called real.
I looked down - no, I didn't. There was nothing to look down with. No hands, no arms, no face. Just a faint sense of shape, the echo of a body that wasn't there. I was hollow, nothing more than a flicker of self adrift in a place that felt wrong.
Around me stretched a city, a forsaken fragment of divine craftsmanship. The buildings were jagged silhouettes of stone and steel, all pitch-black, eroded and fractured like they had been abandoned for eons. Empty windows gaped open, lifeless and unlit, staring like dead eyes into the void.
The sky above was the same, black. Not a starless night, but an absolute absence of everything. No light, no warmth, no moon. Just a crushing blanket that pressed down on me, endless and empty.
The ground mirrored it, cracked obsidian veins spiderwebbing across a surface that swallowed every hint of color. Each step I tried to take made no sound. No weight. No sensation at all.
I couldn't feel the air, couldn't feel myself breathe. Because I wasn't breathing. There was no body to breathe with.
The silence was maddening. The kind of silence that wasn't quiet, but absolute. A silence that roared.
A desolate city. A soulless sky. And me, adrift in it, a ghost without flesh. Everything about this place was abnormal, like it was some kind of giant paradox.
The silence stretched on, oppressive and suffocating in its nothingness. I drifted aimlessly, my soul flickering like a candle threatened by a storm.
Then the air, or whatever passed for air in this forsaken place, shifted.
At first, it was faint, just a distortion high above the cracked street. The shadows bent, as if recoiling from something they recognized. Then a pulse - deep and resonant, vibrating through the empty city like a heartbeat.
A spark of black light bloomed in the void above. It twisted, rippling outward in twisted waves, as though the darkness itself had been condensed into something tangible. The light writhed, sharp and suffocating, spilling across the ruined walls.
Then came the red. Thin strands at first, weaving into the black, threads of blood searing across the air like veins. They pulsed with vitality, alive yet dreadful, dripping power with every flicker.
Violet light followed, slow and purposeful, a glow that seeped through the cracks between the black and red. Not forceful, not frantic, but inevitable, like the slow turn of the world, the creeping march of fate.
The three lights coiled together, converging, condensing into a single form. Black devouring, red burning, violet binding.
And then she was there.
The Goddess.
A body sculpted of pure light and shadow, humanoid yet untouchable, her presence spilling into the city like a tide. Her figure shimmered, delicate yet commanding, radiating the stillness of eternity. Her "eyes", if they could be called that, burned with violet fire, peering down at me as though I had been dragged naked before judgment.
The ruined city seemed smaller now, shrinking beneath her presence.
The swirling lights stilled, and her form settled into something whole. She floated above me, her presence vast yet not suffocating—like an embrace that spanned the entire blackened city.
For a moment, there was only silence. Then her lips parted.
"…I finally meet you."
Her voice was soft, tender, like a small fire in a long winter.. The sound alone felt like a hand reaching for me, wrapping me in a familiarity I couldn't understand but couldn't push away.
She hesitated, as though the next word meant more to her than everything else she'd ever said.
Finally, it left her lips, filled with motherly love.
"My son."